Showing posts with label Bickering partisanship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bickering partisanship. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Hurricane Sandy impacts the 2012 election - How bad is it?

Before we get into the path of Hurricane Sandy, let me bring you up to date on several Electoral Voting sites that I have been following and which I reported to you earlier in my posts of October 18 and October 23.  Of course the Electoral College takes its orders from the popular vote—although there has been at least one case when the candidate who won the popular vote lost—you might wonder just how these EC sites come up with their numbers.

Simply stated, and that is the only way I can approach this, they are projecting into some borderline/tossup states Electoral College votes based on mountains of political data present and past that the lay voter has no access to.  Nor do most of us care as long as we see accurate predictions of where the 2012 election is going at any given moment.  And that is the key because the figures are changing now on a daily basis and will continue that way until Nov. 6.

My favorites are Nate Silver’s 538 and Real Clear Politics, both of which measure a number of polls and then do their own thing with the numbers.  Silver employs a unique methodology using comparative demographic data to balance the polls, applying history, sample size and recency.  Here are the lineups from these two sites:

538

Elec. votes              Obama 296.6          Romney 241.4
Chance to win         Obama 74.6%         Romney 25.4%
Popular vote            Obama 50.4            Romney 48.7

Real Clear Politics

Elec. Votes              Obama 201             Romney 191

Vote Nov. 6
The 270 To Win site agrees with RCP, but the NYT has 243 votes for Obama, 206 for Romney.  As does 538, Time sees Obama already winning with 271 votes, Romney 206.  USA Today unwilling to commit as many total votes as some others shows Obama with 196 votes, Romney 191 and CNN has been static since I started following these polls, Obama 237, Romney 206.  The Huff Post has 277 Obama, 206 Romney, the Wash. Post Obama 255, Romney 206.

What can you do with this?  Well, you can’t take it to the bank but I’ll bet Vegas would give good odds on the numbers remaining the same, if not improving for Obama down the stretch.  When you have this many polls agreeing on the fact that Obama is ahead in the electoral vote, some significantly, the margin of error narrows considerably, particularly with such a small percent of undecided voters.  It isn’t a sure bet for the President but it is better than just comfortable.

Obama and the borderline/tossup states:

So what could happen?  HURRICANE SANDY!  Who could have possibly forecasted a weather disaster of catastrophic proportions hitting a part of the country with a population affected of 60 million?  So since we didn’t plan for this to happen, Nate Silver tries to do some prognosticating of his own.  He imagines 15 million individuals in this highly democratic area around New Jersey and New York not answering their phones for future polls.  In effect, they are shut down.

But if taken without this group, Obama is not likely to lose over one percentage point in those polls.  What is more important are those states in the path of Sandy where people may not be able to get out and vote.  As this is written on Mon. PM, there were 2.2 million people without power and getting worse.  So far, states have extended hours for absentee voting and on-site voting places like schools and fire stations will receive priorities in restoring their power.

Here are the states affected.  By election day, Florida will be completely out of the storm’s loop.  Other borderline/tossup states in Sandy’s way are North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.  Most of the damage has been done in the first three and now it will depend on outages and follow-up crews to get things done in the few days remaining.  New Hampshire is at the tail end of the storm’s path and the status there more apparent by Tues. or Wed.

Those of us not affected by the storm should give thanks and offer our best to those in harm’s way.  You often wonder about things like this, at a time when this country is just beginning to dig out of a near economic collapse, and if someone is trying to tell us something.  Maybe it’s a shot at the downright despicable and hateful partisanship that has been going on in Congress, a kind of warning to clean up your act or else.  Will they listen?  We’ll see.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

It’s time to show Congress the voters mean business


Congress in a word

There are so many failures by Congress in the last few years that one needs a scoreboard to keep the record straight.  According to Kathleen Hennessey on TheDay.com, “Not even Congress is big on Congress.”  She says the body has developed “low self-esteem” because of its “dysfunction, occasionally impaired judgment, and inability to get things done.  Let me add two more: incompetence driven by a fanatical ideology, the latter label assigned to the GOP. 

Less than 10 percent of the public approves of the job they are doing.  Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, said, "I guess we can take some comfort that Fidel Castro is at 5 percent."  Comparing Congress to a communist regime probably doesn’t amuse many conservatives, and is certainly no excuse for the complete ineffectiveness of our lawmakers.  But they have reasons not to worry come 2012, unless, the voting public decides to punish these neer do wells.

Current partisan Congress
According to the Wall Street Journal, the primary reason Congress can stick to their partisanship, voting with the party and not addressing what is right for the country, is that the American voting public has never punished these deadbeats. So they continue their major reason for entering politics, to get reelected each year.  And you have always accommodated them in the past.  I am suggesting we should not do that in 2012 and, as the saying goes, “throw out the bums.

The WSJ says even with Congress’ approval tanked, and with voters exclaiming they hate their bipartisanship these same voters reelect again, while punishing those who dare to cross party lines.  It’s time for you people to put up or shut up.  But it all comes down to the redistricting process that draws the lines that place particular voters in certain districts.  J Gerald Hebert of the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center says political leaders can choose their voters, rather than the other way around.

This has worked comfortably for California which, in the last 212 elections, has seen only one case where the party changed hands.  The sunshine State tried to break this hold on the redistricting process, as have other states.  Arizona voted for a separate commission to draw districts some time ago, but when this assembly did its job recently, fake Gov. Jan Brewer fired the Independent member of the council because the new maps were not more favorable to Republicans.

It is core partisanship that reelects these inept politicians, and there isn’t a lot of hope the extreme right or left will change radically.  Sometime I wonder if these people even bother following the news, or maybe they just aren’t playing with a full deck.  Either way, it is up to progressives to bring out the vote that could not only oust a bungling Congress, it could also get rid of most of the GOP in Washington that is responsible for this insane ideology on absolutely no taxes.

LBJ and Dirksen
There is a balance and it can be negotiated, but not up against the current static credo of the Republicans.  Lyndon Johnson did it when he was in the Senate and as President.  Everett Dirksen did it as a U. S. Representative and later as a Senator.  But the congress of those days still considered what was best for the voters and the country foremost.  Sure, they wanted to be reelected and most were when they took care of the business of the people.

But this pitiable group of lawmakers will push the envelope as long as possible.  Voters can blame themselves for what has happened and with your continued apathy toward this whole mess, we can expect more of the same in 2013.  But if we make it clear next November that we’re mad as hell and not going to take this anymore, Howard Beale’s famous words in the movie Network, (You Tube below) not only will we change things for the better, but it will be a warning to future members of Congress, they work for us.

http://www.theday.com/article/20111125/NWS13/311259926/-1/today

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