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Do I live in the same country as these mysterious non-liberal Obama supporters?

Do I live in the same country as these mysterious non-liberal Obama supporters?

Paul Rahe (via Instapundit) compares the polling punditry to those who could not see the collapse of the Soviet Union coming because they were too focused on minutiae:

When I read Nate Silver, Sean Trende, Charlie Cook, Jay Cost, and the others who make a profession of political prognostication, I pay close attention to their attempts to dissect the polling data and predict what is to come. But I also take everything that they say with a considerable grain of salt. You see, I lived through the 1980 election, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I was struck at the time by the fact that next to no one among the political scientists who made a living out of studying presidential elections, communism in eastern Europe, and Sovietology saw any of these upheavals coming. Virtually all of them were caught flat-footed.

This is, in fact, what you would expect. They were all expert in the ordinary operations of a particular system, and within that framework they were pretty good at prognostication. But the apparent stability of the system had lured them into a species of false confidence – not unlike the false confidence that fairly often besets students of the stock market.

There were others, less expert in the particulars of these systems, who had a bit more distance and a bit more historical perspective and who saw it coming…. They were aware that institutions and outlooks that are highly dysfunctional will eventually and unexpectedly dissolve.

Rahe goes on to analogize Obama’s popularity to the Soviet system:

In my opinion, none of the psephologists mentioned above has  reflected on the degree to which the administrative entitlements state – envisaged by Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and expanded by their successors – has entered a crisis, and none of them is sensitive to the manner in which Barack Obama, in his audacity, has unmasked that state’s tyrannical propensities and its bankruptcy….

When the American people pause to pay attention, they will not vote for four more years of misery, four more years of corruption, four more years of lawlessness, four more years of race-baiting, and they will certainly not vote to embrace Obamacare….

In the meantime, you should not be afraid. This is going to be fun, and our margin of victory is going to be large.

Certainly we cannot be overconfident just based on our gut feelings.  But I get the same feeling as Rahe when I hear polls about how popular Obama still is.

I wonder, who are these people?

Sure, I know the liberals, but only one-fifth of the population self-identifies as liberal.  Really, after 3 1/2 years of Obama, who are all the non self-identifying liberals who are going to return Obama to office?

Sure, there are many people dependent on government largess and some otherwise conservative people who will vote for Obama for racial and/or ethic reasons, but can combining liberals with non-liberal government dependents and racial/ethnic voters really get Obama over the top?

Do I live in the same country as these mysterious non-liberal Obama supporters?

Apparently I do.  Some recent polling shows Obama ahead by mid-to-high single digits nationally, something discounted by one of the people mentioned by Rahe, Nate Silver:

… it is doubtful that Mr. Obama leads by as many as four or six points now (as some other polling aggregation Web sites suggest), and even more doubtful that he is seven or nine points ahead.

I hope my gut is correct and this nation is not so obsessed with short-term selfishness and racial/ethnic identity politics as to put those demands ahead of our children’s futures.

Which is why Obama’s only choice is to destroy Romney.  It’s how Obama wins, because there is no majority ready to return Obama to office.

President Hope gets re-elected by being Candidate Destroyer.  I think Rahe may be missing that.

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Comments

That’s the Chicago way….how do you think Obama won any of his Chicago elections??? By having sealed documents opened of his opponents, and going after them for the information inside. He is a dirty, sneaky, liar who will do whatever he has to, to win.

Bad news for Obama: your campaign can’t unseal Math’s divorce records.

-David Burge “Iowahawk”

Henry Hawkins | August 10, 2012 at 10:55 am

Few are currently focusing as tightly on politics as are bloggers, pundits, and their regular reader/viewership. We see respectable polls showing Obama ahead by nine, Romney ahead by 4, etc. It’s like the weather in North Carolina – wait a few minutes, it will change. I think these widely varying polls reflect a population not yet paying much attention.

Attention will slowly come to focus once the conventions are over, the GOP ticket is set, and platforms become better known, but polls will continue to contradict one another. Many bloggers routinely parse out the sampling to reveal how a given dubious result was achieved. These are professional pollsters, so I can only believe they are biased, in both directions depending on the poll.

My gut says the same, and my heart hopes the American people haven’t gone irretrievably apathetic and/or media-blitz blinded, that it will take its electoral responsibility in hand by election day. However, my head continues to worry, not about the people, but about the GOP’s ability to wage a competent campaign. Since last winter and before I’ve been predicting Obama 52/Romney 48, and not just because I was supporting Gingrich. It’s Romney and the GOP that worry me.

In non-political endeavors Romney put his heart and soul into – Bain, Olympics, etc. – he has shown consummate skills and abilities and won tremendous respect. In his political efforts we see a Senate race loss, a governorship of which criticism is merited, a presidential primary loss, and now a presidential primary victory where he survived as the perceived least of evils.

With the GOP and Dole, then the GOP and McCain, we learned that an uninspired, campaign-by-rote, gentlemanly approach wins nothing. So far, with the Romney campaign, I’m seeing pretty much the same. It is pre-convention, still early, and I hold hopes, but my head and my heart are not in agreement. I fear we are sending out the toughest chicken we could find to tame a rabid fox.

Much depends on the VP choice. At this point, if the selection announcement is Pawlenty or Portman, the country will respond with a resounding “Oh, ok. Um… who?” then immediately forget his name for good, and I’ll stick with my Obama 52/Romney 48 prediction. Ryan, Rubio, Jindal, or Christie bring youth, vitality, a little fire, and the energy required for a currently moribund, neutral-cornered Romney campaign.

    ” .. and my heart hope.s the American people haven’t gone irretrievably apathetic and/or media-blitz blinded …”

    There is a whole ‘nother reality out there, where regular voters have no idea why the Republicans called foul on that ad falsely claiming that Mitt Romney being responsible for the death of a steel-worker’s wife several years after his successor at Bain failed to revive a company..

    That’s because the AP lies by omission. Today’s reporting by Julie Pace and David Espo as carried in the San Diego Union-Tribune focuses on “Pointing Fingers at Attack Ads” without the crucial facts, so that there is no way to tell being discussed, unless you already have another news source. Any normal person would read this article and conclude that this is a tea-pot tempest among the cognoscenti, of no moment.

    I’ve seen this tactic, before. I learned on insurance company press releases designed to bring our courts into disrepute. All they had to do was leave out the facts that would explain why the jury held the way it did.

    One of my favorites was “Boy sues Father for injuries in car wreck.” Naturally, the article did not explain that, under Texas law, insurance companies were allowed to sue in the name of the person, in order to conceal the identity of the real party in interest from the jury. That case was actually something to do with a discussion between insurance law firms, and nothing to do with the family.

      Henry Hawkins in reply to Valerie. | August 10, 2012 at 12:10 pm

      The biased media is a reason, but no excuse, for Americans not to satisfy what I above called their ‘electoral responsibility’, nor is a biased media an excuse to remain ignorant. This is a challenge, but not a barrier.

      The conservative blogosphere is full of commenters, common Americans all, who are fully aware of what’s going on, thanks to the bloggers and news outlets like FOX. I do not see myself as anyone special, smarter or better than the rest of Americans, and I’ve managed to get a decent grasp of what’s going on. I expect other voters to be responsible and find out as well. I think most voters do, at least to some extent, and that the ones who do not – or just don’t care – typically do not vote anyway.

I can tell you from the poll analysts I watch CNN’s poll yesterday had Obama winning among young voters by as much as 18 points more than his margin in 08. There are sampling problems in the network monthly national polls including small samples for younger voters. In short, reaching cell phone voters is difficult and costly. They seem to be “making up” these numbers based on their gut estimate of how they will vote. Romney would have been even in that poll were it not for problems with that specific group.

The national daily trackers like Gallup, Rasmussen and even the online pollster YouGov show a race either in Romney’s favor or destined to be in his favor when likely voter screens are applied. YouGov has consistently shown a race in Romneys favor and it has a very high accuracy rate. YouGov polls online exclusively but they have been able to overcome cell phone issues that are confounding other pollsters.

Gallup shows so many problems for Obama it is hard to know where to start describing them. His core constituents are genuinely unenthusiastic about showing up in November. He is down among women voters which is why we suddenly saw Sandra Fluke back in the national spotlight. The idea Obama would improve his margins with younger voters as CNN polls suggest is laughable.

Don’t let these polls get you down.

    Henry Hawkins in reply to Mary Sue. | August 10, 2012 at 12:12 pm

    When you see a given candidate credited with XX% of the youth vote, that’s much the same as saying the candidate is leading among a group that doesn’t vote.

Anecdotally, everyone with whom I’ve spoken as to the Cruz runoff has remarked that the scurrilous ads by Dewhirst were a helpful contributor to the wide margin of the win. It’s useful to remember that in the primary Dewhirst was at 46% with Cruz in the low thirties. If I recall correctly Professor, you didn’t hold out much hope for Cruz as the challenger. It might make a difference that this is Texas where in my view as an eastern transplant, character has more value. Even so, while the Dems have made careers of playing voters for fools, I believe the backlash is finally at hand. The Cruz victory gives credence to Rahe’s calculus.

LibraryGryffon | August 10, 2012 at 11:02 am

I don’t know how accurate the polling is, but here in deep blue (sort-of) Connecticut, I’m not seeing Obama2012 bumper stickers. I *am* seeing a lot of anti-Romney TV ads from various pro-Ø PACs. I don’t recall seeing this many ads during ’08, especially at this early stage of the campaign.

If Ø and his supporters are so unsure of CT that they have to spend this much money shoring up what has been a reliably (D) state since 1992, and where he got over 60% of the popular vote in ’08, I’d say they think they’ve got problems.

I never believe these polls but never more so that the ones being produced the past couple of months. I live within a few blocks of Cal Tech which is a bastion of liberalism. I know a few professors there as well as employees, their barbers and other sources. I doubt that my friends are a freak isolated subset of the general political mindset that rules there. They are assuring me that Obama is doomed if Cal Tech is his base. They HATE him.

I’m also getting similar stories from another local liberal bastion: JPL. For some mysterious reason, those scientists who design complicated machinery and then work out the calculations and logistics involved in navigating them to land on very specific spots on faraway planets aren’t excited about watching their funding being redirected into “global warming” projects. JPL is about space exploration, not about introspection into Earth’s “soul”.

In any case, the true battle is winning the ground war that Operation Counterweight is fighting. Even after Obama is defeated, all we are doing by electing Romney is to re-instate the team that got us into this mess in the first place. It’s like Michelle Malkin famously says from time to time (and I paraphrase), Bush “presocialized” the economy for Obama and so made Obama possible in the first place.

    Karen Sacandy in reply to Pasadena Phil. | August 10, 2012 at 12:35 pm

    So very true, that Pres. Bush and others, “pre-socialized” the country, leading us inexorably to this socialist state. FDR was bad enough, but HUD, the prescription drug benefit, the 1986 amnesty (we were only going to do it ONCE, for compassion – how did that work out for us?), Dept. of Education, SBA, McCain-Feingold, you name it, we’ve teed up this arthritic culture, in which we can’t move far or fast in any direction.

    Republicans are their own worst enemies.

    Yep, control of Congress will be critical. And I’m not talking John Boehner here. He should be dead meat.

These polls are horrible, they are so horribly biased in the democrats favor right now. When they show Obama ahead by the high single digits with a D+19 or D+9, it is really hard to believe.

Right now the pollsters are predicting an election that will have 2-10% more democrats than there were even in 2008 at the height of Obamamania! This is shown in garbage polls like the recent Pew poll with a D+19 oversample and in the Fox poll released yesterday with a D+9 oversample. Their last poll had a more reasonable D+4 oversample (which may still be too democratic, but much better than D+19).

In the Fox poll especially, they deliberately oversampled hispanics by calling an additional 115 people (they weighted them though, but still, why??). If you look at the crosstabs further you see that Romney and Obama are tied in the extremely interested voters. And compared to the previous poll, Obama is up 4 with a more democratic sample and skewed population while Romney is down 1 with -3 to the republican. There is a lot of democrat crossover and independent support in the subquestions for Romney.

When they start to show likely voter models, the polls will miraculously close and even put Romney ahead. And we can finally look at PPP/Fox/CNN (maybe CBS/NYT and others) seriously when they start actually trying to accurately poll for the election instead of using STUPID adult or registered voters.

This is, in fact, what you would expect. They were all expert in the ordinary operations of a particular system, and within that framework they were pretty good at prognostication.

Expecting experts in any field to predict the end of their own usefulness is even harder than “making predictions, especially about the future.”

Does anybody really expect Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP or any of numerous “civil rights” personalities to declare that “Racism in America is Dead” ? .. and put themselves out of a lifetime job ? .. you must be kidding.

If Obama wins re-election we all lose.

There is nothing transcendent about BHO. He is buttressed only by the rabble demanding rank materialism and Big Brother life insurance.

BHO has produced nothing for this nation except for an irrational fear of inequity. He and his aides are the fast-acting poison that awaits a self-indulgent culture ready to give up its liberty for a few crumbs.

Discontinuities happen. Regardless of the outcome of this election, we are going to have one. We are either going to throw out this administration, or it’s going to use the crises it creates to destroy our country.

A lot of these polls are oversampling Dems by an unjustifiable margin. Obama won by 7% and pulled a majority of Independents.

I can’t see any justification for oversampling D v R by more than 3%. There’s just no way it could be more. Both Gallup and Rasmussen have party ID about equal.

So what does this mean? Who knows for sure? Romney is doing better than he’s polling but by an unclear amount. Assume that it’s a dead heat and act as such.

“Do I live in the same country as these mysterious non-liberal Obama supporters?”

*****

Yes, you do. It is a country where public “education” has been successful beyond the Democrats’ wildest dreams, “producing” these “citizens.”

Cassandra Lite | August 10, 2012 at 11:35 am

I had a friend who’d been an ambassador to two countries and an undersecretary of state before going into private business, working for a company that had a big contract in Iran. This was 1978. As soon as he landed there he could tell something huge was imminent, so he sought ought some CIA agents he knew from his days in government. The CIA was absolutely convinced that everything was fine–because all they ever talked to were the usual sources. My friend told them they were making a mistake, that the situation was perilously close to revolution. They told him he was foolish. And the rest is a nightmare we’re still living.

(By the way, the story of how he secured a 707 to get his company’s people out of the country just in the nick of time would make a great movie.)

    Ragspierre in reply to Henry Hawkins. | August 10, 2012 at 12:13 pm

    My exception to da K’s piece is that the attack can readily be on both tracks. It does not need to be unilateral.

    As trial lawyers understand, you have THREE points you can make to a jury without risking confusion. So TWO are good.

    But attack is the key word.

    Krauthammer highlights Romney’s dilemma: neither he nor Obama can run on their own records (stewardship) and Romney can’t attack Obama over philosophy because it comes down to personality and Romney loses. Besides, if Romney picks Portman as his VP, he now has the biggest lobbyist for the Obama individual mandate as his transition team chief as well as the architect of Bush’s big government and two new entitlements economic team.

    It’s just as Santorum pointed out but was excoriated for doing so: Romney is the worst candidate to run against Obama.

    Krauthammer makes the telling point that running on “competence” failed for the colorless Mike Dukakis (even though the fiscal mess he created as governor was successfully hidden by the national media).

Reading Rahe’s entire piece, however, one is confronted by a dizzying wish list of conditions or expectations as to what needs to happen or what Romney “should”, “can” and “needs” to do to bring about this landslide. Rahe does not address the patterned failure of Romney to ever evince any of these sorts of commanding or proactive behaviors or to take any of the sorts of political rhetorical steps Rahe suggests should happen (or rather that he simply assumes will happen).

The piece fell apart for me because of this. Ultimately this race will be about two men, two characters, two political personalities matched up against each other in the context of the zeitgeist. It always is. I don’t mean to say Romeny cannot win, or won’t even in a landslide, only that Rahe wildly misses the mark in his own prognostications about Mitt Romney. So his piece is suspect.

the poll owners are donks, the question are crafted by donks, the questions are asked by donks, for donks, of donks.Then the data is brought back to have the analysis by donks. It is reported on by Donks in the Press.
Any wonder that Obama is up over Romney?
We never had fixed election or close election until this fetish of polling came to the fore-front. Polling imo is a recipe for cheating i.e., “how much more do we need?”

Alinsky must be smiling in his grave. One of his prize students, still has a good chance at winning this election.

Another Alinsky star, seems relatively happy, being Secretary of State.

The sane must wipe that smile off Alinsky.

casualobserver | August 10, 2012 at 12:13 pm

In my world – where there is a greater portion of people who are classically liberal and a little less “progressive” – many I contact are not very enthusiastic about reelecting Obama nor do they find a lot of positives over the past 3.5 years. Some are pragmatic, to a degree, and could pull the Romney lever. Others are turned off by anything they believe to be “extreme right-wing” and the media is doing a good job of feeding that fear about Romney. However, it is my “gut” feeling that most of those who are not excited and couldn’t vote for Romney will not vote at all. I think that is a significant group. Whether or not they are either honest with pollsters or that pollsters can truly ferret out that they are “likely” voters may not matter. It’s my thought that they have a bigger impact on polling this time than in the past.

MomInLatteland | August 10, 2012 at 12:15 pm

Pollsters get more accurate the closer they get to election day. Right now they can oversample Democrats, etc. because they are using the polls in an effort to drive the narrative in favor of Obama. The people who conduct polls are “graded” after the election as to their accuracy and you would assume (not sure if its true or not) that whether or not they are hired by news organizations, etc. for future polls would depend on their ability to be accurate. http://electoralmap.net/2012/2008_election.php

There seems to be an organized “dislike” campaign at work lately.

Interesting.

    LukeHandCool in reply to Ragspierre. | August 10, 2012 at 12:42 pm

    @Ragspierre

    If you thought Adam Smith costing Chick-fil-A a cup, a cup lid, a straw, and some water and ice was “purposeful,” wait until you see the purposefulness of the subversive lefty campaign to flood conservative blogs with “dislikes.”

    LukeHandCool (who would only add, “I’m like totally heterosexual … there isn’t a bit of gay in me … unlike those fags I support.”)

    Cassandra Lite in reply to Ragspierre. | August 10, 2012 at 2:15 pm

    And you laughed at me last week about this. It began a while ago but has now reached near-critical mass.

    Good. It’s a testament to the professor’s growing influence, which I hope will soon reach the hegemonic level.

Hah! It looks like they got to your post too! It is going to happen more often now with the popularity of this website. Democrats are haters and haters gonna hate.

The polling that was released that shows Obama up by 7-9 points has a LOT of flaws. The most serioius of which are:

* It uses “registered” voters instead of “likely” voters. This group almost always leans democratically.

* It under-samples youth vote.

* It over-samples self-identified Democrat voters as compared to the population

* Although there is no separate breakdown, it appears to under-sample the Black vote.

* It’s only 930 individuals. Statistically I can’t figure out how they got to a +/-3% error rate given the sample size of the United States voting population with a sample size THAT small.

Due to methodology, the pollsters are going to get a higher sampling of “metropolitan” areas when sampling by state in this fashion rather than a standard randomized sample.

    NC Mountain Girl in reply to Chuck Skinner. | August 10, 2012 at 1:35 pm

    I also wonder if the pollsters already abysmally low response rate tanked. With so many schools now starting up again in Mid August a lot of people aren’t hanging round answering their phone right now.

    98ZJUSMC in reply to Chuck Skinner. | August 10, 2012 at 4:32 pm

    Due to methodology, the pollsters are going to get a higher sampling of “metropolitan” areas when sampling by state in this fashion rather than a standard randomized sample.

    That would explain a few things. I ran that thought through my head when seeing some of those polls, also. Being from Chicago orignally, (never, never, ever to return, Sorry folks!)there is a huge (D) advantage when you get towards the city.

Long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I had an undergrad class in geography with a professor whose wife was Russian.

Every now and then he would talk about their trips to Russia. He talked about all the shortages the citizens had to endure and he insisted that the Soviet Union would fall in the not-too-distant future. His anecdotes did make you wonder how they could sustain such a system.

I pretty much forgot about what he said until years later when the Soviet Union collapsed. Unlike so many of the experts, he could really say, “I told you so.”

I recommend reading Rendezvous with Destiny by Craig Shirley about the 1980 primary and general election of Ronald Reagan. Now Mitt Romney is no Ronald Reagan. But generally the hapless Carter generally led Reagan in the polls all the way to the end. It really wasn’t until the weekend before the election that the bottom fell out for Carter.

And did Carter get shellacked! Reagan won by almost 10 percentage points and won the electoral college 489-49! Only Carter’s VP, Walter Mondale, lost worse, getting stomped 525-13 and losing by almost 18 points!

    MaggotAtBroadAndWall in reply to Malonth. | August 10, 2012 at 2:02 pm

    Peter Robinson has the graph of the polling. It really is pretty asonishing how the only time Reagan polled ahead was briefly for a few days around the convention in August. Then he trailed again until the very end:

    http://ricochet.com/main-feed/The-Polls-and-Two-Grains-of-Salt

    NC Mountain Girl in reply to Malonth. | August 10, 2012 at 3:40 pm

    Before Reagan 1980 there was Minnesota 1978. After the elevation of Mondale to Vice President and the death of Hubert Humphrey both US Senate seats and the Minnesota Governor´s Mansion were filled by Democrat appointees. The voters cut these appointees little slack when it came to job performance and by the summer of´78 they were fuming about the lack of performance.

    On election night the first US Senate race was called for the Republican less than an hour after the polls closed. It seems the governor who had appointed himself to Mondale´s senate seat didn’t even carry his home precincts. Republicans won the other Senate race, the Governor´s race, the state auditor´s race and control of the state legislature.

    The disgust I hear in people´s voices when they talk politics today reminds me a lot of Minnesota during the summer of 1978.

I know a number of Blacks who have very quietly said that they never wanted Obama in office the first time, but had to vote for him out of racial identity. I could have told them they were really racists, but didn’t. I’m hoping Col. West is selected as VP, because that’ll help on two fronts: veterans and blacks. Let’s be practical – racial politics are here to stay. Denying it won’t make it go away. But I also happen to have a lot of confidence in West – if I wanted someone 1 heartbeat away from the Presidency, and who could handle a crisis, it’s him.

    “…but had to vote for him out of racial identity.”

    Normally, voters enter the voting booth alone. In that event, no one HAS to vote for Obama.

    Now that the harsh reality of the destruction Obama has wrought in a short 3 1/2 years is undeniable, the simple minded will make any excuse for mindlessly voting for Senator Present.

    Dick Cheney said he swore Obama in as Senator and never saw him again. He should have looked for him on the golf course.

    Estragon in reply to radiofreeca. | August 10, 2012 at 3:09 pm

    It certainly seemed to me that most of the blacks I had contact with were very enthusiastic supporters.

    But it is hardly surprising to find some degree of buyer’s remorse today, with minority unemployment through the roof. As the old saying goes, “Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan.”

2 views , are either or maybe both correct? 1. The mood is that the country is under siege by forces we dont wholely understand. To believe the man and party in charge under this mindset will be voted to continue is incomprehensible. 2. The world population has almost tripled ,the US more than doubled in 50+ years. Go back 100 years ,2 World Wars and genocides. Throw in unprecidented changes. Might we be experiancing some sort of specis insanity? With all the countless words being written ,how many form sentances ,paragraphs ,concepts that stand under time and developments? Is # 1 even possible any more?

    Henry Hawkins in reply to secondwind. | August 10, 2012 at 1:48 pm

    There isn’t much different going on now than has always gone before, entrenched interests fighting over the imprimatur of the American voter.

    If politics is analogized to electricity, the current hasn’t changed, but the amperage has risen, evidence of the stakes involved this time round.

My question about the entire poll thing is colored by the fact that Wisconsin is almost always considered safe for Obama, yet we have gone Republican in every election since 2010. And rather noisily that way, if you remember. The last recall was supposed to be a nail-biter. It was over in a couple of hours. Russ Feingold was considered unbeatable. Herb Kohl is retiring. Safe? I don’t think so.

    Henry Hawkins in reply to kay. | August 10, 2012 at 1:52 pm

    Just so, Ms Kay. That Wisconsin, of all historically blue states, has been pulled to the right is testament to what happens when there is a marriage between the emerging, prevailing spirit of conservative America and the skilled and principled leadership of a Scott Walker.

    Wisconsin is a beacon of hope to conservatives everywhere.

      98ZJUSMC in reply to Henry Hawkins. | August 10, 2012 at 4:18 pm

      Amen, to that.

      Once again though, he was polling ahead the whole time and the end results were very close to the polling data.

      Thank you, Wisconsin, for reaffirming some sanity.

Thank you, Professor Jacobson! I lived through the Carter years, and was fortunate enough to be able to vote for Reagan in 1980. Those were scary times. I actually got out of a sick bed to vote for Reagan because it wasn’t clear that he would win right up until election day.

This ‘feels” like 1980.

    Henry Hawkins in reply to kakypat. | August 10, 2012 at 3:21 pm

    “This ‘feels” like 1980.”

    Boy, doesn’t it?

    Hostage Crisis: Day 234
    Hostage Crisis: Day 235
    Hostage Crisis: Day 236, and on and on…
    Gas lines around the block
    Gas purchases ‘allowed’ on alternate odd/even days by plate number
    Rampant inflation
    Special Advisor to the President on Nuclear Issues: Amy Carter, age 9
    Marine Rabbit Attack!
    Heartlust
    UFO sighting
    Mass emigration generally from NE to SW US hoping for jobs

      98ZJUSMC in reply to Henry Hawkins. | August 10, 2012 at 4:13 pm

      I just get the feeling that, as opposed to 1980, too much of the voting populace has either forgotten what communism is, has no memory of it whatsoever, has been indoctrinated into a warm fuzzy feeling for Socialism without understanding what supports it and is, quite frankly, not as well educated.

      There are some seriously clueless people running around that have an infantile obsession with sparkly media bits.

        Henry Hawkins in reply to 98ZJUSMC. | August 10, 2012 at 6:03 pm

        Yeah, I just made a run to the bank, flipped the radio on. Hannity had some woman in the street somewhere putting a mic on young people while Hannity asked them basic questions. One valley girl was asked if she knew who was running for president. I thought, ‘oh crap, she isn’t gonna know who Mitt Romney is…” Well, she took a second or three to come up with Romney, but drew a blank on who Romney was running against. No, really. Somebody had to whisper ‘Obama’ to her. There were other young adults that were just as abysmally clueless.

NC Mountain Girl | August 10, 2012 at 2:36 pm

In 2008 Obama ran as the blank slated onto which voters projected their expectations of their ideal candidate. Looking at all the combinations and permutations of those expectations is is hard to find a set Obama has met much less exceeded. After the bridal registry farce even those who only liked him because of the crease in his trousers are turned off. That means all Obama can do at this point is pander and scaremonger. Pandering can set parts of the base at cross purposes while scaremongering has to be credible to be effective.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/08/romney-ad-challenges-obamas-character.php

As I noted, there is no reason NOT to attack on each and every vulnerable point.

And there are LOTS of them…!!!!

One of the concerns about Romney is that he would back off taking the campaign to Obama. Why that was a concern is unclear, since after Huckabee supporters’ whisper campaign in Iowa in 2007-08, he has clearly had the gloves off. If there were any doubt, these scurrilous Obama attacks should blow away any reticence which may have remained.

“Who are Obama’s non-liberal supporters?” Well, there are elements of the Democratic base who have never considered themselves liberal. Substantial portions of the black, Hispanic, and union voters don’t, even as they may have continually cast ballots for liberal Democrats.

But 2008 was the all-time record for Democratic dominance of a Presidential election with a 7% advantage. Polls showing D+9 or D+11 – AFTER “weighting” – are not only unrealistic and unreliable, but should be presumed to be manipulated for a specific result.

All these crap polls showing “widening Obama leads” exist in the same universe as the daily tracking polls from respected pollsters Gallup and Rasmussen, whose results haven’t moved outside the margins of error even while the others tell a different story (fiction).

Fox especially needs to fire their polling organization. It is anything but “fair and balanced.”

otherwise conservative people who will vote for Obama for racial and/or ethic reasons

I have yet to meet one.

[…] They? They’re All Around You…. Posted on August 10, 2012 3:30 pm by Bill Quick » Do I live in the same country as these mysterious non-liberal Obama supporters? – Le·gal I… Certainly we cannot be overconfident just based on our gut feelings.  But I get the same […]

[quote]President Hope gets re-elected by being Candidate Destroyer. I think Rahe may be missing that.[/quote]

I pondered this, too, when I read Rahe’s article, but then I started thinking about just how “negative” (it’s so far beyond that it’s not even in the same ballpark) Obama has gone. And about these non-leftist voters . . . whom I’m guessing aren’t slurping sufficient koolaid to believe that Romney is not only a tax evading felon but a murderer. That’s patently absurd on its face, and you have to be a true believer in Teh Won not to question these ridiculous claims. If only to wonder why, if Romney is indeed guilty of actual crimes, the Obama administration hasn’t pressed charges against him, tossed him in prison, and thrown away the key.

Negative ads may work, particularly on some demographics, but these malicious, immoral, unethical claims make Obama look . . . well, exactly what he is: a grasping degenerate with no character and no dignity who shames the office of the President of the United States of America. Most of these non-leftists will see that, at least to some degree, remember the “new tone” and “post-partisan” promises, and realize that they didn’t get what they voted for in (’08, can’t believe even one person who voted for McCain will not vote for Obama).

And let’s not forget that the mask is slipping more each day; Obama is dying to tell America who he really is, that you really didn’t build that you selfish, capitalist pig. I’m still waiting for the meltdown. It will come.

I agree with Rahe.
Delayed reaction, but I just got a chance to read it.

2008
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/172652/obama-temptation/mark-r-levin