Shayna: did you participate in my “Why so confident in an Obama victory” thread? (It’s been idle for too long to be in the first few pages, I think.) If not, would it be fair to say that you are so because you are part of the “Obama machine,” and what you see in that role gives you confidence?
(I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack; if there’s a big factor that would override the importance of the polls, I think it’s on-topic for this thread.)
Oh I don’t know about that. I’m privy to quite a few folks who are not part of the Obama machine who think he’s the favored winner…They are not basing their assumption on blind faith.
I don’t understand why people take current polls so seriously, Obama was up 8 points at the heigh of his bounce McCain is up what? 2-3? and most of his gains have been in deeply red states. The polls you are seeing now are from the height of McCains convention bounce, its all downhill for him once that fades.
I thought Palin was the mayor?
Good advice on getting up and doing something to help win.
Even if you live in solid blue or solid red state, like California, Illinois, West Virginia, or Alabama, you can still help. For example, fundraising never hurts. Throw a house party.
You can also phone bank voters in swing states. For example, many people in California know Obama will win here, so they make phone calls to Nevada voters instead. A Sacramento, CA phone bank volunteer may be making calls to Reno, NV for example. Your state may already be deep blue, or you may not be able to turn your own state from red to blue, but you can call voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida to help turn them blue.
Phone banking is easy. They typically give you a short script and you read it to voters over the phone and provide feedback to the campaign. You will get bad phone numbers and people will hang up on you. Big deal. Yes, it feels weird at first, but you get used to it after about 10 phone calls. You are not expected to engage in political debates with people over the phone. Each call is about 15 seconds. If someone wants a debate or has questions, you typically just refer them to a campaign manager for a return call for more information.
Find your local Obama office or local Democratic Party and ask them what you can do.
I hate saying this, but . . .
Cite?
Logic does not work in the following manner:
If Obama loses, it’s because of racism. If he wins, there was no racism.
There’s no obligation to vote for Obama to have lack of racism- therefore, there is no racism mandated in not voting for Obama.
This is not to say there aren’t racists.
But just because someone is hostile to a black man doesn’t mean they’re hostile to his blackness. Sometimes, it’s because they’re hostile to the man. Perhaps because of what he supports.
I’m in Portland, and the poster commenting about “people whispering”- hell yes, Portland was in Hillary’s pocket. Does your wife know it’s racism, or does she not consider that there are hardline Hillary advocates here? Remember, after all, we have the Pacific Party because the Green Party wasn’t extreme enough.
Well I’m not part of the “Obama Machine” whatever that is, but I’m happy to explain where my confidence comes from; it’s pretty simple.
It’s a numbers game.
I called the primaries for Obama very, very early, in spite of him trailing Hillary in the polls by more than 20%. How did I do this? I saw how organized his game was, and how he tapped into the heart and spirit of average individuals, inspiring them to “own a piece of this campaign” by showing up by the thousands to volunteer, and donating as little as $1.30 to his campaign. He was keeping up with Hillary on fundraising, but his money was coming from an exponentially larger group of donors – donors who translate into voters.
Now, he may not have won the popular vote by a huge margin, but his strategy of mobilization brilliantly afforded him enough of a margin to trounce Hillary in the only metric that mattered – delegates.
The general election is still a numbers game, and he is out-registering voters by the millions across the country. See this article, Democrats post big gains in voter registration. Not only are we picking up tens, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters in every state mentioned, but the Republicans are actually losing registrants from their party in all but one of those same states.
So long as we maintain our ground game, talking to people, explaining Barack’s stand on the issues, registering new voters, canvassing neighborhoods, and convincing our Democratic brethren to actually exercise their right to vote this time instead of sitting home, we will overwhelm them at the only polls that matter – the voting booths.
Racism is only the guess. It could be a fiercely Hillary household, it could be a military household that abhors nonmilitary candidates, or (being Portland) it could be a household that won’t tolerate a candidate who doesn’t live in a tree and drive a Prius. Come to think of it, that last one might be it…
LOL. True. He was President of the Harvard Law Review. I’ve seen publications. Treekiller!
You mean as long as Obama moves toward the center and tries to hide his liberalism he has a shot. The Obama campaign got a huge pass from most of the press. That time has ended. Can he win? Of course he can.
I just have to say hopefully for the last time that I really can’t believe any Democrat thought this would be a blow out election. Seriously, are some of you that out of step? Middle America may be fly over country but the votes all still count.
And for the record I’m a Republican who is not religious, abortion is a personal matter, and I only own one handgun.
It is interesting to compare the electoral vote predictions from '04:
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2004/info/graph.html
With those from this year:
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Pres/ec_graph-2008.html
I recall making some bets based on the data at that site in '04, which paid off for me although considering how much the predicitions swung back and forth in that year, it was not a sure thing.
This year, Obama has been ahead (and by quite alot) since late May, but has nosedived only in the past week or so. This year seems like it has been a lot less back and forth than in '04. So I guess a bunch of knuckledraggers invaded our country within the past few weeks or they finally got telephone service so the pollsters could get ahold of them…
I’ve been seriously thinking about resigning as a precinct election official so I can spend the day transporting Democrats to the precinct instead.
I won’t knock on doors or call people on the phone, or help with mailings. I hate those things and expect most people feel the same way. But I have no problem picking people up and taking them to vote. We could have used more volunteers for this last time.
I think most people have made up their minds – and the only thing left that will really make a difference is getting out the vote.
If you don’t want to haul senior citizens around, then volunteer to be a poll watcher – make sure everything’s legal at your polling place. It’s worth taking a day off work.
This is just bizarre to me, because as far as I can tell even if Russia decides to bomb Georgia off the map it wouldn’t exactly change the lives of the average American much. What would be really bad for Americans would be if this led to irreparable damage to our relationship with Russia. I’m far more scared of what a belligerent, impulsive war-hawk like McCain might do.
47 to 44?
Dear God.
After the past twenty-four hours’ performance by Palin, how McCain can be polling above single digits is incomprehensible to me. She seems to offer the fact that you can see Russia from Alaska as evidence of her skill in international matters. She would advocate engaging Russia on the battlefield if they attack Georgia, after the latter becomes a NATO member.
And the stock high-school debate phraseology. Sometimes it seems she can’t open her mouth without saying something like “read the writing on the wall”, or “all for one, one for all”. Listening to her I keep thinking of the old movie Philadelphia Story, where George Kittridge says, “Well, we can’t turn back the clock”, and C. K. Dexter Haven says, “I wish I’d thought of that”.
This is getting really scary. Listening to her, and to some Republican pundits, it seems we are entering a heretofore uncharted region of exalted incompetence and anti-elitism. One such pundit, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal said just today that the left’s continued disdain of Palin would result in a conservative backlash that would cost it the election. By “conservative” one presumes he means the salt-of-the earth non-egghead real Americans who populate all those small towns. You know, the non-elites. But it’s not a case of resenting elites…it’s coming down to a case of resenting people who actually know stuff. You know, the people who are smart and competent.
I’m an Obama supporter. I’m going to make a prediction, not about the election itself, but about a possibly twist on the road toward Election Day.
You know all those accusations from loudmouth right-wingers about how the media is slanted liberal, and how Republican candidates never get an even break? Smart people, of course, know that that’s just crocodile tears, a sympathy-seeking ploy.
Still, I suspect that members of the MSM are getting more and more pissed at the Republicans’ games as every day goes by. I predict that, if this election is looking close down the home stretch, influential players in the press will do everything they can to throw the election to Obama just short of giving him the keys to a network broadcast booth and walking away.
Reporters, editors and producers, I’ll bet you, hate being falsely scapegoated by Republicans after every imagined slight. They hate that Sarah Palin is a toothy airhead who’s getting a free pass to the White House. They hate that the Bush administration has botched up the economy and government with deception and incompetence, yet his cronies and clones might get another four years in the presidency. But most importantly, they hate, hate, HATE that John McCain – a man that so many of them had immense respect for – willingly sold his soul to the Rove spin machine to win the election.
They will say to themselves (if only subconsciously), “The Republicans love crocodile tears? Well, let’s give them something to really cry about.” McCain and Palin will come under critical scrutiny like they are germs on a microscope slide; meanwhile Obama and Biden will get a pass like big-chested cheerleader at a Star Trek convention. If this plays out like I hope it will, fence-sitting voters, who will be looking for guidance and who, I suspect, have not lost all trust in the MSM, will take their cue from all the pro-Obama coverage and deliver the election to the Democrats.
Of course the Republicans will bitch and moan about the left-biased media, but no one will care because that’s what the Republicans always do when they suffer a setback. The funny thing is, for once they will be right!
We Democrats need to be Fonzies.
Do you remember when Fred Thompson was going to ride up in his rented red pickup and jowl the nation to a new era? Do you remember when Rudy Giuliani was going to 9/11 the 9/11 straight to 9/11? I can understand if you blinked and missed it, but they were on top of the GOP world for a few weeks each late last year.
Both of them were far better ideas than candidates. Once they started coming out and facing real scrutiny everybody learned that Thompson was not D.A. Arthur Branch, and Rudy was more than the guy who gave a great speech on 9/11. They were flash floods, gone almost as quickly as they came.
That’s where Palin is now. Her skill at talking out of both sides of her mouth in the past has allowed everyone to see what they want to see in her, and her stump speech hasn’t done anything to dissipate that. But she’s going to have to start talking to the press, and it can’t be Charlie Gibson slow-pitch and Sean Hannity rimjobs forever.
The election is going to turn in the press, just like it always does. They gave the Swiftboaters far too much credit for far too long in 2004, and we all remember the Gore narratives from 2000. They used to love McCain, but now that the barbecues and the Straight Talk are over they’ve turned cold. They’re calling bullshit on the GOP they never would have called before. And the emerging story on Palin right now is that she couldn’t hold her own in the softball interview.
Let her go a couple more weeks without a press conference or a real interview, and watch the press turn on her like rabid wolves. They’re already snarling a little bit. And as the press goes, so will the swing voters. That’s just the way it is. It’s going to give you right-wingers plenty to bitch about for the next few years while you suffer through the Obama administration.
I’m not overconfident. I’ve lived through enough of these that I know the Democrats can still fuck it up, and the press could do just about anything. It’s still going to take everything Obama and his army of volunteers have to pull it off. But McCain’s bump is just a bump, and pissing ourselves over it is silly and counterproductive. We need to be Fonzies, and you know what Fonzie’s like, right?
The issue of JM’s age and health will be in the back of everyone’s mind. Can Palin pilot this country? Can she keep the evil empires in check? She needs to do far better than she did with Charlie to be seen as anything other than a little red sports car for a candidate in a mid (end) life crisis.
BTW, for those who say JM isn’t in his end game (citing his 90 something year old mother), consider his Grandfather passed on at 61, his father expired at 70.
I hate to say this, but a ticket with NO white guy on it would be an even bigger flyer.
Clinton is a known quantity in the sense that she is famous, but her resume is just as thin as Obama’s and she energizes the large base of people who hate her guts.
I really don’t think so. I think that if he had we’d still be looking at a McCain bump and saying that they could have won it with a fresh-faced and principled candidate like Obama.
I don’t really see why not. The number of actual Hillary supporters crossing the line to Palin is vanishingly small. Palin’s appeal is to the religious right and the right-leaning soccer moms, and McCain needed a boost with them either way. Lieberman or Ridge still would have been just as unpalatable.
They’re already united and pumped. Sure, there are still a few whinybaby Hillary fans who say they won’t vote Obama, but remember that Obama had those, too. Probably more of them, even.
I say this as someone who generally likes both Clintons, but…there is always more dirt to be dug up on them. They may have mined the hell out of that mountain, but that just makes the deep coal easier to get to.
It’s been said that one of the reasons Hillary’s name was crossed off the VP list early on was that Bill refused to open the books on the Clinton Global Initiative, and that his horndoggery hasn’t exactly subsided. Hell, I’d love to know that the Big Dog is using his talents for sleaze to better the world as a private citizen, and if it gets him laid more power to him. (At this point you’d have to assume that Hillary just doesn’t care.) But Clinton sleaze is like sweet, sweet smack to the press, and once they got a taste they’d be tearing open every box in the house to find that stash they may have forgotten about.
We might not have had the same challenges with Hillary, but we’d still have challenges. I think we picked right. If Obama can’t win now, no one could have.
If McCain is winning the eltoral college polls, why does CNN.com’s map look so favorable to Obama?
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/10/electoral.map/index.html#cnnSTCOther1
Can’t we all agree that polls at this point are useless? And even if they were useful, there are just as many showing Obama with a clear victory as there are for McCain?
