OK, a little political education.

[gridlore]

Daily now, we're being bombarded by the results of various polls conducted nationwide about the election.

Ignore them. Because, as most of you Americans should remember, we don't elect the President, the Electoral College does. We vote for the electors. In all but Maine and Nebraska these votes (one for each member of Congress [both houses]) are winner take all. Say Obama takes California by the slimmest of margins, 51/49. He still gets all 55 votes in the college. So the important thing is how the states are feeling.

Which is where electoral-vote.com comes in. Daily updates on how the states are leaning.



270 are needed to win.

Comments

[caraig.livejournal.com]

I'm torn about the Electoral college.

It would make perfect sense if the federal government had much less of a hand in 'states' rights' than it does. (Yes, I know I'm using a coded buzzword there.) If we were, say, still under the Articles of Confederation, it wouldn't be unreasonable to have the Electoral College. But at the same time, that model requires the people of the states themselves to be isolationist, and there are too many folks on both sides of the aisle who approve of at least some intervention here and there, or international peacekeeping, or similar operations.

On the other hand, the government is very much federalist, and becoming more and more so, thus, people get more and more upset when the popular vote and the electoral vote don't match.

On the gripping hand... those numbers are comforting (for now at least) so I'm not sure how much I should be complaining about the EC. :(

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

The Electoral College is, IMO, largely an artifact of a time when prompt polling - let alone nearly real-time polling - was impractical or impossible. Times and technology have changed, but the method of electing our leaders has not.

There are things to be said both for and against "but that's how we've always done it."

[john-appel.livejournal.com]

Let me also recommend the excellent www.fivethirtyeight.com. The main number cruncher is Nate Silver, whom you might of heard of as he's apparently a well-known sports statistics expert. He's doing some really nifty stuff analyzing the poll data and running a simulation model 10K times, sometimes several times a day, and finding some very interesting things.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

Nice to know that the E.C. shows Obama so far ahead where it counts.

As I heard it when I was a kid in history class, the reason for creating the Electoral College was that 97% of the voters were illiterate, and the elite intellectuals in charge of the government designed it as a safeguard in case the people made a terrible mistake. Unfortunately, 97% of voters are still (to a degree) illiterate, in that few of them read books, study issues or have any tangible reasons for voting the way they do, and the Electoral College clearly has not acted as the safeguard it was meant to be, as proven by the fact that in recent years the people have definitely made a few terrible mistakes.

[capplor.livejournal.com]

It's always best to use multiple sources of information. One or two might make an error, some might be biased one way or another. For example: pollster.com gives this graph http://www.pollster.com/08USPresGEMvO600.png of the current political situation. Showing Obama & McPain virtually neck to neck at 46.3% to 46.4%.

Obama still has the lead on EV's 243 to 179 with 116 still in play, but he needs to get everybody's attention off Mama Moosejaw & back onto McSame if he wants to win this one.

Well, as he told Olbermann, http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/09/08/obama-on-countdown-mccainpalin-stretching-the-bounds-of-spin/ there's only two months left, it's time everybody started feeling a sense of urgency.

Of course he also said that the repugs are "not telling the truth." (okay everybody, act surprised.)