Definitely, CA is a no-brainer. No offices there. It's states like Alaska and Nevada that we need to watch.

Any frontier state is automatically swing now.

8/8/08

Toward McCain:
New Jersey goes from strong DEM to weak DEM
Oregon goes from weak DEM to barely DEM
Wisconsin goes from strong DEM to weak DEM

Toward Obama:
Massachusetts goes from weak DEM to strong DEM

I still don't get Oregon. One poll I saw on CNN had Obama up by 10 points there.

McCain is closing the gap and like it or not, his negative attacks have made a lot of undecided white voters somewhat wary of Obama.

Like it or not, this is exactly what is happening, so DON'T YELL AT ME!!

I think the polls are going to fluctuate. While right-wingers are making a lot of hay about how small Obama's lead is, the fact is that he's IN THE LEAD --- despite far more negative press than McCain has gotten. If Obama is to be ridiculed because he has a small lead and can't seem to pull ahead, what does it say about their candidate that he's NOT in the lead? And that he can't seem to get ahead of the far-left communist Muslim black surrender-monkey America-hating candidate with the funny name?

He went from behind by five to behind by three. Closing the gap is more like what Gerald Ford did against Carter -- remember?

I know but imo all hope for an Obama landslide is gone.

Obama's peoople must stop acting like Hillary Clinton's, there are not entitled to win, they must fight to win.

So they should get all of the signs of Obama thinking he is already president.

8/9

Toward Obama:
Michigan moves from barely DEM to weak DEM

Its too early to even speculate on that stuff. Dukakis led George Bush Sr by 20 points before the conventions. Polls are nearly meaningless until we get past the conventions.

Ford did lose, but he really did close a massive gap and he had to live with being tied to the GOP which was arguably more disliked then than it is now. He was also as inexperienced at running for President as Carter was, sorta like this election.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1976

The election ended up being pretty close 297-240.

Mark Nickolas at Huffingpost analyzes past elections and finds that a 5 point popular vote lead always translates into a landslide electoral college victory.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-nick ... 17525.html

This is interesting and I think McCain is going to lose, but I'm not sure how much stock I put into the 5 point popular vote lead.

1. He compares Obama's 5 point lead in August to final election totals. Not exactly comparing apples to apples. He should have compared August leads.

2. Bill Clinton did win more than 5 percent and won by a large amount in the EC, but he was also running against two candidates and wasn't able to obtain 50% + in either election. Many would argue that Perot hurt Bush more than he hurt Clinton.

3. Bush I. did well in both the EC and in popular vote, but that was 20 years ago and it seems difficult to compare something from 20 years ago to now.

Thing is with Perot is that if he wasn't running, tons of his supporters would just stay home.

Maybe it is hard to say. I don't think Perot was a big factor in Clinton's relection win . I don't think Bob Dole had a prayer that year.

No of course you don't, but since when have Republicans ever put much stock in reality, facts, or history?



He's not making a prediction based on the August polls. He's simply saying that with Obama's lead today, he'd win in a landslide. He's refuting the Republican talking point that Obama isn't running away in the polls and therefore the election is going to be very tight.



That's irrelevant. He's not looking at WHY a candidate had a 5 point lead, only at how that lead translated into an EC victory.



So little or nothing can be learned from events 20 years ago? I'll keep that in mind.

Beeble, why must you get your panties in a bunch with every single thing someone says that disagrees, however slightly, with something you say?

I don't see how his 5 point lead idea refutes anything the Republicans are saying. The past couple of races the Dems have had large leads in the summer and Bush closed that lead both times. So if Obama doesn't have that large of a lead now, and the tradition of Republicans closing the gap continues, I don't see how he refuted anything.

I'm not saying that McCain is going to close the gap but that it would be more relevant if he would compare August leads to the November leads. John Kerry had an August lead and he lost in November, when things actually count.

When I was talking about the 1988 elections, I simply said they weren't comparable to now, not that nothing could be learned. But thanks for inserting your normal smugness. My only point was that the political landscape has changed, for instance Mexican-Americans were a smaller part of the population back in 1988 and California was still in play for the GOP...these are just two electoral things that are different now than they were in 1988.

His briefs are very, very tight.

There is no "tradition" of Republicans closing gaps. Things happen either way. Bill Clinton was third place in some polls at one point.

John Kerry was the incompetence equivalent of the Houston Texans.

If you'd like me to point out the number of times I've disagreed with people like Groucho and Anita and done so with respect and the ability to disagree, I will.

It was a pretty simple point. He was not trying to argue that Obama is going to win or that the numbers don't swing from candidate to candidate. He was simply saying that a 5 point lead translates into a big EC win and he seems to have the facts to back that up. You're trying to refute a whole different argument, which is that Obama's lead today means that he's going to win in November. No one has made that claim.



Again, he's not making the case that Obama is going to win or lose based on current numbers. Republicans are saying that Obama is not a strong candidate because he isn't running away from McCain in the polls. Nickolas was simply saying that a 5 point lead usually translates to a huge electoral college victory, which means that a 5- point lead isn't necessarily a small one. None of the other crap you're throwing out there has anything to do with that. We all know that all of this could change between now and November. Duh.

No, no, no, Anita. The past simply is not comparable, unless of course you're pointing out how Republicans beat Democrats. Then even incomparable candidates, like Kerry's campaign vs Obama's campaign, are comparable. But not when it makes Republicans look bad. Then it's simply not comparable. Got it?

That's kind of like how Republicans say we have to wait 50-100 years to judge a president's legacy when it comes to declaring Bush the worst president in history, but just ask them about Reagan or Carter and see if they say that the historians are still undecided.

They can talk about legacies all they want. Herbert Hoover still sucks.

Kerry's campaign was a ship dead in the water. I'm not going to cover his ass.

At the moment, they're a tad uninterested in discussing presidential legacies. There's a reason they want to put it off for 50 or 100 years.



Yeah, talk about comparing apples and oranges. Obama is the anti-Kerry in terms of strategy. I liked Kerry, but his campaign was a disaster. Obama is doing everything that Dems were screaming at Kerry to do 4 years ago.

however time can change legacies.


A great example is Harry.S. Truman who was very unpopular back in his day but now we see him as okay or pretty good. Imo if you ask what is your opinion of Truman, it would be mostly mediocre but back in his day it would be largely negative.

8/12/08

Toward McCain:
Iowa moves from strong DEM to weak DEM
Virginia moves from tied to barely GOP

Toward Obama:
Oregon moves from barely DEM to weak DEM

Most Obama supporters expected to win Virgina easily.