Posted on 08/30/2008 10:27:50 AM PDT by flyfree
What I don’t get is how one day it’s 54 -36 then 1 or 2 days later it’s only a 3-5 point lead.
Man, what kind of voters are these? You can flip flop that easily..... sheesh....
I'm pretty sure Katrina hit as a Cat 3.
It will be an interesting contrast to see how the Jindal government handles the storm. Not that the MSM will examine that angle.
Best-case scenario, obviously, is not any political angle - here's hoping the storm veers off or peters out, sparing lives and property.
“There is no evidence debates decide anything.”
Hmmm, maybe Kennedy/Nixon?
Wait till Sarah and John speak at the convention. Unlike them we WILL have a cohernt message and present a STARK constrast. I expect to be back in the lead after the convention.
>> Kennedy/Nixon >>
Urban legend. There is no focused polling data that indicates Kennedy/Nixon was decided by debates. In fact, it’s rather well known it was decided by Chicago cheating.
Debates as drama are manufactured by the broadcast media to burnish their own sense of importance as a media type. Candidates have had horrendous performances and won. They have had spectacular performances and lost.
They don’t matter.
Only two Democrats since the New Deal have gotten over 50% of the popular vote. LBJ did it in 1964 with a landslide. Carter did it in 1976 by getting more than the usual Democrat share of white southerners & blue collar rust belt votes.
Clinton won in ‘92 with around 43% after Perot ruined everything. He survived with less than 50% in 1996 with a good economy and a weak opposing ticket.
Does anyone think Obama can get more than 50% of the vote? Especially when the only time the Dems win is when they do better than usual with white southerners & white rust belt voters (Clinton did a tad better than usual with those groups, for example). If anything, Obama has thoroughly alienated those voters. The punditry thinks he can make up for it with a massive black turnout and “new” voters, mainly college kids. But I really can’t see him doing better than Kerry. Yeah, there will be a bigger black turnout, but that’ll be cancelled out by the loss of a lot of blue collar whites, and maybe even some PUMAs. The “youth vote” thing is a pipe dream.
The black turnout will be heavy in places where BO will win anyway, like in Baltimore.
Maryland is going RAT regardless, so what if the black vote is around 80& turnout vs 70%.
Same with LA and NYC.
I would have to think that they would make a difference to those who are “on the fence”. Seeing Gore stride up behind Bush to “imtimidate” him or having to hear him make those noises off camera to anything Bush was saying...it had to sway those who did not know what a twit Gore was/is. Many do not pay any attention until the debates...but maybe your “focused polling data” is trying to say that those kind of people do not end up voting when all is said and done.
“This is a close race, and very winnable for us.”
I’ve never said otherwise. In fact, I was saying this was going to be very, very close election even when all the polling websites were saying Obama would get more than 300 electoral votes. This has been shaping up for months to be a classic red state, blue state shootout, as each new round of state polling has confirmed.
My only point, which I get a lot of flak for saying, is that there is no reason to assume that McCain has some sort of automatic, built-in advantage of several points that does not showing up in the polling but will magically be there on election day.
The polling by reputable pollsters in RECENT elections, not thirty years ago, has been remarkably good. If McCain doesn’t take a lead before election day, there is no reason to think he will win.
One possible answer is that Democrats were far more likely to answer the phone the day after Hillary's speech than Republicans.
The more likely answer is they just got a bad batch of respondents that turned out not to be representative.
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