November 04, 2008

11/4: Final Predictions!

Most liberal bloggers expect Barack Obama to win today's election by a sizeable margin. Markos Moulitsas is particularly optimistic, predicting a 390 electoral vote landslide for Obama. Other liberal bloggers are more conservative in their projections, but nearly all of them expect Obama to win at least 300 EV's. Lefty bloggers also expect Dems to pick up 20+ House seats and either 7 or 8 Senate seats (although few believe that Dems will attain a 60-seat majority).

Most conservative bloggers also expect Obama to win, although they think it will be a closer race than do their liberal counterparts. A few righty bloggers think John McCain will win in a squeaker, but they are undoubtedly in the minority.

PREDICTIONS: Entering The Age Of Obama

Most liberal bloggers are predicting a sizeable Obama victory in which the Dem nominee wins over 300 electoral votes:

• Daily Kos' Moulitsas: "Popular vote: O+9 (54-45-1); Electoral College: Obama 390, McCain 148."
• Open Left's Chris Bowers: "Electoral Vote: Obama 353--185 McCain; National Popular Vote: Obama 52.8%--45.7% McCain."
• Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "Obama -- 321-217 ([John] Kerry states + CO, NM, IA, VA, NC, OH)."
• MyDD's Jonathan Singer: "I see Barack Obama taking home the popular vote by roughly a 52 percent to 46 percent margin. In the electoral college, I see a 357 to 181 split for Obama that works out as follows: Obama taking all of the Kerry states, plus the [Al] Gore states of Iowa and New Mexico; Obama picking up the traditional swing states of Ohio and Florida; Obama winning the emerging swing states of Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada and Colorado; Obama picking off a single electoral vote in Nebraska; and Obama gaining three more electoral votes by carrying either either North Dakota or Montana."
• MyDD's Jerome Armstrong: "52.2% [Obama] to 45.8% [McCain] -- a 6.4 percent margin. The last days national trend in every poll thus far (there are a few outstanding) is toward Obama. [...] At the EV level, MyDD's counter has 338-200, which sounds good. I am a little bit nervous that IN, MO, and NC have all flipped back to McCain during the last week. McCain also has increased numbers in FL and OH, both of which I could see him winning. In VA, Obama has fallen below 50 percent on RCP, which could mean trouble. Both NV and CO have had recent polls showing it close. [...] My worst case scenario is that VA & PA are 'too close to call' by the networks and we are up late waiting for the NV results to come in...the best is that Obama hits 400 by winning all the toss-ups, plus upsets in GA and AZ."
• Al Giordano: "Obama 307 Electoral Votes, McCain 231. [...] I have leapt North Carolina and Nevada ahead of other states where Obama has been polling better than in those places because the combination of changing demographics in these growing states, new voter registration numbers and early voting totals, I believe, will place them in Obama's column. Very similar demographic and organizing factors were at work all year in Colorado and Virginia. [...] But while this year is demonstrating to America and the world that a new country is emerging from the ashes of the old, there are segments of older populations in Florida and Appalachia (which includes a significant swathe of Ohio) whom I believe, based in part on my reporting from the ground, that pollsters have marked as 'undecided' or 'won't tell' but whom will vote -- however unenthusiastically -- for McCain."
• Mother Jones' Kevin Drum: "Obama's going to win by 5-6 points (maybe more!), and [tonight] the most disastrous presidency in modern history will finally begin the shamefaced descent into the memory hole that it so richly deserves. I can't wait."

PREDICTIONS II: Red Dawn Is Upon Us

Most conservative bloggers are also predicting an Obama victory, albeit by a narrower margin:

• Right Wing News' John Hawkins: "My best guess is that McCain wins Florida and Missouri, while Obama wins Ohio. That would put the final count at Obama (311) vs. McCain (227) -- but that may turn out to be too optimistic..."
• NRO's Jim Geraghty: "I'm going to put it in the neighborhood of a 52-48, 51-48-1, 52-47-1 popular vote victory for Obama. Going down the list, state by state, I come up with a 286-252 electoral vote victory for Obama. If Pennsylvania flips to red, it would actually be a 273-265 McCain victory."
• Hot Air's Allahpundit: "Obama 318, Maverick 220, with The One pulling 51 percent nationwide to McCain's 47. I gave McCain Ohio partly because he and Palin have spent so much time there but mainly because I don't have the stomach to sketch out a truly gruesome landslide, my reputation for Eeyore-ism notwithstanding."
• The Atlantic's Ross Douthat: "Obama 52%, McCain 47%, and the following electoral-vote breakdown: Obama 311, McCain 227."

Many conservative bloggers are extremely pessimistic about McCain's chances:

• The Next Right's Sean Oxendine: "At this point, the polls would have to be catastrophically wrong for Obama to lose."
• AmSpec Blog's Robert Stacy McCain: "If there is a [McCain] miracle, I will be shocked and gratified. Given the overwhelming contrary evidence, however, I refuse to hope. Hope is for chumps."
• AmSpec Blog's Philip Klein: "Obama has a significant lead nationally, as well as in Pennsylvania. Perhaps hundreds of public polls are completely mistaken and McCain will pull off the greatest upset in history today, but I can't base my analysis on a gut feeling or what I hope will happen, I can only dispassionately draw a conclusion based on the empirical data available to me, as well as my own hands on observations covering the campaign for two years now."

Other righty bloggers are more optimistic:

• Hot Air's Ed Morrissey: "I think John McCain will win a squeaker over Barack Obama, 273-265, by holding Florida, Nevada, and adding Pennsylvania as a trade for Virginia."
• RedState's Moe Lane: "I think that McCain's going to squeak through on this one..."
• NRO's Jonah Goldberg: "I was just playing with the RCP electoral map for the first time in a while (I used to play with it all the time, but then it got depressing). And I have to say, it's actually much easier to see how McCain could pull it off than I had thought. That's not to say McCain's got a cakewalk ahead of him. [...] But I just thought it would be much harder to get McCain past 270 than it is. If McCain can win Pennsylvania, he can be president. Let's hope Thomas Frank finally breaks through to the masses and all of those voters dependent on the coal industry vote their narrow economic interests!"

DEM STRATEGY: Fighting Back The DLC Wing

Liberal bloggers are criticizing recent columns by Dem strategists Doug Schoen and Mark Penn, who urge the hypothetical Obama administration to stick to "centrism" and "conciliation." Liberal bloggers perceive Schoen's and Penn's argument as an attempt to pre-emptively constrain Obama's progressive agenda:

• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "We'll know soon enough whether Democrats have a good Election Day or not, but Doug Schoen is already urging the party not to perceive potentially sweeping victories as an endorsement of the Democratic agenda. [...Schoen argues that] if voters turn out in record numbers, elect Democrats to control almost everything, and deliver a 'wholesale rejection' of conservative Republicans, Democrats shouldn't consider this a mandate for change. Indeed, as far as Schoen is concerned, if Democratic policy makers try to implement Democratic policy ideas after Democratic victories, the party will surely be punished by voters. [...] I suspect Obama, given what we know of his style and temperament, would make good-faith efforts to encourage Republicans to support his policy goals. But Schoen's advice seems misguided -- if Obama wins, he should scale back on the agenda voters asked him to implement? He should water down his agenda, whether it has the votes to pass or not? He should put 'conciliation' at the top of his priority list? And what, pray tell, does a Democratic majority do if/when Republicans decide they don't like Democratic ideas, don't care about popular mandates or polls, and won't work with Dems on issues that matter? Do Democrats, at that point, simply stop governing, waiting for a mysterious 'consensus' to emerge?"
• Open Left's David Sirota: "Mark Penn joins fellow corporate pollster Doug Schoen, Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer and Jon Meacham as the latest member of the Punditburo to insist that no matter what happens on election day, America is a center-right nation, and therefore a President Obama must not govern as a progressive. [...] Penn is following Schoen's lead in making the Democratic side of this Establishment argument -- using the manufactured storyline of Bill Clinton's supposed actions to claim that if a President Obama governs as a progressive, he will end up like Clinton in 1994. Not only is the storyline wholly fake, it implies that nothing has changed in America since 1994. That is, it implies with a straight face that the [George W.] Bush years and the backlash to those years did nothing to move the country in a progressive direction. [...] Look, I'm all for Obama governing as a 'centrist' -- as long as he recognizes that the actual 'center' of American public opinion is far different from the 'center' as defined by corporate-hired pollsters like Penn, and the rest of the Establishment Punditburo."
• Think Progress' Matthew Yglesias: "The real thing that the next administration needs to do is to avoid failure. In particular, the country clearly faces a serious economic challenge. What the next administration needs -- and what the next congress needs -- is policies that will work to restore prosperity. If the administration signs into law a recovery program that, whether popular or not at the time, delivers the goods in terms of restoring prosperity, then the president and the congress will be in good shape politically. By contrast, if they can't do so, they'll suffer. Similarly, a health reform plan that works will be rewarded. That's the real issue here -- not policies that 'are seen as too far left' or policies that are seen as too far right, but policies that are seen as failing."

Atrios makes a similar argument: "No matter how much Obama wins by, if he wins, the media will have Joe Lieberman and Harold Ford explain to us what it really means, which is that the American public supports exactly what Harold Ford supports. The establishment is 'center right,' whatever that means, and no matter what public sentiment actually is, they will tell you that the American People support their agenda."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The First Internet Election

The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini:

"If Republicans conclude that 2008 was simply a mechanical failure -- that it was all about how Barack Obama 'used' the Internet or ran an otherwise flawless campaign -- then they will draw the wrong lessons from this year. [...] None of this would have been possible had Obama not been the cult figure we first saw at the 2004 Democratic convention. Had it been another candidate with the 25-person new media team, the corporate graphic design team in-house, a founder of Facebook on staff, the millions spent on search marketing alone, we still would have applauded, but it wouldn't have been the same. Because there has to be something organically right about it for it to work. This is why some candidates and causes catch on online and others just don't, despite trying every tactic in the book.

The central fact of Obama is the incredible political skill of the candidate. And a campaign was built around him that complemented his strengths. Technology allowed the enormous energy around a candidate like Obama to be harnessed in ways that tangibly helped the campaign, first by dramatically changing the fundraising landscape, and second by making possible a massive influx of volunteer energy (that the publicly funded campaigns of yesteryear simply couldn't have digested). In that it allowed him to reach for the $1 billion spending mark, the Internet was absolutely central to Obama's campaign, even if only a small fraction of that money was spent online.

But as important as these strategies and tactics were, the fundamental building block is the candidate. The candidates who are successful online are the ones who don't just lead campaigns or political parties -- they lead movements. When they ask people to get involved, they really mean it. Our 2012 candidate has to be comfortable with building a movement. Before a change in strategy can work, our candidates need to change. Layering a good Internet strategy on top of someone running for President of the cocktail party circuit whose campaign only cares about bundling the most big checks in Q1 or Q2 of 2011 will not work. That model died in 2008."

LEST WE FORGET: Struggling Lower-Class Still Unsure How Best To Fuck Selves With Vote

From The Onion:

"WASHINGTON -- As election day nears, millions of the nation's poorest voters have reportedly yet to settle on the most profound and enduring way to completely fuck themselves over when they head to the polls this year.

'On the one hand, I'm pretty sure Barack Obama will undermine my best interests by maintaining the same centrist, pro-corporate policies of previous Democratic administrations,' said Jim Estey, 34, a recently laid-off assembly-line worker. 'Conversely, I agree with McCain and Palin on abortion, which might just balance out the fact that they'll further marginalize people like me by supporting deregulation and slashing social programs. So it's pretty much a toss-up at this point.'

Though such behavior appears to directly undermine their own well-being, lower-income voters have historically supported candidates determined to screw them six ways to Sunday, including Bill Clinton, who incarcerated them in record numbers and cut the welfare benefits many depended on for day-to-day sustenance, and George W. Bush, who widened the gap between them and the rich and sent thousands of them to die in Iraq. This year's election is reportedly unique in that the nation's poor must not only weigh how deeply and painfully their chosen candidate will penetrate their rectums, but must also consider unforeseen outside circumstances -- such as economic collapse and terrorism -- that might allow the next president to bend them over and brutally rape them in ways they never thought possible."

Posted by Ian Faerstein at November 4, 2008 12:33 PM