Now that Barack Obama has soundly defeated John McCain in the 2008 United States presidential election, I have just one simple question: can we finally stop paying attention to Joe the Motherfuckin' Unlicensed Lying Scumbag Fucknut Asshole Plumber? Can we? For fuck's sake let's be done with this A-No.1 Asshole once and for fucking all.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
2008 Presidential Election Prediction
The time is almost upon us. In a matter of hours voting booths in the East will be opening for U.S. citizens to elect a new President. The only two candidates with any chance to become the President-Elect are Republican John McCain of Arizona and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. Those other people who have declared their candidacy (and will appear on a limited number of ballots as well) will have, unlike in some years past, virtually no impact on this election. That's ok because, really, who the fuck is Bob Barr, anyway? Normally this lack of a third party "spoiler" candidate would make predicting the election results much simpler, but John McCain and Barack Obama have made things considerably more complicated. After all, John McCain is, um . . . well, the dude is fucking ancient. And Barack Obama is – holy shit! – a black dude! With a Muslim-sounding name, no less! What the fuck does he think he's doing running for President? As old as McCain is, at least he's a whitey who served his country in the Spanish-American War or something. And both men are Senators, which means for the first the time since John F. Kennedy in 1960, somebody will move from the Capitol to the White House. Which senator will it be? Let's take a wild guess and say . . . Barack Obama? Yes, at the risk of putting the ultimate jinx on somebody at the worst possible point in the history of this country, I am predicting that Senator Barack Obama will defeat Senator John McCain for the Presidency of the United States of America. Here's how I see it going down.
Despite John McCain's creepy and constants pronouncements of an incredible comeback in Pennsylvania – the kind of bravado that sounds almost as if McCain knows something about a Pennsylvania fix that the rest of us schmucks don't – Obama will win all 19 states, including Pennsylvania, plus the District of Columbia that John Kerry won in 2004 and gave him 252 electoral votes to Bush's 286 in the process. For the sake of argument, however, we will give Obama one (possibly gigantic) vote less than Kerry's 252. Why? Because Maine does not have a winner-take-all electoral system, and John McCain made it a point to campaign hard in one district in Maine in order to insure himself one electoral vote from the state. Here's the breakdown of Obama's almost assured total of 251 electoral votes thus far:
Washington (11)
Oregon (7)
California (55)
Minnesota (10)
Wisconsin (10)
Illinois (21)
Michigan (17)
Pennsylvania (21)
New York (31)
Maryland (10)
Washington D.C. (3)
Delaware (3)
New Jersey (15)
Connecticut (7)
Rhode Island (4)
Massachusetts (12)
Vermont (3)
New Hampshire (4)
Maine (3)
Hawaii (4)
Before moving on to John McCain's projected electoral votes, it is important to note that one state – at least according to almost every poll taken in it during this campaign – has decided that there is not a snowball's chance in hell it will be held responsible for another four years of a Republican presidency: Iowa. Often overlooked in coverage of the 2004 election is the fact that Iowa barely went to George W. Bush – 50.06% to Kerry's 49.15%. After four more disastrous years of the Bush presidency, however, Iowans made a clear signal they wanted drastic change by overwhelmingly supporting Barack Obama in the Democratic caucuses. The average poll – not the Obama campaign's best-case scenario poll but the average poll – has Obama break-dancing all over John McCain's senile head with a fifteen point lead. Unless there is an incredible number of Iowa Republicans playing practical jokes on pollsters, not even the election-stealing skills of the GOP can take this state away from Obama. This state's seven (7) electoral votes thus give Obama a total of 258, meaning he needs a mere twelve (12) more to win.
George W. Bush won 31 states in 2004, 21 of which are all but guaranteed to go to John McCain tomorrow. Here's a breakdown of the 164 electoral votes John McCain will receive from these 21 states plus Maine's one McCain vote:
Alaska (3)
Idaho (4)
Utah (5)
Arizona (10)
Montana (3)
Wyoming (3)
North Dakota (3)
South Dakota (3)
Nebraska (5)
Kansas (6)
Oklahoma (7)
Texas (34)
Arkansas (6)
Kentucky (8)
Tennessee (11)
Louisiana (9)
Mississippi (6)
Alabama (9)
Georgia (15)
South Carolina (8)
West Virginia (5)
Maine (1)
The ten Bush states McCain is not guaranteed to win include the aforementioned Iowa – which, again, barring a miracle, is going to Obama – and nine others: Nevada (5), New Mexico (5), Colorado (9), Virginia (13), Missouri (11), Indiana (11), North Carolina (15), Florida (27) and Ohio (20). Again, in order to reach the decisive 270 threshold, Obama has to win just 12 more electoral votes. In other words, all Obama has to do is win Ohio, Florida or Virginia, and he wins the election. Unless they have a brilliant plan to pilfer Pennsylvania and its 21 electoral votes (McCain is down an average of 7.6 points there), the Republicans know the only Kerry-won state they might be able to take away from Obama is New Hampshire – and they probably don't even believe that, either (McCain and his GOP operatives still talk positively about New Hampshire because that's where McCain made his mark in both the 2000 and 2008 primaries, but they know they're down an average of 10.6 points there and are more or less humoring McCain at this point). Nonetheless, if they can make a last-second surge and take New Hampshire, Virginia does not become imperative to steal, er – win; only Florida and Ohio's electoral votes could single-handedly give Obama the election. With my apologies to Sarah Silverman, I think that John McCain will win Florida – legitimately, that is – mainly because of Obama's unusual surname. Ohio, on the other hand, is a bit trickier to call. The average Ohio poll has Obama up by approximately three (3) points, which is inside the margin of error for any poll. If the GOP can prevent enough Ohioans from voting once, they can do it again. Besides, I'm having some doubts about the intelligence of the average Ohio voter considering Joe the Lying Unlicensed Plumber is a resident. Chalk Ohio up for McCain and all those moronic Joes, which then gives McCain a total of 211 – forty-seven (47) behind Obama's 258 and fifty-nine (59) short of the 270 needed to win.
So if Obama can't reach 270 through Florida or Ohio, how does he reach it? According to the average poll, there are approximately seven other states up for grabs: Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia. I'm going to give Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina to McCain since he's up in those three traditionally Republican strongholds anyway. Adding those three states' 37 electoral votes to McCain's total, here's how the race to 270 looks now:
Barack Obama: 258 electoral votes
John McCain: 248 electoral votes
This scenario leaves four states to decide the election: Virginia and its thirteen (13) electoral votes, which haven't gone to a Democratic presidential nominee since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964; moderately conservative Colorado and its nine (9) electoral votes; and the lesser states of New Mexico and Nevada, each of which receives five (5) electoral votes. How will these states play out? Let's start off with possibly the most difficult to call, Virginia. Obama is up by an average of 4.3 points here, 49.8% to 45.5%. The 4.3 difference does fall within the margin of error, and Obama's average is still under 50%, so this state is by no means guaranteed to Obama. The fact that the state appears to be on an anti-Republican trend right now – the citizens recently elected a Democratic Governor (Tim Kaine) and Senator (Jim Webb) Party – indicates that Obama should still take it. But, wait – remember New Hampshire and McCain's delusion that he still has a chance there? Well, that's McCain's delusion, not the Republican Party's: they know McCain's not going to win those four votes, which means they also know that an Obama victory in Virginia would give him 271 electoral votes – or one more than he needs to win the election. C'est la vie to Virginia, Senator Obama (but thanks for the effort, Ms. Bishop – it did not go unnoticed). With those thirteen electoral votes, McCain now takes a 261-258 vote lead – and things begin to look rather shitty, don't they? Then we move on to Colorado. Right now Colorado looks very firmly in Obama's grasp; his average lead in the polls there is 5.5 points, 50.8% to McCain's 45.3%. If that five-point lead still pinned Obama below 50%, there might be reason to give McCain the edge just because Colorado tends to steer conservatively. With Obama's average number over 50%, however, I cannot see McCain overtaking Obama legally or not. Thus, Colorado's nine votes give Obama 267 to McCain's 261.
And then there were two: New Mexico and Nevada, western states each worth five (5) electoral votes. Obama leads in both states in the average poll: in New Mexico the average poll has Obama up 7.3 points (50.3% - 43%), and in Nevada the average poll has Obama up 6.3 points (49.6% - 43.4%). At first glance the New Mexico lead looks more formidable for Obama, but New Mexico had some serious election fraud problems back in 2004 that almost cost a Democratic congressman a seat, not to mention the whole U.S. attorney scandal involving the likely illegal firing of David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney who wouldn't kowtow to Karl Rove's demands to prosecute baseless election fraud cases against Democrats. Something just doesn't smell right; combine that with the fact that New Mexico is right next door to McCain's home state of Arizona, and I can't help but think the GOP is going to sneak away with New Mexico's five votes to give McCain 266. Appropriately, then, it all comes down to Las Vegas and the rest of the state of Nevada. Again, Obama has a 6-point average lead in the polls in Nevada, meaning that McCain stands almost no chance of legitimately winning this state. And as firmly as I believe that the Republican Party is in a class all by itself when it comes to successfully and illegally manipulating the inner workings of the election process, I still think it's too much to believe that they can steal not one, not two, not three, but four states (Ohio, Virginia, New Mexico and Nevada). Thus Obama takes Nevada, wins the election by a count of 272-266 and then receives a lovely concession phone call from John McCain – two months after he's lost all forty-seven recounts from Colorado and Nevada, that is!
Come on – you didn't think the Republicans would go without yet another dirty fight, did you?
NOTE: There is one factor that I still cannot determine the legitimacy of in this election – cell phones. Yes, that's right, cell phones. The thing is, most political polls do not include cell phone users in its statistics. With an increasing number of young households (that is, households that appear to go for Obama in this election) not being accounted for in many of these polls, there is a chance that the polls that do include cell phone users – which are the ones that usually have Obama ahead by wider margins – could be more accurate than the polls that do not include cell phone users. If this scenario is true, we probably won't see nearly as close of an electoral race as I just predicted. If a small margin of error is very likely to decide many of these battleground states, then the inclusion of these underrepresented voters would play a bigger role than expected. In which case, I would go ahead and give Obama a few more of those borderline states such as Ohio, Florida, Virginia, New Mexico and perhaps even North Carolina or Indiana – and then give Obama the until recently unfathomable electoral landslide victory as well. Obviously I hope tomorrow plays out closer to this situation, but there really is no way to tell.
Despite John McCain's creepy and constants pronouncements of an incredible comeback in Pennsylvania – the kind of bravado that sounds almost as if McCain knows something about a Pennsylvania fix that the rest of us schmucks don't – Obama will win all 19 states, including Pennsylvania, plus the District of Columbia that John Kerry won in 2004 and gave him 252 electoral votes to Bush's 286 in the process. For the sake of argument, however, we will give Obama one (possibly gigantic) vote less than Kerry's 252. Why? Because Maine does not have a winner-take-all electoral system, and John McCain made it a point to campaign hard in one district in Maine in order to insure himself one electoral vote from the state. Here's the breakdown of Obama's almost assured total of 251 electoral votes thus far:
Washington (11)
Oregon (7)
California (55)
Minnesota (10)
Wisconsin (10)
Illinois (21)
Michigan (17)
Pennsylvania (21)
New York (31)
Maryland (10)
Washington D.C. (3)
Delaware (3)
New Jersey (15)
Connecticut (7)
Rhode Island (4)
Massachusetts (12)
Vermont (3)
New Hampshire (4)
Maine (3)
Hawaii (4)
Before moving on to John McCain's projected electoral votes, it is important to note that one state – at least according to almost every poll taken in it during this campaign – has decided that there is not a snowball's chance in hell it will be held responsible for another four years of a Republican presidency: Iowa. Often overlooked in coverage of the 2004 election is the fact that Iowa barely went to George W. Bush – 50.06% to Kerry's 49.15%. After four more disastrous years of the Bush presidency, however, Iowans made a clear signal they wanted drastic change by overwhelmingly supporting Barack Obama in the Democratic caucuses. The average poll – not the Obama campaign's best-case scenario poll but the average poll – has Obama break-dancing all over John McCain's senile head with a fifteen point lead. Unless there is an incredible number of Iowa Republicans playing practical jokes on pollsters, not even the election-stealing skills of the GOP can take this state away from Obama. This state's seven (7) electoral votes thus give Obama a total of 258, meaning he needs a mere twelve (12) more to win.
George W. Bush won 31 states in 2004, 21 of which are all but guaranteed to go to John McCain tomorrow. Here's a breakdown of the 164 electoral votes John McCain will receive from these 21 states plus Maine's one McCain vote:
Alaska (3)
Idaho (4)
Utah (5)
Arizona (10)
Montana (3)
Wyoming (3)
North Dakota (3)
South Dakota (3)
Nebraska (5)
Kansas (6)
Oklahoma (7)
Texas (34)
Arkansas (6)
Kentucky (8)
Tennessee (11)
Louisiana (9)
Mississippi (6)
Alabama (9)
Georgia (15)
South Carolina (8)
West Virginia (5)
Maine (1)
The ten Bush states McCain is not guaranteed to win include the aforementioned Iowa – which, again, barring a miracle, is going to Obama – and nine others: Nevada (5), New Mexico (5), Colorado (9), Virginia (13), Missouri (11), Indiana (11), North Carolina (15), Florida (27) and Ohio (20). Again, in order to reach the decisive 270 threshold, Obama has to win just 12 more electoral votes. In other words, all Obama has to do is win Ohio, Florida or Virginia, and he wins the election. Unless they have a brilliant plan to pilfer Pennsylvania and its 21 electoral votes (McCain is down an average of 7.6 points there), the Republicans know the only Kerry-won state they might be able to take away from Obama is New Hampshire – and they probably don't even believe that, either (McCain and his GOP operatives still talk positively about New Hampshire because that's where McCain made his mark in both the 2000 and 2008 primaries, but they know they're down an average of 10.6 points there and are more or less humoring McCain at this point). Nonetheless, if they can make a last-second surge and take New Hampshire, Virginia does not become imperative to steal, er – win; only Florida and Ohio's electoral votes could single-handedly give Obama the election. With my apologies to Sarah Silverman, I think that John McCain will win Florida – legitimately, that is – mainly because of Obama's unusual surname. Ohio, on the other hand, is a bit trickier to call. The average Ohio poll has Obama up by approximately three (3) points, which is inside the margin of error for any poll. If the GOP can prevent enough Ohioans from voting once, they can do it again. Besides, I'm having some doubts about the intelligence of the average Ohio voter considering Joe the Lying Unlicensed Plumber is a resident. Chalk Ohio up for McCain and all those moronic Joes, which then gives McCain a total of 211 – forty-seven (47) behind Obama's 258 and fifty-nine (59) short of the 270 needed to win.
So if Obama can't reach 270 through Florida or Ohio, how does he reach it? According to the average poll, there are approximately seven other states up for grabs: Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia. I'm going to give Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina to McCain since he's up in those three traditionally Republican strongholds anyway. Adding those three states' 37 electoral votes to McCain's total, here's how the race to 270 looks now:
Barack Obama: 258 electoral votes
John McCain: 248 electoral votes
This scenario leaves four states to decide the election: Virginia and its thirteen (13) electoral votes, which haven't gone to a Democratic presidential nominee since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964; moderately conservative Colorado and its nine (9) electoral votes; and the lesser states of New Mexico and Nevada, each of which receives five (5) electoral votes. How will these states play out? Let's start off with possibly the most difficult to call, Virginia. Obama is up by an average of 4.3 points here, 49.8% to 45.5%. The 4.3 difference does fall within the margin of error, and Obama's average is still under 50%, so this state is by no means guaranteed to Obama. The fact that the state appears to be on an anti-Republican trend right now – the citizens recently elected a Democratic Governor (Tim Kaine) and Senator (Jim Webb) Party – indicates that Obama should still take it. But, wait – remember New Hampshire and McCain's delusion that he still has a chance there? Well, that's McCain's delusion, not the Republican Party's: they know McCain's not going to win those four votes, which means they also know that an Obama victory in Virginia would give him 271 electoral votes – or one more than he needs to win the election. C'est la vie to Virginia, Senator Obama (but thanks for the effort, Ms. Bishop – it did not go unnoticed). With those thirteen electoral votes, McCain now takes a 261-258 vote lead – and things begin to look rather shitty, don't they? Then we move on to Colorado. Right now Colorado looks very firmly in Obama's grasp; his average lead in the polls there is 5.5 points, 50.8% to McCain's 45.3%. If that five-point lead still pinned Obama below 50%, there might be reason to give McCain the edge just because Colorado tends to steer conservatively. With Obama's average number over 50%, however, I cannot see McCain overtaking Obama legally or not. Thus, Colorado's nine votes give Obama 267 to McCain's 261.
And then there were two: New Mexico and Nevada, western states each worth five (5) electoral votes. Obama leads in both states in the average poll: in New Mexico the average poll has Obama up 7.3 points (50.3% - 43%), and in Nevada the average poll has Obama up 6.3 points (49.6% - 43.4%). At first glance the New Mexico lead looks more formidable for Obama, but New Mexico had some serious election fraud problems back in 2004 that almost cost a Democratic congressman a seat, not to mention the whole U.S. attorney scandal involving the likely illegal firing of David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney who wouldn't kowtow to Karl Rove's demands to prosecute baseless election fraud cases against Democrats. Something just doesn't smell right; combine that with the fact that New Mexico is right next door to McCain's home state of Arizona, and I can't help but think the GOP is going to sneak away with New Mexico's five votes to give McCain 266. Appropriately, then, it all comes down to Las Vegas and the rest of the state of Nevada. Again, Obama has a 6-point average lead in the polls in Nevada, meaning that McCain stands almost no chance of legitimately winning this state. And as firmly as I believe that the Republican Party is in a class all by itself when it comes to successfully and illegally manipulating the inner workings of the election process, I still think it's too much to believe that they can steal not one, not two, not three, but four states (Ohio, Virginia, New Mexico and Nevada). Thus Obama takes Nevada, wins the election by a count of 272-266 and then receives a lovely concession phone call from John McCain – two months after he's lost all forty-seven recounts from Colorado and Nevada, that is!
Come on – you didn't think the Republicans would go without yet another dirty fight, did you?
NOTE: There is one factor that I still cannot determine the legitimacy of in this election – cell phones. Yes, that's right, cell phones. The thing is, most political polls do not include cell phone users in its statistics. With an increasing number of young households (that is, households that appear to go for Obama in this election) not being accounted for in many of these polls, there is a chance that the polls that do include cell phone users – which are the ones that usually have Obama ahead by wider margins – could be more accurate than the polls that do not include cell phone users. If this scenario is true, we probably won't see nearly as close of an electoral race as I just predicted. If a small margin of error is very likely to decide many of these battleground states, then the inclusion of these underrepresented voters would play a bigger role than expected. In which case, I would go ahead and give Obama a few more of those borderline states such as Ohio, Florida, Virginia, New Mexico and perhaps even North Carolina or Indiana – and then give Obama the until recently unfathomable electoral landslide victory as well. Obviously I hope tomorrow plays out closer to this situation, but there really is no way to tell.
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