Senate races

Prediction time…

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The 411 ceiling

Just for fun, I started playing around with the RCP map to see what the final tally would be if Obama swept every battleground state – including a few Lean McCain swing states that haven’t been put away by the McCain camp (West Virginia, Georgia, Arizona, Montana and North Dakota). The Obama ceiling? 411 electoral votes. While it’s impossible to imagine he’d win every one of the states in this equation, there isn’t a single state in the mix that is hard to imagine him carrying (West Virginia has the widest margin for McCain, and that’s in the high single digits.)

The states in the 411 map:

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Why did people start voting?

I don’t mean philosophically. I just mean, whatever happened to all that hand-wringing in the ’90s about declining voter turnout?

Since the low-point for voter turnout in 1996, turnout increased in 2000, again in ’04, and is likely to break records on Tuesday. So, what changed? There are plenty of theories:

1. Early voting.

This is the technical argument. In 1992, 7% of votes were cast before election day. Now, the total nears 1/3. Um… give people more time to vote, and you likely increase the number of people who vote. We’ll call that the Captain Obvious argument.

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Quote of the Day

Alright, I’ve gotta give some credit to the McCain campaign today. In response to a speech by Joe Biden about Obama’s economic plan vs. McCain’s “anger” issues, the McCain campaign issued the following Biden-esque statement: “Ladies and gentlemen, the fact is that Barack Obama and Joe Biden will literally raise your taxes.”

That’s not quite as cute as the Obama campaign staff changing their Blackberry signatures last month to “Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld, a miracle made possible by John McCain.”

Still… a mini-point for the McCain camp. The only thing that could have made it better is if they’d tossed in the word “fundamentally” and paused mid-sentence to say “and I mean this sincerely.”

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Things that make me smile

The Red Sox losing to Tampa Bay in Boston to take a 2 games to 1 deficit in the series.

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“Forward to the Future, or Past – to the Back”*

23 days left in the campaign, and it seems like a fun time to start some post-election predictions (originally, I was going to go back through old predictions I’ve made here and see how I did. I still might after the election, but that doesn’t seem like nearly as much fun right now.)

Alright, first off – fun with Cabinets:

Obama Administration:

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And since I’m on a YouTube kick today…

I keep meaning to post a link to one of my favorite pieces of video of the entire ’08 campaign… the day NBC News lost Andrea Mitchell to a sea of Republican balloons…

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“Angry Man Lurching”

Joe Biden delivered today possibly the toughest speech by a Democrat of the campaign season. Not nearly as tough as the McCain-Palin “pallin’ around with terrorists” stuff, but pretty red meat-y nonetheless.

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The Manchurian Candidate

“Across this country this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners and the same standards of clarity and candor must now be applied to my opponent.”

—John McCain today in Pennsylvania, discussing his opposition to pork barrel spending

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