Polls are all over the place this year.
Even as an outlier,(or total load of garbage) this is a valuable poll - it will serve to puncture the sense of Obama inevitability and give at least the impression of momentum to McCain - things he desperately needs.
So I don’t believe he’s ahead by one.....but this is a big help, even coming out on a Saturday
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Written By:
shark
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Tuesday night is going to be very interesting.... |
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Written By:
huxley
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Zogby did this in 1996, showing Dole and Clinton even:
http://tech.mit.edu/V116/N56/dole.56w.html
The next day Clinton was back to being up 7%.
Note that one night polling for Zogby is a sample of 400, thus having a margin of error of 5%. Also note that one in twenty polls will, on average, be OUTSIDE the margin of error. If you want to see if McCain is really having a comeback, look for similar trends in other polls. Rasmussen today doesn’t show up, and Gallup has shown a trend further toward Obama. (Rasmussen and Gallup use larger sample sizes of 1000 a night). There are feasible scenarios for a McCain comeback, just as there are scenarios for an Obama landslide. Nobody knows for sure. After all, if it were really tightening fast in Penn and Ohio, why would Obama be spending money in Arizona? At this point, it looks very good for Obama, but in any event, Tuesday should be an interesting evening. If McCain does pull it out, it’ll be interesting to see how he approaches the task of bringing the nation together. If Obama wins, he’ll have to chart a path that is not hyper-partisan, and avoid allowing the Congress to dictate the agenda.
http://scotterb.wordpress.com |
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Written By:
Scott Erb
URL:
http://faculty.umf.maine.edu/~erb/blog.htm
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This could be an outlier, or it could be a sign that the race is going down to the wire. We may have a more educated guess in a day or two, but won’t know until Election Night, at the very earliest.
That said, I don’t rule out the possibility that McCain may win Tuesday’s vote by a whisker, and lose the election overall due to early and/or often voting. |
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Written By:
Xrlq
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http://xrlq.com/
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If McCain does pull it out, it’ll be interesting to see how he approaches the task of bringing the nation together. If McCain wins, the Democratic Party needs to seriously rethink itself. If they can’t win after 8 years of Bush, the war, and the financial meltdown, they are at risk of irrelevence as a party.
If Obama wins, it is four years with a radical left president who will likely be a one term wonder, and he will boost the Republican Party (but also damage the country in the process).
Essentially a McCain win is a loss for the Democrats, and an Obama win is a win for the Republicans. |
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Written By:
Don
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If McCain wins, the Democrats need to... try to avoid the temptation to kvetch too much because frankly solid Congressional domination isn’t exactly a pathetic consolation prize, you know? Even if isn’t quite filibuster- or veto-proof, Congressional domination is still plenty of power to set the agenda and move it forward on your terms. A unified Legislative branch is generally more powerful than the Executive branch under our system; much of the Executive’s power derives from being inherently unified.
Complaining about only being in solid control of one branch would make them sound like petulant children. |
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Written By:
Jeremy Bowers
URL:
http://www.jerf.org/iri
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After all, if it were really tightening fast in Penn and Ohio, why would Obama be spending money in Arizona? Obama has more money than he knows what to do with. As a person who despises advertising and cold calls, I’ve often wondered whether there is a saturation point in political campaigns where spending more money is counter-productive. If so, I suspect that in battleground states the Obama campaign is testing the exact parameters of that threshold.
I do look forward to the books that will be written about this election.
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Written By:
huxley
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If McCain wins, there is little question in my mind that there will be rioting like we haven’t seen since the sixties. I think (hope) that such rioting will be over quickly, but who knows. In any event it will be a very ugly four years for McCain and I doubt he will be able to do much about it beyond hunker down and keep the economy functioning and foreign affairs from going nuts in one place and another.
If Obama wins, there won’t be riots and there won’t be the sort of abuse that a President McCain will receive, but I see no reason to suppose that Obama will be able to bring the country together. Obama will be caught between his current moderate rhetoric, his debts to the left, and the profound economic squeeze, thus he won’t be able to please anyone—assuming he doesn’t commit errors that make things far worse out of his inexperience and his blue-sky campaign promises. The media, however, will do their best to gloss over Obama’s problems and blame them on Bush.
America is deeply fractured along red-blue lines. I don’t see that changing until the boomers are halfway shuffled off the stage. By then, I believe younger voters will realize that they are bearing the brunt of the costs of Democratic attempts to recreate a New Deal, and these younger voters will then start shifting to the right. |
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Written By:
huxley
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This blog seems to have sections where people are thinking of civil war against a leftist America after an Obama win, or predicting riots should McCain win.
This is not a country prone to radical responses to political shifts. Riots are possible. But the civil war talked about in another thread reeks of Timothy McVeigh like thinking.
It’s just an election. There will be others. If McCain wins, I suspect he’ll quickly reach out to Democrats, name Democrats to his cabinet, and have a high profile meeting with Obama followed by a call by Obama to pragmatically move forward the progressive agenda and not get embroiled in bitterness or nastiness. If Obama wins, he’ll quickly reach out to Republicans.
We’re Americans. We can win or lose elections with grace. The late campaign emotion is just that — emotion. It will fade. After all, politics isn’t the end all and be all of life. People have their real world situations to deal with too — and usually rioting or starting a civil war doesn’t make it easier to pay bills or take care of the kids.
http://scotterb.wordpress.com |
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Written By:
Scott Erb
URL:
http://faculty.umf.maine.edu/~erb/blog.htm
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Prof. Erb — Riots are riots not civil war. However, I haven’t seen much grace from the left in the last eight years. I have read amazingly violent fantasies about the assassination of George Bush from the left. I have read much dark conspiracy mongering. I have seen an amazing amount of dishonesty about the Bush administration and sheer propaganda about Bush and frankly I’d include you in that group. I have also read leftists predicting riots and blood in the streets should McCain win and I believe them.
In my pacifistic little liberal church one of the heads of the church sent out email last month, when McCain broke ahead of Obama, advising members not to give into hate.
The left has not had the White House for eight years and this year they feel due. They have a charismatic leader into whom they have poured all their hopes and dreams, and if he fails, it seems likely to me that they will react with an even greater rage than we have seen so far.
You are describing the way it should be. I agree, but I am calling it as I see it based on what has gone before and the rage I sense underneath the Obama movement. |
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Written By:
huxley
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This is not a country prone to radical responses to political shifts. You found some really good acid in 1964, didn’t you?
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Written By:
Bithead
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http://bitsblog.florack.us
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Huxley, as much as my style of writing might irritate you, notice that I almost always refer to the President as "President Bush" or "the President," and do the same with cabinet members and politicians. I’ve not yet wrote "McSame" (until just there), and have never claimed that the election was stolen in 2000 or 2004. In fact, I’ve stated publicly that I think President Bush has done a good job changing course in his second term, and praised Rice’s diplomacy. If McCain does what I think is unlikely (I’m seeing this race 53-44, 410 EV to 128 — full details at my blog, which I know you won’t read), I’ll be one of the voices arguing to respect the choice and recognize McCain as the legitimate winner, as I did with Bush in 2000.
So...yeah, excesses exist on the left AND the right. But that’s the minority. Emotions run especially high close to an election. Moreover, I trust the winning candidate, whether it be McCain or Obama, will make symbolic and substantive gestures to the "other side" after election. And the game continues, and the political pendulum swings left-right-left-right...
http://scotterb.wordpress.com |
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Written By:
Scott Erb
URL:
http://faculty.umf.maine.edu/~erb/blog.htm
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