The last national Pew poll before the election is out now.
This tweet from Ari Fleischer …
Prediction Time:1) The election won’t end Tuesday night. 7 states will b decided by 1 pt or less. (VA, OH, CO, IA, PA, WI, NH)
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) November 4, 2012
There are more state polls to come today, so the map may change, but as of right now, the only two tossups on the TPM Electoral Scoreboard are Florida and North Carolina.
It’s hard to make definitive judgments based on anecdotal reports in the couple days just before a national election. But I’ve heard enough to come to the tentative conclusions that lots of SuperPAC dollars are currently being poured into markets where they can have little or no effect on a contested race. So why is that? Read More
This sounded too crazy to me as a theory when readers first started raising it. But now I’m at least wondering. Could the GOP SuperPacs simply be trying to run up the popular vote as high as possible as some sort of legitimacy cudgel in the face of an electoral college defeat? I have no doubt this would be very valuable to Republicans as a cudgel against a reelected Obama. But actually deploying so much money to get it while so many races — both state presidential and senate — are still in play seems really hard for me to believe.
Here’s the theory from TPM Reader MW … Read More
From TPM Reader GJ …
Regarding dumping money into non-competitive states, here in Dallas nearly every other commercial is an anti-Obama ad from the superPAC, “Restore our Future.” I’m trying to figure out why they’re dumping so much money into the Texas ad market when I’d assume Texas is about as solidly red as it gets. I have two theories:
We’ve got a series of reports from readers over the last few days about vast SuperPAC spends in states that just don’t look like they have very competitive races. Competitive is sort of in the eye of the beholder. If there’s even a theoretical chance of a win, and you’ve got money to go on the air, why not, I guess? And you don’t always know whether a spend in hopeless State A may actually be aimed at hitting a corner of neighboring State B where there’s still a competitive race. Read More