Robert J. Elisberg of the Huffington Post declares The McCain Campaign Jumps the Shark
If Texas goes blue it would be a bigger upset than Appalachian State knocking off Michigan. Sounds great but don’t hold your breath. Arizona is only slightly more likely than Texas.
Bob I know that such is the standard analysis and is commonly accepted. I know that I am a minority view (maybe even a minority of one!) and have attempted to defend my position in another thread, but I am still struck by the simple fact that 900,000 Hispanics came out to vote in the Texas Democratic primary - 450% more than did in 2004, and a much bigger increase than any other demographic. Obviously a large number of them have not voted in a previous presidential election (oh about 700,000 of them) and the way likely voter screens work will therefore be counted as “unlikely voters” in any poll that uses a likely voter screen. But I expect that they’ll come out this time and they are a solidly Obama demographic (at least right now). And a very large demographic in Texas. Meanwhile Texas Republicans are a motley crew. Some are Bush fans and not too happy that McCain has dissed their leader so much. Some don’t especially like McCain much for other reasons. Some even don’t have too much distaste for Obama, could even see him as President. Turnout in that crowd may indeed be lower than usual even though they have voted before and follow the election some. Little money will be spent other than on this massive Hispanic voter registration drive, and even that will not be primarily focussed on Texas. But a quietly effective (and unanswered) ground game will occur and I for one will not be shocked in Election Night ends with Texas putting Obama over the top. Ya heard it here first.
Jon Stewart’s take on the “celeb” ad (it’s on the front page of the show’s site) was nothing short of brilliant last night. Wow.
And there’s still speculation that the most recent ad from McCain has to be a fake, because one has to believe nobody in their right mind would put out a commercial so dense and thick and irony-free with a straight face.
But it appears to be 100% legit. Double Wow.
Seems like McCain’s sole hope in this election is that the majority of the voting public doesn’t look too closely at what he’s doing.
So in other words he has an excellent chance to win.
Yeah, apparently, we’re not supposed to vote FOR McCain- we’re supposed to vote AGAINST Obama.
When was the last time we heard anything about what McCain stands for… except that he’s not Obama?
I guess McCain flipflopped on the “negative ads” thing.
The press has actually been extremely critical of Obama and very forgiving of every McCain gaffe and blunder. But the tide is beginning to change. I’ve seen the press become more and more fed up with McCain’s bullshit. Even Andrea Mitchell is pulling away from him.
Yes I know that I already responded to this but now there is this to add to the pot.
Following the link -
Within MOE (just) in the GOP stronghold of the state. As we have bantered in other polling data - when you have two in a row it is hard to know which set to dismiss as outliers, eh?
And McCain really can’t afford to lose his home state.
Actually, Clinton WON months ago by getting more people to check the name ‘Clinton’ on a ballot than checked ‘Obama’ period.
Obama was not elected, he was selected by the supers. He never was able to put her away by winning more of the votes in primaries. To the last moment while supers were switching to him, she was still winning down to the last 2 states which they split.
Likewise, Obama can’t pull ahead of McCain by anything much beyond the margin of error and Mac is gaining. Obama can’t seal the deal because he is inspiring to a certain segment and repulsive to the other half of the country for being the arrogant middle school child that he is that implies opposition to him is racist (“I don’t look like the guys on dollar bills…” etc.) and then ‘forgives’ you for it and ‘rises above’ that and calls for unity.
He creates a strawman, implicitly and falsely accuses the other side of playing the race card (which is, of course, Obama himself playing the race card), and then tsk tsks the other side for doing so.
Meanwhile, he is the one playing the race card first against Bill Clinton (who is currently on a tour of Africa and who did more for African Americans in giving money to Harlem neighborhoods on his way out of office than the merely tan Obama ever did – as Jesse Jackson would no doubt agree as would others, I suspect, like Bobby Rush of Chicago who are biting their tongues just to get an AA elected) and now trying to play it against McCain.
It’s despicable and beneath contempt.
Oh yeah, and he’s for offshore drilling now. ROFL 
Gee, most Americans are for offshore drilling…and O was against it all week (which seems to be about his limit for holding to a position) and now…he’s lauding himself (as usual) for being willing to ‘compromise’ and switch in favor of offshore drilling…sort of like his awesome Messiah-like ability to ‘compromise’ on public financing by issuing a scroll-like “Declaration of Independence” from public financing on his website…and ‘compromising’ on the telecom bill that he had explicitly promised to FILIBUSTER.
Not just not support it, but FILIBUSTER IT.
Instead, he didn’t filibuster it.
He didn’t vote present (as he has over 100 times in Chitown).
He voted FOR the bill he said he would not just not vote for, not just vote against, but FILIBUSTER.
He can’t denounce Wright. Then he does.
It’s slanderous, apparently, to call him by his given middle name of Hussien. But he can call HRC out of her name as Annie Oakley.
He’s against nuclear. He’s not against nuclear.
He’s for public financing. He decides not to take it after saying he would.
He’s for public schools and not private school vouchers. His kids are in private school.
He’s against offshore drilling.
Now. He’s. Not.
Keep chanting, O groupies. :rolleyes:
None of you will ever be able to become as big a fan of Obama as he is of himself.
I don’t think you understand how primaries are won.
I think you don’t read very carefully. You’ll see what I said about that is accurate.
To help you out on the POINT, however: Obama wasn’t able to pull pull pull ahead of HRC to win outright without supers. He wasn’t able to landslide her away, pull dozens of points ahead overall and seal the deal in THAT WAY.
Likewise, he can’t do it with McCain.
And if the states HRC won are won by Mac, Mac will win because it’s winner take all.
O’s performance in the primaries is more telling of the system in place than of O’s ability to wash away opposition even with fawning millions and money he is currently within the margin OF ERROR.
He can’t pull way ahead. There will be no supers to save his ass this time.
He doesn’t need 60% of the delegates to win this time. Hillary got crushed, go back under your rock please.
You said she won. She didn’t. You can invent metrics to pretend that she won but it still won’t be her giving an acceptance speech in Denver.
If McCain wins California and New York, the Democrats will have bigger problems than superdelegates.
Zogby Interactive is on a level below ARG - I won’t even cite it as confirmation of a more reliable poll. So I’m still regarding this as one in a row.
OTOH, Montana is looking interesting:
The fact that Obama and McCain are running even in Montana, rather than Obama being ahead by 5, means less to me than the confirmation that Obama’s earlier showing wasn’t a fluke, and MT is still anyone’s game.
Ditto North Dakota, where Rasmussen showed McCain up 47-46 in early July, and Research 2000 showed McCain leading by 45-42 in late July.
Rasmussen polled SD in early July, and found McCain up 47-43.
Republicans didn’t used to have to worry about Montana and the Dakotas. They do now.
RTF points well made.
As to Arizona (and to Texas too, more so really) … I would appreciate your reaction to my thoughts on the potential undercount of newly engaged Hispanic voters (who are very heavily going for Obama) as a consequence of “likely voter” screens that are hard to pass unless an individual has previously voted. I am extremely confident that such effects the numbers but would be very happy to have a way to quantify the magnitude of the error. Texas is 36% Hispanic and Arizona is 29%.
Guys and gals, 9th never understood how primaries work and doesn’t understand how the electoral map does either. Don’t waste your breath. Counting up the EVs of the states that are safe for Obama vs McCain, and of figuring out how many of the ones that are potentially up for grabs each one would need to win … looking ahead and seeing what pathways to victory are possible for each candidate and realistically figuring out how probable each one is … is no more something 9th can/will do than he/she was able to see that Senator Clinton had no pathway to victory for a long time before she conceded, even as she won several states. You’ll just waste electrons engaging.
And in that regard your other point is notable RTF - these are all states that open up many more pathways to Obama wins. There are many combinations that Obama has as realistic possibilities. It was indeed possible for Clinton to absolutely run the table with huge majorities for a long time after many of us had already concluded she was forked. It was possible the supers could all flip her way by an obscenely overwhelming majority. But it was highly unlikely. McCain’s path to victory is not quite so improbable as there is still so much that can change but it is heavily in that direction - he needs to run the table of battleground states and there are an awful lot of them. He can’t lose any of the ones which should have been sure things for him (and were for Bush) and yet several of them are clearly in play. That’s leaving my thoughts on Texas and Arizona out of it. But Montana in play? The Dakotas? McCain having to even worry about it?
I dunno if Palast is being paranoid, but if the past 7 years have taught us anything, it’s that a great deal of paranoia has turned out to be justified:
So I’m a mixture of optimistic and nervous. And I do wonder how big a win would be too big to steal.
Maybe Palast’s paranoia and mine are totally unjustified. But we shouldn’t have a system that leaves room for tampering, either by voter-roll purges or by ID requirements that keep people on the edge of the system from voting, or by computerized voting with no paper trail.
It makes me miserable that I even have to worry about this stuff. But it’s hard to know, anymore, what paranoia is reasonable, and what’s not.
The one thing I’ll say about the nomination is that of course it took supers for Obama to win. To win without the support of supers would have required a 62.5% majority of the pledged delegates. There are many reforms the Dems should institute for their nomination process - enough to rate a pretty hefty thread of its own - but one of them is to drastically reduce the ratio of superdelegates to pledged delegates. For supers to have even the possibility of deciding the nomination if the pledged delegate support of the respective candidates differs by 25% or less of the whole, is just absurd.
And hey, if you want to take the superdelegates out of it, Barack still won.
No worries. If the Dem primaries had gone the other way, we’d have the exact same “concerned opposition” go on and on about how Obama “really” won it, and that Hillary stole the election, and how any voter who goes her way is obviously trying to take away the ‘will of the people’.
-Joe