2012 US General Election Discussions: Start to Finish

[BullDog]

Well, unfortunately no matter how often I look at polls or read another article, they are all telling me it's a close race.

If my life depended on correctly choosing who would be the next president I would say Obama. I think he does still have the Electoral College advantage in several of the key swing states. It mostly boils down to Ohio. (see I have nothing new). Whoever wins Ohio will almost certainly be President, and I do think Obama still has the edge there.

My biggest concern is voter turnout. The Dems do seem to be doing well with early voting, so that should help. It's just that enthusiasm is way down from 2008.

My second biggest concern is in a very close race we will have Republican shenanigans- especially in Ohio.

I do think at this point that Obama will win but it is way too close for comfort!

[Tommi]

Close races are scary.

Polls are biased I believe, so I am trying to discount them. My friends and I have collected the mailers, the literature left on the doorknobs and fenc and perused it all. We have researched where the money comes from for candidates, ballot issues here and there. One of my friends sounds like she is doing just what Bully is. We all went over the Voter's Guide over the weekend, and spent hours looking up who , what and where on the Calif. issues

On voter day turnout****Seeing the electoral counts and then voter ballot recounts and feeling that something fishy somewhere will jump out attcha after the vote booths close.

CNN reports "47 young, female and undecided voters" this late in the game ..WOW


Mother Jones
7 Highlights You Missed From the Romney Video

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012...draising-video
"By now you've probably heard about the secret video we published exposing a bunch of real talk from Mitt Romney as he dined with rich Republican donors. But the hour-plus footage, which left the Romney campaign reeling and provoked a full-blown eruption of "chaos on Bullshit Mountain," is a real embarrassment of riches, as it were. Here are some telling moments that you may not have seen yet from Romney's unvarnished Q&A behind closed doors at the $50,000-per-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton on May 17:"

[chefhmboyrd]

early voting tomorrow
i am so ready for this election to be over.
there is NO WAY that Romney is gonna win....

[BullDog]

I do look at polls, but I look at them over time and for trends. There is always the margin of error and there is always some "statistical noise" going on, but I do not think they are meaningless.

I like Nate Silver and do read him every day. If you really want to geek out on the numbers, his article today is awesome.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

His bottom line for today:

"There remains an outside chance that the race will break clearly toward one or the other candidate, after the third debate on Monday or because of some intervening news event, but the odds are strong that we will wake up on Nov. 6 with a reasonable degree of doubt about the winner. For that matter, we may wake up on Nov. 7 still uncertain about who won.

Nonetheless, stipulating that the race is clearly very close is not an adequate substitute for placing any kinds of odds on it at all. And the central premise behind why we see Mr. Obama as the modest favorite is very simple: he seems to hold a slight advantage right now in enough states to carry 270 electoral votes."

Silver currently shows Obama with a 67.7% to win.

[Martina]

The PBS video on called The Choice 2012 I watched last night made a good point -- similar to what Daktari quoted above. Obama isn't really running on his record because no one is happy with it. He is scaring people with the possibility of Romney. The more rational Romney looks, the less likely Democratic voters are to turn out. Romney was scary during the Republican primaries when he was playing to the base. Now he has morphed into Moderate Mitt as Clinton called him. And he is a good debater. So . . . .

This Clear Channel billboard thing in Ohio chilled me. Not that I think the billboards had that much of an effect. But that the company who paid for them chose to have them taken down rather than have their identity revealed. Someone has something to hide -- probably a connection to Romney. In any case, I think there are a lot of potential behind the scenes shenanigans in Ohio. The behavior of the Secretary of State, John Husted, around the early voting law is reason enough to be worried. I won't recount all this. Rachel Maddow has been following it closely, and I know most of you watch her. And Ohio has a documented history of election tampering.

If we have another stolen election, who are we as a nation? Oh well, I am running away with myself. But with a significant amount of wealth, education, and privilege, we are going to hand the democratic process in this nation over to the oligarchy -- cause we can't be bothered to insist on election reform?

OK. I gotta stop. I can be relied upon to veer off into one political rant or another given the slightest push. I am scared. I am volunteering this week and next just to calm my nerves.

Originally Posted by BullDog

Well, unfortunately no matter how often I look at polls or read another article, they are all telling me it's a close race.

If my life depended on correctly choosing who would be the next president I would say Obama. I think he does still have the Electoral College advantage in several of the key swing states. It mostly boils down to Ohio. (see I have nothing new). Whoever wins Ohio will almost certainly be President, and I do think Obama still has the edge there.

My biggest concern is voter turnout. The Dems do seem to be doing well with early voting, so that should help. It's just that enthusiasm is way down from 2008.

My second biggest concern is in a very close race we will have Republican shenanigans- especially in Ohio.

I do think at this point that Obama will win but it is way too close for comfort!

[Martina]

I also read Nate Silver every day, and I comb through the Real Clear Politics list of polls and their graphs, etc. And I play with one of those clickable electoral college maps somewhat obsessively. Not counting reading Politico and the papers. And it's not reassuring. Bulldog's summary is where I am. I think Silver is optimistic unfortunately. Based on what? I don't know.

What bothers me is that I heard someone talk about how many states have ended up actually coming in more than four points from how they polled. So we have swing states polling at 1 and 2 point differences. That doesn't mean anything. Heck we are calling four point leads as "leaning" when they may not mean a thing. Really a lot of states are in play. And anything could happen. Obama's ground game is good, but I can't possibly know if it will be enough. So I am scared.

Before the primaries, my mother, a lifelong Democrat, was disillusioned enough with Obama that she wasn't going to vote. Her disgust with Romney is what is getting her off her ass. Last time I talked to her she said, "Oh well, if Romney wins, it won't be the worst thing. He's not Bush. He won't get us in another war." She lives in Florida. She will vote cause she's an old lady and that's what old ladies do. And she will vote for Obama, but tracking her attitude toward the election has not been encouraging to me.

[BullDog]

I've been skeptical about Romney's "surge" after the first debate. Yes I know it was a disaster for Obama, but it just doesn't add up for me that the swing could be that big. Then I tell myself, you are just trying to convince yourself. I don't know, for me it doesn't add up. I know many people will disagree with me about that. I do think Obama has a bit of a lead. But it is too close when it only shows 1-2 points lead to be comfortable. I do agree with Martina about that. I think this is a Base Election- which means Democrats need to get out and vote. Yikes. OK I still think Obama is in a better position to win but not by much.

[Slater]

It's a little hard to go by the polls because of the question of who will actually vote. Those "likely voter" polls use different formulas to determine who is a likely voters and the tend to skew older because if you have a long history of voting you are more likely to vote. But we saw in 2008 a lot of people, especially in the African-American community, who were voting for the first time.

If voter turnout is good in Ohio, Obama will win it. While it's not impossible for Romney to win without Ohio, it's pretty unlikely. Romney has to have Florida. If Obama can take Florida, and I do not think he will unfortunately, that is pretty close to game-set-match. With a really strong voter turnout it could be a decisive victory for Obama as it was in 2008. But if turnout is low--hence all the voter suppression efforts by the Rs in PA and OH--Romney has a chance.

I think as a political party it should be time to do some soul-searching when your best electoral strategy is to make it harder for people to vote.

[Martina]

October 22, 2012
Poll Addict Confesses
By DAVID BROOKS

Hello, my name is David, and I’m a pollaholic. For the past several months I have spent inordinate amounts of time poring over election polls. A couple of times a day, I check the Web sites to see what the polling averages are. I check my Twitter feed to see the latest Gallup numbers. I’ve read countless articles dissecting the flawed methodologies of polls I don’t like.

And do you know what I’ve learned from these hours of attention? That if the election were held today (which it won’t be), then President Obama would be a bit more likely to win. At the same time, there seems to be a whiff of momentum toward Mitt Romney. That’s it. Hundreds of hours. Two banal observations.

I have wasted a large chunk of my life I will never get back. Why? Because I’ve got a problem.

Look, I know in the cool light of rationality how I should treat polling data. First, I should treat polls as a fuzzy snapshot of a moment in time. I should not read them, and think I understand the future.

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that even experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior. Financial firms with zillions of dollars have spent decades trying to create models that will help them pick stocks, and they have gloriously failed.

Scholars at Duke University studied 11,600 forecasts by corporate chief financial officers about how the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index would perform over the next year. The correlation between their estimates and the actual index was less than zero.

And, if it’s hard to predict stocks or the economy, politics is a field perfectly designed to foil precise projections.

Politics isn’t a game, like poker, with an artificially limited number of possible developments. National elections are rare, so we have ridiculously small sample sizes. Political campaigns don’t give pollsters immediate feedback, so they can gradually correct their errors. They have to wait for Election Day for actual results, and only the final poll is verifiable.

Most important, stuff happens. Obama turns in a bad debate performance. Romney makes offensive comments at a fund-raiser. These unquantifiable events change the trajectories of tight campaigns. You can’t tell what’s about to happen. You certainly can’t tell how 100 million people are going to process what’s about to happen. You can’t calculate odds that capture unknown reactions to unknown events.

The second thing I know is that if you do have to look at polls, you should do it no more than once every few days, to get a general sense of the state of the race. I’ve seen the studies that show that people who check their stocks once a day get lower returns than people who check them once a quarter because they get distracted by noise and make terrible decisions. I’ve seen the work on information overload, which makes people depressed, stressed and freezes their brains. I know that checking the polls constantly is a recipe for self-deception and anxiety.

I know all this. But do I obey? Of course not. I check every few hours. I’m motivated by the illusion of immanent knowledge. I imagine that somehow the next batch of polling will contain some magic cross-tab about swing voters in Ohio that will satisfy my voracious curiosity and allay this irritable uncertainty.

I’m also motivated by the thrill of premature celebration. Elections aren’t just about policy choices. They’re status competitions. When the polls swing your way, you feel a surge of righteous affirmation. Your views are obviously correct! Your team’s virtues are widely recognized! You get to see the humiliation and pain afflicting your foes.

When the polls swing the other way, well, who believes the polls anyway? Those idiots are obviously skewing the results. This has been a golden age for confirmation bias.

Finally, I’m motivated by the power of cognitive laziness. It’s hard to figure out how each candidate will handle the so-called budgetary fiscal cliff or the uncertainties involved with Iran. But the polling numbers are like candy. So clear and digestible! Just as the teenage mind naturally migrates from homework to Facebook, just as the normal reader’s mind naturally wanders from Toynbee to Twitter, so the political junkie’s brain has a tendency to slide downhill from policy to polling.

Look, I went into a profession — journalism — committed to the mission of describing the present. Imagine how many corrections we’d have to publish if we tried to predict the future. Yet, despite all that, every few hours, I’m on my laptop, tablet or smartphone — sipping Gallup, chugging Rasmussen, gulping Pew, trying to figure out how it will all go down.

Come on, David, think through the poll. This is the first day of the rest of your life.

Wait a second! The 7-Eleven Coffee Cup Poll is out! Just one more look. Obama is up big!

[Martina]

THis happened to a friend of a friend. So so disgusting. There is a high school girl living there. It's an implicit threat. It may be in Virginia -- the town -- but it's a college town. Don't the reactionary bastards expect there to be some liberals living there?

OH, TRIGGER ALERT. There is a picture of a dead animal carcass draped over an Obama sign.

http://www.newsleader.com/apps/pbcs....=2012310220012