No, they do it by a telephone survey. http://www.bls.gov/cps/faq.htm
I don’t see how that follows. And the premise is wrong.
He may lose. Intrade gives him a 60.5% chance, which I think is a bit high and at any rate isn’t far from 50-50.
Uhm, I’m not sure why unemployed people would want a Republican either. There’s Ron Paul, who voted his son after his favourite author. You know, the one that held that the unemployed were “looters” and probably deserve to starve to death.
Then there’s Mitt Romney, who helped contribute to the unemployment fund by letting his savings trickle down completely untaxed offshore.
Then Newt Gingrich, who will get a lot of votes from unemployed children.
Rick Santorum doesn’t seem to mind the unemployed as long as they don’t want a college education, watch pornography, use contraception or have ovaries.
Obama on the other hand tried to pass a jobs act, nearly passed a bill compensating the victims of the financial crisis as well as the perpetrators and actually donates his own money to struggling individuals.
I don’t know if “cruises into” are the right words, but he’ll win. Romney might give him a run for his money(no pun intended), but Obama will win. Romney has alienated the blue-collar Republicans too much, IMHO. Gingrich is finished at this point. Santorum? Welll, he still has massive appeal to the extreme Religious Right, but that won’t get him elected.
The only Republican I kinda liked was Ron Paul, and he never had a chance.
Obama hasn’t been as great a Prez as I’d hoped he’d be, but he’s a damn sight better than any of the alternatives. I’ll vote for him again, even though I’m in a red state so it won’t count (again). :mad:
So who do they like?
None, the economy is in the toilet, gas nearly $5 a gallon and Obama still will ease in. He won’t win as much as last time, but he’ll have an easy time
The GOP candidates are all toads. That by itself seals the deal. Frankly it is insulting because it relieves Obama from pressure to do a good job. Not that I think Obama sucks, on the contrary I think he is the best candidate. But… the pubbies aren’t even running against indefinite detentions, nor corrupt bankers. Instead it is just a bunch of pornographic bullshit.
So, 4 months after the last post in this thread…how about now? Does Obama cruise into his second term?
“Cruising” means coasting by with no effort, so no it doesn’t matter how easily he wins that is not going to happen. It is still more likely than not that Obama will win though.
Yeah, “cruising” would imply that Obama doesn’t need to put in any effort in order to be reelected. Even though he is going to have to work to get a second term, it’s still far more likely that he’ll win in November than Mitt-fucking-Romney.
Basically, Obama will win his second term unless - and this is a big deal - voter suppression efforts in swing states succeed in killing enough Democratic votes. As long as that doesn’t happen, I think a second Obama term is virtually assured; Mitt Romney is just too terrible of a candidate and nobody really likes him more than Obama.
And the republicans are trying their darnedest to make sure that happens.
From over here, Romney looks to be the Republican version of Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis. (And I say that with all due respect to those two gentlemen, having voted for both of them.)
More of a Kerry really. Both were labeled flip floppers and were so utterly unlikeable that nobody wanted to vote for them.
At least Kerry had 3 purple hearts. More or less. Certainly more than Romney will ever have (unfortunately).
Cruising to a 2nd term implies that he’ll actually take a substantial lead in the polls at some point. any predictions on when that will be?
He may very well beat Romney, but it doesn’t look much like cruising. Reagan cruised over Mondale. Clinton cruised over Dole. Bush did not cruise over Kerry, that was a fight. This one looks like a fight too.
And I do agree that Romney compares to Kerry in terms of political style. They have different strengths as candidates, but similar weaknesses. the strategy to beat Romney is the same strategy used to beat Kerry, attack his lone strength and try to portray it as a weakness. Go negative since the incumbent doesn’t believe his record can justify his reelection.
The comparison to Dukakis I can also see. Mondale, not so much. Mondale was an old style Democrat fighting in vain to turn the clock back to the way things were before Reagan. Too beholden to special interests, too fixed in his ways. And he had firm beliefs, however outdated they were. Romney can’t be said to have firm beliefs.
I find it amusing that one of the strikes against Obama earlier in this thread was high gas prices. In the four months since then, gas prices have sunk like a stone.
He may not “cruise,” but everything’s coming up Obama right now.
The four big swing states are Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia. Obama will win if he carries two of these states, but they may all be up-hill battles. Pennsylvania, with 20 electoral votes, should be easiest to win: it’s voted Democratic for President in the last five elections and is shown as 78% likely to go for Obama at a major prediction site. Yet, like the other big swing states, it is controlled by Republicans and they have already cheerfully announced that 750,000 voters will be disenfranchised in November.
If Obama wins Pennsylvania and loses the other three big swing states he still has a fair chance of getting to the magic 270. I worry he may not even get Pennsylvania.
Yeah, I’ve been stewing on Pennsylvania’s importance lately. Predictions tend to be that it’ll go to Obama in 2012, but it’s difficult to gauge whether any of those assumptions are taking the state’s disenfranchisement efforts into account and how the voter ID law will skew the results in November. It’s still possible that the courts will throw out the law before the election, but in the meantime the best thing for the campaign to do would be to make sure that everybody who will want to vote will have the proper ID to do so.
If Obama wins Pennsylvania he’ll probably have Ohio sewn up as well; Virginia is probably safe for him too, but, like Florida, I think it could go either way.
Michigan is also in play. There are actually a lot more swing states in this cycle than normal. Wisconsin, even Minnesota, appear to be in play, and Missouri’s status as a bellwether state still isn’t nullified just because it didn’t happen in 2008.
New Mexico and New Hampshire are also in play and even small states can be pivotal. Oh, and Colorado of course.
Bricker says it ain’t so.