{"id":3581,"date":"2008-11-03T12:17:59","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T17:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3581"},"modified":"2008-11-03T12:17:59","modified_gmt":"2008-11-03T17:17:59","slug":"the-presidential-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3581","title":{"rendered":"The Presidential Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

If someone held a gun to my head and said “pick the Presidential Race” right now, I’d say Obama by a point or so.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I also think that the factors are there for an upset – perhaps a one in three chance.\u00a0 The factors are…:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Huge numbers of undecideds<\/strong>:\u00a0 Over the weekend, the AP said around 14% of voters hadn’t made up their minds about the race as of last weekend.\u00a0 That’s phenomenally high – and as Ed and I noted during the show on Saturday, I don’t think most of them are going to take a flyer and vote for the least-experienced Presidential candidate in US history.\u00a0<\/li>\n
  2. Obama always overpolls<\/strong>:\u00a0 Remember – Obama won the caucus <\/em>states by a huge margin, indicating his popularity among activists.\u00a0 Hillary Clinton won most of the primary<\/em> states – the states that decide their endorsements by popular votes.\u00a0<\/li>\n
  3. Mac underpolls<\/strong>:\u00a0 He always has.<\/li>\n
  4. Americans underpoll, too:\u00a0 <\/strong>As Ed noted on the show, pollsters are reporting hang-up rates around 80%.\u00a0 Since Democrats are vastly more likely to be the ones sitting in their armchairs on a Friday night praying to Marx that a pollster calls them so they can add their opinional grease to the Obama skidway, I think it not at all outrageous to think that Democrats are overrepresented; the crosstabs on a disturbing number of polls show oversampling of Democrats.<\/li>\n
  5. Pauline Kael Syndrome<\/strong>:\u00a0 Obama has saturation media coverage, of course – and the media, nationally and regionally, is centered in the hotbeds of Obamania; state capitols, university towns and so on.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Regionally, one more bit of good news for Republicans; election day is supposed to be cool and rainy<\/a>.\u00a0 Historically, Minnesota Democrats are more likely to stay home for inclement weather; Republicans will drag themselves through blizzards over paths strewn with razor blades in weather that’ll make Dems stay home and watch Just Shoot Me <\/em>reruns.<\/p>\n

    So we shall see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    If someone held a gun to my head and said “pick the Presidential Race” right now, I’d say Obama by a point or so.\u00a0 I also think that the factors are there for an upset – perhaps a one in three chance.\u00a0 The factors are…: Huge numbers of undecideds:\u00a0 Over the weekend, the AP said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}