You’re trying to whoosh me. T’wont work.
Thanks, Lantern.
All the polls put together have basically suggested Obama is ahead by 5-7 points for almost a month and a half now. Discounting outliers, it’s been roughly 52-46 pretty much constantly, and will very likely end up that way, barring a GOP cheating effort that I doubt they have in them (but can’t totally discount.)
If you read Nate Silver’s analysis on 538, which is unquestionably the best one out there, it’s been pretty much the same for many weeks, and that’s what he’s been saying: “No movement.”
The voters, it seems to me, have made their picks.
“Democratic Republican” ≠ “Republican”
(At least not as “Republican” is understood today.)
In fact, the so-called Democratic Republicans (they usually called themselves simply “Republicans”) were the linear antecedents of modern Democrats.
But RickJay when there is no news you need to at least pretend that there is some!
Someone help me out here–I don’t get the left column on fivethirtyeight.com. We’ve got a list of sates and their likelihood of being won by either candidate, right? But many of them are absolutes (ie, TX is 100% McCain, MA is 100% Obama, suggestion it’s impossible for Obama to win TX). But that seems unlikely to me, that there isn’t even a 1% chance of either of those states, or any of the other absolute states, flipping. Texas in particular has been brought up on this board a few times as having some factors that might make it unpredictable. So why the absolute? What am I missing?
It’s near enough to 100 to round up.
Well, we can’t ask CNN, Fox, ABC et al. to go hungry.
Watching McCain fight for Pennsylvania is just surreal. He’s losing Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, probably Nevada, Iowa, possibly even North Carolina, and Ohio and Florida look scary for him… I don’t understand his resource allocation at all. He’s fighting for one french fry while Obama walks away with his prime rib.
I’m well aware of that.
However, the statement was not “Republican as it is understood today.” It was “most worshipped Republican of all time.”
In his 10,000 simulation runs of his regression model it comes up as a win less than .5% of the time which rounds down to 0.
Of course even Nate can be wrong! In particular his model is only as good as the data it is fed. Texas is sparsely polled and the polling data that has been reported is after LV screens have been applied. The issue with TX is how accurate those LV screens will be this year in a state that has many potential voters that may be filtered out by a traditional LV screen. For that we only have speculation and his model doesn’t get fed any best or even educated guesses.
And I honestly think that modern Republicans pay a great deal of homage to Reagan than to Lincoln or Jefferson. They say they’re the party of Lincoln, but supposedly the biggest gaffe in one of their debates was Huckabee getting Reagan’s birthday wrong. Probably the best analogous figure on the left is Roosevelt (or possibly Kennedy), and I don’t think anybody gives a crap about when his birthday is.
He’s actually fighting for a side of fries. Still likely not worth it, but I sorta get the reasoning. He didn’t have much in the way of resources and probably figured Florida, Ohio ( both very expensive markets ), Nevada and North Carolina are close enough he might have been be able to eke out a win even with minimal resources deployed. Meanwhile Pennsylvania is expensive but a possible firewall against other losses and with an overall demographic that it seemed might have been receptive to McCain’s pitch. If McCain held the above states and managed to swing Pennsylvania, he would win, even while losing Virginia, Colorado, Iowa and New Mexico. It’s logical enough given the resource constraints.
It’s just not very likely to work. But then I don’t know that he had all that many better options.
It’s not like McCain has a bunch of options right now.
I think McCain figured that he was going to lose Colorado because of the early voting. Given this the only possible path to 270 lay through Pennsylvania so he didn’t have much of a choice. Plus his internal polls probably showed a tighter race than the double digit Obama leads in many polls. To a small extent his strategy has been vindicated and the tightening polls in PA give him a tiny sliver of hope on the home stretch.
The November surprise, McCain is SAVED!!!
oh, wait…I wonder why the Obama campaign released information about a McCain endorsement?
Anybody else get the feeling that McCain wishes the Evil One had kept his fucking mouth shut?
Next up “George Bush Endorses McCain” 
But what about the email I got this morning?
*Dear MoveOn member,
Here’s some ominous news: In the last week, Obama’s lead in the national tracking polls has dropped by almost three points. If it keeps dropping, we could be looking at four years of President McCain and Vice President Palin.*
Is the consensus here that there’s no way this’ll happen?
I can’t help but think that had he started out playing a prevent defense, and working Colorado and Virginia earlier, that would have been a better approach. Both those states were a lot closer just a month ago than Pennsylvania was, were Republican in 2004, and the demographics are better. In mid-September, McCain was winning Virginia (according to most polls) and Colorado was a bit closer than it is now. Could he have stopped the bleeding? Maybe not - he’s been losing ground in a lot of Republican states, even ones he’ll end up winning anyway - but it could not possibly have been a worse approach than this one. He could win the Presidency even giving away Iowa and New Mexico.
If it’s his campaign’s belief that Colorado and Virginia are lost causes, it’s too late no matter what. I freely admit my “prevent defense” idea is one he shouldn’t been playing six weeks ago; today, it doesn’t really matter. He’s not going to carry Pennsylvania. He’s been losing it consistently for six weeks and isn’t any better off there now than he’s ever been.
McCain’s campaign marks, to my eye, a new benchmark in Presidential campaign incompetence and stupidity in my lifetime. It has been incompetently run for a long time, and from the choice of Palin on, it’s been inept to the point of comedy. I cannot help but think that ANY strategy different from the one they have employed would have to be better.
What he should have done is say, “Damn. He beat the Clinton machine? Okay, people, get out your slide rules. We need to figure out how he pulled that off, and work out a defense to it.”
What he should have done is say, “Maybe we can’t match Obama dollar for dollar on the airwaves, but by God we’re gonna get our people organized.”
What he should have done is say, “While the Democratic primary races drag on and on in the media, this is the time we need to spend getting our shit all in one sock. We need offices, we need volunteers, we need phones. The enemy is sparring with itself, so we’re going to take the opportunity to train the troops on the ground.”
Sorry–it was winking at me 
so I just thought it was Sarah Palin.
The rhetoric in fundraising emails (whether James Dobson homophobic crap or MoveOn alarmism) should NOT be mistaken for reality.