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General Zod wrote:Goddamnit. I actually thought Schwarzenegger wasn't too bad for a Republican until this.

Surlethe wrote:If Obama wins Indiana by 1 point, let alone 10 points (!), I will join RI for a sock-eating party. There is no way the economy is bad enough to flip this state by thirteen points when it's been deep red since 1964. The fact Obama is trailing McCain by a mere 3-5% shows how poorly McCain's doing, but if Obama scrapes out a win here, he won't need it because he'll have turned all the other swing states deep blue.

CmdrWilkens wrote:

Surlethe wrote:If Obama wins Indiana by 1 point, let alone 10 points (!), I will join RI for a sock-eating party. There is no way the economy is bad enough to flip this state by thirteen points when it's been deep red since 1964. The fact Obama is trailing McCain by a mere 3-5% shows how poorly McCain's doing, but if Obama scrapes out a win here, he won't need it because he'll have turned all the other swing states deep blue.

Well Colorado was Bush +4.6% and is looking right now at anywhere from 5 to 7 points Obama for a swing of 9-11.5 points. Missouri was Bush +7 and that is now polling Obama +1 to 3 for a swing of 8-10 points.
virginia went for Bush by 8.2% and is now an Obama 5 to 7 point lead for a swing of 13 to 15 points

Within that context, and especially with the proximity of the Chicago machine, Indiana flipping is far from impossible. A 10% win in indiana is probably unrealistic though but not by that much since Survey USA has it as Obama +4 and PPP with a +2.

Grandmaster Jogurt wrote:FiveThirtyEight had Indiana light blue earlier in the campaign, too. And wasn't there just a discussion on "The numbers just changed! Victory/failure is guaranteed!"?

Don't get the socks out just yet.

Turin wrote:This is a slightly irrelevant aside, but this last exchange has me thinking. Is there any particular reason the Republicans are "red" and the Democrats are "blue?" I mean, both are conservative but the Dems are supposed to me more liberal. Why aren't the Dems "red," which is what I would expect to see anywhere else in the world?

According to The Washington Post, the terms Red states and blue states were coined by Tim Russert.[12][13] This term refers to those states of the United States of America whose residents predominantly vote for the Republican Party or Democratic Party presidential candidates, respectively. It began to emerge in mainstream political discussion following the 2000 presidential election.

Surlethe wrote:

CmdrWilkens wrote:Well Colorado was Bush +4.6% and is looking right now at anywhere from 5 to 7 points Obama for a swing of 9-11.5 points. Missouri was Bush +7 and that is now polling Obama +1 to 3 for a swing of 8-10 points.
Virginia went for Bush by 8.2% and is now an Obama 5 to 7 point lead for a swing of 13 to 15 points

Indiana has been significantly redder than those states; electoral-vote.com shows it going for Bush 60%-39%: a full 21% point difference. Flipping to Obama +1, let alone Obama +10, is a correspondingly significantly greater swing -- 22 points, or 31 points, respectively.

Edit: Hovering over the map at electoral-vote, Indiana's Bush margins are more similar to Mississippi's, Tennessee's, or Alabama's than Virginia's, West Virginia's, Colorado's, or Missouri's. This is a state that has been consistently more Republican than Georgia; even though different dynamics are in play because of Indiana's industrial (or, I should say, post-industrial) economy, flipping Indiana is, for Obama, more like flipping MI, TN, or GA than flipping VA, WV, CO, MO, or any other swing state.

Within that context, and especially with the proximity of the Chicago machine, Indiana flipping is far from impossible. A 10% win in indiana is probably unrealistic though but not by that much since Survey USA has it as Obama +4 and PPP with a +2.

It's not impossible, but I do hasten to note that within the last month, Research2000 has it as an exact tie, Rasmussen put it at McCain +7, SurveyUSA had McCain +3, and CNN, McCain +2 (data frome fivethirtyeight.com). I do admit that at the time of my writing, I was unaware of the newest SurveyUSA and PPP polls; all I knew about was the absurd +10 poll from Big Ten. It does appear IN is trending toward Obama right now. But a significant Obama win is still a far bigger achievement here, I contend, than in CO, VA, or MO.

Caveat: Things can change in ten days.

So this morning I had an unsettling conversation with a conservative "Friend" of mine online... Basically he was Terrified that if Obama won, that black nation wide would "Want their due" and feel like they "were going to get payback" for years of racism... Now, my friend ASSURED me that he was not a racist, but non the less felt that "for years, black have been getting out of the way of whites, of moving to the back of the bus, if Obama wins I fele like im going to be forced to do those thing for blacks."

Anyone else finding this a growing trend? Yesterday I heard a similar conversation on NPR from some voters... Seriously WTF?

Crossroads Inc. wrote:So this morning I had an unsettling conversation with a conservative "Friend" of mine online... Basically he was Terrified that if Obama won, that black nation wide would "Want their due" and feel like they "were going to get payback" for years of racism... Now, my friend ASSURED me that he was not a racist, but non the less felt that "for years, black have been getting out of the way of whites, of moving to the back of the bus, if Obama wins I fele like im going to be forced to do those thing for blacks."

Anyone else finding this a growing trend? Yesterday I heard a similar conversation on NPR from some voters... Seriously WTF?

Washington Post Writers Group
"Whose Side Are You On, Comrade" by E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Why conservatives have finally lost their sense of solidarity and purpose.
Post Date October 24, 2008

WASHINGTON--Conservatives are at each other's throats, and here's what's revealing about how divided they are: The critics of John McCain and the critics of Sarah Palin represent entirely different camps.

Skeptical social conservatives are precisely the people McCain was trying to mollify by picking Palin as his running mate. These include the faithful of the religious right who remember McCain as their enemy in 2000, and parts of the gun crowd who always saw McCain as soft on their issues.

That McCain felt a need to make such an outlandishly risky choice speaks to how insecure his hold was on the core Republican vote. A candidate is supposed to rally the base during the primaries and reach out to the middle at election time. McCain got it backward, and it's hurting him.

A Pew Research Center survey this week found that among political independents, Palin's unfavorable rating has almost doubled since mid-September, from 27 percent to 50 percent. Whatever enthusiasm Palin inspired among conservative ideologues is more than offset by middle-of-the road defections.

Even on the right, she hasn't done the job. In The Washington Post tracking poll released on Thursday, Barack Obama drew 22 percent of the vote from self-described conservatives. That's a seven-point gain on John Kerry's 2004 conservative share.

Yet the pro-Palin right is still impatient with McCain for not being tough enough--as if he has not run one of the most negative campaigns in recent history. This camp believes that if McCain only shouted the names "Bill Ayers" and "Jeremiah Wright" at the top of his lungs, the whole election would turn around.

Then there are those conservatives who see Palin as a "fatal cancer to the Republican Party" (David Brooks), as someone who "doesn't know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin" (Kathleen Parker), as "a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics" (Peggy Noonan).

These conservatives deserve credit for acknowledging how ill-suited Palin is for high office. But what we see here is a deep split between parts of the conservative elite and much of the rank and file.

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against "liberal elitists" and "leftist intellectuals." Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity--and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

And then there is George W. Bush. Conservatives once hailed him for creating an enduring majority on behalf of their cause. Now, they cast him as the goat in their story of decline.

The conservative critique of Bush is a familiar rant against his advocacy of big government and huge deficits--now supplemented by a horror over his embrace of actual socialism with the partial nationalization of big banks. And, yes, a fair number of conservatives were never wild about the adventure in Iraq.

Things are so bad that the internecine warriors on the right have begun copying the rhetoric of the old left. In a Washington Times column this week upbraiding dissidents such as Brooks and Noonan, Tony Blankley, the conservative writer and activist, fell back on an old left slogan, asking them: "Whose side are you on, comrade?"

This is a revelatory question. It arises when a movement has lost its sense of solidarity and purpose, when the "sides" are no longer clear. There is no unified "right" or "center-right," which is why we are no longer a conservative country, if we ever were.

Conservatism has finally crashed on problems for which its doctrines offered no solutions (the economic crisis foremost among them, thus Bush's apostasy) and on its refusal to acknowledge that the "real America" is more diverse, pragmatic and culturally moderate than the place described in Palin's speeches or imagined by the right-wing talk show hosts.

Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as "Joe the Plumber" often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.

It isn't working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against "liberal elitists" and "leftist intellectuals." Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity--and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

Then there are those conservatives who see Palin as a "fatal cancer to the Republican Party" (David Brooks), as someone who "doesn't know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin" (Kathleen Parker), as "a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics" (Peggy Noonan).

These conservatives deserve credit for acknowledging how ill-suited Palin is for high office. But what we see here is a deep split between parts of the conservative elite and much of the rank and file.

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against "liberal elitists" and "leftist intellectuals." Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity--and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

Ender wrote:I actually wonder what will happen if Obama loses, particularly if it is very close with accusations of cheating.

Working around here I've heard some pretty heated statements on that topic. I figure most of them are in line with "I'm moving to X if Y wins!" BS, but some people are saying them with that scary kind of conviction in their eyes.

evil duck wrote:McCain's collapse possibly isn't entirely his own fault- it's the division of the Republican Party between those who want a McCain and those who want a Palin.

Darth Wong wrote:Most of the McCain/Palin campaign right now seems to be focused on accusing Obama of "wanting to spread the wealth". Is this attack really supposed to be devastatingly effective, in an environment where most of the country is furious at the rich guys on Wall Street for taking their money?

Most of the McCain/Palin campaign right now seems to be focused on accusing Obama of "wanting to spread the wealth". Is this attack really supposed to be devastatingly effective, in an environment where most of the country is furious at the rich guys on Wall Street for taking their money?