swampy wrote:
[quote=Ted King]
You should still be. It's still possible enough people will not care enough if Romney doesn't release more of his tax records or that Romney will release them and there's not anything all that troubling in them. If so, then even though Romney may not be a very good candidate, that may not be enough to keep him from winning the presidency because the economy is still so bad, there will be a hugely unequal amount of money spent to defeat Obama (thanks in no small part to the Citizens United ruling) compared to money spent to defeat Romney, and many Republican dominated state governments have made it so that literally millions of people who are disproportionately more likely to vote for Obama will not be voting because of the Republican voter suppression strategy. I think if Obama is only a percent ahead in the average of all the polls (of all voters) shortly before the election, then he will probably lose. If he is up a couple of points at that time then it will be really close. I think he will need to be up by an average of the polls of at least 3 percent for him to be more likely than not to win the election.
I was almost with you, Ted then you said that.
I don't think the polls of "all voters" is as accurate as polls of all _likely_ voters. Obama's young enthusiasts from 2008 are not as supportive this time and in hard times the incumbent is at a disadvantage. A couple of the swing states have Republican leadership that is tending to improve their economy. Virginia comes to mind. Then you have former Obama supporters that are showing buyer's remorse.
Yes, I am well aware that polls of likely voters tend to be more accurate, but polls of all (registered) voters are much more common so I decided to use those and factored the less accuracy of averages of registered voters as opposed to likely voters when I came up with the percentage numbers I used.
As to voter suppression. If you prefer I can refer to it as functional disenfranchisement. Either way it's a cynical partisan ploy by many Republicans to reduce the likelihood of Obama winning the election by reducing the number of people that would otherwise legitimately vote for him (relative to Romney). It's been obvious that Republicans have wanted to do this sort of thing since Karl Rove pushed the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales to get lots of indictments for voter fraud in the months leading up to the election in 2004. That totally blew up in their faces, but the lack of any evidence of widespread voting fraud didn't stop Republican dominated state governments from using the refuted "voter fraud is such a big problem we just have to do something about it" argument to justify doing what they wanted to achieve raw political power ends. In Pennsylvania alone over 700,000* people that will be functionally cut off from voting because of the new voter ID law there passed by the Republicans (unless the courts stop the implementation of the law as the courts have done in a couple of other states), and way disproportionately, those people are in the demographic groups that tend to strongly support Obama.
*http://articles.philly.com/2012-07-09/news/32602276_1_voter-id-law-commonwealth-carol-aichele-voter-impersonation
And here is a link explaining why the PA voter ID law functionally operates to disenfranchise many voters and the kinds of legal arguments that are going to be made in the courts:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opin...uppression
