Do you mean “good weather” in some metaphorical sense, or the actual weather conditions? The idea that the weather could decide an election based on half-assed voters deciding whether or not to go due to it is depressing to me.
He wrote that joke in the New Yorker.
Meteorlogical sense. It’s real.
In '04, I waited for an hour starting at 07:00 in pissing down, 40-degree rain, to vote at the Main Library in Cincinnati. And it only got worse throughout the day.
Since many of my (former) neighbors were folks with buses to catch, I can’t say I was depressed or surprised that many of them chose to skip voting. I was more depressed that the state Republican cabal made it difficult for folks in my type of neighborhood to vote.
But that’s been taken care of. So I hear.
Needless to say, I gave up my umbrella that day.
Lucky you. I waited for 2.5 hours in Columbus in the same pissing-down 40-degree rain. During which time I saw many people drive or walk up, check out the line, and then leave again. I assume that most of these people did not come back later, as it was already late in the day when we were there.
This, among many other reasons, is why the Democratic campaign and allied campaigns have really made an effort to get people to vote early: so that fewer people decline to vote because of long lines in bad weather.
Actually, according to my family in Illinois, people are moving OUT of the state in droves and state revenue is down because of that fact.
Regarding “undecided” voters in Ohio…I just read some blog that claimed people who still say they are undecided are now being considered as people who might never have intended to vote from the getgo, and will probably wind up not voting at all.
In other words, they are still undecided because they have no intention whatsoever of ever making a decision or actually voting. Sounds about right to me.
I think that some people say undecided because they do not want people to know for whom they will vote.
Monavis
No, I missed it, dammit! Didn’t hear about it until it was too late to go, which pisses me off because I love David Sedaris and don’t think I’ve missed any of his Cleveland appearances before (I even drove down to Akron a few years back to see him there).
PM me, kitten, if you’d like a little pro-Obama persuasion. 
I think he’s the best candidate by far, and hope he’ll have your vote.
Ohio is a swing state because it reflects and is representative of the nation in so many ways. It has roughly the same percentages of urban, suburban and rural voters as the U.S. as a whole, and roughly the same partisan balance and racial and ethnic demographics, too. As Hostile Dialect wrote, it has a pretty good record of picking the winner of the White House.
I agree with Jackmanii that McCain is likely to win the state, when all is said and done, by a slim margin. But I’d be delighted to be proven wrong!
There may be a bit of a vicious circle thing going on: We here in Ohio are continually bombarded with political ads, I’d venture to say at a factor of several times higher than some other places. I have given up answering my land line because I know it’s going to be a political call. The proportion of “real” mail to junk propaganda in the last few weeks has gone down to about 10%, and I’m being generous.
If they stop sending all the mail and making all the calls, they’ll risk not converting all of us who won’t declare for a candidate. But I, for one, simply hang up and throw the stuff away. Can they not conceive that I’ve heard enough? Do they think it’s that *one last postcard *that’s going to convince me?
Yes, Monavis, I believe many people claim to be undecided because they’re too intimidated or polite to say “none of your business.” I, however, am not.
I’m glad Ohio is an important state. Maybe when either Candidate O or Candidate M is elected, he will remember to try to throw some jobs our way during the next four years.
I get at least one glossy mailer per day from the Ohio Democratic party, and since Friday morning have received 10 robocalls from the McCain campaign.
Yes, it’s very easy to get election fatigue here. Though honestly, it’s not as bad in this household this year as it was in 2004. That was hellish.
One? ONE? I got SIX on Friday. Just from Obama. And I think four from McCain. Plus the calls. For me, this is the worst year ever. No one has knocked on my door, at least not when I’ve been home, but they have attached stuff to my doorknob with rubber bands and dropped material on the doormat for me to pick up.
This is the worst ever, far worse than 2004 for me.
Ohio is important because it’s big and average. While it’s part of the Mid West, it’s the easternmost state in that region, so it borders on the Mid-Atlantic region (Pennsylvania), and the south of the state (including one of the largest cities) borders on the Old South and on Appalachia. With the mixture of influences, it’s not surprising that it’s pretty average politically.
But I’m confident it will go to Obama this time. 2000 and 2004 were close, partly because of Republican Secretary of State who did his best to suppress the Democratic vote. In the 2006 election, the Governor and the Secretary of State positions became Democrat, and the sitting Republican US Senator was defeated and replaced by a Democrat. On top of that, the polls are going Obama’s way. so everything is pointing to a shift from a very narrow Republican vote to a comfortable Democratic vote.
(And I heard Governor Strickland and Senator Obama tell a crowd at the Ohio Statehouse just yesterday that Obama is going to win Ohio, and if you can’t trust them, who can you trust?)
A more interesting question, to my mind, is why AREN’T more states swing states? Throughout the planet’s history there has been a drive towards divergence, a selection for diversity. Each human is a unique and beautiful snowflake. So why, in so many instances, are we as predictable as a lump of ice, frozen into an amorphous blob of hydrogen bonds? I’ve found a book which discusses this issue although I haven’t read it yet, I read about it and heard a Q&A session with the author. It seems very interesting. Basically since 1965 the divide between ideologies has become focused in cities. Cities gain reputations as being friendly to certain types of ideologies and draw residents of that type. With a middle class which is more mobile than pretty much any other time or place in history, people are grouping themselves. Thus you end up with large clusters of like-minded individuals which drive the statewide politics.
That’s the thesis of the book at any rate. I’m going to have to see the evidence before I accept it, but it’s certainly interesting and examines a phenomenon I’ve always found puzzling. Why, given the disparity of candidates, issues, etc. are so many states “predictable”? For my part, I applaud Ohio, either for being diverse enough to have avoided becoming the sort of ideological echo chamber that The Big Sort postulates many areas are morphing into, or for keeping their independence of thought even in a sea of similar voices. Would that more states showed similar characteristics.
Enjoy,
Steven
Cause nobody cares if you’re undecided in North Dakota.
Ohio is a large state and is quite diverse demographically and to a large extent Ohio generally reflects the country as a whole – six major metropolitan areas combined with extensive rural areas (and traditionally a major manufacturing state), and also a big chunk of Appalachia.
You could slice up Ohio into fairly separated regions – the coal-steel belt of Cleveland-Akron-Youngstown, the white-collar and tech belt of Columbus-Dayton-Cincinnati, the heavy defense industry (Wright-Patterson), the major research universities (Ohio State, Case Western), the top notch liberal arts colleges (Oberlin), rural farmers, immigrants, the eastern end of the plains, the western end of the Appalachians. It’s all there.
Eight. Eight decent-sized cities: Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Dayton, Akron, Canton, Youngstown. You could combine Cleveland, Canton, and Akron into one making it six major metropolitan areas.
Next to Michigan, Ohio was also a center of the automobile industry.
I was thinking more along the lines of South Park. We have been given the choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. As far as I am concerned, neither one of them is qualified for the job, and their policy proposals are a bad joke, designed to win votes, not fix the problems in this country.
That’s actually seven. And you can add Canton to the list, because it’s almost the same size as Youngstown. (There are actually nine cities larger than 80,000 in population in Ohio, but Parma is really just a suburb of Cleveland: List of cities in Ohio in Wikipedia).
(And I see that ascenray beat me to it)
I wasn’t counting the candidate advertising, just the Democratic Party ads. I haven’t received anything much from McCain other than the calls.