Anyone know the stats on the rodent? How often is he right? I’m hoping it’s more right than not, puhleeze?
Archive for prediction
Dan Balz is reporting that Willard M. Romney’s advisers believe that if their candidate can get to the GOP convention with the race close to even, he could end up leading during the final two months of the campaign. That means they also believe that he can compensate for any damage he’s done to himself in the swing states, which so far favor President Obama.
And by compensate they mean convince voters that he’s not a total dufus loser outsourcing tax- returnless gaffe machine.
They have a lot of work to do.
But in looking at the numbers nationally and in the battleground states, the consistency of Obama’s lead is striking. More than two dozen national polls have been conducted since the beginning of June. Obama has led in the overwhelming number of them.
Polls in the most contested states show a similar pattern. In three of the most important — Ohio, Florida and Virginia — there have been roughly three dozen polls total since April, about the time that Romney’s GOP rivals were exiting the nomination race. In Ohio and Virginia, Obama has led in all but a few. In Florida, Romney has done better, but overall, Obama has led about twice as often.
Those polls are not definitive predictors of the November outcome, by any means. A movement in the national numbers, which could easily occur in the final weeks, will change the look of many of those states. But at this point, the available evidence suggests that the advantage, however small, is with Obama. If this were truly a dead even race, Romney should be ahead in these polls almost as often as he is behind.
Fingers crossed.
Get out the vote.
Michael Tomasky has another great article at the Daily Beast. If you recall, his last one was a major smack down of Willard Romney’s wimp factor. Read about it, you’ll be glad you did: VIDEO- Robert Gibbs: Romney is “embarrassing.” Daily Beast: He’s “lame, annoying, a true wimp, a weenie, nervous, terrified, nasty, whiny.”
In keeping with Tomasky’s article, yesterday I posted some encouraging news from Nate Silver: “Mr. Obama’s probability of winning the Electoral College increased…” Tomasky adds fuel and support to that assertion by writing in his new piece, “…The fact is that the more you look at it, the more you come to conclude that Mitt Romney has to draw an inside straight like you’ve never ever seen in a movie to win this thing.”
He goes on to say that Pennsylvania has been trending back toward Obama lately. In fact, it has.
Tomasky:
Obama can lose the big Eastern four—Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida: all of ’em!—and still be reelected.
And barring some huge cataclysm, he’s not losing all four of those states. If he wins even one—say Virginia, the smallest of the four—then Romney has to win Colorado, Iowa, and New Hampshire; all possible, certainly, but all states where he has been behind, narrowly but consistently, for weeks or months. [...]
Sure, something big could happen to alter the dynamic completely. … All the supposedly game-changing events of the last few weeks haven’t changed much of anything. This is a paradoxical situation that has little or no modern precedent, which makes it hard for people to accept. Liberals are too nervous to think it, reporters too intent on a “down to the wire” narrative, and conservatives too furious and disbelieving, but it’s shaping up to be true: An extremely close election that on election night itself stands a surprisingly good chance of being not that close at all.
He has more details so please link over, and I still have a few concerns: Voter suppression (hopefully, the courts will continue to derail the GOP effort to stop people from voting); super PAC money (hopefully, saturation of the air waves by negative ads will desensitize and/or anger enough unconvinced swing voters that they’ll stop listening); hatred of the president (hopefully, those people are the same 20-30% we keep seeing in the polls who comprise the most extreme members of the Republican base who would never vote for Obama in the first place).
The key is Democratic turnout. Please consider doing everything you can to assist people in accessing places of registration right now, and then getting them to the polls in November.
Nate the Great at 538 has good news for President Obama– including those 300 electoral votes in the top graph– and it goes a little something like this:
Mr. Obama’s probability of winning the Electoral College increased slightly on the economic news, to 71.1 percent from 70.2 percent. [...]
Meanwhile, the comparatively encouraging economic reports of the past week make it less likely that there is another shoe to drop on Mr. Obama in the form of a further economic downturn.
He goes on to say (among other things, so please follow the link) that voters have a history of judging incumbents on their progress, despite the current state of the economy. Since the president has certainly made progress, as you can see plainly right here, then that bodes well for his chances in November.
If I’m gonna slam him, I’ll give him the pixels to do the right thing. Via Media Matters.
If a Republican wins the presidential election, then this country’s voters have a collective death wish. I wish I meant that figuratively, but if the GOP has its way, we can say good-bye to Social Security and Medicare as we know it, and that would literally crush seniors and the poorest among us. And don’t get me started on privatization in general, foreign policy, health care, tax cuts, ad nauseam…
Not that President Obama wouldn’t alter programs in some way, too, as in being open to raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67, among other things, but if a Republican wins, and the House and/or the Senate end up in GOP hands, that’s a worrisome toxic combination.
We need a Democratic president’s veto power at the very least. With a loony President “God Told Me To Do It” Perry as chief executive, for example– well, I don’t even want to think about what would happen. Via Washington Whispers:
Allan Lichtman, the American University professor whose election formula has correctly called every president since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election, has a belated birthday present for Barack Obama: Rest easy, your re-election is in the bag.
“Even if I am being conservative, I don’t see how Obama can lose,” says Lichtman, the brains behind The Keys to the White House. [...]
Lichtman developed his 13 Keys in 1981. They test the performance of the party that holds the presidency. If six or more of the 13 keys go against the party in power, then the opposing party wins.“The keys have figured into popular politics a bit,” Lichtman says. “They’ve never missed. They’ve been right seven elections in a row. A number that goes way beyond statistical significance in a record no other system even comes close to.”
Now we have to get out the vote, or Lichtman’s magic keys mean nothing.
“Oh no!” they shouted.
“Doom and gloom!” they screamed.
“A six-month moratorium on deep water drilling?! There go thousands of jobs and zillions of dollars!” they bellowed.
President Obama, what the heck are you doing to America!?
[T]he worst of those forecasts has failed to materialize, as companies wait to see how long the moratorium will last before making critical decisions on spending cuts and layoffs. Unemployment claims related to the oil industry along the Gulf Coast have been in the hundreds, not the thousands, and while oil production from the gulf is down because of the drilling halt, supplies from the region are expected to rebound in future years. Only 2 of the 33 deepwater rigs operating in the gulf before the BP rig exploded have left for other fields. [...]
[I]t now appears that the direst predictions about the moratorium will not be borne out. Even the government’s estimate of the impact of the drilling pause — 23,000 lost jobs and $10.2 billion in economic damage — is proving to be too pessimistic.
So why is Big Oil doing just dandy, thank you?
Drilling firms have kept most of their workers, knowing that if they let them go it will be hard to field experienced teams when the moratorium is lifted. Oil companies have shifted operations to onshore wells, saving industry jobs.
P.S. Deep water drilling is here to stay. Way to have foresight, world.
The chairmen of the presidential panel investigating the Gulf oil spill are expressing disappointment that the Obama administration didn’t consult with senior U.S. environmental officials before announcing plans to expand offshore drilling before the accident.
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