Gallup's Final Presidential Estimate: Obama 55%, McCain 44%: Independents break for Obama, boosting Obama’s broad base.

Likely Voters-Expanded:
Obama 53, McCain 42

Likely Voters-Traditional
Obama 53, McCain 42

Registered Voters:
Obama 53, McCain 40

"PRINCETON, NJ -- The final Gallup 2008 pre-election poll -- based on Oct. 31-Nov. 2 Gallup Poll Daily tracking -- shows Barack Obama with a 53% to 42% advantage over John McCain among likely voters. When undecided voters are allocated proportionately to the two candidates to better approximate the actual vote, the estimate becomes 55% for Obama to 44% for McCain."

USA Today reports: "Gallup says that when it allocates the 4% of likely voters who either had no opinion or would not choose between Obama and McCain, it estimates the candidates' current support levels would most likely be 55% for Obama, 44% for McCain."

Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby Poll Nov, 02

Pollster John Zogby:

"Obama has consolidated his lead over McCain. His single day lead today was back to 52%-42%. He leads by 10 among independents and has solidified his base.

He leads among Hispanics by 70-25 points,

African Americans by 90-5,

Jewish Americans by 75 -20,

18-24 year olds by 70-25,

18-29 year olds by 65-30,

25-34 year olds by 55 - 35,

women by 55 - 40,

and men by 50 -45.

He has a 17 point lead among those who have already voted,

22 by those who have registered to vote in the past 6 months,

Moderates by 34,

Catholics by 10.

He even receives 21% support among Conservatives."

Final NBC/WSJ Poll

Obama 51, McCain 43

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122567494708692025.html

Here's what you can look for as results come in Tuesday night.

Nate Silver of 538 describes what a McCain win looks like. Check it out:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/what-mccain-win-looks-like.html

So on election night look for this:

If Obama wins Florida, Obama wins. McCain has no other path to victory.

If Obama takes both Pennsylvania and Virginia, Obama wins.

If Obama takes Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, Obama wins.

If Obama wins Ohio, Obama wins.

If McCain wins Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, it will be a long night.

Reassurance, to soothe your nerves, from Nate at FiveThirtyEight:

"Of all the polls out late tonight -- and I do hope to have some sort of midnight update to the polling thread -- the one that ought to give Democrats the most reassurance is the new poll out from NBC and the Wall Street Journal, which gives Barack Obama a 51-43 lead. What's to like about this particular survey?

Firstly, all of the interviewing was conducted today (Sunday) and yesterday, so it's about the freshest set of data that we have.

Secondly -- and this is an underrated factor -- the NBC/WSJ poll always behaves intuitively. It goes up when the other polls go up, and goes down when the other polls go down:

Date Obama McCain
11/1 - 11/2 51 43
10/17 - 10/20 52 42
10/4 - 10/5 49 43
9/12 - 9/22 48 46
9/6 - 9/7 47 46
8/15 - 8/18 45 42
7/19 - 7/21 47 41
6/6 - 6/9 47 41
4/25 - 4/28 46 43
3/24 - 3/25 44 42
3/7 - 3/10 47 44
1/20 - 1/22 42 42

Those numbers very closely match our "supertracker" trendline at any given time period, albeit with perhaps a 1-2 point Obama house effect.

Thirdly, it's hard to accuse the poll of partisanship, as it is co-directed by a Democratic pollster (Peter Hart) and a Republican one (Neil Newhouse), and is co-branded with a conservative-leaning newspaper and the most left-leaning of the three broadcast networks.

Finally, it includes cellphones (which may be part of the reason for the "house effect"). [...]Between the NBC poll and the final Gallup numbers, the discrepancy has now grown even greater: Obama leads by an average of 10.0 points in the cellphone[also] polls, versus 5.1 in the landline-only's."

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/reassurance-for-dems-in-nbcwsj-survey.html

After Obama wins, do consider making a video blog, your humor is worth a thousand words.
Hugs, Lily

The final 2008 Gallup Poll is out, and it is showing a last minute surge towards Obama and the Democrats.

The numbers:

Likely voters:

Obama: 53%
McCain: 42%

Among registered voters the numbers are Obama: 53 & McCain: 40. (Registered Republicans are traditionally more reliable voters.)

However, when Gallup allocates undecided voters (based on what methodology I don't know) Obama's share climbs to 55%, giving him an 11-point spread over McCain's 44%.

These are blowout numbers. By comparison, in 1988 (the last time one of the two major parties posted a decisive win, without a significant third-party candidate in the race) George Bush Sr. won 53.4% to Michael Dukakis's 45.7%.

In other words, if Gallup's final poll is roughly right, John McCain may very well end up underperforming Mike Dukakis.

And how effective have McCain's slimeball attacks on Obama been?

"One more historic tidbit from the survey: Obama's favorable rating is 62% -- the highest that any presidential candidate has registered in Gallup's final pre-election polls going back to 1992." [Gallup]

Gallup's take on the House and Senate races:

"Democratic congressional candidates have a 15 percentage point lead among registered voters, the widest advantage for either party since 1964."[Gallup]

1964, of course, was the year of Lyndon Johnson's landslide win over Barry Goldwater, in which the Democrats picked up two Senate Seats (taking them to a postwar high of 68 seats) and 36 House seats (giving the party a two-thirds majority in that chamber as well).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_1964

Gallup's forecasting record in recent presidential elections has only been so-so -- its final poll in 2000 had Bush up by two points over Gore, 48-46, while its last 2004 reading got the order right but lowballed both candidates, putting Bush up 49 to 47 over Kerry.

However, Gallup is still the industry's leading brand -- if only because of the weight it carries with the corporate media. That alone would make these results worth noting. But even if Gallup is off this year by roughly the same margins as in 2000 and 2004, these numbers still spell electoral devastation for the Republicans on Tuesday. States like Georgia, Montana and even Arizona could definitely be in play, and a "filibuster proof" Senate majority (not really, but as a propaganda talking point) could be back in reach. 59 Dem Senate seats (counting Joe Lieberman) is likely on Nov. 4.

It might not be a 1964 or 1972 or 1984 style absolute landslide, especially in the electoral college, where the Republicans have built in structural advantages (like the overweights given to small rural states), but -- again, assuming Gallup is even close to right -- there shouldn't be any doubt on Wednesday morning that the country has decisively rejected both the Republican Party and the conservative ideology that has dominated American politics since Ronald Reagan first took office.

Some fun, huh?

And who will lead their tattered party? Palin? McCain? Huckabee, Romney?

It was only a few years ago, in 2004, Karl Rove was talking about a "Permanent Republican Majority." When Barry Goldwater lost to Kennedy, all was not lost, he created an amazing grassroots conservative movement which bore fruits in the years ahead culminating in the Reagan revolution. In many ways the Goldwater movement is an inspiration for the current Progressive movement headed by Howard Dean in 2004.

Lets bid GOP a farewell into their long years in wilderness with no Moses in sight.

Hi there, Lily S.

I hope your succinct idea (words) is worth a thousand videos :)

Two additional thoughts on the Gallup poll. One is that I notice Gallup has cranked up the thermostat on its turnout projection, and now predicts 64% of the voting age population will have voted by the time this marathon is over -- an amazing number(at least in the US).

The upward adjustment in the turnout estimate may or may not be a direct cause of the shift towards Obama in Gallup's last poll, but it's a thought worth keeping in mind.

Which brings me to my second thought, which is something McDonald's boss Bell supposedly "...according to Reuters, once told analysts that he would shove a fire hose down the throat of competitors if he saw them drowning."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4180627.stm

I guess it's time for the Obama's ground operation to get out the fire hoses.

***

And for what it's worth (not much, usually) Zogby's penultimate tracking poll is out, and it shows Obama picking up 1.4 percentage points overnight, taking him to just under 51% to McCain's 43.8% (unchanged).

http://www.zogby.com/main.htm

I mention this only because a 1.4 point move in a single day of a three-day tracking poll is a reasonably large one (although it could still just be random noise). Zogby splits his samples across two days in order to get the results out early. This means most of the interviews that accounted for Obama's gain were done on Saturday, not Sunday. If Gallup is correct, and a last minute surge is going towards Obama, then Zogby's final poll, which will be released early Tuesday morning, may show even bigger gains for Obama.

However, in the counterfactual department, the new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll (see comment #3 for the link) shows Obama' lead slipping slightly, to 51-43 from 52-42 two weeks ago. Interviews were conducted Saturday and Sunday. But note that those numbers leave an unusually high number of undecided, which may or may not have been pushed to state which way they lean.

Timothy Lange makes a timely comment "D.L. Hughley said Sunday night on CNN that he's too "scared to get excited" about an Obama victory Tuesday. Perfectly understandable to have the heebie-jeebies given the spoken and unspoken history of our country, of knowing the startling results of recent presidential elections, of - for the superstitiously minded - jinxing the upcoming results by a premature counting of our political chickens. But 'I am' excited, not scared. Because I see that all our work for more 'and better' Democrats since the wretched loss of 2004 is perched on the brink of paying off with one of our own in the White House and a bunch more Democrats in Congress.

Not that anybody should slack off in the few hours left to us before the polls close. Not that we should relax our guard watching for shenanigans. And not that winning the election - even in the big, realigning way it appears the Democrats will win - means everything skewed around and screwed up in America will be magically and rapidly fixed. Barack Obama has himself made clear that we need a "bottom-up politics." Assuring that this will be more than a forgotten slogan is up to us. After Tuesday, we'll need to have Obama's back against all who would wreck his administration 'and' simultaneously to hold his feet to the fire.

But we will have, for the first time since Ronald Reagan plopped himself down at the desk in the Oval Office, a breather from having to fight rearguard actions against those who would dismantle the modest but important gains that progressives made during those brief windows of opportunity in the 1930s and the 1960s. We'll be able to move forward again. For all the caveats attending it, that coming shift is nothing to sneeze at.

And it 'is' coming. Sure, right now, there are doors to knock on, phone calls to make, citizens to drive to the polls. The election isn't over until it's over. But there's no crime tonight in smiling a little and expressing some pre-celebration joy at our coming victory."

Nate in his early morning poll update writes about "the undecideds":

"...there are now very, very few true undecideds left in this race. After accounting for a third-party vote, which looks as though it will come in at an aggregate of 2 percent or so (after doing some work on this tonight, I concluded that I had been slightly underestimating the third-party vote before), I am showing only about 2.7 percent of the electorate left to allocate between the two major-party candidates. Even if John McCain were to win 70 perecnt of the remaining undecideds (which I don't think is likely), that would only be worth a net of about a point for him. Frankly, McCain's winning scenarios mainly involve the polls having been wrong in the first place -- because of a Bradley Effect or something else. It is unlikely that the polls will "tighten" substantially further -- especially when Obama already has over 50 percent of the vote."

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/todays-polls-3-am-edition-113.html

"Barack Obama's position has become somewhat stronger since our update this afternoon. We now have him with a 5.8 point lead in the national popular vote, and winning the election 96.3 percent of the time. Earlier today, those figures were 5.4 and 93.7, respectively."

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman:

"Maybe the polls are wrong, and John McCain is about to pull off the biggest election upset in American history. But right now the Democrats seem poised both to win the White House and to greatly expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.

"Most of the post-election discussion will presumably be about what the Democrats should and will do with their mandate. But let me ask a different question that will also be important for the nation’s future: What will defeat do to the Republicans?

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant "Vote McCain, not Hussein!"[...]

"Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place."

[...]

"Also, the Republican base already seems to be gearing up to regard defeat not as a verdict on conservative policies, but as the result of an evil conspiracy."

[...]

"I’m not saying that the G.O.P. is about to become irrelevant. Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Congress has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/opinion/03krugman.html

G...i hear yah dude!

who the f... in their right mind (assuming they have one) will vote for macinsane and poopy pantz?

these duds must be f...... stupid...no ifs and or buts about it...

u hear me amigos? damn!

Maybe Obama needed 1 billion dollars to convince the undecideds.

What if Obama loses, oh the horror, the horror, the horror

Common Barak close the deal for once

Enjoy the next 48 hours everyone

Steve

amber...are u for real? or u just love to stir the pot? damn!

I use to fall for the rhetoric and get overly excited too, hurl insults, and jokes about the other side, but then something happened, I grew wiser and older. I don’t see the benefit in getting emotionally racked anymore during election time, because I don’t fall for the pre-election hype anymore, and I imagine the undecided don’t either. Its all bull, and that wishful thinking has burned me and them many times in the past.

You will see that very few things actually change between administrations and all the hype is identical every 4 years, what a joke to think anything really changes fast in D.C., and if it dose its at a snails pace. With me, and I think the undecided, is that we’re happy with either candidate, we know they are both good people and qualified, and the war in Iraq is pretty much over. To think one president will have an effect on the economy is pretty far fetch, especially when the whole world is pulling together to uplift the economy and we see ineptitude of that change, but I guess it’s slow process, sound familiar?

I also think a lot of them are libertarians, and since both candidates blur the lines so well in order to get elected, makes it hard to decide on who’s for real.

There is no superman! Just superlatives.

I love stir the pot D

If O loses, I predict some world class hissy fits here.

Amber

morning Gotham and Everyone,

very funny...

Undecideds......my sass!.....at this point in the election process there are only the "I ain't telling you who I choose"...sneaky petes...

ruth

this is the thing.....forget the polls....tomorrow the actual votes will be counted and until then it is a ?

Ambasteve says: Hey, what if McCain wins? Let me show my compassionate side and worry about you liberals. We grown-ups will be just fine (pass the Jack Daniels.)

Another fairly astonishing defection from the right: Jeffrey Hart, a National Review veteran and force in the conservative movement.

He writes: "It seems clear to me that Obama is the conservative in the 2008 election"

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-31/obama-is-the-true-conservative/

This after Christopher Buckley mega endorsement:

The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama/

BTW Francis Fukuyama has thrown his support behind Obama, and published it in the November 3rd issue of The American Conservative. (Several other prominent figures who contribute to the American Conservative magazine also supported Obama.)

Fukuyama was an important contributor to the political philosophy that led to the rise of Neoconservatism. That intellectual contribution aside, he was part of the development of the Reagan Doctrine, and later became active in the Project for the New American Century.

More prominent leaders of the conservative movement for Obama...Wick Allison, former publisher of the National Review and current editor-in-chief of D magazine, endorses Obama and writes "I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history."

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/09/09/22/0922allison_edit.html

It is almost 218 Years since the very first Election in America and amazed to see that Americans are yet to learn to live in Democracy. If you want your candidate to win the election it takes simple arithmetic of winning more than 50% of the electoral votes. If you have the ability to convince more than 50% of the people to vote for your candidate then you will win. It is as simple as that. Please don't whine!!!

Sean Quinn: Chicago Tomorrow

“And I swore I’d be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn’t give a damn, just as long as I’d be in Chicago tomorrow.”

– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road

***

Organizers of America,

H-Hour, D-Day is upon you.

After the election[...]there's more to say about what you did.

For the organizers, the volunteers, every damn brave last one of you:

"That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."

-- William Shakespeare, Henry the DXXXVIII

For he to-day who sheds his blood with me, shall be my brother.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

FiveThirtyEight.Com: More Than Just Numbers

by Jason Linkins

"From the beginning of the campaign, the people behind Barack Obama's bid for the presidency have been pretty adamant that one should expect big things from their ground game. They'd be up in all fifty states, socially networked, plugged in, and microtargeting their way to success. At about the same time, I started wondering, "Well, that's all well and good, but who's going to cover the story of the 'ground game?'" It's precisely the sort of story that flies underneath the typical campaign coverage. Besides, the press does a fine job cataloguing all manner of activity, but when it comes to analyzing achievement? Not so much."

...

"Talk of the ground game would figure in the post-election analysis, mainly speculatively, but we'd end up not knowing much about the efforts that were made in the trenches by McCain and Obama to win this election."

...

"As it turns out, if you're looking for this story, you could just go to the same place that thousands of political junkies are already going to get a little bit of scrutability from the endless march of competing polling data - FiveThirtyEight.com. See, while stats stud Nate Silver has been busy crunching numbers, his colleague Sean Quinn, along with photographer Brett Marty, have been in pursuit of the ground game, and they've been dropping by field offices for both candidates to take pictures and chronicle the activity. And if there's one thing that's been revealed, nearly consistently, in comparing the two operations, is that there seems to be no comparison: ..."

...

"That's from a recent post called, "The Big Empty," and its accompanying photo essay could be the sorts of pictures that haunt the McCain campaign in a few days.

"Of course, even with all this specific reporting, attesting to the fact that the balance of response, activity and enthusiasm appears to be on the Democratic side, the big unknown is whether it will all end up being remembered as a spirited, failed attempt or the ingredients of bona fide electoral success. Still, I'm terribly impressed by the way FiveThirtyEight.com is working this balance between raw data and anecdotal reportage, doing each as fully and as fairly as possible, and putting themselves out there by making predictions with conviction. Silver's taken the site to acclaim behind the strength of his statistical analysis, but the site deserves kudoes to their commitment to following the election on the road. Both on the balance sheet and on the trail, FiveThirtyEight has done a superlative job at making sense of this election, in ways that have far surpassed the traditional media."

www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/02/fivethirtyeightcom-more-t_n_140201.html

Nate Silver: Today's Polls, 11/3 (PM Edition)

"With fewer than six hours until voting begins in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the national polling picture has cleared up considerably. Barack Obama is on the verge of a victory, perhaps a decisive victory, in the race for the White House.

The national polls have all consolidated into a range of roughly Obama +7. That is right about where our model sees the race as well, giving Obama a 6.8 point advantage in its composite of state and national polling. Our model notes, however, that candidates with large leads in the polls have had some tendency to underperform marginally on election day, and so projects an Obama win of 6.0 points tomorrow.

Far more important, of course, is the race for 270 electors. It appears almost certain that Obama will capture all of the states won by John Kerry in 2008. Pennsylvania, while certainly having tightened somewhat over the course of the past two weeks, appears to be holding at a margin of about +8 for Obama, with very few remaining undecideds. Obama also appears almost certain to capture Iowa and New Mexico, which were won by Al Gore in 2000. Collectively, these states total 264 electoral votes, leaving Obama just 5 votes shy of a tie and 6 of a win.

Obama has any number of states to collect those 5 or 6 votes. In inverse order of difficulty, these include Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri and Indiana. Obama is the signficant favorite in several of these states; winning any one of them may be fairly difficult for John McCain, but winning all of them at once, as John McCain probably must do, is nearly impossible.

McCain's chances, in essence, boil down to the polling being significantly wrong, for such reasons as a Bradley Effect or "Shy Tory" Effect, or extreme complacency among Democratic voters. Our model recognizes that the actual margins of error in polling are much larger than the purported ones, and that when polls are wrong, they are often wrong in the same direction.

However, even if these phenomenon are manifest to some extent, it is unlikely that they are worth a full 6-7 points for McCain. Moreover, there are at least as many reasons to think that the polls are understating Obama's support, because of such factors as the cellphone problem, his superior groundgame operation, and the substantial lead that he has built up among early voters.

McCain's chances of victory are estimated at 1.9 percent, their lowest total of the year."

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia writes, "Thanks for the opportunity to greet fivethirtyeight’s readers, and I am looking forward to Sean and Nate’s breakdown of the results on Election Night and after."

I recommend 538 for IB'ers (both McCain and Obama supporters.)

___

The Huffington Post is now the internet's highest trafficked political news site/blog as of September 2008, according to a comScore study.

From Reuters:

"The winner is... HuffingtonPost.com – founded by commentator Arianna Huffington, the site led among stand-alone political blogs and news sites with 4.5 million visitors in September, comScore said. That was way above the site’s tally of 792,000 in the same month last year."

My favorite Conservative political site Politico.com comes in 2nd with 2.3 million readers.

The Daily Kos came in 8th place with an audience of 923,000 for the month of September 2008, a noteworthy improvement over last September's figure of 192,000.

While conservative websites such as the DrudgeReport and TownHall have also enjoyed larger audiences during the election season, the surge among liberal blogs has been overwhelmingly greater.

FIVETHIRTYEIGHT.COM which was founded only earlier this year, during the primaries, came in at 18th spot with 169 thousand readers.

Full List:

Selected Stand-Alone* Political Blogs & News Sites
September 2008 vs. September 2007

http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2525

NOW HERE'S THE BIG SURPRISE!

FiveThirtyEight's October numbers are in!

Their October numbers have SKY ROCKETED (tells something about the quality of their site, a must visit for political junkies from both sides):

*****
3.63 million unique visitors.
*****

Sean Quinn of 538 writes, "Seriously, thank you everybody. Who knew a Chicago-based baseball stathead, a Commerce/Bike-based poker player and a SF-based documentary filmmaker could break through like that?

"Nate and I have plenty of good ideas for after the election (above and beyond FiveThirtyEight After Dark, the porn subsidiary). Politics is going to stay interesting for a long time, and we'll be here, feeding you your goodies.

Stay tuned."

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Karl Rove chimes in with his final electoral prediction -- Obama 338, McCain 200.

http://www.rove.com/uploads/0000/0049/McCain-Obama_11_3_08_FINAL.pdf

Walt Whitman said, in 1884:

"If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,

'Twould not be you, Niagara - nor you, ye limitless prairies - nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite - nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon's white cones - nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes - nor Mississippi's stream:

This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name - the still small voice vibrating -America's choosing day..."

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/11/04/a_poem_for_election_day/

Bob Herbert tells what today's vote means, but says that it is only the first step:

"Americans have to decide if they want a country that tolerates this kind of debased, backward behavior. Or if they want a country that aspires to true greatness — a country that stands for more than the mere rhetoric of equality, freedom, opportunity and justice.

That decision will require more than casting a vote in one presidential election. It will require a great deal of reflective thought and hard work by a committed citizenry. The great promise of America hinges on a government that works, openly and honestly, for the broad interests of the American people, as opposed to the narrow benefit of the favored, wealthy few.

By all means, vote today. But that is just the first step toward meaningful change."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/opinion/04herbert.html

11/4 Daily Kos R2K Tracking Poll: Obama 51, McCain 46 (FINAL)
by DemFromCT
Tue Nov 04, 2008

[...]

Today
Research 2000: 51 (51) 46 (45) 3 LV Final
Reuters/Zogby: 54 (51) 43 (44) 2.9 LV Final
IBD/TIPP: 52 (48) 44 (43) 3.3 LV alternate link
Rasmussen: -- (52) -- (46) 2 LV Final today
Battleground: -- (50) -- (44) 3.1 LV Final today

Yesterday
USAToday/Gallup: 53 (52) 42 (45) 2 LV Final
Gallup: 53 (52) 42 (43) 2 LV Final all variations
NBC/WSJ: 51 (52) 43 (42) 3.1 LV Final
Diageo/Hotline: 50 (50) 45 (45) 3.4 LV Final
DCorps(D): 51 (52) 44 (43) 3 LV Final
Marist: 53 (50) 44 (43) 3.5 LV Final
CBS: 51 (54) 42 (41) 3 LV Final?
Fox: 50 (47) 43 (44) 3 LV Final
ABC/WaPo: 53 (54) 44 (43) 3 LV Final?
Ipsos: 53 (48) 46 (42) 3.6 LV Final

" Look at the Obama number (a tight 50-54). The McCain numbers are 42-46. Mix and match and you get any poll you want. Further, all the polls picked up late tightening, then even later widening."

"This is already 1980 redux (close race->debates->change->comfort level->not close race..."

" But the real question is whether 2008 is another election like 1932."

[...]

Are the polls right? Jon Cohen from the WaPo thinks so:

"Despite my list of worries, a few things remain clear to me: Not all polls are created equal. We've been bombarded with polls that fell far short of the methodological rigor required for a good survey. If you mix in bad polls with the good ones, as happens all over the Web, you just may get dodgy results.

I also remind myself that humility is built into my field's DNA. The mathematics of the "random sample" on which all polling is based says that five times out of 100, we will be badly off the mark. Call it the pollster's law of averages.

But these seem to be topics for another day. The polls appear to be in general agreement that Obama is ahead; the only question is by how much. And this time, the pollsters' findings are being reinforced by the work of two other groups of campaign obsessives: the political scientists who use predictive models drawn from past election results to predict the next one (the one professor whose forecast had McCain headed for victory has "adjusted" his model), and the reporters out there knocking on doors and interviewing voters."

Nate Silver hopes so, too, in this very good interview on CNET:

[CNET]: "How would you respond to criticisms that it's impossible to build a good poll-based predictive model for elections?"

Silver: "If the polls are wrong, then we're going to be wrong too. We can massage the data, but if there is some kind of a Bradley effect, for example, then our numbers are going to be wrong.

But we do emphasize that the actual errors in presidential polls are a lot larger than the reported (margin of error). In the primaries, the average miss was six or seven points. When the polls miss, they all miss in the same direction, so to that extent, averaging them can only do you so much good."

Nate also talks about the future of fivethirtyeight.com after the election, making this a great read.

[...]

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/4/7547/14316/258/651633

Do we have our excuses ready if Obama loses?

Lead with the Bradley Effect or

Diebold machine malfunction or

Simply stupid Americans?

Just checking,

Go vote!

I absolutely appreciate Barack Obama's call for unity and bipartisanship. We should pursue it as we work our way out of the huge crises we face. At the same time, we Democrats must never forget what the Republican party hath wrought. They have sucked our nation virtually dry of hope, progress, achievement, trillions of dollars, and goodwill around the world. It seems like these neocons and theocons were born to wreck.

Over the weekend I read an article by former Nixon White House counsel John Dean, who references "half a century of empirical research" to describe the traits of "authoritarian leaders" like Bush, Cheney, McCain and Dobson. These are some of them:

"Dominating, opposes equality, desirous of personal power, amoral, intimidating and bullying, vengeful, pitiless, exploitive, manipulative, dishonest, cheats to win, highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic), mean-spirited, militant, nationalistic, specializes in creating false images to sell self."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/31-5

In other words: lying cheating merciless bastards. Big surprise.

And then there are authoritarian followers. As we know all too well from many in the right-wing blogosphere and punditocracy (not to mention attendees at McCain rallies), they're a swell bunch:

"Submissive to authority, aggressive on behalf of authority, highly conventional in their behavior, trusting of untrustworthy authorities, prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals and followers of religions other than their own), mean-spirited, narrow-minded, bullying, zealous, hypocritical, inconsistent and contradictory, highly self-righteous"

In other words: angry, inflexible, ignorant ("Obama's an Arab!" "No, ma'am, he's decent!") lemmings.

To be sure, it's heartening to see so many conservatives taking a critical look at themselves this year and recoiling in horror at what they've become. ("Hey! Emperor ain't got no clothes! Shocking!") That kind of scrutiny needs to continue. Because after watching the way McCain's campaign was run, it's hard for a sane person to come to any other conclusion but this: the core of the Republican party has lost its marbles. I don't expect them to come to their senses anytime soon, mind you. In fact I'm counting the hours until I see the first "PALIN & JOE THE PLUMBER IN 2012" sign in someone's front yard. But until they reject the knuckle draggers at the wheel, they're stuck in a place they never thought they'd find themselves again: the wilderness.

Anyway. It's 11/04/08. Tomorrow we explore the possibility of national unity. But today? Today we crush the bastards. They have it coming.

I am naked and my donkey is saddled and ready to take me to the polls. We clippety clop into history! Heeyaaaahhh!!!

Spencie baby...

wheeeew....you got all the buzzwords in that one! homophobic, etc.....better find a krispy kreme now, and settle your nerves...

Aren't the glock and the pink lacie panties a little bit incongruous?

better drag my knuckles to the polls....

:)

Spencie baby...

wheeeew....you got all the buzzwords in that one! homophobic, etc.....better find a krispy kreme now, and settle your nerves...

Aren't the glock and the pink lacie panties a little bit incongruous?

better drag my knuckles to the polls....

:)