what do you mean? that the "big" Republican names didn't run? if so, I agree completely. I remember telling someone back when the Republican primary field was forming that there had to be something that Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels and Haley Barbour knew that kept them from running. To some degree, I think they didn't want to preside over the wacko element of the party that has developed over the past 8-10 years or so. personally I would like to see that happen. It would likely thrust the mainstream Republican party into the political center where they need to be in order to compete nationally.
The electoral college is the only count that matters and because it's the only math that counts, national polls are a waste of time. They're meaningless. We pretty much know which states each candidate will carry. Ohio and Florida are the two big ones right now that will tilt the election. Ohio is leaning to Obama and Florida is leaning to Romney. Meet Nate Silver. Nate Silver is a statistician who runs a blog called "FiveThirtyEight". He is strictly a numbers guy who had a lot of success with the PECOTA system in baseball. In 2008 he started running a politics blog and successfully predicted 49 of 50 states' electoral votes that election (he missed Indiana) as well as all 35 Senate elections. The Obama camp gave him access to their polling data that year in exchange for signing a confidentiality agreement. In 2012 he predicted the GOP would pick up 7 seats (they picked up 6) in the Senate and 55 in the House (they picked up 63). He also correctly picked 36 out of 37 gubernatorial races. He has also been a speaker at TED. A couple years ago his blog proved to be so successful that the NY Times decided to pay him for doing it. He freely admits to voting for Democrats more often than not and publically announced that he is voting for Obama. The results he provides are scientific in nature. Math doesn't lie and he has become a very well respected statistician in a very short time. I tell you all of this because he has no agenda and he's proven to be pretty accurate in a very short time. In this short time he's become the respected guy in polling and stats. He's become so respected that insiders have given him access to a lot of their highly protected data for him to include in his figures. That should tell you a lot about how credible he is. At this point, he is claiming a 73% chance that Obama will win 295 electoral votes, which again is the only vote that really matters. The popular vote is much closer. That's pretty significant, especially since the polls all seem to show Romney losing ground overall, but winning Florida. He would need something pretty significant to turn the trend against Obama and need it pretty soon. Again, this isn't just his opinion. He has no agenda other than to be right with the outcome of this election. This is his science, created by using many polls, trends, etc. in his logarithms to forcast the likeliest scenarios. Oct. 24: In Polls, Romney's Momentum Seems to Have Stopped - NYTimes.com I'm not saying it's a done deal, but Romney has a steep road to climb and a little over a week to do it with no more debates, no more bills to be passed, etc. which is why you see support for him at a plateau. Unless some kind of financial crisis hits or the country is attacked before the election, it doesn't look good for Mitt.
Mlu posting stats that say his guy wins. That was hard to figure out after reading 2 sentences where this was leading. I hate all who think their guy wins because it's their guy. Both are bums.
1) I don't have a guy. I'm not registered to vote in Florida yet and if I were, I probably would still abstain. Presidential voting is a sham. 2) Read up on him and see for yourself. What he has to say isn't always what I would want to hear. He successfully predicted the GOP gains as well as the Democrat wins. He looks at the entire picture unlike anyone out there right now. 3) Nothing wrong with being skeptical. I've been reading him for a while. I started out pretty skeptical, but it's tough to argue with his results. I hesitated sharing him here for the longest because things like "facts", "evidence" and "not what Republicans say or want" are not accepted on this forum.
between 2000 and 2005 i bought a copy of baseball prospectus every year and read every essay in it, many of which were by nate silver. he is smart and right and obama is gonna win the electotral vote pretty easily.
