U.S. 2012 Election

[cupper]

I prefer the tried and true method, reading the entrails of a dead goat. ;D

Or watch the results on election night. 

Or wait for the Supreme Court to render a decision over a month after the election. >

 

[a_majoor]

Like T6 says, this is a pocketbook election. Note the actual U3 number near the to right; 11%:

 

[a_majoor]

More on trends. The polling by Rasmussen is probably the most reliable indicator of current positions and trends, and closer to the election you might find interesting data on Intrade, since as a "market" it can clear and process information from millions of sources (bettors) in real time, providing a much clearer and more fine grained picture than possible in any poll.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/08/is-obama-slipping.php

IS OBAMA SLIPPING?

The media-formerly-known-as-mainstream are doing their best –as a commentator who is more outspoken than I am put it–to “drag Barack Obama’s sorry ass across the finish line.” We see this every day; a particularly egregious example was the press coverage of Mitt Romney’s excellent trip overseas. The Media Research Center analyzed the news coverage of Romney’s trip and concluded that an astonishing 86% of network news stories focused on Romney’s supposed “gaffes.” If you watched the video of “reporters” from the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN heckling Romney in Poland, you don’t need a scorecard to know which presidential campaign they are trying to boost.

In the past few days, some of these same news organizations have released polls purporting to show that Obama has pulled into a significant lead in several key states. But if you look deeper, you always find that the pollsters have over-sampled Democrats. It is no surprise that if a pollster asks 32% Democrats and 18% Republicans whom they favor for president, the Democrat will come out ahead. Strange as it seems, I think the pollsters and the news organizations they work for are doing this on purpose, in hopes of buoying Obama’s candidacy. Otherwise, wouldn’t they occasionally over-sample Republicans?

So one has to pierce through a lot of clutter to get any real sense of how the race is going. Given that actions speak louder than words, one thing you can do is look at where the candidates are spending their money: nearly all of Obama’s campaign spending (and Romney’s too) is directed at states that Obama carried in 2008. This means that notwithstanding the media cheerleading, Obama is playing defense, not offense.

You can also follow Rasmussen Reports. Rasmussen’s polls are more meaningful than most others because 1) he samples likely voters, and 2) he continuously tests voters’ party affiliation, and weights survey results to reflect the current composition of the electorate. (Republicans have a slight edge in party ID, but essentially the electorate is 1/3 Republican, 1/3 Democrat, and 1/3 independent.) Because of that methodology, Rasmussen’s polls do not jump around randomly depending on the sample composition, and they are better able to measure actual trends.

So it is interesting to see how the matchup between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney has looked over the months:

Romney has generally led Obama ever since he became the clear front-runner for the GOP nomination. As always, the numbers bounce around some, and Romney’s lead among likely voters has widened and narrowed. On several occasions, Obama has briefly taken the lead. But the overall trend is clearly in Romney’s favor.

Currently, the tide seems to be running against the president. Romney leads him 47% to 43%. If the adage that undecided voters tend to break against the incumbent holds true, Obama is in a pretty deep hole. Moreover, voter approval of Obama seems to be slipping. His overall approval rating stands at only 44%, a number that, if it holds through November, would preclude re-election. Even worse for Obama is his Approval Index, the difference between those who strongly approve and strongly disapprove of his performance. Since early in his term, a plurality of voters have strongly disapproved of Obama. In today’s survey, 45% strongly disapprove while only 22% strongly approve. I think we can assume that none of those 45% are going to vote for Obama, while conversely, there is a fair amount of soft Obama support that could be eroded. Given those numbers, Obama’s Approval Index now stands at -23, which is just awful:

How significant are these numbers? There is a long way to go until November, and there have been several prior occasions when it looked as though Romney may be pulling away. It is entirely possible that Obama might again bounce back. Still, his prognosis is not good. He is nowhere near 50% approval with voters, and it is hard to see what could happen in the next 100 days to get him to that level. A plurality of voters strongly disapprove of his performance, and many of them will not only vote but will work to elect his opponent. Many voters still have little knowledge of Romney, and he will get a bounce from the Republican convention, and possibly from his vice-presidential selection as well. Most important, perhaps, is the fact that so far, Obama has vastly out-spent Romney on television advertising. Romney and his supporters have a great deal of money stored up for when the campaign officially begins, after the conventions. So the stars do not appear to be aligned well for the president.

My guess is that this is why the Democratic Party’s media arm has been working overtime in recent weeks. They are trying to pump life into a campaign that, viewed objectively, is in trouble.

 

[cupper]

Romney needs to do one of two things with the Harry Reid accusations / implications / speculations.

He either needs to show the returns and deal with whatever fall out comes

or

He needs to ignore the obvious attempt to distract the campaign from it's main themes of Economy and Jobs. And his campaign team needs to give him a kick in the butt and remind him that he is running for President, not Senate.

Me thinks that the only real solution is the former, and not the latter. This problem is not going away.

And the left wing media is already making hay with the archival footage of his 1994 senate run against Kennedy where he challenged Kennedy to release his tax returns. Then the 2002 race for Governor where he challenged his opponent's husband to release his returns as a lobbyist, but refused to release his own citing personal privacy. Ironically he had an epiphany from Kennedy.

See the first 8 item links in the Maddow Blog post here: http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/03/13109605-links-for-the-83-trms

 

[cupper]

And much as I hate to admit it, Anne Coulter may be right.

http://youtu.be/okjIK0HrhXM

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

Romney needs to do one of two things with the Harry Reid accusations / implications / speculations.

He either needs to show the returns and deal with whatever fall out comes

or

He needs to ignore the obvious attempt to distract the campaign from it's main themes of Economy and Jobs. And his campaign team needs to give him a kick in the butt and remind him that he is running for President, not Senate.

Me thinks that the only real solution is the former, and not the latter. This problem is not going away.

And the left wing media is already making hay with the archival footage of his 1994 senate run against Kennedy where he challenged Kennedy to release his tax returns. Then the 2002 race for Governor where he challenged his opponent's husband to release his returns as a lobbyist, but refused to release his own citing personal privacy. Ironically he had an epiphany from Kennedy.

See the first 8 item links in the Maddow Blog post here: http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/03/13109605-links-for-the-83-trms

It's a sad state of affairs when you have to hide your success.  The amount of money he makes should be largely irrelevant to his ability or inability to lead a country.  As for Kennedy, perhaps he only asked him to release his records as a way of pointing out some sort of "Limo liberal" type theme. 

I do agree that Romney's biggest opponent seems to be Romney himself.  All of his random statements (London's not ready for the olympics), refusal to release statements and information, and general lack of "it" are what will cause him to lose.  Obama is a weak leader who has likely put America back, fiscally at least, 20 years, but will likely come out on top of what SHOULD be a vote for america's soul, but will more likely be a vote for random, non-issues like gay marriage and abortion.  :2c:

 

[Brad Sallows]

Every person interested in restoring civility and seriousness to US federal politics should stand behind Romney's refusal to release more past tax returns.

There was a point in time up to which the calls for more information were civil and reasonable, despite being a facade for a fishing expedition.

But since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made a hearsay accusation, admitting directly in his own statements "Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain", the quest has become rude and corrosive.  Reid does not deserve to be rewarded for such discreditable behaviour, nor should such behaviour be encouraged among others, so the returns must not be released.

 

[Haletown]

Gotta  give Obama et al props for manufacturing a nice little bobble to tantalize the media and distract the nation's attention away from  the real story - the US economy, for at least a week or two.

The whole Harry Reid bit about Romney doesn't pay taxes has dominated news coverage and minimized the disastrous economic "recovery"  news.

Some pretty slick politics . . .  Good old school drive by slimes for the media to feast on.

 

[muskrat89]

I debated on whether or not to post this here or in a separate thread, but here is a pretty interesting run of economic facts. Some random, some pertinent...

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/07/17/100-mind-blowing-facts-about-the-economy-.aspx

 

[cupper]

If he's not going to release the returns, Romney has to stop biting every time it comes up. His statements aren't helping the cause, and has just devolved into a "You'll have to trust me and take my word for it" defense.

And no one is buying what he is selling.

What I do find curious about the Obama strategy is that so far they haven't gone after Romney's biggest weakness, his continually changing stance on just about every issue he's ever had an opinion on.

From abortion to health care to gay rights and on, there is tape of him taking one strong undeniable and absolute stance, only to have tape from another political run doing a 180 on the same issue. At best it shows he cannot be sincere, and panders to get votes. At worst it shows that he has no convictions, and can easily be lead by the nose.

 

[a_majoor]

Actually since President Obama has had a constantly changing opinion of everything from Gitmo to Gay marriage, perhaps it is best that that entire subject is left fallow...

 

[Haletown]

Obama has kept one promise.  He said elect me and you won't recognize America in four years.

 

[cupper]

Congress killed the ability for him to shut down the detention facilities at Gitmo, so you cannot lay that at his feet.

As for his views on gay marriage, it may be a little more complicated than saying he flip flopped. At least he never said he'd be a better defender of gay rights than Ted Kennedy, sign a law allowing same sex marriage as Governor, then say he'd bring in a constitutional amendment ensuring that marriage remains an institution between one man and one woman.

Which is ironic when you consider Romney's Great grandfather was a polygamist.

 

[PPCLI Guy]

Obama has kept one promise.  He said elect me and you won't recognize America in four years.

:boring:

 

[Haletown]

. . . .  Romney's biggest weakness, his continually changing stance on just about every issue he's ever had an opinion on.

From abortion to health care to gay rights and on, there is tape of him taking one strong undeniable and absolute stance, only to have tape from another political run doing a 180 on the same issue. At best it shows he cannot be sincere, and panders to get votes. At worst it shows that he has no convictions, and can easily be lead by the nose.

Right. Because Obama has been completely consistent in his policies, positions and beliefs!

"In the case of our first postmodernist president, Barack Obama, there cannot be facts, past or present, only a set of shifting assertions that gain credence to the degree that they prove transitorily useful for progressive causes. A sympathetic biographer, David Maraniss, noted that almost all the touchstone events in Barack Obama’s mythographic memoir were fabricated."

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313242/obama-never-never-land-victor-davis-hanson

Very lucid description of the Obama presidency. 

 

[a_majoor]

Congress killed the ability for him to shut down the detention facilities at Gitmo, so you cannot lay that at his feet.

Really, a Congressional Democrat supermajority in the Senate and a Majority in the House prevented President Obama from Closing Gitmo from 2008 to 2010? They also blocked a great deal of the other legislation the Administration attempted to pass as well, I suppose....

And a special bonus for those people who continue to claim voter fraud isn"t a problem:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/york-when-1099-felons-vote-in-race-won-by-312-ballots/article/2504163

York: When 1,099 felons vote in race won by 312 ballots
August 6, 2012

Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
The Washington Examiner

Sen. Al Franken (Getty Images) In the eyes of the Obama administration, most Democratic lawmakers, and left-leaning editorial pages across the country, voter fraud is a problem that doesn't exist. Allegations of fraud, they say, are little more than pretexts conjured up by Republicans to justify voter ID laws designed to suppress Democratic turnout.

That argument becomes much harder to make after reading a discussion of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race in "Who's Counting?", a new book by conservative journalist John Fund and former Bush Justice Department official Hans von Spakovsky. Although the authors cover the whole range of voter fraud issues, their chapter on Minnesota is enough to convince any skeptic that there are times when voter fraud not only exists but can be critical to the outcome of a critical race.

In the '08 campaign, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman was running for re-election against Democrat Al Franken. It was impossibly close; on the morning after the election, after 2.9 million people had voted, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes.

Franken and his Democratic allies dispatched an army of lawyers to challenge the results. After the first canvass, Coleman's lead was down to 206 votes. That was followed by months of wrangling and litigation. In the end, Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn into office in July 2009, eight months after the election.

During the controversy a conservative group called Minnesota Majority began to look into claims of voter fraud. Comparing criminal records with voting rolls, the group identified 1,099 felons -- all ineligible to vote -- who had voted in the Franken-Coleman race.

Minnesota Majority took the information to prosecutors across the state, many of whom showed no interest in pursuing it. But Minnesota law requires authorities to investigate such leads. And so far, Fund and von Spakovsky report, 177 people have been convicted -- not just accused, but convicted -- of voting fraudulently in the Senate race. Another 66 are awaiting trial. "The numbers aren't greater," the authors say, "because the standard for convicting someone of voter fraud in Minnesota is that they must have been both ineligible, and 'knowingly' voted unlawfully." The accused can get off by claiming not to have known they did anything wrong.

Still, that's a total of 243 people either convicted of voter fraud or awaiting trial in an election that was decided by 312 votes. With 1,099 examples identified by Minnesota Majority, and with evidence suggesting that felons, when they do vote, strongly favor Democrats, it doesn't require a leap to suggest there might one day be proof that Al Franken was elected on the strength of voter fraud.

And that's just the question of voting by felons. Minnesota Majority also found all sorts of other irregularities that cast further doubt on the Senate results.

The election was particularly important because Franken's victory gave Senate Democrats a 60th vote in favor of President Obama's national health care proposal -- the deciding vote to overcome a Republican filibuster. If Coleman had kept his seat, there would have been no 60th vote, and no Obamacare.

Voter fraud matters when contests are close. When an election is decided by a huge margin, no one can plausibly claim fraud made the difference. But the Minnesota race was excruciatingly close. And then, in the Obamacare debate, Democrats could not afford to lose even a single vote. So if there were any case that demonstrates that voter fraud both exists and has real consequences, it is Minnesota 2008.

Yet Democrats across the country continue to downplay the importance of the issue. Last year, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, denounced "the gauzy accusation that voter fraud is somehow a problem, when over and over again it has been proven that you're more likely to get hit by lightning than you are to [be] a victim of voter fraud."

Wasserman Shultz and her fellow Democrats are doing everything they can to stop reasonable anti-fraud measures, like removing ineligible voters from the rolls and voter ID. Through it all, they maintain they are simply defending our most fundamental right, the right to vote.

But voter fraud involves that right, too. "When voters are disenfranchised by the counting of improperly cast ballots or outright fraud, their civil rights are violated just as surely as if they were prevented from voting," write Fund and von Spakovsky. "The integrity of the ballot box is just as important to the credibility of elections as access to it."

Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on washingtonexaminer.com.

 

[Haletown]

Must have been the same Super Majority that prevented him from fulfilling his campaign promise to cut the deficit by half in his first term.

 

[cupper]

Really, a Congressional Democrat supermajority in the Senate

When exactly did the Dems have a supermajority in the Senate?

The results of the 2008 Senate elections were as follows

Democrats = 57 seats

Republicans = 41 seats

Independents = 2 seats (caucused with Dems.)

In actual fact the senate voted 90 to 6 to strip the $80 Million for closure of the Gitmo prisons from the war authorization bill.
It was considered a rebuke for lack of a clear plan to transfer the prisoners to the US mainland. No one in Congress wanted the prisoners to be transferred to US prisons in their own districts.

So yes, Congress killed the ability for the Administration to close the prisons in Gitmo.

 

[cupper]

And a special bonus for those people who continue to claim voter fraud isn"t a problem:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/york-when-1099-felons-vote-in-race-won-by-312-ballots/article/2504163

Seriously, you're going t play the voter fraud card? :

You should do more research.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/lets-play-voter-fraud-whack-a-mole/2012/08/08/99f9b66c-e18e-11e1-89f7-76e23a982d06_blog.html?hpid=z7

Voter fraud whack-a-mole continues. Remember the bottom line here: no one has found convincing evidence of any recent, significant level of voter fraud. The cases that have been alleged often turn out to be phony. And the voter suppression “remedies” Republicans like don’t have anything to do with whatever fraud is generally alleged.

So: the latest conservative talking point is the claim that there were a bunch of felons who voted improperly in Minnesota in 2008 — perhaps enough to have flipped the very close Senate race in that cycle from Democratic Al Franken to Republican Norm Coleman. Conservative columnist Byron York points out correctly that flipping that seat would have been hugely consequential; the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank, and other legislation might well have failed if Dems had lost just one more Senate seat.

But the accusations are old and long ago debunked. The evidence that York discusses is in a new book by a conservative journalist and a former Bush administration lawyer — charges that were pretty convincingly rebutted when they were made back in 2010. The authors don’t have a great track record on such charges, as voting expert Rick Hasen notes. And a new Steven Rosenfeld article today points out the weaknesses of this latest case; basically what we have is, well, not very much. Some ex-felons voted. A plurality might have voted for Franken. It wouldn’t have yielded Coleman anywhere near enough net votes had they been tossed.

And just to add insult to injury: The Pennsylvania Govenrment admits in it's defense of a challenge of Voter ID laws they admitted were implimented to prevent voter fraud that there has never been a single case of suspected voter fraud.

Ahead Of Voter ID Trial, Pennsylvania Admits There’s No In-Person Voter Fraud

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/pennsylvania_voter_id_no_in_person_voter_fraud.php 

As the Justice Department investigates Pennsylvania’s voter ID law on the federal level, a coalition of civil rights groups is gearing up for a state trial starting Wednesday examining whether the law is allowable under Pennsylvania’s constitution.

In that case, Pennsylvania might have handed those groups and their clients (including 93-year-old Viviette Applewhite) a bit of an advantage: They’ve formally acknowledged that there’s been no reported in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania and there isn’t likely to be in November.

The state signed a stipulation agreement with lawyers for the plaintiffs which acknowledges there “have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.”

Additionally, the agreement states Pennsylvania “will not offer any evidence in this action that in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania and elsewhere” or even argue “that in person voter fraud is likely to occur in November 2012 in the absense of the Photo ID law.”

Pennsylvania has said that over 750,000 registered voters do not have ID from the Transportation Department, a problem more concentrated in urban centers like Philadelphia. One top state Republican has claimed the voter ID law would help Mitt Romney win the Keystone state and Democrats have already altered their campaign plans should the law survives legal challenges.

Judge Robert Simpson will hear the case, Applewhite et al. v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, et al., in Harrisburg starting on Wednesday. The ACLU expects the trial to last five to seven days.

 

[Haletown]

When exactly did the Dems have a supermajority in the Senate?

The results of the 2008 Senate elections were as follows

Democrats = 57 seats

Republicans = 41 seats

Independents = 2 seats (caucused with Dems.)


[/

With 100 seats in the US Senate, if the Democrats hold 57 of them, they have a majority.

Since the Democrats also held a majority of the House seats and they owned the White House, they could have passed Bills as they wished.