Indian Interests in US Presidential Election Campaign 2012

[ramana]

Romney Runs as an Outsider but Makes Room for Lobbyists
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

They have hosted fund-raisers and raised millions of dollars for his campaign. They employed some of his top operatives after his first White House run, helped create the platform for his second bid and have deployed regularly to attack his Republican rivals on the campaign trail.

For a candidate running against the entrenched interests of Washington, Mitt Romney keeps an awful lot of lobbyists around.

His kitchen cabinet includes some of the most prominent Republican lobbyists in Washington, including Charles R. Black Jr., the chairman of Prime Policy Group and a lobbyist for Walmart and AT&T; Wayne L. Berman, who is chairman of Ogilvy Government Relations and represents Pfizer, the drug manufacturer; and Vin Weber, the managing partner for Clark & Weinstock.

At least 294 registered lobbyists donated a total of at least $401,000 to Mr. Romney through the end of 2011, according to a New York Times review of federal disclosure records, while an elite group of 16 “bundlers,” representing interests as varied as Wall Street, Microsoft and the tobacco company Altria, gathered more than $2 million worth of checks from friends and business partners for Mr. Romney’s campaign.

Other lobbyists serve on one of Mr. Romney’s policy advisory teams, have hosted fund-raisers for his campaign or have joined the many influential Republicans whose endorsements Mr. Romney’s campaign has hailed. Among them are David Wilkins, a former United States ambassador to Canada who lobbies for the Canadian oil industry, and Stephen Rademaker, a former State Department official who lobbies for the defense contractor General Dynamics.

Many of the lobbyists advising Mr. Romney, like Mr. Black and Mr. Berman, are veterans of other Republican presidential campaigns, including Senator John McCain’s four years ago.

“These are the people who have made a career at the intersection of policy and presidential campaigns,” said David A. Donnelly, executive director of Public Campaign Action Fund, which advocates for public financing of elections and tracks campaign contributions. “To the extent that Mitt Romney depends on these people, and he gets elected, it’s four more years of business as usual in Washington.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Romney did not respond to requests for comment. In an era when K Street firms serve as holding pens for political operatives and landing pads for retired lawmakers of both parties, the profusion of lobbyists around Mr. Romney’s campaign in part reflects the growing embrace of his candidacy by the Republican establishment, including most of the party’s elite donors and dozens of members of Congress.

His supporters disputed the notion that Mr. Romney’s case against the Washington establishment was undercut by his deep ties to it.

“He does have people who respect him, like him and trust him” in Washington, said Ron Kaufman, who was a senior adviser at the public affairs firm Dutko Grayling until last year and now often travels with Mr. Romney on the campaign trail. “There’s no question of that. But it’s different from being of them — and it’s not going to affect how he will govern.”

Other Republican candidates also count lobbyists among their advisers and donors. And while President Obama does not accept campaign contributions from registered lobbyists, at least 15 of his own bundlers work at lobbying shops or Washington consulting companies but have not registered as lobbyists with the Senate. Those bundlers raised more than $5 million for Mr. Obama’s campaign through September.

Yet as Mr. Romney seeks to highlight his career as a businessman and attacks his chief Republican rivals as “creatures of Washington,” the contrast between his anti-Beltway message and the layers of lobbyists aiding his campaign can be jarring.

Speaking to reporters early Wednesday after Rick Santorum won caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota and the primary in Missouri, Mr. Romney’s senior strategist, Stuart Stevens, remarked, “I just don’t think it’s a time when people are looking to Washington to solve problems with Washington.”

Less than 48 hours later, Mr. Romney’s campaign held an elaborate “policy round table” fund-raiser at a Washington hotel, featuring panel discussions run by lobbyists and former cabinet officials or members of Congress.

James Talent, a former senator who runs the lobbying and public affairs firm Mercury Public Affairs, led a panel on infrastructure, according to an invitation. William Hansen, a former deputy secretary of education who is president of the lobbying firm Chartwell Education Group, led the education panel.

The price for attending the round table: a promise to raise $10,000 for Mr. Romney’s campaign. A photo with Mr. Romney went for $2,500, while a ticket to a general reception later in the evening was $1,000.

An invitation to the event named seven “industry finance chairs” for Mr. Romney’s campaign. They include Thomas F. Farrell II, the president of the Dominion power company and Mr. Romney’s energy industry finance chairman; Brett McMahon, an executive at one of the nation’s leading concrete subcontractors and Mr. Romney’s infrastructure finance chairman; and Patrick Durkin, a Barclays executive who is Mr. Romney’s top lobbyist-bundler and his financial industry finance chairman.

The event attracted hundreds of supporters, many of them lobbyists, and reportedly raised more than $1 million for Mr. Romney’s campaign.

While Mr. Romney’s broad positions on financial regulation, taxes, energy and other issues are shared by other Republican candidates, they have also not infrequently overlapped the interests of his advisers’ clients.

John M. Herrmann II, a co-chairman of Mr. Romney’s trade policy advisory group, is a lobbyist for Allegheny, a major steel producer whose products have figured in United States trade lawsuits against China. Mr. Romney’s platform calls for a more aggressive posture with China on trade, including more “punitive measures to deter unfair Chinese practices.”

Mr. Talent’s firm, Mercury Public Affairs, represents one of the largest coal producers in the country, Peabody Energy. That connection is not disclosed in a commentary that Mr. Talent contributed to Mr. Romney’s energy platform, which calls for increasing production of coal and oil and amending the Clean Air Act to exclude carbon dioxide from environmental regulation.

A number of Mr. Romney’s donors, including at least four of his bundlers, have lobbied for financial companies on the Dodd-Frank Act, which tightened Wall Street regulation. Mr. Romney has called for repealing the law.

They include Mr. Berman, who represents the Blackstone Group private equity firm. Blackstone’s founder, Stephen A. Schwarzman, has co-hosted major fund-raisers for Mr. Romney in New York and Palm Beach, Fla., and Blackstone employees donated at least $86,850 to Mr. Romney last year.

Mr. Weber began advising Mr. Romney on foreign policy in August. He is a lobbyist for the Council on Pakistan Relations, which has sought to protect United States aid to Pakistan as relations between the countries have soured.

In a debate in November, Mr. Romney said he wanted the United States to “bring Pakistan into the 21st century” to help the country “engage throughout the world with trade and with modernity.”

In an interview, Mr. Weber said he participated regularly in the campaign’s broad policy discussions, but “I’ve never spoken to Romney or anyone on the campaign about anything related to Pakistan.”

He suggested that Washington lobbyists — many of them with significant experience in the executive branch, on campaigns or on Capitol Hill — would continue to be an important source of advice for candidates.

“At the end of the day, this is the capital city,” said Mr. Weber. “If you want to go someplace to find expertise, it’s probably going to be in Washington. And that’s why candidates look to us — some a little less, some a little bit more.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/us/po ... print&_r=0

[Amber G.]

Okay, here is just math ... (computation based on what we know about polls, and computation based on Amber G's model - which BTW is consistent with few other reliable sources)

Probability that Obama will win (Electoral vote is one which counts ) - 87%
(This means he will get more than 270 electoral votes)

Median/ Mode / Mean ..

Mode is 332 (Probability that he will get 332 is about 18%, 307 is about 14% and 347+ is about 12%)

Ohio is heart of all it all .. we are bombarded by ads, polls etc like never before. Though O has statistically significant lead among registered voters here, the lead among "likely" voters is very thin.
It will depend on how many people go out and actually vote..One statistician, who has access to internal polling said something to the effect ..3 votes per precinct, here in Ohio, can make a difference in the eventual result... the race is that close!

[CRamS]

AmberJi,

Nate Silver of NYT also predicts the same. What iI am looking for tomorrow night is how accurate the actual polls are. Because Nate Silver's model and I assume yours take as input state by state polling #s. My question then from a purely math point of view, what is so profound about Silver's model because he is afterall averaging state polls? But everybody everybody except of course reps are raving about his model.

[ramana]

'538' Nate Silver's today's take:

Did Sandy blow Romney off course?
Short answer no.

The last three days of polling have brought what is almost certainly Mr. Obama’s strongest run of polling since the first presidential debate in Denver. Mr. Obama led in the vast majority of battleground-state polls over the weekend. And increasingly, it is hard to find leads for Mr. Romney in national surveys — although several of them show a tie.

SHQ was also saying the same yesterday evening after listening to polls round up on CNN.

-------------

CRS, Nate Silver uses Bayesian probabilities to come up with his estimates. In otherwords, he uses the knowledge from one poll to update the results of next poll.

So its statistical summation/composite of the polls and not just each individual poll.
Sort of wisdom of the crowds.

I have his book "Signal from Noise"

[pentaiah]

Romney is out and out liar
So consumate he is
As would any mormon
with many a woman
He has no spine
Only supine
die is cast
as we find nation
just after election
Cast away
to fade away


PS : I am no democrat or a republican just undecided with intellect devoid.

[Mihaylo]

Regardless of what Nate Silver says, I think this time he wrong. It is going to be a Romney win. It will be hugely ironic if Bronco Bama gets 47% of the EVs.

<added later> .. just wanted to add that I don't live in the US and so have no direct stake in the elections.

-M

[CRamS]

RamanaGaru,

How good kis the book? If he "wins" tmorrow, I will get the book.

[venkat_r]

From the George Friedman article

Many who condemn U.S. hegemony also seem to demand it. There is a shift under way that they have not yet noticed -- except for an absence that they regard as an American failure. My attempt to explain it as the new normal did not always work.

Given that there is a U.S. presidential election under way, this doctrine, which has quietly emerged under Obama, appears to conflict with the views of Mitt Romney, a point I made in a previous article. My core argument on foreign policy is that reality, not presidents or policy papers, makes foreign policy. The United States has entered a period in which it must move from military domination to more subtle manipulation, and more important, allow events to take their course. This is a maturation of U.S. foreign policy, not a degradation. Most important, it is happening out of impersonal forces that will shape whoever wins the U.S. presidential election and whatever he might want. Whether he wishes to increase U.S. assertiveness out of national interest, or to protect human rights, the United States is changing the model by which it operates. Overextended, it is redesigning its operating system to focus on the essentials and accept that much of the world, unessential to the United States, will be free to evolve as it will.

This might look funny, but that is very true wiht respect to how US has been operating in the world today. There is a huge difference between the Iraq war and Afghan war, and there is a big lesson to learn there.

Indian interests should be to claim the vaccum that is going to be created by US in Afghan in 2014 and should favor whoever furthers that position

[ramana]

CRS, Its not the # crunching behind it but whether the data makes sense or not to be fed into the # cruncher.


LINK

See the graph in the middle of the right 1/3 of the page. From it Obama had enough electoral votes since June!

What that means is the bump from the first Oct debate was a blip from the Repubs who were glad to find Romney as a viable candidate. And thats all.

AmberG, Can you share with us details of your AmberG predictor model/engine?

[pentaiah]

. "CRS, Its not the # crunching behind it but whether the data makes sense or not to be fed into the # cruncher."

That was precisely the problem with the quants who brought the financial industry capital pass through (0,0) coordinates in 2008

[Nandu]

Repost from strat-e-gic noose thread.

SHQ voted straight Republican and I voted straight Democratic. When in 2008 both of us voted straight Democratic. SHQ was impressed with Romney in the first debate, not because of his performance, but she saw his sons and grandchildren on stage with such a large family. She immediately concluded that Romney was a stable family man who promoted the well being of his grandchildren; therefore, he must be ok. Who knows what logic flows through the minds of wimmin?

Mort-ji, she has a point. While Obama has a stable family himself, he comes from a single mother family and was raised by his grandmother. My SHQ had a similar reaction when she saw that Obama's sister doesn't look anything like him, and I explained why.

It is not incorrect to say that Republicans are more supportive of the traditional family structures, while Dems are not explicitly against those, they are more tolerant of things like out of wedlock births, gay marriage etc, which I think most Indian Americans do not favor. On the other hand, Reps have this undercurrent that all good values, including family values, come only from Christianity, so there you go.

[g.sarkar]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83236.html
POLITICAL COLUMN
'Swift-Boating' of Obama fails
"Obama should have been destroyed by now. That was the plan.
He was going to be “Swift Boated” in this election, just like John Kerry was in 2004.
t would be about Benghazi, where on Sept. 11 of this year, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. This would be the spear point that would fatally wound the Obama campaign.
It would be a classic smear: The Obama administration had delivered a “stand down” order to potential rescuers, and so the four Americans had died.
Why would any agency or anybody in the administration do such a thing? It didn’t matter. Wingnuts can always find motives. There are still people who say Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster. Whole books have been written about that one.
There are legitimate questions to be answered about what happened at Benghazi. There always are questions after such tragedies. Warnings were ignored by the George W. Bush administration before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, after all. Were warnings ignored in Libya? Hindsight will probably find some.
But Ambassador Stevens would hardly have ventured to Benghazi with inadequate protection if he thought there were legitimate warnings not to do so.
So a different narrative, a different point of attack, would have to be found for Benghazi. On Oct. 26, Fox News reported that urgent requests for military backup during the attacks in Benghazi “was denied by officials in the CIA chain of command - - who also told the CIA operators twice to ‘stand down’ rather than help the ambassador’s team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.”
The CIA and State Department denied it, but “stand down” would become the rallying cry for the far right.
It not only appears everywhere on social media, but on Friday Obama was on his way to a rally at the Franklin County Fairgrounds in Hilliard, Ohio, when, according to the White House press pool report, it “passed small groups of onlookers, including a slightly larger cluster holding signs related to Benghazi such as: ‘We won’t stand down … Benghazi’ and ‘What are you hiding?’ ”
But Benghazi has proven to be not dynamite, but a firecracker. The October surprise has not turned into a bombshell. Instead, it has bombed.
Romney might have made it an issue, but he blew two chances. In the second presidential debate, Romney delivered a muddled attack as to whether the administration had called the killings a terrorist act quickly enough. Then Romney finally managed to remember his talking point.....
Gautam

[pentaiah]

''I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.''

—President Ronald Reagan

[ramana]

Whoever crosses 300 electoral votes will claim a mandate.
Expect the other side to get hammered till next 2014 elections.

No quarters.

[Amber G.]

Some interesting graphs to see how accurate the prediction will turn out, and historic data..
(Average of many polls) (From .electoral-vote which has lot of raw data ..)

Electoral College 2012 Including States Where the Candidates are Statistically Tied:


Electoral College 2012 Excluding States Where the Candidates are Statistically Tied


2008 Results for the same.... (Same order as above)



Ramana - I got roped in to do some data analysis for one of the campaign...Models are standard.. I just crunched numbers ..

[Gus]

^ only if Dems manage to get filibuster proof majority in Senate. House will still be Rep controlled.

[shaardula]

my two bits...

we should be careful about bandying the term bias. for polls, i think we can identify three different sources of biases - bias in data, model and interpretation.

stat analysis is conducted at multiple levels. at all levels, analysis consists of data and models. data is actually numbers and uncertainty in the numbers. models is actually data (+ its unc) + model and its unc. more than the crunching of numbers and building the models, it is in modeling and estimating the uncertainty in the data and the model where the foot steps on the daal, instead of the husk. modeling uncertainty is the art of understanding the nature of the known unknowns, and isolating them from unknown unknowns. i dont want to be cryptic but this is the nature of the game. this game is hard enough to do in sciences and engineering, where reductionism rules, and there is a deep understanding of micro-processes, variables are all clearly defined and their importance logically anticipated and experiments are all controlled. these models, as carefully nourished as they are, blow up when subject to real world situations. trust me when i say, real world data in these fields is very ugly. people in engineering are only now grappling with all this (the math is old, active incorporation is current and hot). imagine the blowup in social/psycho fields where even the axioms are all handwavy and so nothing is provably logical. in anycase, none of this is a prescription for paralysis, only a pointer to be aware, and even when aware to be skeptical. this field is popular and accessible to mainstream before its time, is what i'm saying.

anywho, rasmussen et al., do surveys. they collect data and use descriptive models aka summary stats (mean, median, std). their analysis is primarily subject to bias in data. this is because the models for summary stats have some nice robustness properties especially when you have large enough data sets, which i'm sure any survey worth its salt would ensure. but at this level rasmussen et al., AND all known properties of stat procedures, are BOTH blind to their own biases - nature of the beast. to eliminate these biases you need to know a lot about the population even before you collect data. there is a catch-22 here - how much you know about the population depends on data, and how you interpret the data depends upon how much you know of the population. again not a a prescription for paralysis, only a pointer to be aware.

data collection is incredibly hard to do, and bias in this can never be eliminated.

even within the bias in data there are many sub-sources of bias, but the main sources are: not taking a representative sample of the population for surveys, and the choice of metrics (measuring the wrong things).

but rasmussen et al, dont report their raw numbers. they report summaries that their models spit. we use these summaries to make our own inferences. the 'models' that rasmussen et al, use are summary stats. the statistics of summary stats are fairly well understood. these are good things to report because summary stats have some nice robustness properties. But it is very important to understand that when somebody reports these numbers these represent the characteristics of the data that was collected and NOT of the properties of the population that the data hopes to represent. since they report summary stats, the problem with rasmussen et al's numbers is that they cannot estimate their own bias (for one they cannot estimate/correctly model the uncertainties in each data point. while summaries are agnostic to the nature of the individual data point, they are only so asymptotically - when very large number of data is available). so numbers rasmussen et al report CANNOT, objectively, reflect their own bias.

surveys can only report precision not accuracy. very very important to understand this.

while micro-modeling of uncertainty in survey data is not possible, you have some usable models for taking things to the next level and modeling the uncertainty of summaries.

and that is what nate silver is doing. nate silver does not do surveys himself, but he makes predictions using higher order models that combine different data. nate silver's model is at a different 'scale' - as in einsteinian physics vs newtonian physics. roughly, silver works at newtonian level - he collapses all prior uncertainties into one large chunk and thus deals with gross properties.

his predictions are only as good as how good his aggregation of various uncertainties is, and how good his models are.

nothing fancy to what he does. very simple, but well understood models. he uses models that have been consolidated into text books for several decades now . i mean serious math/physics/engg people like amber/bose etc would balk at that if they paid attention.

but it is important to understand that silver's model is subject to bias in model - bias that comes purely from the model. depends on the type of model you impose on the data. see the thing is that the models used here are not physics-based models. there is no apriori basis in scientific/empiric reasoning in selecting these models, there is only a post-facto justification of the model given the data. there is no apriori way of establishing the complexity and correctness of the model before data is collected. on the other hand, complexity and correctness of the model can only be validated based on the data. this is double dipping. again not a prescription for paralysis. for such models, how the data and its uncertainty is modeled is very important. again nothing to be sneezed at. current understanding of stuff like fatigue crack growth under multiaxial stress, and energy dissipation in joints is based on these principles. it is important to know that silver anticipates these issues and uses considers heterosckedastic data models(each survey survey has different amount of precision- even he cannot model accuracy). this leads to models that are slightly more efficient. but it is still important to appreciate that even at this level the model is based on equating accuracy with precision, and there is no systematic way to account for accuracy. you can impose what are known as priors on accuracy, but they are not objective, especially in non-scientific/non-axiomatic fields.

as long as you understand the above, nate silver is sound in downstream analysis. i'm not surprised by his numbers.

#2. nate silver's high percent predictions are for electoral votes and not popular vote. quite possible for the popular vote to be tied, and still somebody to win electoral votes. election decided by where you are popular and not amongst many people. an analogy, you toss a fair coin, and the payoff is 2$ for every heads and -1$ for every tails. While there is 50-50 chance of heads and tails, the chance of being the red is smaller than the chance of being in black, because while the distribution of coin toss is fair, the distribution of the payoff is skewed. Winning some states(even if by a 50.1% vote) means more than the others.

#3. nate silver is reporting probabilities. not be confused with actual outcomes. unfair coin 90-10 chance of heads vs tails. before you toss, good sense to bet heads. but when you actually toss the coin, heads not guaranteed and you cannot rule out tails. if you toss the coin thousands of times, 90% of the times you will get heads. model is correct. but in life you dont get 1000 tosses, you get one toss and that toss has a good chance of tails.

[shaardula]

i'm sorry if i rambled on. but the only thing more dangerous, in fields that matter, than not using stats and data is not understanding what the stats actually say - it may be go/no go on space shuttles or vote no vote for a party.

deleted irrelevant.

[devesh]

not sure if anybody paid any attention to the candidates' rallies in the last few days but Obama has gone from one dud rally to another. in Wisconsin, only 18K people showed up for his event with Springsteen. in 2004, Kerry had 75K people with Springsteen.

and Romney is doing very well with rallies. in OH, PA, and NH, he has been pulling crowds of 30K over the past week.

Obama might be in for a nasty surprise in the usual Democratic bastions of Wisconsin and Minnesota.

[ramana]

shaardula, Thanks for the lesson in uncertainity of stat models of people's choices.

Now I get what happened in 1977 to Mrs G.
Based on IB gold ( play on Nate Silver ) she declared polls and lost badly.
IB was wrong due to the inherent bias in their technique.

If katmal comes and asks who will I vote for, it would be suicidal to say not for sarkar.

-
PEW research guy, on NPR last night, was saying they have a nationwide sample of 2800 of all pop strata spread over the country.

[pentaiah]

Vijay Amritraj was excellent in rallies but no power in serve


in 1977 IB had inherent bias because they were afaraid of speaking the truth and also when you sample in emergency conditions the responses from respondents would be also biased (to wards self preservation, like the supporters of Ghadfi (before and after toppling images) .

That is why free and fair election polls are mere assumptions and human mind is multi dimensional.
if per chance like what Mitt said honestly about his faith that 47% he doesnt care and would not vote for him anway that would fortify 53 % voting for him and 47% remain true to his faith as well.

Psephology like economics assumes rational behavior, you will notice that some women vote based on the progney behind the candidate in family photo than the candidates views on equal pay, self detrmination with respect to health options, some even may be "swayed by the size of binders on Women"




Also most elections are decided by negative vote than positive affirmation (most often)

I dont like Dosa so I will take Samosa
I dont like Joe maccain so I vote Ombaba!
I dont like Ombaba he has a record of not doing what he promised, where as Mit the Flint lights a fire by promising and cant fault him till he is elected.

Mitt is a flipper where as Ombaba is quitter so I will vote Ron Paul ( who is not even candidate, that means I wont vote)

**************

f katmal comes and asks who will I vote for, it would be suicidal to say not for sarkar.

The smart mango aadmi of India will say, Kya bade huzoor aap mazak kar rahe ho app ko tho mere pasand mallom he hai, app khud vote daldentha , muje kyun moka dekar sharminda kar rahe ho

[devesh]

Romney's foreign policy stance is an enigma. even wrt Europe, he hasn't really said what he's going to do. it will be interesting to see, if he wins, how he will stat giving out his views.

[shaardula]

everything about romney is enigma, when not idiotic. in a country where the median income is << 50K, his idea of middle class relief is tax exemption for capital gains. you have to be kidding me if this makes any economic sense to 80% of the population in US. by the time people payfor basic necessities, they have barely any money for saving forget capital investments. US is a highly highly skewed society. 80% of people have zero disposable income, even if they lived on desi frugality priciples.

[Manny]

I want Obama to win in this election... But I am worried that John Kerry the far leftist anti Indian, Pro Paki would replace Hillary Clinton.

[Manny]

everything about romney is enigma, when not idiotic. in a country where the median income is << 50K, his idea of middle class relief is tax exemption for capital gains. you have to be kidding me if this makes any economic sense to 80% of the population in US. by the time people payfor basic necessities, they have barely any money for saving forget capital investments. US is a highly highly skewed society. 80% of people have zero disposable income, even if they lived on desi frugality priciples.

People voting against their own self interest is not exclusive to the US, Look at India.. Indians have managed to keep a single family that has kept 600 million in abject poverty in power into perpetuity. Yup.. voting against their own self Interest,,,, We Indians pioneered it.

[pentaiah]

I prescribe to Shiv jis medication, irrespective who is POTUS or SOS they will be pro TSP.
and thats the best way Unkil learn the lessons

[pentaiah]

People voting against their own self interest is not exclusive to the US, Look at India.. Indians have managed to keep a single family that has kept 600 million in abject poverty in power into perpetuity. Yup.. voting against their own self Interest,,,, We Indians pioneered it.

That is why we do Bhajan singing

"Radha kyon gori main kyun kala"

[Rangudu]

Looking at the body language of talking heads in Fox and MSNBC, it seems like exit polls are favoring Obama??

[Amber G.]

... Not watching Fox ... Just sitting here in Ohio and looking at the electoral vote map ...

[Rangudu]

To me the most telling exit poll statistic is the 46-52% stat for "right track" vs "wrong track". If this is true, then I'd be shocked if Obama doesn't win big.

Plus, I just checked InTrade and Obama is at 70%, up from last night, suggesting that big money is moving away from Romney

[Satya_anveshi]

During the 2008 election thanks to Bush and his ways, a well speaking chimp that can throw mud at republican policies of the past eight years would have done the job. He/She/It didn’t need to bring a lot of corrective policies to the table but just being different than Bush and his ilk was more than enough. People lapped on to the most different character they could find.

Situation is 2012 is not much different and this time thanks to both Bush and Obama. Romney did seem to pack quite a punch but he was fighting Bush and his own party principles more than Obama. He simply lacked conviction in what he was saying and what results he would demonstrate. He generally came across as saying…”the biggest problem is economy..I know how to create jobs and have balanced budgets all my life…just trust me and I will fix it.” I don’t think people bought it or will bite it today.

There were several comments that came out during debate where Obama showed Romney his place

- Romney’s stance of “me too, me too” on many of the views held by Obama show that Romney does not stand for any ideology and changes his stance like he changes clothes
- Obama’s comments about Romney being “All over the map” also indicates that Romney is just using whatever that sells rather than substance in his stand. Clear assault on his solutions/proposals and even character.
- Obama’s very clear statement about Romney’s criticism of Libya incident neglecting the sentiments of folks on the ground and how it is unbecoming of being a commander in chief is showing that Romney is not yet ready for that big post
- Obama mentioning that healthcare plan that he put forward is a replica of what Romney implemented in MA left Romney totally defenseless
- Romney’s biggest strength, by far, is his so called experience of “balancing the budget” but there too Obama’s repeated counter argument that “maths does not add up” wasn’t handled well by Romney
- Publicly pointing out that Romney was cooperating and investing in Chinese companies within the jobs context is a punch in the face

Libya incident was a nullifier to Obama’s Bin laden success and he could not milk it properly. One cannot neglect that incident in the overall context of elections and its nullifier effect on Obama’s foreign policy successes.

All of the above and many more may have left voters with an impression that known evil is better than an unknown.

[ramana]

To me the most telling exit poll statistic is the 46-52% stat for "right track" vs "wrong track". If this is true, then I'd be shocked if Obama doesn't win big.

Plus, I just checked InTrade and Obama is at 70%, up from last night, suggesting that big money is moving away from Romney

R, What is right track and wrong track? Still 3.30 on West Coast!

[ramana]

AmberG, Battle ground states:

http://www.intrade.com/v4/misc/key-races/states/

[Rangudu]

Ramana

It is "Is the country headed on the right track or wrong track?" Typically, dissatisfaction with the inclumbent means 35-65 or worse but a close split means good things for Obama.

[pentaiah]

Wisconsin should have been shown as Swiss miss
Minnesota as Somali Land

[ramana]

Rangudu, Thanks.
The big picture from composite polls since June 12 is Obama had a lead all along. This Romney coming from behind was all just faux news.

[Rangudu]

Obama is increasing by the minute on InTrade...up to 72% now. We should get the first set of results in a couple of minutes, especially from Virginia.

[pentaiah]

Situation is 2012 is not much different and this time thanks to both Bush and Obama. Romney did seem to pack quite a punch but he was fighting Bush and his own party principles more than Obama. He simply lacked conviction in what he was saying and what results he would demonstrate. He generally came across as saying…”the biggest problem is economy..I know how to create jobs and have balanced budgets all my life…just trust me and I will fix it.” I don’t think people bought it or will bite it today.

There were several comments that came out during debate where Obama showed Romney his place

- Romney’s stance of “me too, me too” on many of the view held by Obama show that Romney does not stand for any ideology and changes his stance like he changes clothes
- Obama’s comments about Romney being “All over the map” also indicates that Romney is just using whatever that sells rather than substance in his stand. Clear assault on his solutions/proposals and even character.
- Obama’s very clear statement about Romney’s criticism of Libya incident neglecting the sentiments of folks on the ground and how it is unbecoming of being a commander in chief is showing that Romney is not yet “ready” for that big post
- Obama mentioning that healthcare plan that he put forward is a replica of what Romney implemented in MA left Romney totally defenseless
- Romney’s biggest strength, by far, is his so called experience of “balancing the budget” but there too Obama’s repeated counter argument that “maths does not add up” wasn’t handled well by Romney
- Publicly pointing out that Romney was cooperating and investing in Chinese companies within the jobs context is a punch in the face within the job context of the debates

Libra incident was a nullifier to Obama’s Bin laden incident and he could not milk it properly. One cannot neglect that incident in the overall context of elections and the nullifier effect of Obama’s foreign policy successes.

All of the above and many more may have left voters an impression that known evil is better than an unknown.

It's like Penelope character in SNL

http://www.joblo.com/video/player.php?v ... igpenelope

[Abhijit]

O loses IN - the more idiotic the Christian right becomes (a la mourdock) the more they succeed at the hustings.

[Rangudu]

O loses IN - the more idiotic the Christian right becomes (a la mourdock) the more they succeed at the hustings.

Mourdock is not winning yet.