“I asked Barack Obama what he wanted for his birthday. He said, ‘Indiana, Colorado and Virginia,’ ” said Kerry, referring to three potential swing states Obama hopes to win in the Nov. 4 election.

Wow - that’s all he wants? And what is a possible way, at least in their minds, that this might happen?? Well, if they chose EVAN Bayh as Obama’s running mate, they think that might just get them Indiana. You remember Evan Bayh - the big HILLARY supporter. Yes, there is a big ol’ meeting tonight in Indiana, one SO important that Evan Bayh canceled a BASEBALL game - a game that was supposed to be played last night. Whatever. Anywho - my question is: why would we (PUMAs and those who Just Say No Deal be any more swayed by Obama picking someone who was staunchly in Hillary’s camp? It’s not like we, or should I say, I, will go, “Well, heckfire - if BAYH is okay with Obama, then I guess I should be, too.” Nope. For me, it is more like, “Wow, Evan - what a turncoat!! I cannot believe you are so buddy-buddy with Obama! So much for loyalty! How COULD you??” Or something along those lines.

Anyway, there is supposed to be a big To-Do in Indiana tonight, and there is MUCH speculation that this is going to be the big day for Bayh. Even though His Royal Highness will be taking off for Hawaii in a couple of days for vacation. And Hillary will be stumping for him (do NOT even get me started on that, except to say, ARGH!). So could this be Bayh’s big day? Maybe. And next, would Obama then get his birthday wish of Colorado, Indiana, and Virgina? Well, our good buddy, GeekLove, has prepared a map of what it would look like if Obama does get his wish. With her permission, here it is:
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Republican John McCain has quickly closed the gap between himself and Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama in several key battleground states even as the Arizona senator struggles to break through the wall-to-wall coverage of Obama’s trip to Europe and the Middle East this week.

McCain and Obama are in a statistical dead heat in Colorado, Michigan and Minnesota while the Illinois senator has a more comfortable double-digit edge in Wisconsin. …

63% Say Trip Does Not Make Obama More Fit to be President, Rasmussen Reports:

While Barack Obama has touted his travel to the Middle East and Europe this week as a “fact-finding” trip, 63% of Americans do not believe it makes the Democratic candidate any more qualified to be president.

A new Rasmussen Reports national survey, taken Monday night, also finds that less than a third (32%) think Obama will learn from his trip to Iraq. Forty percent (40%) say his mind is already made up about policies to deal with the war there. The Democrat has been accused by liberals in his party of softening his long-standing opposition to the war in Iraq in an effort to appeal to more moderate voters. …

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When all the polls are averaged, Obama averages 46%. When you look at February to present, to analyze what happened when he really was gaining momentum, Obama averages 46%. And when you just look at the polls from June 3rd forward, when Obama ‘cinched’ the nomination, Obama averages 47% of the vote. This pattern is much more flat that I would have anticipated, and indicates that Obama is having a very difficult time in getting more than 50% of the vote. In fact, only 3 of the 147, or less than 2% of the polls showed him with over 50% of the respondents favoring him.

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The first post, Obama’s Flawed Race Strategy: Why the Black Vote Won’t Be Enough by iam0nly1, argues convincingly that Obama’s weakness in the Rust Belt cannot be offset by African American voters in the South:

Obama’s entire claim to redrawing the political map is based on his perceived ability to win in Southern states precisely because of African American voters. After all, this is why Hillary’s claim that she alone was capable of winning large swing states that Democrats must win, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, went unnoticed and unheeded by Dean, Pelosi and others. However, this is a severe and dangerous gamble.

Obama is in serious trouble in Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and, particularly, Florida. Consequently, he’s trying to expand into traditional red states, especially Virginia and Georgia in the South, and the Rocky Mountain West region.

The second post, by Charles Lemos, is a video and PowerPoint presentation by renowned pollster Douglas Schoen. On the surface, it seems to be good news for Obama. He now leads McCain, the country wants change, and a generic Democrat beats a generic Republican:

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It’s worth the read. Part one starts out like this:

In 1998, as six years of a national campaign to demonize First Lady Hillary Clinton — funded by conservatives and rooted in profound anti-feminism — was reaching a fevered crescendo, then-conservative David Brock (now of Media Matters) penned a book called The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. The publisher’s note for the tome says of its subject: “No public figure in contemporary life has elicited more polarized reactions than Hillary Rodham Clinton. The first presidential spouse who pursued a major policymaking role, the beleaguered first lady has been a heroine and role model to her feminist allies - and a malevolent, power-mad shrew to her conservative foes.”

Sometime in the last decade, her liberal foes evidently decided that whole “malevolent, power-mad shrew” thing sounded pretty good, too.

Throughout the course of the Democratic primary, it was neatly repackaged as “wildly ambitious person who will do anything in her voracious quest to win including destroying the Democratic Party while cackling monstrously and whose womanness totally doesn’t matter we swear.” The classic misogynist charge once used against Clinton by the vast right-wing conspiracy became the rallying cry of large swaths of the erstwhile reality-based community.

Without a hint of irony.

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The boost in the wake of the primaries about which Obama supporters have been gloating has evaporated.  According to Gallup’s three day tracking poll, Obama and McCain are now tied at 45%.

Obama also trails McCain in the important state Missouri by a margin of seven points in a poll Survey USA released today.  McCain has already consolidated the support of a slim majority, or 50%, of Missourians, while Obama underperforms at 43%.  Consider Missouri a red state in 2008 now that superdelegates selected Obama as the Democratic nominee.

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The algorithms used by pollsters are beyond the vast majority of voters. Most people take polls at face value. WRONG.

Pollsters massage their numbers based on what they believe about the electorate. Are pollsters taking into effect PUMAs? I don’t believe they are for two reasons: 1) their state results skew unrealistically towards BHO and are out of sync with the national polls 2) almost all analysts believe PUMAs will return to the fold.

The only polls I trust right now are Rasmussen’s. He mentioned changing this methodology after BHO self-nominated.

[Ed. Note: See TexasDarlin’s “Rasmussen: McCain Takes Florida” on June 20.]

Here’s a simple example. (more…)

The Florida survey also found that McCain currently leads Obama in the state by a 47% to 39% margin. Six percent (6%) said they would vote for some other candidate while 8% are undecided.

However, after voters were told that McCain favored offshore drilling and Obama opposed it, McCain’s lead increased to eleven points, 49% to 38%. While a three-point net gain is not stunning, it is significant that the issue didn’t push voters towards Obama. All of McCain’s gains on the offshore drilling issue came from male voters.

How does Obama respond to the results of this poll? He drops the race card, of course. I quote Barack Obama, who according to Mark Halperin uttered the following at a fundraising event this evening in Jacksonville, Florida: (more…)

Above average voters, the citizens of Arkansas are different. (more…)

Vote By Numbers

This conclusion comes not from wishful thinking but from a new method of analysis on the statistics of polls that has been accepted for publication in the journal Mathematical and Computer Modeling. The authors, J. Richard Gott III, a professor at Princeton, and Wes Colley, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, are not political scientists. They are astrophysicists. And one of the tasks of scientists is to clarify the apparent complexity of the universe by using the language of mathematics.

Essentially the method is taking into account the median results of the polls a few weeks before an election. Using this method, Gott and Colley were able to pick the correct result in 49 of 50 states in 2004.

Here’s what they discovered: in swing states, the median result of all the polls conducted in the weeks prior to an election is an especially effective predictor of which candidate will win that election — even in states where the polls consistently fall within the margin of error.

To make his prediction of the outcome of the 2008 race Tyson followed the same rules established by Gott and Colley. If no poll had been take 6 weeks prior to an election or if the median poll is a tie, the win was given to the party that won it four years before. Real Clear Politics was chosen as the central database from which to make comparisons. What Tyson discovered is instructive.

We begin with the Kerry states. The states that in 2004 were won by Kerry. And we use his 251 electoral votes as a starting point for determining which states would be normally Democratic. And this is where Hillary’s case is exemplified. Because the numbers bear out the case she made on the campaign trail.
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