I am beginning to become scared that Romney/Ryan will win. Can smart people please post here and say reassuring things to convince me that he won't?

at least kid rock has a neck

538's "Now-Cast" is now rougly back to pre-convention levels, btw.

roughly, even

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/25/an_actual_october_surprise/

booklets full of testimony

admirable restraint

Why are most of the news channels saying Ohio will determine who wins the election? Btw, I understand very little about the election process, but doesn't something need to change if one state determines the election.

acc to 538 OH has a 50% chance of determining who wins the election

and i think everyone agrees that this electoral system is all kinds of fucked up

but doesn't something need to change if one state determines the election.

hahahahaha welcome to hell

It's not that any one state "decides" the election; obviously all the other states count. But since the great majority of states are basically no-contest wins for one or the other party, the discussion closes around the ones that seem to be up for grabs. As the campaign goes on, some of these fall out of the running: one or the other candidate has them in the bag. (Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, were considered toss-ups much earlier in this election cycle. Now they're not.) Then, if you break out the electoral math, it becomes apparent that some of the remaining toss-ups have so many electoral votes that they appear to "decide" the election.

Axing the electoral college, or (as a workaround) pursuing the National Popular Vote Compact, would change this up a lot. Instant-runoff voting would also be great to see.

the good news is that if you don't live in one of the 8 swing states ur television viewing experience is blissfully presidential ad-free

bad news is the candidates don't even have to pretend to care about your problems. I almost miss living in Ohio. But not really. It's been observed many times on this board and elsewhere, that without the electoral college gamesmanship you could imagine national politicians suddenly giving a shit about urban issues again - there's a fuckton of voters in big cities after all, but why bother with them when you fully expect to take them and their state for granted? Not so easy when keeping turnout up nationwide becomes important.

The federal system with 50 different states with 50 different governments and sets of laws is extremely peculiar, and the electoral college system of electing the POTUS is just one small aspect of that essential weirdness.

I just googled electoral college to refresh my memory on how it works, and still it makes no fucking sense.

the good news is that if you don't live in one of the 8 swing states ur television viewing experience is blissfully presidential ad-free

― Mordy, Wednesday, October 24, 2012 11:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

well.... this is true as far as presidential ads go. but a deluge of ads for state/local elections (even in illinois!) still exists.

If only televisions had some kind of controls.

xp. Haven't seen a single presidential ad in New York (upstate), but for fuck's sake, literally every prime-time ad break is nothing but "[sinister voice] Senate Candidate A wants to personally force-feed your children excrement laced with the eyeballs of adorable puppies. [cheery voice] But Senate Candidate B wants to pass a law making sunshine and rainbows mandatory under penalty of death!"

this shit invades youtube and hulu repeats of "Bob's Burgers. " I can't escape it.

I'm getting Obama ads on my Scrabble app.

JacobSanders, are you American? Just curious.

I see zero presidential ads (I don't think either of them even bother coming to WA, OR, or ID) but I see a bunch of ads that:

- point out how the republican gubernatorial candidate is, shockingly, a republican

- show normal boring married people talking about how they gay families they've met aren't scary

- a smaller number of ads saying you're going to get sued if you're a homophobe and don't want gay people getting married in at your resort or whatever

- a lot of ads with serious people in suits telling me how marijuana should be legalized

It's kind of awesome and surreal actually

oh yeah, and the ads attacking a candidate for attorney general for helping a death row inmate get a lawyer (which pretty much makes me more favorable to him).

Plus there's this insane bullshit where the Seattle Times bought $75,000 of ad space in its own paper to run ads for the republican gubernatorial candidate as an "experiment" in the effectiveness of print ads. Not that this experiment can possibly produce any useful conclusions or anything.

i guess they're also buying space to support gay marriage but still, such an awful paper.

Yes I'm american, and american politics make very little sense to me. For instance some states spilt their electoral college vote by district, most don't?? Texas is largely republican so it's a given that our electoral vote will go to Romney, so why vote in Texas?

i think i'd rather be inundated with ads while having a greater chance of my vote mattering

i think i am glad to live in a state where my vote doesn't matter at all because we are gimme for the dems, but ymmv

Obama could win electoral votes in Texas if the votes were spilt by how a district votes, Austin alone could give Obama votes.

I might be wrong about that, maybe I'm giving Austin too much liberal credit.

Texas isn't that conservative, it's just the most conservative state that the media gives a shit about

Obama won Travis County (where Austin is) pretty handily last time. Harris County (Houston) too I believe.

Romney's first day after losing the election: montage featuring Todd Rungren's Bang on the Drum where Romney locks himself in his house and, for he first time in his life, has a marathon session of marijuana smoking and dirty movie viewing. He also kills a ton of time on ILX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4KpGiVHP6s

I've up early today and have seen six Romney and Obama ads in 15 minutes

Sorry, Alfred. I live in Texas, and... Well, you can gues the rest.

Our ads are a) local race and b) national issue. The Ted Cruz campaign and whoever his opponent was, their ads are the ones we saw the most of, and that was a while back.

Obama could win electoral votes in Texas if the votes were spilt by how a district votes, Austin alone could give Obama votes.

― JacobSanders, Thursday, October 25, 2012 1:31 AM Bookmark

This would also be a good system, potentially; Maine and Nebraska have both had it in place for a long time, although it's never actually made a difference. Alternately, you could just proportion out a state's electors based on the overall breakdown of that state, so if the state were 60-40 blue/red you'd have 60/40% of the electoral vote roll out that way. Would also be a huge boon to third-party candidates. Of course, the ruling party in any given state has basically no incentive to ever implement something like this.

i mean. why not just have a popular vote

bc it would end the republican party

seems to me mitt would have a pretty good shot if we were directly electing presidents!

it was my impression that there are far more dem voters in the united states but bc they are mostly concentrated in a few urban areas in traditional blue states they vote less. i don't remember where i got that impression from tho.

probably a Democrat

Obama getting 270+ electoral w/ Romney getting the popular vote would be our best shot at changing the way the electoral college works, giving each party a recent popular win/electoral loss to remember.

would also be interested in how the likely voter model would change with direct presidential election, currently a lot of people on both sides don't bother voting if they're in a lopsided state even if the race is close nationally.

I don't know that the Democratic idea of what should have happened in 2000 was "we should elect the president based on popular vote" so much as "we should fire Jeb Bush into the sun"

and I'm sure there will be other recount controversies if it goes the other way this year, but until the Republicans are hurt by the electoral college there won't be much of a push to change it from that side

my idea was that we should elect the president based on popular vote

There have been four elections (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000) in which the winner of the popular vote lost the election. Each time it was a Democrat. In 1824 Andrew Jackson won both the popular vote and the electoral vote and still lost. (At the time you needed a majority of electoral votes, and with four candidates, he only received a plurality. Congress then decided the winner.)

electoral college doesn't necessarily help dems/reps as much as it helps certain states. change is never going to happen because as soon as it started happening people who don't currently realize they have disproportionate voting power would quickly learn that they have disproportionate voting power. less a party issue and more a state issue.

NYTimes:

While female voters generally tend to favor President Obama, that cannot be said of white women without college degrees, a group known in this race as waitress moms.

"Waitress moms"!?!

maybe they aren't voting Democrat because they keep getting called "waitress moms"

by whom, though?