I think the spirit of one Joseph McCarthy has been found, and it comes wrapped in just as much us-against-them spirit that rolling yourself tightly in Red, White, and Blue can come to offer.
Michelle Bachman, Republican representative of Minnesota’s 6th district, welcome to the national stage!
Put aside the fact John McCain’s VP pick destroys whatever argument Republicans have made over Obama’s experience.
Put aside the fact Obama’s acceptance speech night was watched by a mere 38 million.
This time, the giant pink elephant in the room is taking a huge shit on your desk and you’re not even noticing the smell.
Sarah Palin, a one-term governor and former mayor of a sub-9000 population Alaskan town, is now one breath away from assuming the presidency of these United States. A woman with links to a secessionist group. A woman who, though she has a pregnant teenage daughter, slashed funds for teen mothers. A woman whom the right-wing is already playing the sexism card for. A woman who objected to Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne’s decision to place polar bears on the endangered species list for fear it would “hurt oil and gas development” in their habitats. A woman who, though she recently claimed she was all out against pork barrel spending, only backed out of the ultimate earmark of recent history when she found out the American government would force Alaska to pay roughly 80% for their own $398 million road. Imagine that. A republican who only wants to put the majority of their earmark spending on the American people’s Chinese owned credit card. Now imagine a republican pitching a fit because the American people didn’t want a near $400 million bridge to an airport in Alaska on their national charge card. This is Sarah Palin.
I won’t take all the credit for this, that’ll go to nyceve from DailyKos who made this posting. For those who wonder what exactly the senior Senator from Delaware brings to the Democratic ticket this fall, I present the following samples, just on the other side of the jump.
That drip, drip, drip you hear is not a leaky sink in the background, its the torturous political stagnation that are the dog days of summer: Congress is on vacation, the candidates are running out the clock on their campaigns as solo shows, the Olympics are on TV, and most of the pollsters are twiddling their thumbs awaiting the selection of Vice Presidents and the conventions their selves.
Translation: two weeks removed from the last post on this and the polls have moved quite little. If anything, there’s been continued solidification of the base on both sides, taking states out of play for the moment until we get past the resolution of the Veepstakes and the Conventions that bookend the start of September.
That doesn’t mean there’s absolutely nothing to speak of, and below the jump we’ll get into just that.
The prediction series continues on this time around with the first actual decline in the estimated number of electoral votes for Senator Obama since I’ve started doing this in early June. Delay hitting the panic button yet, however, as it is the usual suspect states (or in this case, state) flipping between leaning one way and the other, as is to be expected probably right up to election night.
Long story short, the numbers this time around are exactly the same as they were two weeks ago, except Florida is slotted under the Republican column this time around instead of the Democratic column.
There’s still some tasty data to digest below, however, and I invite you over the jump.
The prediction series continues this week with a map rather similar to our last one, with the exception of three states flipping. Two of them don’t do much electoral damage or benefit to either candidate (aside from psychological): Montana going blue and North Dakota going red. The biggest state flipping news comes from a state that is impossibly difficult to predict now, a month from now, election night, and depending on which voter machines are hacked, the results might still be in doubt by 2012. That would, of course, be the state of Florida – coming up on the blue side, if barely, this time.
The lack of movement in the map, outside of those three states, isn’t so much due to each candidate digging in to their territory, but a summer vacation by the pollsters – with new data drying up around Independence Day. After the exhaustive (and expensive) primaries, can’t really blame them for wanting to get a couple weeks of shut-eye in before the race to November. That, and we are also in a lull waiting for each candidate to pick their contender for Vice President, something that will be revealed, or heavily hinted, to us in the next 4 to 6 weeks. With that in mind & barring any epic gaffes on either side, the map ought to remain relatively stationary through the rest of July.
Now onto the data. Firstly starting up on the Canadian border states…
Another two weeks gone by and the momentum for Senator Obama continues to accelerate over Senator McCain. Two weeks ago on June 7th, we were just coming off the announcement by Hillary Clinton that she was dropping out of the race and supporting Obama – complete with a rather good speech trying to excite her supporters to the junior Senator from Illinois. She plans on hammering home this point in the coming couple of weeks with campaign stops with Senator Obama. Time will tell if this is a great idea or not but so far, so good.
Greetings once more. I’m back with the third in the bi-weekly prediction series, though to a case of Real Life Syndrome (i.e. having a real job now and not having Mondays off) this got pushed back to Saturday – and probably will continue to be a bi-Saturday experience. As you can see compared with the previous map, there have been some notable changes, and a slow continuing increase for Senator Obama’s lead. Now onto the numbers to see why.
Greetings. I’m back again with the second in the series of prediction threads for the general election coming up this fall. A few things have changed in the past two weeks, most notably on a meta level. For number geeks like myself I have found a great new resource site, FiveThirtyEight.com. I’m getting a majority of my numbers from there, and probably will continue so from here on out. Now to the numbers.
Key:
Blue – Democrat ‘lock’
Teal – Too close to call / lean Democrat
Orange – To close to call / lean Republican
Red – Republican ‘lock’
