Voting FAQs

I may have posted this before but....

http://www.theonion.com/articles/election-faq,30158/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=standard-post:other:default

Prediction

I'm optimistic.

Presidential Election:

Obama 332
Romney 206

But that depends on shenanigans being kept to a minimum in Florida and....

The Senate

Maine - Angus King +1 Dem
Massachusetts - Elizabeth Warren +1 Dem
Connecticut - Chris Murphy
Pennsylvania - Bob Casey
Ohio - Sherrod Brown
Indiana - Joe Donnelly +1 Dem
Virginia - Tim Kaine
Missouri - Claire McCaskill
Wisconsin - Tammy Baldwin
North Dakota - Rick Berg Rep +1
Montana - Jon Tester
New Mexico - Martin Heinrich
Arizona - Jeff Flake
Nevada - Shelly Berkeley Dem +1

The last is my upset pick of the night.  If Harry "I'm not a pornstar" Reid can mobilize his machine, Berkeley pulls off the upset

Democrats pick up three seats.  But Baldwin could lose and Heitkamp could win, so it could be a net of zero to a gain of five.  Arizona isn't out of the equation, either.

(Also note that I'm assuming Angus King caucuses with the Democrats, and I resisted the urge to list Murphy as a Democrat pick up with the ouster of Joe Lieberman.)

The House

Who the hell knows?  I say the Democrats pick up 5-10 seats.

Comparison

Look at the NRO four years ago.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226223/predicting-tonight/nro-symposium#

I'll take Nate Silver...

Cut And Paste Blogging

Party Roles are Changing

by BooMan
Mon Nov 5th, 2012 at 11:20:11 AM EST

In 1988, the Democrats lost very badly for the third presidential election in a row, and for the fifth time in six attempts going back to the debacle in 1968. Without the Watergate scandal and President Ford's unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon, it probably would have been a complete shutout. But, since 1988, the Republicans have lost three out of five elections and are poised to lose four out of six. And, in the two years that the GOP "won," they did so by the narrowest possible margin. In 2000, they lost the popular vote and only won the Electoral College because of a decision by the Supreme Court which handed Florida to George W. Bush. In 2004, Bush would have lost if not for Ohio. Since 1988, no Republican nominee has received more than 286 Electoral College votes. In this cycle, there was never much chance that Romney could exceed that number.

Assuming Romney loses, he will be the one who gets most of the blame, but the GOP needs to start worrying about the fact that they have a coalition that must basically win every battleground state to have any chance at winning the White House. To give you an idea of what I am talking about, consider this. If Obama wins in Nevada and Colorado in the West, New Hampshire in New England, and in Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin in the Midwest, he will have 290 electoral votes even while losing Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. That is 20 more electoral votes than he needs to be reelected. In other words, the Southern coalition is not big enough to compete for the White House. For the foreseeable future, any respectable Democratic nominee for president is going to be just one big state away from winning the election before the campaigning even begins. Winning Ohio will likely be sufficient, and if it is not, winning Virginia and one other state will get it done.

Now, Obama could wind up winning Florida and Virginia and North Carolina, but those states will probably remain competitive in future presidential elections. The problem is, they are not enough for the GOP to win. This is a structural change from the second half of the 20th Century. The Republicans had a lot of success winning the presidency from 1952-1988, but they controlled the House of Representatives for only two of those years and the Senate for only eight. The way things look now, we should see nearly the opposite. The GOP will be hard to dislodge from the House and will trade the Senate back and forth, but the Democrats will dominate the presidential elections. The problem is that the two parties are not built to work that way. The Republicans are not legislators and they do not know how to work with an executive from the opposing party. It's impossible to understand modern conservatism without understanding that they developed a hatred of the federal government precisely because they almost never controlled the pursestrings from 1933-1994. The have the ideology and mentality of a minority party. Meanwhile, progressive Democrats have developed a deep suspicion of executive power both because of the mistakes of the Vietnam era and because of abuses under Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. To a certain degree, Democrats are less comfortable wielding executive power. These are legacies of the 20th-Century, but they will probably unwind in some ways as this new power dynamic takes hold.

In the short term, it's a recipe for dysfunction. Our only hope for avoiding this in the short term is to win the House tomorrow. But the real solution to the problem is for the GOP to go through a wrenching civil war and come out the other side with a new ideology more suited to being legislators. They also need to do something to appeal more to non-white voters or their advantage in Congress will dry up before too long.

Said This A Year Ago

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/unions-say-romney-paying-the-price-for-labor-fights-in-ohio-wisc.php?ref=fpblg

Obama is not just winning Ohio and Wisconsin because he bailed out the auto industry.  He's winning because the people in those states who belong to unions HATE their local GOP.  And that trickles upwards.

I thought Rick Scott (aka Governor Bat Boy) would prove to be the same liability in Florida.  Not sure if that will hold.

VOTE!

Walking Dead

TWD and the Falcons are on at the same time.

Massive conflict of interest.  Went with The Walking Dead because...

Anyway... holy body count, Batman.

Few other shows will just up and kill off major characters like this.  Lori?  T-Dog?  Maybe Carol?

Wow.

Vote For The White Guy

Only A Democrat

Can kill bin Laden, save GM, create universal health care, negotiate the START treaty, save the country from depression and end DADT and be told: You can't run on your record.

http://www.barackobama.com/news/entry/what-obamas-accomplished

I Just... I... Jesus

I have been hearing about this video for a couple of days now.  I tried not to watch it.  Not sure "nut picking" is healthy.

But holy crap.

The level of pig ignorance is obscene.  But then again, I obsess about this stuff.  When I moderated the student mock presidential debate, I was stunned that very bright students - when given the questions in advance - could not come up with better answers.

Then again, I do follow this stuff compulsively.  Both the politics and the policy.  It's my hobby.  You could probably do the same sort of interview at an Obama rally.  It wouldn't be quite so blatantly surreal, though.  You wouldn't have the parroted attack lines that are demonstrably false.  The apology tour, the socialism, the atheistic, communistic Muslim.  Instead you'd get some boilerplate about health care or "caring about us" that wouldn't hold up to much scrutiny.

All of which suggests three things to me.

First, is that populism is dangerous.  It's unavoidable, perhaps, but dangerous.  I thought Obama should embrace the OWS message more closely, be more stridently populist.  Instead he has a sort of apologetic populism.  "You know, maybe we should raise taxes a little bit on those like me who are already well off."  Mary Ellen Lease he is not.

But mindless populist attacks create mindless voters.  The big worry at the moment is that Obama is going to win a narrow popular vote victory and a more comfortable electoral college victory.  But the Fox News Wurlitzer has been spinning the "Romney is winning" theme for weeks.  When he loses... well all those mouth breathing idiots above will just "know" that the election was stolen.  They will know this the same way they "know" Obama is a communist, an atheist and a Muslim at the same time.  They will know this in the same way they "know" Obama is taking away freedom of religion and flying drones overhead to keep an eye on gun owners.

Second, that there is a place for expertise.  And that place should be at the top of presidential tickets.  I would bet you dollars to doughnuts that the overwhelming majority of the people in those interviews loved Sarah Palin.  Loved her.

Mitt Romney may very well be a moderate technocrat in some sense.  Maybe.  Who the hell knows?  He has run such a fundamentally dishonest campaign - see the Jeep attack recently - that he seriously makes Nixon look like Adlai Stevenson.

The character of Romney's campaign should disqualify him from any rational person's ballot.

But it won't.

Finally, this thundering ignorance of policy specifics suggests that there is some merit in having actual ideological parties.  The GOP is already there and the Democrats are right on their heels.  Of course, you can't have only TWO parties in an ideological party system.  You need more.  But our electoral system cannot tolerate third parties.

And so we are left with a system that both polarizes left and right, but an electorate that - in order to justify their vote - has to embrace ridiculous positions that they don't even examine because they have to support them as partisans. And with the GOP moving even further right, then their voters have to take the positions of the Tea Party, no matter how ridiculous those positions might be.

Just like Mitt Romney has done.

So don't think that Romney - if he gets elected - will somehow morph back into Massachusetts Mitt.

He's a member of the modern GOP and the people above are his people.

Why Does These Israelis Hate Israel

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/obama-is-good-for-israel-1.473888

Tuesday Viewing Schedule

http://www.mediaite.com/online/when-will-the-media-call-the-important-races-heres-when-all-the-polls-close/

At 7pm, Virginia's polls close.  They also close in the major part of Florida, though they will likely wait until 8pm when the panhandle's polls close.

At 7:30, Ohio and North Carolina close.  At 8pm, you have final poll closings in Florida, plus New Hampshire.

Colorado and Wisconsin close at 9pm eastern time.

Iowa and Nevada close at 10pm eastern time.

I could see the presidency called by 9:30.

The Onion FAQ

In the days leading up to the Nov. 6 General Election, the Onion political team will answer your common questions about voting. Check back daily for two more responses to voters' most pressing questions.

Is my vote kept a secret?

Nah.

How do I fill out a ballot?

How do you make your bed? How do you tie your shoes? What are we, your babysitters?

What if I change my mind after I vote?

Should you change your mind after voting, you may file a formal grievance with your county clerk. If you voted for the winning presidential candidate and now support the loser, your grievance will likely result in the removal of the current president or, depending on the circumstance, will at the very least exempt you from all the laws of the country for the remainder of the sitting president’s term.

Where can I get information about third-party candidates? Why aren’t they included in the debates?

Third-party candidates are not included in debates because they won’t fucking win the election. Happy now?

Am I eligible to vote? How do I register?

It depends on who’s asking. Who is this?

How are the votes counted on election night?

There is a man who counts the votes. His name is Brian Durgess.

Why do we use the electoral college?

We continue to use the electoral college because no one has been able to come up with a simpler or more straightforward way to choose the president of the United States. Think about it: Is there anything more logical or intuitive? Nope.

Where can I find out election results?

Open your window. If you hear gunshots and the wails of starving babies, the other guy won.

Or, if you are Native American, you can smell most state and federal election returns on the wind

Vote For Romney Or The Economy Gets It

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/romney-stump-speech-november-14363197

Wow.  Well, it's an honest argument at least.  If Obama is re-elected, the GOP will have another freakout over the New Black Panther Party and ACORN and God knows what else.  Jon Cohn points out that Obama will likely win the electoral college at some point Tuesday night but won't win the popular vote for days because of mail-in voting out west.

And so... freakout.  And debt ceiling hostage crisis.  And default.

In the last debate, Obama said quiet forcefully that another debt ceiling fiasco won't happen again. I have no idea what he's basing this on, but it's difficult to see a scenario where the GOP doesn't try to intentionally sabotage the economy again.

So Romney's argument is vote for me, because the House GOP is batshit insane.

Of course, another argument would be to vote in a Democratic House...

Jobs Report

It's pretty good, especially the upward revisions of the last two reports.  Unemployment ticked up as people re-entered the job market.  Again, good.  Not great, but good.

We'll see if Jack Welsh has any thoughts on the matter.

The US was not hit as a hard by the fiscal crisis and a lot of other developed countries were.  A lot of that was the damned stimulus.  Countries in Europe that embraced austerity - or had austerity forced upon them - have suffered greatly.  We've done alright.

Now it's still a weak recovery, in the sense that we still have to cope with Europe's weakness.  I just moderated a mock presidential debate (I introduced myself as Candy Crowley), and I dropped the question about dealing with the EU mess, since the grownups can't answer the question either.

We have seen the housing market bottom out.  We have seen good private sector job growth and significant public sector job contraction thanks to the enforced austerity at the state levels.

Which is why it's important to re-elect Obama.  Unless Europe implodes again, the economy should keep ticking upwards.  Obama has done the heavy lifting and it would be a shame for that lying weasel Mitt "Mitt" Romney to benefit politically.  Especially since his economic policies will probably lead us right back down into the abyss.

Should Obama have done more?  Yes.  Could he have done more? Doubtful.  Is he a better option than a plutocrat with economic policies from the Coolidge administration?

You betcha.

Full Of Win

I love it when Tbogg takes a day off then comes back with a sack full of fun.

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2012/10/31/a-dream-come-true-ill-live-there-til-i-die/

A sample for the clickaphobic:

Might I just add that this rightwing obsession with Benghazi where Benghazi has grown to become 9/11 times the Holocaust plus the Rape of Nanking, is the most amazing wingnut freakout that I’ve seen since Hillary murdered her lesbian lover, Vince Foster, in Fort Marcy Park with a candlestick.


And speaking of winning, Booman explains where all this movement towards Obama is coming from.  Basically, we have the Poll of All Polls coming.  It's called election day.

If Rasmussen remains out in the weeds, predicting a Romney win in Ohio or other some such nonsense, then their credibility takes a huge hit.  Two weeks ago, it made sense to suggest that Ohio and Wisconsin were in play, since without them, Mitt Romney will go back to being just a really rich guy with tremendous hair.

But now that we are faced with actual live votes, Rasmussen and the Baby Rasmussens will have to come back in line with reality.  They are no longer trying to shape a narrative, they are trying to report reality.

Keep an eye on that.

UPDATE: Citizen's United... Yeah, those guys... have a poll out now that has Romney up 3 in Ohio.  Now, they don't care about being hired for their accuracy in the future.  While most pollsters have a partisan lean, because of how they weight their samples, pollsters are endeavoring to "get it right".  Citizen's United?  Not so much.