Yucca Mountain is in Nevada, not New Mexico. The only facility with any sort of comparison to Yucca Mountain in New Mexico would be WIPP, and that’s a bad comparision because WIPP just takes materials that are contaminated with radioactive material, not actual waste. Personally, I don’t see the problem with Yucca Mountain or with WIPP, but that’s not really part of this thread.
Depends on where you look. That one EV predictor or all of these –
Rasmussen Reports has Bush ahead 222 EV to Kerry’s 186.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/
Race 2004 has it Bush 207 to Kerry’s 185.
Federal Review has it Bush 296 EVs to Kerry’s 242.
Election Projection has it Bush 286 EVs to Kerry’s 252.
Yucca Mt is in Nevada…we don’t give a shit about that issue here. 
Well, except the folks (like my mom) who work at Sandia Labs that is…because they have a contract there. Definitely a minority of the population though.
-XT
In that case, I’m surprised that Kerry isn’t well ahead. I just checked the NM results for NM. Bush beat Gore by a mere 0.1% of the popular vote.
This may be true in the Southwest, but Hispanics in Florida lean Republican. Generalizations about Hispanics nationwide are rarely useful. (I don’t mean to imply that you don’t already realize this; I just want to make the point for people who may be confused about what they’ve heard about the Hispanic vote in Florida.)
[QUOTE=Tigers2B1]
Depends on where you look. That one EV predictor or all of these –
Aren’t there 538 electoral college votes?
That’s because a lot of FL Hispanics are Cuban-American. Hardly any Cuban-American Hispanics in the Southwest.
[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
What are you talking about?
As much as I’d like a Kerry win, I don’t want to make any predictions on this election, as I’m too afraid to jinx it.
Oil speculators on the other hand, are seeing a Kerry win:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=568&ncid=749&e=1&u=/nm/20041101/bs_nm/markets_oil_dc
Maybe they are trying to jinx it.
On Wisconsin Public Radio this morning a Republican pundit predicted early election returns will give Pennsylvania and Ohio to Kerry, and Florida to Bush…then the eyes of the nation will turn to the central time zone: Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. He said whoever wins two of the three states will win the electoral college.
Kerry has consistently held a modest lead in the Minnesota polls, while Iowa and Wisconsin have been true toss-ups. I happen to live in a “swing” section of Wisconsin (southwest), where Kerry, Bush, or a surrogate have visited every darn day for weeks. Just as an example, Kerry and the Bush twins are scheduled to campaign in LaCrosse on election day, and Bush last week even campaigned in Cuba City (pop. 2000)!
I predict that Kerry will win southwest Wisconsin, therefore the entire state, therefore the election. Some of my reasons:
>Yard signs. A lot of Republicans have signs out for their state representative and state senate candidates, but not for Bush or the Republican U.S. Senate candidate. Kerry signs have been abundant.
>The towns on highway 14 ignored Bush when he cruised through last week on his bus. He drew MUCH heavier crowds in June.
>People have been griping about how the Bush rallies were “invitation only”. It seems snobbish. The rally at the Richland Center school was also poorly received because students were told they could not wear Kerry buttons, or they had to stay in the detention room for the day.
>I “campaigned” in two towns Saturday and Sunday dressed in a John Kerry costume, and most people happily shouted their support. 
>LaCrosse usually, maybe always, votes Democratic. I think the only reason the Republican candidates keep going there must be to shorten the drive for the LaCrosse TV reporters, so they are sure to broadcast the event to the politically split rural areas. If that is so, the strategy has not worked for Bush.
I think he was talking about these figures that don’t total 538:
*Rasmussen Reports has Bush ahead 222 EV to Kerry’s 186.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/
Race 2004 has it Bush 207 to Kerry’s 185.
Those are the non-swinging projected Electoral Votes.
Race2004.net is actually predicting the following:
Bush and Kerry tie the electoral college with 269 votes each. Unless an elector changes his vote (unlikely, but legal and possible), the 12th Amendment to the Constitution dictates the matter to be resolved by the House of Representatives. Each state delegation receives one vote. If a delegation is evenly split on which candidate to vote for, no vote is cast. 26 votes are needed to win. The vice-president is elected seperately from the president through a simple majority vote of the Senate.
That would really suck if that happened.
I reckon Kerry will just win the popular vote. Don’t know about the EC vote.
How does that add or take away anything, substantive or not, from any of the polls. Why is it even relevant? – So, they don’t total 538 - big shit.
Umm, yeah. Thanks for jumping on me. I was just trying to help Hentor the Barbarian with his question “Aren’t there 538 electoral college votes?” which I assumed he was wondering why Race2004.net and Rasmussen’s numbers didn’t equal up to 538.
Sorry if I came across that way stpauler - it wasn’t my intent -
Other way round. Gore beat Bush by 366 votes. Had a mistake in handwriting not been caught, the state could have easily gone to Bush just by simple error on the part of election officials. Not even maliciousness, but just an error that in a less-close race would have had no effect on the results. Had that been the only error, and not caught, then Bush would’ve won NM.
Yep. You are right.
And as I pointed out in my diary over there (where I’m just RT), Pew did the same thing. Weighting for a 4-point Dem edge in party ID (which is what Pew said was the case at midyear), you get a 49-46 Kerry edge from Pew’s poll of likely voters.
Between them and (gasp!) Fox, which according to Chris Bowers renormalizes to a 49-45 Kerry lead, I’m starting to think Kerry could win by 4-5% once the undecideds break.
Not betting my life on it, though. But if Kerry clears 50% of the popular vote, which I think he will, he’ll get enough EVs so that when the GOP challenges, they’ll have to overturn the results in at least 2 states to reverse the result. And that won’t fly.
I notice Zogby has posted one final update to their “swing state” map and it shows enough movement towards Kerry to put him over the 270 mark (although several states are still within the margin of error).
Kerry would benefit greatly from even one of the following to be true:
a) The cell phone thing — that enough voters to make a difference are cellphone-only users, that their preference is strongly towards Kerry (as Zogby indicates), and that they do indeed turn out to vote in appreciable numbers (see next item);
b) The huge turnout thing — that a really big turnout is going to occur and that it is going to have a pro-Kerry impact;
c) The last-minute-break-for-the-challenger thing — that the undecided voters really will break towards Kerry much more than towards Bush once they finally make their decision.
There is some truth to the notion that bettors are more likely to know something (unless specific precautions are taken to insure that they don’t, such as checking the roulette wheels and reshuffling an eight-card blackjack stack halfway through), since the betting population is spiked with people who have done their homework. However, there are no guarantees, and this effect can be overwhelmed by a flood of ignorant bets from the Teeming Millions.
I saw a show about the lead-up to the 1929 stock market crash, in which one of the big investors (I forget the name) was described as someone who didn’t bother with business research and treated the stock market as simply another gambling game.