With all this talk of how Obama supporters must start coddling Clinton supporters to gain their support in the general, you’re kinda bein’ a dick.
Regardless, how do a few people tired of you being so rude and condescending
mean that Obama (your parenthetical) doesn’t understand that he needs her supporters. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be pulling so many punches with all the crap she’s still spouting.
It seems that at some point (which we’re well past, IMHO), we’re going to have to move past the point of trying to appeal to supporters of a candidate who’s no longer in the race, and instead start appealing to voters in general. The process wouldn’t be so painful if we didn’t feel like we had to get you a pillow in order to secure your support.
It’s fallen on the Obama campaign to be the grownups here, and they’ve done so quite well, with Obama setting the tone.
At some point the temper tantrums and whining become too much. Having won, Obama moves on to the race against McCain. Those Hillary supporters susceptible to reason will support him; the others won’t.
I’ve actually never heard of this. Can you elaborate or point to a cite that explains it? It’s hard for me to believe that people would vote for a view that opposes their own just to keep the party that’s different from the President than becoming/remaining a majority in congress.
My apologizes to both the mods and Elvis. I was under the impression that it was not okay to say somebody was a <name>, but that it was okay to say they were acting like a <name> or being a <name>. Now that it’s been cleared up, it won’t happen again.
Well as a moderate I could care less if you are on my side. I find your extreme left positions as distasteful as the extreme right. I would be more interested in Obama moving more people straddling the line into his camp then those from your camp. How many people like me do you think Obama will pull in? I imagine we are the unknown to be totally honest.
From my viewpoint your position is equal to those on the right in their choices. McCain is NOT the choice of the right, but they either vote for him or don’t vote at all. Hillary voters either vote for Obama or they don’t vote at all-who are you going to vote for–McCain?
As a moderate in my opinion I win either way–either Obama wins or McCain does. I prefer Obama for many reasons. I actually wasn’t that unhappy with Hillary at the start, but she has not handled her campaign in a way to impress me.
I’ve not heard of it playing out as ticket-splitting but rather during the next mid-terms. Generally the party which has just taken over the White House loses a dozen or so seats in the next mid-terms. Some cycles have seen this much larger - see the blow-back against Bill Clinton. You can see the pattern here. On average the President’s party has lost 22 seats in the House during midterms since Truman, and about 3 seats in the Senate. Eisenhower lost 48 House seats and 13 Senate seats his second term which put him up there with Bill Clinton who lost 52 House seats and 8 in the Senate during his first mid-term.
I have generally heard that interpreted as evidence that the public actually does want gridlock.
I’d also be surprised to see it play out as actual ticket splitting. Maybe someone has the energy to see how often Congressional seats increase or decrease in conjunction with the party of the Presidential victory.
I don’t participate in many of these threads, though I lurk in several. If the question is whether McCain can win, the answer is “yes.” Putting aside who one would like to win (I’m for Obama), this is fundamentally a factual question. McCain has at least four strengths. First, in presidential politics, folks tend to favor Republicans because they feel they’re less likely to raise taxes. Put aside the policy issue of rising deficits, which never seems to get traction as a politcal issue, folks care about their tax bill next year. Second, folks hate, hate, hate to lose wars. It’s a matter of pride, ego and (they say) patriotism. This is McCain’s bread-and-butter issue. I’ll mind being outvoted on this one, but it’s certainly possible. Third, a fair number of folks won’t vote for a black man. That sucks, but there it is. Fourth, a lot of Obama’s support is concentrated in states he’s going to win anyway. What matters in a winner-takes-all-by-state electoral system is what happens on the margins, where the first three issues make McCain a viable contender.
Not in our hands. Men with names like Maliki, al-Sadr and al-Sistani hold the election in their hands. Now, its the economy, Iraq blows up, all bets are off.
Your site and explanation both say “If Y, then X”, while **Elvis **is asserting “If X, then Y”:
I’d still like a cite that shows ticket-splitting voters are a bulk. It sounds more like people who didn’t win a couple years ago are more apt to get out and vote because they want to get something back, not because people are just going out to try and make congress have a different party majority than the pres’s office.
Election Projection (run by a Religious Right conservative) also shows Obama currently winning although his projections are as much sheer guesswork as they are poll based. I’m not sure where he got his Ohio & Wisconsin poll info mentioned in his most recent entry – SUSA just showed Obama with a large lead in Ohio (which averages with other polls on RCP to Obama by +1.2) and there hasn’t been a new Wisconsin poll in forever.
It has been hard enough for me to pin down what happens to Congression balances during Presidential election years, let alone to deduce a causation sequence. What I can find shows that Dem’s lost 9 House seats with Clinton’s win in '92 and there was no change in the Senate. '96 the Pubbies gained 2 Senate seas and I can’t find what happened in the House. In 200 the Dems picked up 2 House seats and 4 Senate seats with Bush’s victory but the Pubs picked up 5 each with Bush’s win in 2004. So no solid consistent pattern but then I don’t know of any years where the word ahead was a one party Congressional blow-out was in the offing. The closest may be in 1980 when the GOP picked up a total of 33 seats in Congress and the country elected Ronald Reagan. A second double digit Congressional pick up hasn’t been done since then.
I can find no evidence to support Elvis’s claim.
My sense is that people split tickets because they have indepenent assessments of the person running for each office. They like their Republican Senator even while they hate the Republican Presidential candiate or visaversa or same with the Dems.
HRC is still in the running. Obama only has it 90% clinched.
Unless Obama teams up with HRC and kisses up to Fla, Obama will lose that state. If he loses Fla he loses the election, it’s as simple as that. That electoral vote predictor show Clinton has a much better chance vs McCain as she wins Fla. But I think it’s too optimistic for Obama, I doubt if he’ll win Ohio.
**DSeid ** *If Obama was losing by as much as Hillary has been losing then he would have conceded and thrown his support to Hillary long ago.
No, he wouldn’t have and I’d be disappointed if he did. Although, yes, he might have accepted Hillary’s offer of Veep.
AFter the first groups shakes out and it’s down to two- no one should quit until it’s decided. It’s not over yet. If HRC wins the popular vote (and come PR, she likely will) and Obama can’t pull off 2026 delegates, HRC is gonna show that map to a lot of SuperDelegates, and they will flock to her.
I guess it’s just hard for me because as someone new to this I usually find these threads very informative, and then EL comes along and insists that somewhere, visible to only him because he’s apparently the only person who’s bothered to read it, is some source of information that totally proves his points that he refuses to share with anyone because he holds them in that much contempt, even if it’s something as simple as his own posts.
Sometimes the roll calls don’t quite add up. I guess there’s a steady stream of change with 435 reps. Like Jo Ann Emerson who was briefly an independent.