Posted on 11/04/2012 7:14:38 AM PST by ScottinSacto
Let's review the events of the final week of the campaign. Exactly a week before election day, the only debate between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan was won by Reagan by a margin of 44 to 36 in a CBS News poll, and by 46 to 34 in the AP poll, and by 2 to i in the widely publicized ABC mock public dial-a-poll. During that same final week, Richard Allen resigned from the Reagan campaign for an alleged misuse of influence during his Nixon White House days. The same day Carter's congressional liaison, Frank Moore, resigned after repeating the unsubstantiated story of the Ayatollah's cancer. On Friday of that week the final economic indicator of the campaign showed inflation still seriously on the rise. And on Sunday morning, November i, the Iranian parliament announced their conditions for freeing the American hostages. Jimmy Carter immediately abandoned campaigning and appeared on national television in the early evening to repeat much of what the public had been hearing all day. It was a week, in effect, with much that could affect the choices made by voters.
(Excerpt) Read more at amstat.org ...
Just go vote. Forget 2008, remember 2010 and Chik-fil-a Day. If people waited an hour for a chicken sandwich, do you think they are going to forget to vote? There is too little bandwidth for all the nervous-nellies and eeyoring going on around here.
” Three days out from election, the CBS/NYT poll had Reagan up by ONE point. Reagan won by TEN.”
That’s the key.
Carter had us in a horrible situation at that time and STILL the pollsters had it “too close to call”.
We look back in hindsight and we wonder how people could have been so stupid to feed such garbage to their viewers. And you have to wonder what was the reaction of those that were old enough to vote back then seeing someone like Reagan TIED with Carter just before an election that netted a landslide so epic that Carter quit before the sun went down.
Dont fret polling. Do your part, keep your nervousness to yourself, Dont spread garbage you get in your email, on blogs, and on Twitter to others, and just show up on Tuesday.
Obama himself underperformed to what he polled with heavy D turnout. He’ll underperform even worse Tuesday due to a number of polling factors that now skew things in a D direction. The GOP has narrowed the gap on absentees and I expect alot of D crossover as well.
As always...the MSM will play down GOP leads...and pull for their hometeam.
My brother tells me that on the day before the election in ‘80...he was a student at UW, Madison...he remembers the Wiconsin State Journal healine...”It’s a tossup”. Some tossup.
Reagan won in a huge landslide...may the same be true on Tuesday.
What is amazing is how much power the mainstream media could still have by the choice in spinning/covering this Sandy disaster. They COULD make it be Obama’s katrina by simply asking pointed questions and doing certain shots etc etc.
If this were Pres Romney running against a challenger, is there any doubt what the MSM would doing right now?
Ummm ... we're on the same side, but let's be honest about 1980. Reagan won by 10% but his vote total was only a tad above 50%, at 50.7%. He won by 10 because independent John Anderson had 7% of the vote. These are voters who specifically didn't want Reagan, voters who were extremely displeased with Washington DC, and voters who, had Anderson not been running, would've voted reluctantly for Carter or just stayed home.
None would've voted for Reagan. Why? Because if they were leaning Reagan, they would've known that a vote for Anderson was a vote against Reagan already.
My guess is that without Anderson, the vote would've split 80% Carter and 20% stay at homes.
Curiously, this means a margin for Reagan of about 4 points (51-47), which is about as good as we might expect from Romney.
Implications:
Reagan's revolution didn't really cement until after the economy got worse and then turned around. Regardless of how well we loved him.
Americans don't like to fire their Presidents, even Presidents as incompetent as Obama.
The only one of those stories reported with repetition was Carter racing back to the White House. He tried the same stunt with Kennedy in the spring and won a slew of primaries.
NBC had a great political show on Sunday late night. It was objective and had the Reagan states in blue. I waited for it every week of the campaign. I felt really good after that last show. I feel the same way now.
Good article, but the report then goes on to stay its purpose is to show that earlier polls showing Reagan ahead were flawed and only those polls showing statistical ties were “correct”. How? Well, they claim that a repolling of 90% of prior respondees showed 8% changed their mind after the prior poll, just as they went to the booths.
I would call this “Grabbing at ‘straws polls’.” (Pun intended)
Most would agree that the media are much more openly Left-wing partisans now, and they now appear to use the reporting of their sponsored polls to influence momentum in their desired direction. Their bias shows up in their sample selection.
Aside from Gallup, it does not appear that pollsters have come close to capturing the intensity of the anti-Obama sentiment - despite obvious signs: The Tea Party phenomenon, the 2010 election, the Scott Walker recall results, the nearly spontaneous Chick-fil-a rallies across the country. I don’t think the media have ever before been as invested in a candidate as they are in Obamugabe. His defeat will crush them.
LOL, what??
One could use the same false logic and claim...
A lot of us remember how we were the laughing stock of the world under that bumbler. This time there isn't that much laughing but more of a morbid fear of what 4 more years of Obmanomics will do to our country.
Do not be surprised almost every "battleground state" goes for Romney and even the normally Left-leaning Minnesota will be a up for grabs--even though it will not affect the election because Romney would have won decisively anyway.
You’re 100% correct.
Even more important, the demographics of 1980 were MUCH more favorably disposed toward Republicans than the demographics of 2012.
That’s why the pollyanas predicting a huge Romney win are sadly deluded.
At best, he wins very narrowly - and given how horrendous Obama has been, that’s a sad commentary on the America of 2012.
Say what you will about Carter (at least the 1980 Carter), he did not project the win-at-any-cost,
litigate-each-and-every-vote
attitude that the current occupant projects.
In 1980 the mainstreama media (unlike today, there was no other) hated Reagan but didn’t love Carter. He was always viewed with a certain suspicion in the Northeast because of his religiousity. Today’s mainstream media has a relationship with Obama roughly equivalent to the relationship an observant Catholic has toward the Pope. Their dislike of Romney isn’t personal, they would hate anyone opposing Obama.
Your assumption is incorrect. The folks who voted for ANderson would NOT have split 80/20 Carter....your reasoning that they didn’t vote for Reagan can as easily be applied to Carter. They didn’t like either. You have no clue as to who they didn’t like the most. For all you know they disliked Carter enough to either stay home or hold their noses and vote for Reagan.
Nice try but your whole analysis is not only flawed but pointless
On Tuesday when you find that you are the one ‘sadly deluded’ will you apologize???
Yeah didn’t think so.
Gladly!!
I want Romney to win passionately.
But I’m also realistic about the state of America in 2012.
apparently you missed 2010.....many states elected republican and conservative governors and state houses that hadn’t been held by same in many decades (eg Ohio)...your pessimism is not realism it is just pessimism
I didn’t miss 2010. Conservatives can still win lower turnout off year elections. Hell, we won the Senate race in Illinois. Doesn’t mean Illinois will go for Hussein in 2012.
I don’t know why you’re upset with anything I’ve said. All I said is that Romney might win in a very close race, but that its not in the cards demographically for him to win by a landslide. I have no doubt that if we had the demographics of 1980, he’d win handsomely. But we don’t.
If you want to indulge in an exercise that will make you very sad, go back and read these boards in 2008. We heard that the “pollsters were in the tank for Obama”, that there was a vast underground of hidden voters that would magically appear to win it for McCain, that Palin was energizing the crowds, etc. etc. Hell I wanted to believe it too. How could this beautiful country vote for Barack Hussein Obama for president? How was that even possible??
Denial is the first stage of griefm and there is much to grieve. That said, let’s hoist the champagne and hope that Mitt can pull this one out.
Anderson was a Republican Congressman who ran for the Republican nomination in 1980, and lost to Reagan. He ran as independant to provide a candidate for those who did not want more Carter, but could not stand Reagan, and for a time RePublicans were very concerned that he would split the anti-carter vote and give Mr Peanut a second term. I don’t think Anderson voters were so anti-Reagan that they would have split 80-20-0 with Cater getting 80%, 20% staying home, and Reagan getting zero. But everybody understood that not voting for Reagan meant not voting for the only guy who could beat Carter, so I don’t doubt that the race would have been closer without Anderson.
Tight races are good for TV ratings. Follow the money, better ratings = higher advertising rates.
We’ll see what happens Tuesday....
And apparently you haven’t been paying any attention to the increase in republicans since 2008...Gallup has released interesting new numbers that belie pretty much everything you have said.
All I know is that no one was predicting a McCain win two and three days before the election last time. The early voting in Ohio as an example was strongly for O (by something like 13 or %....this year Romney is carrying the early voting by an estimated 6 or so %.
All of the arguing is moot. Tuesday is the day that will tell.
Carter’s Job Approval was much worse than Obama’s. Also there are a lot more polls now. The election’s going to be close, but looks like Romney’s doing OK, assuming Rove’s analysis of Ohio is correct (Romney wins by 80,000 to 120,000, base on EV results so far.)
Trust me, there were a lot of McCain diehards on this board predicting he would pull it out because the polls were biased. I know, I was arguing with them.
Gallup and all the other pollsters are showing the race essentially tied, so I don’t see how anything they can have released can belie anything I’ve said.
Bluntly put, I do not believe there are enough white voters left to give Romney anything but the slimmest of margins. If he gets 60% of the white vote, which is a lot, and the white vote is 78% of the total, as Gallup has projected, and then he gets 15% of what remains, that brings him to 50.1%, if my math is correct.
So let’s curb our enthusiasm.
we will know on Tuesday....and for the record arguing with folks on FR i snot the same as actually looking at the polls and the methodologies. We will know on Tuesday
>>Bluntly put, I do not believe there are enough white voters left to give Romney anything but the slimmest of margins<<
I sure wish I wasn’t right.
Ominous implications for the America we once knew.
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