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?

http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/undergroundw/undergroundw1012/undergroundw101200085/8426535-male-offering-flowers.jpg

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/oct-1-is-the-presidential-race-tightening-heading-into-the-debates/

it's weird bc the model is showing the highest % for obama since it started (now at 85.7%) - also nate is all about electoral ties right now even tho the model indicates they'll only happen a whopping 0.6% of the time???

Oh snap, Ryan's got an unwanted videotape in his past, too

it's in the interest of Nate's publisher to look for storylines other than "yep, this is all wrapped up" xp

electoral college tie where bam wins the popular vote but house picks romney = best hope for american gov't total collapse?

one of the things i like most about nate tho is that he generally is good at resisting nonsense storylines.

imagine the other way around (were it possible) xp

Silver's not in the business of making up shit.

oh I don't think he's making anything up, it's just gotta be boring (and bad for pageviews) to make every update "yep, O is still winning by a lot!"

Yeah, he's got to get a post a day up, and there's not a lot of change most days, so a lot of them are going to be "Could _this_ happen? *massive nerd-out*... so, in conclusion, no"

Specifically the race tightening is about "maybe a little, but remember that the country-wide polls don't matter shit compared to the swing states".

When I was around 9 and I learned about the electoral college. I figured out that someone could win the popular vote but lose the election and I was quite distressed by this, so I used the library computer to email President Clinton that I had discovered a glaring flaw in our electoral system.

I got a letter in the mail thanking me for my interest in the electoral process. Now that Nate Silver has predicted that Romney will be anointed against the people's will, throwing us into civil war, I suppose I'll be drafted to fight the Federated States of The Real America. If only Clinton had heeded my warning.

Is it against the spirit of the thread to post the trailer to the new Red Dawn?

http://i.imgur.com/y181U.jpg

successfully gasfacing mitt romney in a photo makes that guy a hero to us all

In all these various electoral scenarios, Florida and Virginia aren't crucial if Obama wins Ohio/Michigan/Pennsylvania, right?

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/obama-swing-states-polls-leads-ohio-tied-virginia-florida.php

I think that's right. He's still over 270 even without Iowa and Colorado, too.

I don't know if it's because I am feeling sick this afternoon or just paranoid because of 538's latest post, but I've become a little panicked about this happening.

it hasnt been a good week!

That 538 post bears out the idea that state polls follow national. Inexplicable and grim.

http://teamaltman.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/house_of_cards-apva-090324-266x300.jpg

press loves a nailbiter

Dems love a mittpocalypse

I prefer no drama, and no chance of a mitt win. But I am not a dem.

I prefer no election.

I prefer the drummer

Can't believe this Libya stuff has legs. Horrible the embassy was attacked - my father in law was an ambassador- but are there Americans up in arms about this? Does Libya get cheers and boos on the trail?

doubt anyone gives a fuck except Hannity et al

Wingnuts blatantly running a play from the Carter 2.0 playbook, trying to draw parallels between botched hostage rescue mission and Libya killings. That it's no longer 1980/1950/(insert pre-Abolition year of choice) seems to be a terrible and eternal source of dismay for these oxygen thieves.

Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight)
10/12/12 6:42 PM
Real good day for Romney in the polls. Maybe his best yet. He's now up to almost 40% in our forecast. fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com

u not understand the point of ths thred

wanted to make it more exciting

kinda fascinated w/ how quickly and to what extent the polls have followed the New Media Narrative

I feel similarly, like there's some kind of feedback loop in play here

i'm kinda shocked too. i don't really think of debates as real events, so it's hard to imagine a debate moving the dials so drastically. i have to reevaluate what an event is.

you obv can't remove media from the equation but there were tons of new media narratives that didn't budge the polls at all this campaign

feel like poll respondents heard Obama lost something and are like "what? I'm not voting for a loser!"

people are stupid

even so I still expect Obama to win handily, there is no way Romney can sweep all the states he needs to.

i wonder if obama is kicking himself

eh i agree w/ silver that its lessa bout obama doing poorly than it is about romney solidifying support after a few bad months. and honestly the race was always going to tighten after that -- its just the rate at which its quickening!

yeah it's like the GOP is rallying behind their guy both out of admiration that he did something right + desperation

I like my narrative that this is where romney shoulda been post-convention and this was basically convention take 2 w/r/t getting the normal 'ya prob not gonna vote for the democrats' ppl fully on board

No longer a chance Mitt will withdraw in favor of Mitch Daniels xp

Max, otm. GOP voters have been whinging for ages about the candidate they ended up with and the fact that Mitt wasn't trounced gave them some fire in the belly. The Fox/RNC would have stoked their Obama hatred anyway so this is probably not much of a game changer.

its just the rate at which its quickening!

That's part of what's so discombobulating for me. There are a hundred ways this could have ended up exactly the same place it's at now--maybe tied, maybe one guy or the other a point up--and I wouldn't have batted an eye. It's the speed at which it's happened, the extreme reversal, and the fact that it was triggered by a debate performance that was merely listless.

GOP smelled blood in the water with so many in the New Media conceding victory to Mitt. personally I didn't think Obama did that badly, I thought both were horribly boring.

well if the race stays narrow for a few weeks it's going to come down to ground game, and OfA has quite the ground game, as one might recall.

he didn't do badly at all, but mitt is the most competent debate candidate the gop has had in a longggg time + tricky shift to the center caught obama a little off guard w/r/t what he needed to be attacking mitt on

the gop won the 'lower the expectations' game by plotting this out 20 years in advance and making sure every candidate until now was barely literate

lol

Their butlers read to them.

its funny that the gop base is getting so fired up over someone who has decided running as a republican was a surefire route to defeat

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=4555583617923&set=a.2790859940934.2136786.1541438279&type=1&relevant_count=1&ref=nf

Oof