The new Polltracker charts are out. The latest snapshots in all the key national races. Give ’em a taste.
I love the last few days of campaigning. So much of artifice and pretense is stripped away from the candidates and their campaigns. Whatever it takes to win. Consistent messaging, careful massaging of constituencies, and all the rest of it be damned.
Now is when you get things like a Republican Senate candidate urging black voters to vote for her and Obama.
I’ve seen Republicans in Blue states (and vice versa) play up how they get along with the President of the other party. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a major candidate actualy sending around flyers or doorhangers and actually say ‘Hey, vote for me and Obama, it’ll be awesome.’ But that’s exactly what Linda McMahon is doing in Connecticut. You’ve got to see this.
From an article just out from Politico …
If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.
A broad mandate this is not.
As I’ve written many times before, the second rate product. If this is a subject that interests you, I’d encourage you to read the piece I linked right there.
Or to be more specific, Obama’s winning but not with the best votes. I mean really, if you can’t win with a broad cross-section of white people, can you really be said to represent the country? Really.
Just a quick exercise here. Just about all the major polling outfits have spoken today. So I just wanted to take a quick overview. This mixes tracking poll dailies and full polls. It also includes Internet polls we report at PollTracker but do not compute in our averages. But two days out it’s interesting to look at the snapshot it shows us. Read More
TPM Reader BC tries to unskew that Politico reasoning …
There, now i fixed it…. totally makes sense now?!
“If Governor Mitt Romany wins, he will be the popular choice of Caucasians, really really white people, married women and highly under educated rural whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of Hispanic voters than George W. Bush got of whites voters in 2000. A broad mandate this is not.”
I mentioned earlier today that there were lots of anecdotal reports about pro-GOP SuperPACs dumping money in places where there don’t seem to be seriously contested elections. Dallas, Chicago, just places where it’s really hard to figure there’s any real bang for the buck, to put it mildly. Read More
TPM (non?) Reader JJR checks in …
Josh, the fact that you are implying that some votes are better than others is disgusting – beyond cynical, actually quite racist, classist, oligarchist, shameless… I could go on, but why ask for pears from a peach tree?
Listening to a story from a friend this evening. Guy in a social setting talking to a group of Wall Street heavyweights. Every single one in the room certain Romney wins. Has Ohio locked. Has the whole thing tied up. No doubt.
I always find this time in a campaign fascinating and surreal. I remember it from 2000, 2004, 2008. Little memories. I think Joe Lieberman and Al Gore getting a cheesesteak in Philly in 2000 in the middle of the night? My experience of it is a certain way because I experienced it as a reporter. Sometime, perhaps yesterday, the campaign took that turn into something like a fugue state. Read More