Colorado, Colorado, Colorado; And the Obama blowout
Writing by abuhatem on Monday, 16 of June , 2008 at 5:46 am
The WSJ today has a blog post on battle ground states. The gist of the argument is that McCain will have to hold on to Virginia, Ohio, and Colorado to beat Obama, meaning a loss in either of these states will cost McCain the election. The WSJ makes a specific point to put an emphasis on Colorado. This is because an Obama victory in Colorado, New Mexico, and either Nevada, or Iowa, under the old Bush-Kerry map of 2004, would result in an Obama victory, and both states are strongly leaning his way.
This has been my argument numerous times on this blog (here, here, here, and here).
Second tidbit of electoral politics, the mainstream media - i.e. The Politico - has finally begun to pick up on the argument of the strong improbability of a McCain victory based on the old fashioned “electoral barometer” analysis of Litchman’s Keys to the White House which I discussed here. While the usually rancid stench of Mort Kondrake’s pitiful attempts at penmanship make this blogger want to puke, he was the first in the mainstream media to break this decade old tool of scholarly political scientists. Politico’s article quotes Litchman as saying:
“This should be an overwhelming Democratic victory,” said Allan Lichtman, an American University presidential historian who ran in a Maryland Democratic senatorial primary in 2006. Lichtman, whose forecasting model has correctly predicted the last six presidential popular vote winners, predicts that this year, “Republicans face what have always been insurmountable historical odds.” His system gives McCain a score on par with Jimmy Carter’s in 1980.
The article then quotes Alan Abrowitz, who I noted of (as did Kondrake) weeks ago discussing McCain’s atrocious odds:
“It is one of the worst political environments for the party in power since World War II,” added Alan Abramowitz, a professor of public opinion and the presidency at Emory University. His forecasting model — which factors in gross domestic product, whether a party has completed two terms in the White House and net presidential approval rating — gives McCain about the same odds as Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and Carter in 1980 — both of whom were handily defeated in elections that returned the presidency to the previously out-of-power party. “It would be a pretty stunning upset if McCain won,” Abramowitz said.
Category: American Politics
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