Election Day, USA!

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Coito ergo sum
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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Coito ergo sum » Wed Nov 07, 2012 1:06 pm

Ian wrote: I know you agree. I just wanted to elaborate because there are some conservatives here who like to pretend that the Democrats act just like Republicans. I call it False Balance; it's a very understandable defense mechanism for people.
They do act essentially alike. They aren't more magnanimous than Republicans. They act in their political interest, like most other politicians do. When they have the power to do something with or without their opposition, they'll roll over the opposition if they opposition doesn't play ball. When they can get their cooperation, they'll take it. The Republicans obstruct things they oppose and so do the Democrats.

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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by laklak » Wed Nov 07, 2012 1:15 pm

mistermack wrote: That's the will of the people. They have spoken. "We want fuck-all to happen."
And election 2016 is beginning right now, for more of the same.
"The People" are a scurrilous lot at best. If 2016 is starting now then my only choices are suicide or emigration to Mars.
Yeah well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Svartalf » Wed Nov 07, 2012 1:18 pm

Send us rock and atmosphere samples.
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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by tattuchu » Wed Nov 07, 2012 1:29 pm

Some stupid twat in the news the other day, I don't remember who, some politician I guess from the other side, the wrong side, said that a Romney victory would be a sign from God. So now that Romney has lost, is that also a sign from God? Or is it only a sign from God to the faithful (that is, the credulous and superstitious) when the things you want to happen, happen?
People think "queue" is just "q" followed by 4 silent letters.

But those letters are not silent.

They're just waiting their turn.

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Jason
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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Jason » Wed Nov 07, 2012 3:54 pm

Obama mentioned global warming and gays in his speech. Oh my fucking gerd! It's a sign!

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Gawdzilla Sama
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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Gawdzilla Sama » Wed Nov 07, 2012 5:02 pm

PordFrefect wrote:Obama mentioned global warming and gays in his speech. Oh my fucking gerd! It's a sign!
He didn't mention gout either.
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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by rasetsu » Wed Nov 07, 2012 5:03 pm







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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by amused » Wed Nov 07, 2012 5:05 pm

PordFrefect wrote:Obama mentioned global warming and gays in his speech. Oh my fucking gerd! It's a sign!
But not unbelievers, as he has before, and took shit for it.

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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Gawdzilla Sama » Wed Nov 07, 2012 5:09 pm

rasetsu wrote:
I was thinking "Mitt the Cat" this morning. :biggrin:
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Jason
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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Jason » Wed Nov 07, 2012 5:17 pm

amused wrote:
PordFrefect wrote:Obama mentioned global warming and gays in his speech. Oh my fucking gerd! It's a sign!
But not unbelievers, as he has before, and took shit for it.
I noticed that. I cringed a little when he thanked god too. Have to play to your crowd I guess. :ddpan:

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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Jason » Wed Nov 07, 2012 5:18 pm

I suppose you could argue that he covered nonbelief with he said 'no matter your belief' (or something like that).

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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Gawdzilla Sama » Wed Nov 07, 2012 5:22 pm

Good news is not he doesn't have to worry about getting re-elected. He can do what needs to be done.
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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Ian » Wed Nov 07, 2012 5:22 pm

This is a review of some of my predictions (made three weeks ago; see page 20 on the Election Round 2 thread) and other comments I made during this election season:

Overall I predicted the electoral vote would be 295-243 in favor of Obama. It turned out to be 332-206 in favor of Obama, which means I was pessimistic about a couple battleground states.

I also made a somewhat daring prediction that Romney would win the popular vote while still losing the electoral college. I say daring because even 538.com, which is one of my main sources for polling data, never predicted that at any point during the campaign. As it turned out, I should have just listened to Grandmaster Nate Silver and my own instincts. Obama won the popular vote by more than two million ballots.

Battleground states:
*Florida: This really surprised me. I predicted Romney would win it. I said a few weeks ago that the state is trending red and isn’t quite the battleground it was twelve years ago. I can only assume that in 2016 it will still be a closely contested state, whether or not the same proposals to turn Medicare into a voucher system comes up again. There is also a growing non-Cuban Hispanic vote there.
*Ohio: I predicted Obama would win it, and he did. It was closer than I thought though. This was a crucial state for Romney, but it wasn’t such a bold prediction from me: Obama’s leads were small but pretty consistent all year long. There are deep ties to the auto industry there, which never quite warmed to Romney for obvious reasons.
*Virginia: I predicted a close Obama win because the state has been trending blue due to the rapidly growing DC suburbs. It was even closer than I thought. I think a lot of that has to do with Virginia being traditionally red, but there are also a lot of military people very worried about sequestration (which is a bit silly as an election factor, considering Obama would have to deal with Congress on that within the next few weeks even if he had lost last night). No doubt VA will be a battleground again in four years unless one of the candidates (Mark Warner, perhaps?) is actually from VA.
*Wisconsin: I thought this was going to be a squeaker in terms of the polling I was seeing in mid-October, so I gave the advantage to Romney in my predictions, based on Ryan’s presence on the ticket. That was a silly mistake. Obama took WI by 7 points.
*Colorado: I predicted an Obama win, though I wasn’t too sure of it. It was a solid win. And recreational marijuana being passed there (as well as in Washington state) is icing on the cake. (I would love to see the insides of a Colorado ski resort at night sometime in the near future! :hehe: )
*Nevada: I predicted an Obama win, and it was. This was a tough call based on how close the polls were, but Obama won it big in 2008, and like Ohio his polling leads were small but consistent all year.
*New Hampshire: The close polling all year surprised me. I thought Obama would have little trouble with this one, but he only won it by 5 points.
*North Carolina: I figured on a Romney win there, and I was right. The state has moved from safely Republican to battleground status largely due to the influx of people into the Research Triangle, as well as increased black voter participation with Obama on the ticket. But it still leans red.
*Iowa: I predicted Obama would win it again and he did. This state puzzles me: the Republicans there are VERY conservative, but the state often votes Democratic in the general election. I’d think the level of conservatism to be found there would be insulated by many more moderate Republicans. Maybe it’s just more polarized than most states.
*Pennsylvania: I don’t know why I bothered to make a prediction about this one. Maybe because around October Republicans always seem to think it might be in play. It was in fact slightly closer than I thought - Obama took it by 5 points.

Education breakdown:
Coito and I spent more than a bit of time arguing over my rather haughty and arrogant (I admit it) stance that highly educated people are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican these days. While the popular vote went 50-48% for Obama, data from yesterday shows that people with graduate degrees or higher (18% of the electorate) voted for Obama 56-42%, a 14-point landslide. The GOP just isn’t what it used to be; the northern/midwest Rockefeller Republicans have long since lost control of their party, and the GOP leadership over the last few decades became cozy with –actually, dominated by- the anti-intellectual bible-thumping crowd. Last night it was to their detriment. I hope 2012 will go down in history as the beginning of the end of that domination.

Rasmussen:
I made a point of challenging this polling company a few times when I saw their results posted on the forum, specifically to the effect that since 2009 or so their results have been deliberately skewed towards favoring Republicans. I predicted that this election would show that they had a +2.0%R bias at a minimum. It looks like their bias this year is closer to +3%%R, putting them at the bottom of the major polling houses in terms of reliability. At least their 2012 record seems better than the 3.9% bias they had towards Republicans in 2010. I would give them the same pass I’m giving to Gallup, who also wound up being off the mark especially in the last month or so, except that Gallup’s problem appears to be an inadvertent undersampling of Democrats (or oversampling of Republicans, maybe) rather than a deliberate one. Rasmussen, however, are who they are: the GOP’s cure for the common poll.

Congress:
I predicted 3 weeks ago that Democrats would retain the Senate and even gain one more seat, and I was right. This would have been an even gutsier call 3 months ago, when Democratic candidates were defending too many seats and not looking great in the polls, but then a few of the crazier GOP candidates (Akin, Mourdock) started speaking their minds out loud in front of microphones. I guessed the Republicans would retain control of the House, though they would lose 12-15 seats; a few races have yet to be called, but it looks like the Republicans may only lose a few seats at most and still retain control there.

Outlook:
So, Obama keeps the White House, the Democrats keep the Senate, and the Republicans keep the House. Has anything changed? On the surface, not much at all… but underneath I think things will really start to shift around. For one thing, Obama is a now a 2nd term President, free from the constraints of having to think about re-election. Bush waited until his 2nd term to try to tackle Social Security overhaul, among other things. I suspect Obama will also be burned out from the election enough to try and tackle some big items he's danced around up until now, like immigration reform and defense spending (while his approval numbers slide into the mid-to-lower forties, despite the economy continuing to recover). More importantly though, I think the GOP is going to experience infighting which will make their last few years look like a pre-season scrimmage.

Summary:
Anyway, one thing I WON’T do on this post is try to proclaim this election as a moral victory for Obama, or gloat about how the country collectively made the right choice. Even if I genuinely believed all that, the conservatives on the forum won’t want to hear it, nor should they have to. I’m magnanimous, so I’m sticking with electioneering analysis… except for one important takeaway point: I sincerely hope that in the aftermath of this loss, Republicans will not chalk up Romney’s defeat to his not being conservative enough. This is exactly the wrong lesson to learn, but I’m certain that many conservatives will learn precisely that. There will undoubtedly be a LOT of discussion among conservatives as to why they didn’t defeat Obama in 2012, and there will be lots of second-guessing and blame to go around. And one thing which I think is inevitable is that many Republicans, particularly the majority who took forever and a day to finally nominate Romney as opposed to any of the previous frontrunners, will say that Mitt wasn’t REALLY their guy, that he was a moderate in disguise, that he was a flip-flopper. And in 2016 they’ll want to nominate a true conservative standard-bearer, one who won’t feel the need to waver his way through the campaign and come off as untrustworthy and insincere. But having never been an unquestionable, bona fide conservative is not what did Romney in. The most salient point I can bring up is the first debate: sure, it was Obama’s loss more than Romney’s win (considering the President hadn’t acted like that before or since), but one important thing that came out of that night was that Romney did his best to re-brand himself to the public as the moderate guy the GOP primary voters were worried that he was instead of the “severely conservative” guy he assured them he was. After that debate happened, Romney’s numbers actually surged for a couple weeks. But that one surge couldn’t keep going for a full month. Now, for the next few years conservatives will look at the details of the campaign’s missteps rather than at the big picture, and they’ll want to nominate a reliably right-wing candidate. It’ll happen, too – keep an eye on guys like Ryan, Rubio and others on the far right – they’ll be rising stars on the path to 2016. Fortunately, I think Christie will be a rising star too. But the problem the GOP currently has isn’t that they were unfortunate enough to nominate a flawed candidate, but that the process through which he or she emerges guarantees that he/she comes out flawed. Even if Romney had always been as conservative as he appeared in the primaries, it was the remarkable jump back towards the center that Democrats derided, not his pre-primaries moves from being a one-time moderate to acting like a true conservative. The GOP primaries have been forcing candidates too far to the right for them to prevail in the general election (Iowa takes a ton of blame for this), but the reverse isn’t true of the Democrats. Obama never had to make a huge jump towards the center after his primaries in 2008, whereas Romney twisted himself into a pretzel trying to do so this year, thereby damaging his credibility. Hopefully the Republican leadership will notice that, unlike their party, the rest of the country really isn’t drifting further to the right any more, and they’ll nominate their next candidate accordingly.

So which will it be? Will the Republican pendulum finally start swinging back towards the middle, meaning the Tea Party will become marginalized and a moderate candidate will emerge from the primaries without having to pull a Romney and pander to the far-right too much? Or will the diehards increase their control, hoping to field a true conservative in 2016 instead of the imposter they already believe they fielded in 2012? Will we have to wait until the 2016 primaries are over before this infighting is finally sorted out (probably, IMO)?

And who the heck will the Democrats nominate in four years? :dunno:

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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Gawdzilla Sama » Wed Nov 07, 2012 5:25 pm

tl;dr

Did you win any money? :pop:
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Re: Election Day, USA!

Post by Ian » Wed Nov 07, 2012 6:01 pm

I should have. In 2016, I'm gonna place bets on Intrade. :awesome:

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