McCain will win?

eoin2nc

TBH I dont trust the polls that much, but when paddypower are giving Mccain odds of 6-1 in a two horse race, it would have to be a huge upset for him to win. The bookies will lose a fortune if they get it wrong

miju

thats a bet I took yesterday (he's 11/2 btw )

I personally feel the closet racism will see Mc Cain limp over the line

Biggins

eVeNtInE wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Dear God, I hope not!
More years of Republican politics, heaven help the planet!

KerranJast

Biggins wrote: »

Dear God, I hope not!
More years of Republican politics, heaven help the planet!

McCain is no ordinary republican. I wouldnt be surprised if he sacked half the hardliners if he gets in. It surprises me how everyone thinks racism will deny Obama when his race is the main reason hes even a contender. In 4 years maybe but hes only in the door before he started running. That said either man will be a change for the better.

horseflesh

ninty9er wrote: »

Obama is to McCain, what Marx is to Churchill.

Comparatively very left leaning.

A lot of middle America can see Obama as "socialist". While he may be anything but in international eyes, that is what America sees from a "re-distributor" and that could mark the final nail in a campaign that must have cost over $1bn at this stage. That's not very equitable now, is it;)

"The final nail"??
When did we miss all the other nails???

Obama will win this easily, it won't even be remotely close.

miju

horseflesh wrote: »

Obama will win this easily, it won't even be remotely close.

famous last words

amacachi

Obama has it in the bag alas.

marco_polo

He would need all the 50-50 and slightly Democratic leaning states to fall his way on the day, and I just cannot see that happening.

I don't think that race will be an issue at all TBH, at least not in any of the states that are not firmly in the McCain camp already.

miju

Does no one else think that given all the economic hassles the fact Obama can only muster a 7 point lead in the last few days is a bit worrying?

marco_polo

miju wrote: »

Does no one else think that given all the economic hassles the fact Obama can only muster a 7 point lead in the last few days is a bit worrying?

I'm not sure, my suspicion is that the percentages of core Republican and Democratic voters is quite high and as a result the available 'floating' vote in America is not as large as in other countries.

EDIT* Also it may be that McCain has done a pretty good job of seperating himself from the current administration in they eyes of the public. (In spite his voting record).

Personally were it not for his running mate I would not have been too dissappointed to see him as president.

ninty9er

miju wrote: »

Does no one else think that given all the economic hassles the fact Obama can only muster a 7 point lead in the last few days is a bit worrying?

The thought of either of them is worrying to be honest...and becomes even more so each day that passes.

horseflesh

miju wrote: »

famous last words

See you on Wednesday morning

mumhaabu

McCain will take Pennsylvania and the election, the Democrats will then only have themselves to thank for losing it by putting forward a Black man instead of a White Woman, you will see alot of Hillary's supporters will defect to the McCain side and they will are what are called closet Republicans and will be doing it because of Sarah Palin as VP.

You will also see alot of Whites who claim they will vote for Obama will not due to Race... they won't admit this but it will happen, I predict Obama will fare worse than Kerry did in 2004. The Great American Decade will continue and I for one hope that George W. Bush will have a say and I hope he will continue in politics for a long time to come as he is one of the true greats.

MagicMarker

mumhaabu wrote: »

McCain will take Pennsylvania and the election, the Democrats will then only have themselves to thank for losing it by putting forward a Black man instead of a White Woman, you will see alot of Hillary's supporters will defect to the McCain side and they will are what are called closet Republicans and will be doing it because of Sarah Palin as VP.

You will also see alot of Whites who claim they will vote for Obama will not due to Race... they won't admit this but it will happen, I predict Obama will fare worse than Kerry did in 2004. The Great American Decade will continue and I for one hope that George W. Bush will have a say and I hope he will continue in politics for a long time to come as he is one of the true greats.

*tumbleweed*.......




...... Anyway, I was watching a good program last night on both candidates, and although i'm rooting for Obama, it's clear that either candidate is a huge improvement on Bush. So, win win for America!!!

cornbb

mumhaabu wrote: »

The Great American Decade will continue and I for one hope that George W. Bush will have a say and I hope he will continue in politics for a long time to come as he is one of the true greats.

*snigger*

The era of an America controlled by people who think like you will come to an end on weds morning, and good riddance too.

Otacon

mumhaabu wrote: »

McCain will take Pennsylvania and the election, the Democrats will then only have themselves to thank for losing it by putting forward a Black man instead of a White Woman, you will see alot of Hillary's supporters will defect to the McCain side and they will are what are called closet Republicans and will be doing it because of Sarah Palin as VP.

You will also see alot of Whites who claim they will vote for Obama will not due to Race... they won't admit this but it will happen, I predict Obama will fare worse than Kerry did in 2004. The Great American Decade will continue and I for one hope that George W. Bush will have a say and I hope he will continue in politics for a long time to come as he is one of the true greats.

I honestly thought your points, though I disagree with them, were well made... until that last sentence.

Bush has one of the lowest approval ratings of any US President, he has had a detrimental effect on US foreign relations and was at the helm of one of the worst economic disasters in history.

While I greatly respect McCain and his views, prior to this election campaign, his VP decision and swings to the right have left a bad taste in the mouth of moderates on both sides of the aisles, who previously I'm sure, may have seen him as a worthy candidate. He would have been an outstanding President in 2000.

cornbb

mumhaabu wrote: »

You will also see alot of Whites who claim they will vote for Obama will not due to Race... they won't admit this but it will happen

Has it occurred to you that maybe a lot of whites who claim they will vote for McCain due to race might actually vote for Obama? They won't admit this but it will happen.

blobert

McCain now at 12.5/1 on Betfair, pretty impressive odds for any event where there only 2 possible outcomes.

His odds been going up steadily, I think it may be worth a small bet...

Will see where he is later this evening.

Darragh29

Just looking at PaddyPower.com, odds for Mc Cain to win are 13/2, so a tenner down on Mc Cain to win will pay you back 75 yo yo's, if he wins...

I'm hoping Obama will do the business but it's by no means wrapped up yet, I'm surprised the odds are so high for Mc Cain to win.

Dirk Gently

blobert wrote: »

McCain now at 12.5/1 on Betfair, pretty impressive odds for any event where there only 2 possible outcomes.

His odds been going up steadily, I think it may be worth a small bet...

Will see where he is later this evening.

You can get 18 on betfair at the moment. I jumped at 14.5 early this morning. I'll be surprised at anything other than a big obama victory (that kind of vote rigging just seems too hugh to pull off) but I couldn't resist a cheeky bet on Mc Cain earlier.

Nodin

mumhaabu wrote: »

McCain will take Pennsylvania and the election, the Democrats will then only have themselves to thank for losing it by putting forward a Black man instead of a White Woman, you will see alot of Hillary's supporters will defect to the McCain side and they will are what are called closet Republicans and will be doing it because of Sarah Palin as VP. .

....which rather ignores the fact that Palin, while mobilising the 'hard core' of the right of the Republican party, causes independent voters to not only run, but run screaming, in the opposite direction, while putting off potential 'HilLary defectors'.

mumhaabu wrote: »

The Great American Decade will continue and I for one hope that George W. Bush will have a say and I hope he will continue in politics for a long time to come as he is one of the true greats.

Unless you attempt to back this up, I'd have to say you were looking for the wrong kind of attention.

conceited

I'm getting that nagging feeling.. voting machines, October surprise, "closet racism", etc... will McCain snatch it?

Even if the polls showed Obama 20% ahead I still won't believe it till I see it..

No johnny he won't win and your only saying he will win so you will be the guy who went against everyone else just on the slight chance you came off looking good if he did win .

Obama has this !!!By a huge margin.

Sean9015

Firetrap wrote: »

I'd be wary of opinion polls in this case. I think there's plenty of closet racism out there. In the Bradley Effect case, people even fibbed in the exit polls!

I usually do if asked - after all, it is suposed to be a secret ballot
S

Hippo

I think the reported huge early turnout is going to do it for Obama, unless they find some way to disqualify an awful lot of votes.

Rjd2

The Bradley effect is overrated anyways! Even one of Bradleys people agree!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/inside-the-bradley-effect_b_135592.html

Will the "Bradley effect" bring down Barack Obama, seen here after his Wednesday night debate win?

Barack Obama has won all three presidential debates over John McCain. He has a solid lead in the polls. What could go wrong for him? Well, many say the polls could be wrong, skewed by a hidden racist vote.

The "Bradley effect" -- the notion that white voters lie to pollsters when a black candidate is in the race -- has become widely known. But what you think you know from the campaign that gave rise to the phrase, then Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's ultimately near-miss race for governor of California in 1982, isn't so.

I was in the middle of that, doing opposition research for Bradley's campaign. I vividly recall election day that November, as reports from the exit polling done by California's leading polling organization, the Field Poll, circulated. It seemed that Bradley, the first black mayor of Los Angeles, was headed for a big win as California's first black governor. A girlfriend advised me -- in my kid, pre-Armani days -- to get a better tie to go along with my blue blazer and slacks to better impress the high command at the victory party that night in downtown LA's Biltmore Hotel.


Tom Bradley was the first African American mayor west of the Mississippi. He served as mayor of Los Angeles for 20 years.

When eight o'clock rolled around, with my spiffy new tie firmly in place, the formal projection of the Field Poll based on its exit polling came onto TV screens across California: Tom Bradley over Republican Attorney General George Deukmejian, by a whopping 10 points!

But it quickly became apparent that something was wrong. The raw vote coming in didn't reflect this projected Bradley landslide. As the night dragged on, it seemed shockingly apparent that Bradley could end up losing.

Which Bradley ultimately did, losing by one point, with Deukmejian the victor, 49% to 48%. How could Field's exit poll have been so wrong? It must have been racism, right?

Well, only if California voters also thought that two-term Governor Jerry Brown was black, too.

The Field Poll made two big projections based on its exit polling that fateful November night. Bradley as the next governor of California. And Brown as the next U.S. senator.

But Brown lost, too. And pretty much everyone knew he was white. Brown's race actually wasn't as close as Bradley's, with then San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson defeating Brown, 51% to 45%.

Talking with Brown yesterday, he said that he had trailed Wilson pretty much throughout the campaign. And had been surprised by the election night projection of a relatively easy win for him.

Brown had been a controversial if shrewd governor, winning re-election by 20 points. But he ran for president twice during his governorship. The first time entering late and finishing a distant runner-up for the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter. The second time encountering what John Edwards found this year, a race in which two bigger stars left no room for him, in Brown's case having to contend with President Carter and the return of the Kennedys in the form of Senator Ted Kennedy. To maintain traction in the race, Brown adopted less mainstream positions, which did not help him in California. Brown realized after running the Senate race that California voters had simply seen too much of him as a candidate in the '70s and early '80s.

Clearly, the famous exit poll was simply wrong. No racial factor was involved in Jerry Brown's loss to Pete Wilson.

So what went wrong for Tom Bradley?

First, there was a hotly controversial initiative on the ballot, Proposition 15, which would have banned new handgun sales in California. Anyone who didn't have his or her pistol or revolver by April 1983 was out of luck when it came to handgun ownership. This proved to be wildly unpopular, and went down to a massive defeat, 63% to 37%. Deukmejian, helped by a huge campaign by the National Rifle Association, targeted rural and suburban voters heavily on this issue.

Second, the Deukmejian campaign was much more aggressive than the Bradley campaign. Bradley, a stately mayor of Los Angeles, ran a stately campaign. He was the front-runner and he acted like he was the winner.

Some damaging information was uncovered on Deukmejian. But Bradley refused to use most of it, insisting on a high-minded campaign. Mindful of his perceived need not to appear too aggressive as a black man, Bradley employed a kid gloves approach with Deukmejian in debate.

And on the campaign trail, well, on the campaign trail Bradley spent the final weekend of the election traveling around California thanking people for supporting him.

Meanwhile, the attack ads and mailers by Deukmejian and the NRA whirred away all the while.

That doesn't sound like Barack Obama's campaign, does it?

Bradley actually did win in the vote cast in polling places around the state on election day, though not by 10 points. But he lost badly in the absentee ballots, which Republicans targeted heavily.

Were there voters who simply would not vote for a black man, even a former police lieutenant and successful mayor of one of the nation's largest cities, in that 1982 California election? Undoubtedly. But it's clear that the problem lay not with significant numbers of voters lying to pollsters, but with the nature of the campaign itself. Whatever anti-black vote existed, Deukmejian already had it. The event that gave rise to the famous "Bradley effect" was created by faulty polling.

Bradley went on serve another nine years as LA's mayor, a record 20 years in all, before passing away in 1998. Bradley ran again for governor against Deukmejian in 1986, but lost in a landslide. Brown, of course, following his own perception of voter exhaustion with him, withdrew from public life for a time, though he ran a think tank, before returning as chairman of the California Democratic Party, runner-up to Bill Clinton for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination, a two-term mayor of Oakland, and now California's attorney general.

Chardee MacDennis

good article i read on fivethirtyeight.com

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/ten-reasons-why-you-should-ignore-exit.html wrote:

Oh, let me count the ways. Almost all of this, by the way, is lifted from Mark Bluemthnal's outstanding Exit Poll FAQ. For the long version, see over there.

1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

2. Exit polls have consistently overstated the Democratic share of the vote. Many of you will recall this happening in 2004, when leaked exit polls suggested that John Kerry would have a much better day than he actually had. But this phenomenon was hardly unique to 2004. In 2000, for instance, exit polls had Al Gore winning states like Alabama and Georgia (!). If you go back and watch The War Room, you'll find George Stephanopolous and James Carville gloating over exit polls showing Bill Clinton winning states like Indiana and Texas, which of course he did not win.

3. Exit polls were particularly bad in this year's primaries. They overstated Barack Obama's performance by an average of about 7 points.

4. Exit polls challenge the definition of a random sample. Although the exit polls have theoretically established procedures to collect a random sample -- essentially, having the interviewer approach every nth person who leaves the polling place -- in practice this is hard to execute at a busy polling place, particularly when the pollster may be standing many yards away from the polling place itself because of electioneering laws.

5. Democrats may be more likely to participate in exit polls. Related to items #1 and #4 above, Scott Rasmussen has found that Democrats supporters are more likely to agree to participate in exit polls, probably because they are more enthusiastic about this election.

6. Exit polls may have problems calibrating results from early voting. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, exit polls will attempt account for people who voted before election day in most (although not all) states by means of a random telephone sample of such voters. However, this requires the polling firms to guess at the ratio of early voters to regular ones, and sometimes they do not guess correctly. In Florida in 2000, for instance, there was a significant underestimation of the absentee vote, which that year was a substantially Republican vote, leading to an overestimation of Al Gore's share of the vote, and contributing to the infamous miscall of the state.

7. Exit polls may also miss late voters. By "late" voters I mean persons who come to their polling place in the last couple of hours of the day, after the exit polls are out of the field. Although there is no clear consensus about which types of voters tend to vote later rather than earlier, this adds another way in which the sample may be nonrandom, particularly in precincts with long lines or extended voting hours.

8. "Leaked" exit poll results may not be the genuine article. Sometimes, sources like Matt Drudge and Jim Geraghty have gotten their hands on the actual exit polls collected by the network pools. At other times, they may be reporting data from "first-wave" exit polls, which contain extremely small sample sizes and are not calibrated for their demographics. And at other places on the Internet (though likely not from Gergahty and Drudge, who actually have reasonably good track records), you may see numbers that are completely fabricated.

9. A high-turnout election may make demographic weighting difficult. Just as regular, telephone polls are having difficulty this cycle estimating turnout demographics -- will younger voters and minorities show up in greater numbers? -- the same challenges await exit pollsters. Remember, an exit poll is not a definitive record of what happened at the polling place; it is at best a random sampling.

10. You'll know the actual results soon enough anyway. Have patience, my friends, and consider yourselves lucky: in France, it is illegal to conduct a poll of any kind within 48 hours of the election. But exit polls are really more trouble than they're worth, at least as a predictive tool. An independent panel created by CNN in the wake of the Florida disaster in 2000 recommended that the network completely ignore exit polls when calling particular states. I suggest that you do the same.

Teacherman

Sarah Palin is hot! Give her 4 years during which she can read up on foreign policy and she will be Republican candidate 2012. I agree with Kevin Myers, that there is this knee-jerk reaction to anyone who comes from a certain background in the USA. She has religious beliefs I dont agree with-big deal. She is anti-abortion and goes hunting. Hardly deterrants from public office. Sure didnt Bertie like animals as well-horse racing was it not?

Hobbes

Hippo wrote: »

I think the reported huge early turnout is going to do it for Obama, unless they find some way to disqualify an awful lot of votes.

Reading the ourvotelive website it is pretty amazing/distressing some of the stuff that is going on in regards to voter suppression. It is going on and in droves and it isn't just Republicans.

Manic Moran

You'll know the actual results soon enough anyway. Have patience, my friends, and consider yourselves lucky: in France, it is illegal to conduct a poll of any kind within 48 hours of the election

I like this.

NTM

RugbyFanatic

Teacherman wrote: »

Sarah Palin is hot! Give her 4 years during which she can read up on foreign policy and she will be Republican candidate 2012. I agree with Kevin Myers, that there is this knee-jerk reaction to anyone who comes from a certain background in the USA. She has religious beliefs I dont agree with-big deal. She is anti-abortion and goes hunting. Hardly deterrants from public office. Sure didnt Bertie like animals as well-horse racing was it not?

So attractiveness and the ability to as you so bluntly put it 'read up' on foreign policy now makes a candidate worthy to be the president of one of the most powerful nations in the world?


Oh and it hardly surprises me that Kevin Myers likes her.....