GOP Looks to Win Ugly

The GOP plan to win presidential elections by allocating electoral college votes based on congressional districts rather than winner-take-all in states Obama won twice is finally getting attention.  Rachel Maddow has been raising the alarm, and here’s Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

“Rather than going by the overall vote in a state, they’d allocate by congressional district. And this is where it gets real good, or bad, depending on your point of view. Democrats are now increasingly concentrated in urban areas and Republicans did an extremely successful round of gerrymandering in 2010, enough to enable them to hold on to a substantial House majority even though they got fewer votes in House races than Democrats.

“In other words, the new plan is to make the electoral college as wired for Republicans as the House currently is. But only in Dem leaning states. In Republican states just keep it winner take all. So Dems get no electoral votes at all.

“Another way of looking at this is that the new system makes the votes of whites count for much more than non-whites — which is a helpful thing if you’re overwhelmingly dependent on white votes in a country that is increasingly non-white.

“This all sounds pretty crazy. But it gets even crazier when you see the actual numbers. Here’s a very illustrative example. They’re already pushing a bill to do this in the Virginia legislature. Remember, Barack Obama won Virginia and got 13 electoral votes. But… if the plan now being worked on would have been in place last November, Mitt Romney would have lost the state but still got 9 electoral votes to Obama’s 4. Think of that, two-thirds of the electoral votes for losing the state. If the Virginia plan had been in place across the country, as Republicans are now planning to do, Mitt Romney would have been elected president even though he lost by more than 5 million votes.

“Remember, plans to do this are already underway in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states in the Midwest.

“This is happening.”

Got that?  Mittens would be president today with five million fewer votes than Obama.  If the GOP can’t win with women and minorities, they’ll just win with gerrymandering.  Be afraid, be very afraid.  They know demographics are against them, but if they soften their crazier stands, they will lose their base.  So desperate times call for desperate measures, and this is pretty damn desperate.

Why Mitt Was Campaigning in Pennsylvania

Poll workers in PA are allowed to ask for Voter ID, but it is not required to vote.  Talking Points Memo reports on how well this ridiculous policy is working out:

“Voting and civil rights activists said Tuesday that Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law was causing mass confusion across the state as people tried to go to the polls.

“Because of a judge’s ruling in October, the law attempted to walk a line by allowing poll workers to ask voters for photo identification while also giving voters a big loophole to cast a regular ballot without it.

“The Election Protection’s coalition voter hotline here began lighting up with complaints soon after polls opened. Some voters said they were upset about being asked for photo identification. Others said they had been turned away because they did not provide it.

“’We’ve definitely gotten reports about voters being turned away,’ Eric Marshall, co-director of the Election Protection coalition, told TPM. ‘We’ve had reports of people who have shown up, been asked, and when they didn’t show ID they were turned away.’”

I’m guessing these people who were turned away are not rich white people.

What Exit Polls Showing

Matt Drudge is reporting that exit polls show Mitt winning North Carolina and Florida; O winning New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada; and toss-ups in Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, and Iowa.

Remember to keep your eyes on Hillsborough County, Florida and Hamilton and Montgomery Counties in Ohio.

Christie Hits Back at Romney Campaign in Tough Jersey Style

NJ Gov. Chris Christie hits back at criticism from unnamed Romney staffers for his failure to join Mitt at an event in Pennsylvania on Sunday:

“I told Gov. Romney at that time that if the storm landed as predicted that it was going to be catastrophic to New Jersey and unprecedented.  I said to him, ‘Listen, Mitt, if this storm hits the way I think it’s going to, I’m off the campaign trail from here to Election Day.’ And he said to me, ‘Chris, of course. Do your job, don’t worry about me. I’ll take care of things.’ So all this other noise, I think, is coming from know-nothing, disgruntled Romney staffers who, you know, don’t like the fact that I said nice things about the president of the United States. Well, that’s too bad for them.”  Emphasis added.

The Best Polls Money Can Buy

The Daily Mail is reporting that internal polls done for Mitt by Neil Newhouse show Mitt up by one in Ohio, two in Iowa, three in New Hampshire, and tied in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Obama won’t campaign tomorrow, he’ll finish in Iowa tonight and go home to Chicago to practice his victory speech.

Mitt had been expected to finish campaigning in New Hampshire tonight, but they’ve added events in Pennsylvania and Ohio tomorrow, after which Mitt will head back to Boston to concede.

The moment we’ve all been waiting for — Mitt’s concession and all the sad, angry faces at Fox.

Troubling…

Mitt is going to campaign in Pennsylvania on Sunday.

I don’t pay that much attention to last-minute ads because both sides have plenty of money to spend.  But the top of each ticket has only so much time between now and Tuesday, so I’m watching to see where they spend it.

Polls, Polls, Polls

The freshest polls, right out of the oven:

President Obama is up by 5 in Ohio, but by just 1 in Florida and 2 in Virginia (NYT/CBS).

President Obama is up by 4 in Pennsylvania (Franklin and Marshall).

President Obama is up by 5 in both Wisconsin and Iowa (PPP — leans Dem).

These are narrower leads than he’s had earlier in the race — you know, before the first debate.

Troubling, Very Troubling

Watching the Obama campaign send Bill Clinton to Minnesota and Joe Biden to Pennsylvania.

At this late date, you campaign in swing states and don’t waste time in solid states.  So you have to wonder how solid Minnesota and Pennsylvania are.

The Romney campaign claims they’re expanding the map not to get to 270, but to get to 300.  Since they lie about everything else, I sure hope they’re lying about this.

Pennsylvania Voter I. D. Struck Down

The new Pennsylvania voter I. D. law, designed to reduce votes for President Obama, has been struck down for this election cycle.

This is final for the 2012 election, no more appeals.  The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously told the Commonwealth Court judge that he must stop the law unless he found that it wouldn’t disenfranchise people, and today he said that he couldn’t make that finding.

President Obama has a solid lead in Pennsylvania polls, and this should ensure that those who want to vote for him (and other Democratic candidates) will be able to do so.

This is a big win for Democrats, but even more, it’s a big victory for our democracy.

Nate Silver Explains It All

From “How to Solve the Swing-State Puzzle,” Nate Silver, NYT:

Using my FiveThirtyEight model, I’ve determined — through about 25,000 simulations that I run each day — which states could put either candidate over the top. Crucially, the model takes into account not only how states poll relative to national trends but also to one another. Demographically similar states can rise and fall together. If Romney makes gains in Wisconsin, for example, he will probably also do so in neighboring Minnesota.

Perhaps more important, the program evaluates the order in which the states might line up. Obama could win North Carolina, where the polls show a competitive race, but he’s unlikely to do so without already having won Ohio, Florida and Virginia, where the demographics are slightly more favorable to him. Some combination of those states would probably get him to 270 electoral votes anyway. By that point, North Carolina would be redundant.

Which states, then, are the most strategically important? The answer exists along a spectrum rather than in absolutes. Ten states could play an important role in the electoral calculus. I have listed them below, in four groups, along with the chance that each state will be the one that determines the next president.

The Big Two: Ohio (32 percent chance of determining the Electoral College winner) and Florida (20 percent).

The auto industry’s recovery has helped drop Ohio’s unemployment rate from 8.6 percent when he took office to 7.2 percent now, making it one state where voters really are better off than they were four years ago.

Florida’s economic recovery has not been as robust, but Obama may be buoyed by long-term demographic factors there. The G.O.P. has long been buffered by Cuban-Americans, a historically right-leaning group, who made up a majority of the state’s Hispanic electorate. Now not only are non-Cuban Hispanics growing in the electorate, but the Cuban population is increasingly divided along generational lines, with younger voters leaning heavily left.

The New Breed: Virginia (9 percent), Colorado (9 percent) and Nevada (5 percent).

In these states, which Obama carried in 2008 but Kerry and Gore lost, swift demographic changes have become manifest. Obama won Nevada — which now resembles a West Coast state to some degree — by an unexpectedly large margin, 12 percentage points, in 2008. And despite a wretched economy there, he has led in every state poll conducted this year.

The polling has been more inconsistent in Colorado and Virginia.

In the end, Obama might simply conclude that Florida or Ohio — and not Colorado and Virginia — represents his path of least resistance. If the president can win either Florida’s 29 electoral votes, or Ohio’s 18 plus Nevada’s 6, then Romney’s shot at 270 will become vanishingly thin, and it won’t matter how Virginia and Colorado turn out.

Primary Purple: Iowa (6 percent) and New Hampshire (3 percent).

The voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are almost entirely white and mostly rural — factors that ordinarily favor Republicans. But they are also highly educated, which gives Democrats a chance. … [I]t’s worth remembering that if Al Gore had won New Hampshire in 2000, he wouldn’t have even needed Florida.

The Blue Wall: Wisconsin (9 percent), Pennsylvania (5 percent), and Michigan (1 percent).

In Michigan, Romney’s opposition to the auto bailout may be too much of an albatross. In Pennsylvania, though, the issue may be that while the polls are close, they are also hard to move; each party has its respective constituencies, and there may be few true undecided voters left.

My calculations suggest that, despite Romney’s deficit, the upside of his winning Pennsylvania is so great that he might want to take a chance. It’s Obama’s closest equivalent to a must-win state, and the combination of losing Pennsylvania and Ohio would essentially ensure his defeat. Unfortunately for Romney, it may be too late to adopt that strategy, as Obama has come close to clinching a majority of the state’s electorate in recent surveys.

Wisconsin, however, is the state that Romney must contest. If Romney can’t overtake him in Wisconsin, considering his problems in Ohio and Florida, he’ll leave Obama with too many paths to 270, and himself with too few.

The most plausible range of outcomes runs from Obama losing the election by about two percentage points, slightly better than John Kerry did, to his winning it by perhaps six or seven, slightly worse than his margin from four years ago. Given where the election is being contested, however, the most likely outcome is that Obama wins enough tipping-point states to eke out a victory.

Heading emphasis in original; text emphasis added.