Popular vote?  …50/49 Romney/Obama.

I’m not putting up the map, for two reasons: one, it’s a mildly conservative estimate, which means that states that are on the cusp of being won by Romney aren’t on it.  Two, I don’t want to depress anybody who is from a state that I’ve decided is a true toss-up or leaning away from us, alas.

Moe Lane

PS: No math, no arcane analysis.  I’ve just been reading the campaign reports, listening to people whose judgement that I trust, looking at the early voting totals, noting what people are and are not talking about, seeing how things in politics look when the Presidential Race Reality Distortion Field isn’t operating… and have made my best guess on it.  Which is pretty much what everybody else is doing, too.

PPS: This is my personal prediction, not anybody else’s.

Not that they say that, of course.

Two weeks of Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll interviews find 84 percent of likely voters who supported Obama in 2008 support him this year, while 13 percent say they are switching to Romney and 3 percent are backing others or haven’t made up their mind yet.

Now, let’s just assume for the moment that we have 100% turnout from 2008 and that every voter then is a likely voter now (God knows that happens a lot, particularly with the state polls these days). 69.46 million people voted for Obama; 59.93 for McCain. Assuming that Obama gets 84% of that total then he’ll be effectively handing over 9.03 million votes to Romney, 2.08 million to third-party votes, and be at 58.34 million votes… or less than McCain’s totals.

(pause)

Well all right, then.

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I don’t know why this is the funniest damn thing that I’ve seen yet today, but it is:

We might be having a small problem with coming to a consensus on how the election is going.

I spent perhaps a bit too much time this morning trying to put the spreadsheet below into graphical form:

It shows the current pollsters checking the Generic Congressional Ballot, as per RCP.  Most of the labels are self-explanatory: “R +/-” represents the amount by which Republicans are ahead/behind on any given poll.  RCP’s current average is R+1.3, which represents a strong shift towards the Republicans in the last month among all three pollsters: 5 points for Rasmussen, 4 points for Politico, and 3 for NPR (although ‘shift’ is possibly the wrong word for the last one, given that there’s only been two polls).

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Jonathan Last has an interesting thought:

[H]ere’s my question: Imagine a world in which, during and after the debate, the left didn’t have a collective, public freak out. In other words, a world in which a still-functional Journolist-type of operation was able to corral lefty elites and get them into something like a coherent message instead of having them set themselves on fire over Twitter. Imagine if they had gotten some message discipline and taken a line more like Republican heads did after the second and third debate–Yes, our guy probably lost this on points, but this was a strong performance and blah-blah-blah.

Would it have made any difference? The debate would still be the debate, and the insta-polls would have been the same. But if Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan and their fellow travelers hadn’t micturated on the carpet in public panic, would the story out of the Denver debate been anything more than, Strong performance by Romney, Obama needs to up his game.

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The trajectory of the race is set.  The problem here for David Axelrod is that after the first debate his candidate was aiming for the ground, and three debates were not sufficient to level him out.  The open question of American politics right now is: what will Obama hit first?  The tree canopy, or the mountains?

This Weekly Standard article is all the more brutal for its lack of overt viciousness: but then, with a title like “George Herbert Walker Obama” it doesn’t have to be.  I had the dickens of a time separating out a representational piece of Andrew Ferguson’s awesome, politely relentless comparison of the last days of the 2012 election with the last days of the 1992 one, but here goes:

The president, it was said, had no agenda.

Again our campaign leapt into action. Frantic phone calls were placed to federal agencies and cabinet departments: Who’s got an agenda? From the Department of Health and Human Services came a “health care reform”—something having to do with tax credits. The Education Department sent over scraps from an “education reform” that the president hadn’t been able to move through Congress; something with tax credits. And child care—a big issue in ’92—where the hell can we find a child-care policy? Somebody dug one up at Labor, where it had been buried a year earlier. A child-care tax credit.

The agenda was strung together and packaged in a booklet with glossy blue covers. The president could hold it up at rallies, with a look that said: No agenda, eh? What do you call this, smart guy? Chopped liver? The word renewal was testing very well with focus groups—better than reform, even—so our booklet got called Agenda for American Renewal. Millions of copies were mailed to voters. Perhaps you still have yours?

It gets better from there, but you need to read the whole thing.  There are a lot of comparisons to be made between George HW Bush and Barack H Obama, in fact; and some day I might write about them, once I think that I can successfully do so without having the combined wrath of the partisan blogosphere fall down upon my head*.  Until then… 10 days until Election Day.

Moe Lane

*It is not cowardice to refuse to put your hand in a working buzzsaw.

Look at this title and subtitle: great news for Democrats, right?

2012 U.S. Electorate Looks Like 2008

Composition of electorate by race, age, gender essentially the same

Yup, horrible news… wait a second.  Notice what’s missing from that subtitle?  As in, what rather important category?  For an election?  You know… political affiliation?

Yeah, well, there’s a reason for that.

In 2008, Gallup had the electorate as being +10 Democrat (+12 Democrat, with leaners).  Right now, they’re forecasting it as being +1 Republican (+3 Republican, with leaners).  Which means that by the most important criterion of the Presidential election 2012 is not like 2008 at all: it’s like 2004 (+2 Republican/even, with leaners).  Which means that the subtext of the title (“Democrats gonna win!”) is actually completely subverted by the implications of the data (“Democrats gonna lose!”).

I take some pleasure in being an aggravating so-and-so to the Online Left, but I have to say: this is epic trolling by Gallup.  I would like to think that I could come up with something this contemptuously brilliant, but I am forced to admit that I am unsure that I could pull it off.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Not surprising: I believe that the man is still technically a Democrat (or that he was one until recently). That means that he knows where the sensitive bits are.

Liberals used to go gaga over the man who promised that Guantanamo and renditions would be part of our distant criminal past, only to gag that he has embraced and expanded almost every one of the Bush-Cheney protocols that he once demagogued. Obama even recruited Yale Law Dean Harold Koh, who used to sue the government on behalf of Guantanamo detainees, to write surreal briefs explaining why stepped-up Predator missions can quite legally vaporize American citizens suspected of terrorism, and why American planes dropping bombs over a foreign country do not constitute warlike acts. A Yale Law dean who does that is like the proverbial dog walking on two legs, eliciting wonder not just that it is done, but why it is even attempted.

I wonder (but do not particularly care) whether antiwar progressives ever contemplate the equivalent of that paragraph, then go get blind, stinking drunk…

As God is my witness: I never thought that it would get this bad.

I thought that after it was clear that the stimulus didn’t work, the Democrats would see sense.  I thought that after it was clear that the country wanted the government to concentrate on economic recovery, the Democrats would see sense.  I thought that when the American people went out and spanked the Democrats in 2010 like Romney spanked Obama at the last debate, the Democrats would see sense.

But they didn’t.

So vote every Democrat out that you possibly can.  Down to bedrock.

So, I had the opportunity to talk with Senator Marco Rubio last night, and ask him a question.  I’ll spare you the verbal tics and whatnot: what I asked Rubio, effectively, was “What advice did the Romney campaign take heed off, out of all of New Media’s unsolicited offerings along those lines?”  This is how Rubio responded:

Rubio 10/03/2012

The funny part was: at the time, I didn’t think that Senator Rubio had actually answered the question*.  But that’s because I had asked the question before the debate.  It was fairly clear last night that Romney had taken to heart the fundamental realization of most of us: Barack Obama ain’t so tough.  He is a little too ready to believe his own hype, doesn’t realize in his bones just how much he’s carried by others, and has an overrated sense of his personal skills and core competencies.  Mitt Romney exploited that from the start last night, and made the clear distinction between him and his opponent that the Senator talks about above and we all wanted Romney to make.

Which is great.  But it’s a start.  Have your warm, fuzzy feeling this morning, sure – then start thinking about how we can take away more from the Democrats.  And then start doing it, too.  We will not be able to coast to the election on the basis of this one primary, and winning elections is a team sport.  Fortunately, Mitt Romney gave us some good stuff to work with, last night.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS Erick is right: put your money where your mouth is.  I just did.

*This did not particularly bother me. Questions and answers in this business is often a cat-and-mouse game where neither side is ever really sure which one is the cat.

I get that Reason.com has an understandable (if ultimately self-defeating) affinity towards the Libertarian party, but this wishful thinking piece about how Gary Johnson could give Ohio to Obama is, well, absurd.

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