Touche, we’re getting into philosophy here, makes my head hurt. A person’s one vote is highly unlikely to make the difference anywhere. But everyone thinks that and all those votes would make a difference.
Billyboy says he’d walk over broken glass to vote for Glove if he lived in Ohio but probably won’t bother since he lives here. I’ve heard similar from other ratstaters.
If it’s even close here it means Osama is getting his teeth kicked in by a far large margin that expected. I think it will be Bush 2004 #s at best.
Because of the 2010 election results, I think that the Republican will easily win Ohio. In 2010, OH elected a new U.S. senator, a Republican. A democrat governor ran for re-election and lost. 4 of Ohio’s 18 U.S. reps. are in their first terms, and all four of them are Republicans.
Because of the 2010 elections, I think that Illinois is a swing state. IL elected a new republican U.S. Senator, to replace a retiring Democrat. IL Republicans got a net gain of four members, in the U.S. House. Republicans gained seats in the state senate and state house.
I might as well chime in with another one of my “electoral reforms that BillyBoy thinks is a good idea but will never happen” posts.
If it were up to me, all states would enact the Maine-Nebraska system of distributing their electoral votes based on how their congressional districts vote, rather than the current system of “winner take all” used in 48 states. The Constitution is silent as to what method states use to distribute their electoral votes, so its perfectly constitutional AND a far better idea than the Orwellian “Popular Vote Compact” being pushed by Jim Edgar, Fred Thompson, and some other misguided Republicans (what’s the point of having your state in the Presidential election if just decided to cast your electoral votes for the NATIONAL winner even if 100% of your state’s citizens OPPOSED him?)
If electoral votes were distributed based on how the state’s congressional districts voted for President, there would be a hell of a LOT more competitive states than just the 12 or so that decide the election now. Democrats would be able to win electoral votes in states like Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee, Republicans would be able to win electoral votes in states like California, Illinois, and Maryland. The GOP still wouldn’t bother competing in my district and my vote for President STILL wouldn’t count (I’m in Bobby Rush’s district in Crook County, Illinois), but you’d see GOP candidates spend time and money campaigning in downstate Illinois and the collar counties trying to pick up electoral votes there. Even with the 20102 remap designed to reverse the 2010 gains and give the RATs total control of the states, Republican Bill Brady won 10 out 18 of Illinois’ “new” congressional districts, so there’s definitely room for Republican Presidential candidates to be competitive in Illinois when it’s not winner-take-all and Crook County deciding how the whole state will vote.
Someone did a study of how the raw numbers of the votes cast in the 2000 election would have changed if electoral votes were distributed by congressional district, and Bush would STILL beaten Gore because Bush won a lot more Democrat-leaning districts that year than Gore won GOP-leaning districts.
Interestingly enough, I think both Maine and Nebraska have had their system in effect for decades, but it never changed the results until 2008. That was the first and only election thus far where the number of electoral votes was different than it would have been if they had used a winner-take-all system. Obama won NE-1, based around the city of Omaha (yes, Omaha for Obama) so he got 1 electoral vote out of a usually safe GOP state. Had it been winner-take-all, he would have gotten 0. Oh well. Now only if the Republican state legislators in RAT majority states were smart enough to introduce this so they don’t have to sit on the sidelines every Presidential election. It’s really depressing thinking the people of 38 states or so have absolutely no effect on deciding the President, simply because of what state they live in.