Presidential election minus one day

My tip: Obama to win 303-235, carrying Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada.

If you’re a Crikey subscriber, you can observe my reading of the situation here, which concludes thus:

I don’t see any reason to bet against the view shared by FiveThirtyEight and the RealClearPolitics state polling averages: that Obama will win the electoral college 303 to 235, carrying Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada, while falling short in Florida and North Carolina.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,468 comments on “Presidential election minus one day”

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  1. HOW HILARIOUS IS THIS!

    The Romney campaign was SHOCKED that they lost because their computer system, called ORCA, told them they were going to win!

    [Some Romney aides were surprised too, especially since they had put an enormous amount of effort into tracking the hour-by-hour whims of the electorate. In recent weeks the campaign came up with a super-secret, super-duper vote monitoring system that was dubbed Project Orca. The name “Orca,” after the whale, was apparently chosen to suggest that the project was bigger than anything any other campaign, including Barack Obama’s in 2008, had ever imagined. For the project, Romney aides gathered about 34,000 volunteers spread across the swing states to send in information about what was happening at the polls. “The project operates via a web-based app volunteers use to relay the most up-to-date poll information to a ‘national dashboard’ at the Boston headquarters,” said a campaign email on election eve. “From there, data will be interpreted and utilized to plan voter turnout tactics on Election Day.”

    Orca, which was headquartered in a giant war room spread across the floor of the Boston Garden, turned out to be problematic at best. Early in the evening, one aide said that, as of 4 p.m., Orca still projected a Romney victory of somewhere between 290 and 300 electoral votes. Obviously that didn’t happen. Later, another aide said Orca had pretty much crashed in the heat of the action. “Somebody said Orca is lying on the beach with a harpoon in it,” said the aide]
    http://washingtonexaminer.com/in-boston-stunned-romney-supporters-struggle-to-explain-defeat/article/2512861#.UJySe4dthao

  2. You know, Mod Lib, I think you’re on to something. Forget all the policies, campaigning etc. The key to Obama’s win is that people like him.

  3. [Forget all the policies…]

    Why? Because Tories/Repub/LNP types want to pretend that their policies are as fundamentally decent is Labour/Democrat/Labor policies? Well that’s NOT the case. If you are uncomfortable with your party’s policies then try and do something about it within the party but don’t pretend that the US result is because O is a nice guy. There was a philosophical debate that took place and THAT is what decided the election.

  4. The U.S. HAS a Federal Electoral Commission:
    http://www.fec.gov/

    It simply doesn’t have powers to do the most basic things an electoral commission needs to do. For example, ensuring that districts are gerrymandered, ensuring that the same ballot format is used nation-wide, ensuring that there are polling places distributed properly throughout the entire country.

    Can you believe that the Democrats won the popular House of Representatives vote with a current margin of 500,000 votes, yet they didn’t go close to claiming even 50% of the seats? That’s because Republicans at a state level have drawn some of the most idiotic looking electoral boundaries of all time.

  5. ShowsOn @ 1455

    [ Can you believe that the Democrats won the popular House of Representatives vote with a current margin of 500,000 votes, yet they didn’t go close to claiming even 50% of the seats?]

    Wow. I actually didn’t know the margin was that big. Unbelievable. No wait – totally believable. Nothing about the US electoral system surprises me any more.

    [That’s because Republicans at a state level have drawn some of the most idiotic looking electoral boundaries of all time.]

    Yes, that they have. The boundaries are designed to maintain the status quo. Here’s a great article on this:

    http://prospect.org/article/why-house-didn’t-flip

    The Dems will have to hope that in certain pivotal states (like Pennsylvania and Ohio) that they control the state legislatures when the next re-districting occurs – and the next one is still several years away.

  6. Someone suggested that the $600 million that super-PACs spent to defeat Obama may have sti9mulated economic activity enough to ensure his re-election!

  7. [Someone suggested that the $600 million that super-PACs spent to defeat Obama may have sti9mulated economic activity enough to ensure his re-election!]

    😆

    Although, realistically, looking at the size of the US economy, that’s unlikely. But still, even if slightly true, it is very much the textbook definition of irony!

  8. Nebraska-2:

    Still can’t seem to find exact results for the NE-2 electoral college vote…..

    I know Obama lost it clearly, but would be interested to see the swings if anyone can get there hands on it. What I can find is:
    1. House NE-2 district only went to the Republicans by 2.4% (hardly a landslide!)
    2. Presidential NE-2 is largely Douglas county which went Romney by 4%
    3. Presidential NE-2 also includes the urban part of Sarpy County (the whole of Sarpy went Romney 61-37)

    …it would just be interesting to see how Obama would have done on NE-2’s old boundaries

  9. Basically, the electorate preferred a smart half-black man with a Muslim name to a multi-millionaire Mormon who drove to Canada with the family dog strapped on the roof.

    Politics made simple.

  10. There’s a CNN exit poll (http://edition.cnn.com/election/2012/results/race/president#exit-polls) that for me spells out in one big stat why Romney failed. (Of course there are many contributing factors including Romney being not a particularly good candidate but this for me is the big one.)

    The question was who is more to blame for current American economic problems.

    Response: Obama 38% George W Bush 53%.

    The Republicans tried to remove Obama by blaming him for the state of the economy, since this was really the only serious argument for not giving him another term. Outside of existing Republican sympathisers (32% of respondents were registered Republicans) practically nobody agreed with them.

    And those who did buy it probably included a lot of ex-Republicans who now identify as independent, a trend which explained both the Democrat lead in party ID and the fact that Independents skewed Republican but the Republicans were still unable to win.

  11. ShowsOn:

    [Can you believe that the Democrats won the popular House of Representatives vote with a current margin of 500,000 votes, yet they didn’t go close to claiming even 50% of the seats?]

    Yes I can

    [That’s because Republicans at a state level have drawn some of the most idiotic looking electoral boundaries of all time.]

    True. Apparently the advantages of incumbency are so great that only about 10% of seats are even contests. They are walkovers for one party of the other.

  12. Fom the excellent “American Prospect ” site…looking at the fate of “the whiteman’s party” in California
    ________________________
    A great piece on how the Immigrants vote has changed California and how the Repubs are unable to counter this

    In the state election on the same day as the Pres.poll the Democrats captured 2/3 of the state seats and all major state officers.
    They carried a referendum for icreased taxes on the rich by lands tax and death duties…thus helping the ailing school system and the medical services too
    a great article on the demographic changes there

    http://prospect.org/article/future-white-mans-party

  13. Ruawake:

    After a poll came out with a clear ALP win in Vic election I posted this:

    [Mod Lib
Posted Friday, October 29, 2010 at 10:10 pm | Permalink
Confess, I comPletely misread this one (althogh no a Victorian so can be excused)! I thought this was going to be a surprise cliffhanger with narrow minority gov , similar to feds. oh well, lets see how it turns out.]

    US elections:

    [Mod Lib
Posted Sunday, November 4, 2012 at 12:46 am | PERMALINK
    
I was out, so sorry for the delay! However, I am not changing my earlier prediction-
    Obama 332 (just minor changes to margins):

    Minnesota: +5

    Wisconsin: +5
    
Nevada: +5 …. now +4
    
Ohio: +1 … now +2
    
Colorado: +2 … now +1
    
Virginia: +1
    
New Hampshire: +1 … now +2
    
Iowa: +2 … now +3
    
Florida: +0.1 … now +0.5
    
North Carolina: -2.0
    
Obama 50.8%

    Romney 48.0%

    and the Senate:

    [236
 Mod Lib
Posted Sunday, November 4, 2012 at 12:48 am | PERMALINK


    Senate predictions (draft 2) = 54

    That is made up of 47 safe Senate seats, including Maine Independent King, plus:

    Mass: Dem (Warren) +5
    
Conn: Dem (Murphy) +5
    
Missouri: Dem (McCaskill) +5
    
Wisconsin: Dem (Baldwin) +2
    
Virginia: Dem (Kaine) +1
    
Indiana: Dem (Donn) +1 … now +4

    Montana: Dem (Tester) +1
    
Nevada: Rep (Heller) -1
    
Nth Dakota: Rep (Berg) -3
    
Arizona: Rep (Flake) -3
    
Nebraska: Rep (Fisher) -5]

    …particularly proud of the Montana prediction as few predicted that correctly.

    Also, although I missed North Dakota, I did say Heitkamp was running a great grassroots campaign, and in the end she just won so not such a bad prediction to say she would just lose in a very red state in a bad year for the Dems. She actually did brilliantly to take it.

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