2012 US Presidential Election Superthread

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digitize

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Have at it. This thread can replace the myriad others floating around all about the same topic.

I suppose I'll post some of Nate Silver's current data here, for lack of anything better to post. Here are his current swing state probabilities:

Nevada: 77.6% Obama
Colorado: 56.8% Obama
Iowa: 68.3% Obama
Wisconsin: 85.7% Obama
Ohio: 74.8% Obama
Virginia: 54.3% Obama
North Carolina: 81.4% Romney
Florida: 64.7% Romney
New Hampshire: 68.8% Obama

If each candidate wins the states which they have a 50% probability or higher of winning, then the EC map would look like this:

mapjj.png


Virginia and Colorado are the closest. They've both done a good bit of flipping back and forth, although there's been somewhat of a trend towards Obama lately. I think that those states could easily go either way. But this does paint a scary picture for Romney. The fact that Romney has never managed to flip Ohio in a majority of polls, or even really come close, even after the first debate, is fairly bad news for him.

The popular vote is a somewhat different story. RealClearPolitics has a +0.9% spread for Romney, but Nate Silver's model still projects a marginal win for Obama. I'm not sure why they diverge; probably because Silver's model is discounting some Romney-leaning polls somewhat. Whether this is bias or the discounted polls are legitimate, I'm not totally sure.

Anyway... have fun. The election is in eleven days. I early voted yesterday! Everyone... get out to the polls when you can. :)
 
Do you guys actually get to pick specifically between Obama and Romney? Cos we don't get to pick our preferred PM here, we have to vote for the seat we live in, based on those candidates, if I'm not mistaken.
 
Do you guys actually get to pick specifically between Obama and Romney? Cos we don't get to pick our preferred PM here, we have to vote for the seat we live in, based on those candidates, if I'm not mistaken.

We actually pick between Obama and Romney.

I don't know what you mean by seat, but if Australia is anything like it is in the UK where people vote for the party and not the candidates, we Americans don't do it that way.
 
We vote directly for President. We vote separately for our representative to the House of Representatives and a Senator. The difference between the House and the Senate is the House's delegates are allocated proportionally to population, so states like California get more than Wyoming. The Senate has two senators per state, to make sure the smaller states have a voice.

I actually prefer the Parlimentary system you guys have.
 
Pearl said:
I don't know what you mean by seat, but if Australia is anything like it is in the UK where people vote for the party and not the candidates, we Americans don't do it that way.

I think it's a mix between British & American, that's why it's nicknamed "Washminster", but Ax will know for sure.
 
Do you guys actually get to pick specifically between Obama and Romney? Cos we don't get to pick our preferred PM here, we have to vote for the seat we live in, based on those candidates, if I'm not mistaken.

That would be because the Prime Minister is no more and no less than the leader of the party able to command a majority in the house. We do not vote for the head of state, but for the party of government. And actually that's fair enough. A parliamentary party decides who its leader will be, and people in the general public who think they have a say in that matter (because the party in question happens to be a viable governing proposition) are woefully misinformed about the state of play.




The 'mix' of Westminster and American systems finds its greatest expression in the matter of a Senate.
 
Well Biden knifing Obama would be a bona fide constitutional crisis to be sure.


Of course, we don't always have leadership spills. In government, I can think of exactly three in the last fifty years: Gorton/McMahon, Hawke/Keating and Rudd/Gillard.

Conversely, could Bush/Gore 2000 happen in Australia? Not on your nelly. Because we have an actual independent commission that runs elections.
 
That would be because the Prime Minister is no more and no less than the leader of the party able to command a majority in the house. We do not vote for the head of state, but for the party of government. And actually that's fair enough. A parliamentary party decides who its leader will be, and people in the general public who think they have a say in that matter (because the party in question happens to be a viable governing proposition) are woefully misinformed about the state of play.

This makes more sense than the US system. When we pick a president, we're under the impression that we are voting for an individual. But we're actually voting for someone who will be heavily influenced by his party, and by his cabinet and advisors who are also members of his party. In that sense, I'm with trojanchick99 by saying the parliamentary system is better.
 
Think of the Australian system as the Congress and Senate, where the majority leader in Congress runs the government, and the President is a powerless figurehead who opens flower shows. And you've about got the picture.
 
cobl04 said:
Do you guys actually get to pick specifically between Obama and Romney? Cos we don't get to pick our preferred PM here, we have to vote for the seat we live in, based on those candidates, if I'm not mistaken.

What we are technically voting on are slates of electors chosen at state party conventions. However, the ballots the names of the candidates, for obvious reasons.
 
trojanchick99 said:
Ahhh, the Electoral College. As a resident of the great state of California, don't even get me started on that.

As a resident of the great state of Texas, I'm in the same boat.
 
I get the feeling that Florida will be red, much like the data you've presented displays.

General impression I've gotten so far from everyone who I know that voted Obama last election seems to be voting Romney, for the swing voters, that is.
 
trojanchick99 said:
It must be even more frustrating to be a Democrat voting in Texas because the winner take all Electoral College just nullifies your vote.

Yeah, it's very annoying. I would happily support a constitutional amendment to do away with the Electoral College.
 
I'm fine with doing away with the Electoral College, even though I a feeling that there's a good chance that Obama loses the popular vote but still wins the election.
 
Just about the only advantage of Obama winning the EC and losing the popular vote would be that the Republicans would start yelling about abolishing the EC. Which of course will never happen because if it did they wouldn't win an election ever again except if they completely changed their platform.
 
mikal said:
I'm fine with doing away with the Electoral College, even though I a feeling that there's a good chance that Obama loses the popular vote but still wins the election.

I agree.

If Obama loses the popular vote and wins the election, I think I would advocate for him to ask his electors to vote for Romney.
 
It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Yes, let's give up the Supreme Court, the Presidential veto, etc?
 
I mean, it's not like my input would matter. But I'm not sure I would buy the legitimacy of an Obama victory if he lost the popular vote, unless the number of Jill Stein voters put the left wing past 50% (or at least the number of Romney votes).
 
Most people only have a 'short hand version' of why the electoral college came into being, ppoon fed to them by partisans.




Founders' choice: the electoral college
It's widely criticized, but it's part of our Constitution's philosophy — carefully crafted as a compromise between competing interests to guarantee checks and balances.

By Joshua Spivak

October 25, 2012


The electoral college is one of the most controversial and ridiculed parts of the Constitution. It is not just for the obvious reasons — the "wrong winner" elections of 1876, 1888 and 2000. The college has also focused the nation's attention on a few swing states, allowing candidates to ignore a large percentage of the voters in their campaign. Today, the three largest states get little attention, except as ATMs for campaign fundraising.

Criticism of the electoral college is rampant, and defense of it rarely goes beyond "why change?" What is rarely discussed is why it was created and what it was designed to do. The college was very much a part of the philosophy of the Constitution — an intelligent compromise between many competing interests, part of the system of checks and balances.

What would eventually be called the electoral college — it did not gain that moniker until the 1800s — generally escaped criticism in the bitter ratification debates after the Constitution was written. Alexander Hamilton was particularly proud, noting that it was "almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure." The "anti-Federalist" opponents of the Constitution tacitly agreed with the college concept. This may not be surprising because Congress, not the executive branch, was supposed to be the locus of power.


However, an even more important reason to have an electoral college was because the young nation had little experience in directly electing executives. In most states, the governors were not chosen by the voters. Instead, in eight of the 13 original states, the legislature chose the governor. And in two of the other states, if no candidate received an absolute majority of votes, the legislature ended up making the choice. This was the model the constitutional conventioneers drew on. The original plan that was brought to Philadelphia, and the first outlines of a presidency adopted by the convention, provided for election of the chief executive by Congress.

The option of choosing a president by popular vote was voted on a number of times during the convention, but only two states were in favor of it. There were a number of reasons to oppose it. Many of the conventioneers believed the country was too large to directly elect the president. Some Southerners realized their states' impact would be diluted, as the compromise that counted three-fifths of slaves as part of the population for representation and taxation purposes gave the slave states more impact in Congress than they would have in a popular vote. Some states' rights advocates wanted the states to have more of a say. Small states were concerned that their votes would be drowned out, with a few large states able to gang up to select a candidate; the same impetus helped push forward the idea of equal representation in the U.S. Senate. And still others simply did not trust the people to choose properly.

But the idea that Congress would choose the president failed the checks-and-balances test. The conventioneers were worried that a congressionally chosen president would be basically owned by his selectors. So they created the electoral college to act as an alternative Congress. It contained exactly the same number of members as Congress. As an added safeguard, federal officials were banned from serving as electors, and the electors did not meet as a national group but rather met in each state.


Even with this alternative, Congress still retained a potentially large role. Each elector cast two votes, one of which had to be for someone from another state. The second-place finisher became vice president. There was a further expectation that the electors' votes would be divided among favorite sons. If this came to pass, the electors would have served as a nominating committee. The top five candidates would be sent to Congress, which would select a president in a state-by-state vote of the House delegations. The winning candidate needed an absolute majority of the states.

The system was not perfect. Congress was called on to select a president in 1800 and 1824. In the first instance, Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, both got 73 electoral votes. That election led to the creation of the 12th Amendment, which divided up each elector's vote into one for a presidential candidate and one for a vice presidential candidate and lowered the number of candidates sent to Congress from five to three. In 1824, there was a four-way split, which played a large role in helping to create our current two-party political system. Congress also played a role in the disputed election of 1876 — though that was ultimately decided by a commission.

If the vote in November is close, the electoral college is guaranteed to come under increased scrutiny and another avalanche of complaints. Although the likelihood of change is small, it bears considering how the college came into being and that it met the founders' basic goal of a system of checks and balances.

Joshua Spivak is a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College.
 
Because of Hurricane Sandy - alias Frankenstorm - it is expected that there will be power outages all over the NYC area, and elsewhere, that would last probably past Election Day. Can you imagine how this will play out and effect the results? Will we have to wait days before we know the results?

We may be in for a wild ride. :|
 
or a GOP voting in CA *

* long list of solid Dem states here



right now, we could predict the outcome of the 2016 election in at least 40 states without even knowing the nominees, that would be probably 200+ of the required 270 electoral votes.

the number is probably more that 40


here is what the electoral college has turned our country into,

600
 
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