Election Mumbo Jumbo

Our Energizer President is running around the country, drawing huge, enthusiastic crowds wherever he goes. He topped 37,000 in L.A. and ended the night with a large enthusiastic crowd in Nevada. He's going to keep on going until election day, revisiting Ohio, Minnesota and Illinois.

Are the Democrats just whistling in the wind? The Atlas project run by former Kerry campaign chairman has studied the early voter returns in 17 states. They conclude the partisan balance is much like 2006, the year the Democrats took back both the Senate and the House. In fact, they say it's a little more Democratic. Michael McDonald at George Mason concluded that Democrats are not voting at the high rates of 2008 but they are voting at higher rates than Republicans in early voting. Even in a contentious state like Nevada, Democrats are voting at 45% to Republicans at 40%.

Now does any of this mean anything? Republicans are spinning it that they tend to vote later. But there seems to be a ramping up of efforts on the Republican side. The NRCC, which funds the House races, just applied for a $20 million line of credit. Dick Armey, Mr. Teabagger, is crying that Democrats are voting earlier because they want to commit voter fraud. And Rush Limbaugh has brought back Operation Chaos, urging Hillary Clinton supporters to vote Republican as a protest against Barack Obama. What this did in 2008 was vastly enlarge the Democratic registrations in Pennsylvania but very little else. But why make such odd noises if something wasn't going on?

Newsweek just released a fascinating poll, which showed that Obama's approval rating just jumped since their last poll to 54% and that those polled preferred Democrats holding Congress by 48 to 43%. In prehistoric electoral politics, that would mean it's tied and that if you compare a split vote to House races, you end up with Democrats barely holding on. While Newsweek leans Democratic, there was the same five point spread buried in the latest Gallup poll.

Now why is this Newsweek poll so interesting? It's because one-third of the answers were from people using cellphones. The lack of cellphone users has been widely criticized this year. Landline users prefer Republicans by 10%. Also, the lack of cellphone users in the polls this electoral season bring down voters under the age of 30 down to 7%, almost one-third of their general mid-term voting record. And, of course, this would bring down the Democrats' percentage.

Newsweek does caution readers that Bill Clinton experienced the same uptick in his ratings prior to the 1994 elections. Just a NOTE--Barack Obama's approval rating over the last 14 months has fluctuated a massive 4 points, less than the margin of error. He basically has run between 47 and 51%.

Nate Silver now has Republicans winning over 230 seats in the House elections. Right now Electoral-Politics. com has it GOP 208 and Democrats 207 and 20 Tied.

The question is whether the GOP gaffes over the next 10 days will cost them. Or has everyone become innoculated against allegations of corruption and bizarre, crazy beliefs that it doesn't matter?

Personally, I am stuck with the problem of how to explain how a party with a 24% approval rating, now clearly bankrolled by banks and big corporations, both insitutions which are despised in public opinion more than Republicans, can roar back to a massive victory. This becomes a greater problem if you see that Obama's surge voters appear to be awake and voting.

Washington pundits claim today that Chris Van Hollen is being a goodsport and putting up a brace face on what D.C. claims is a debacle in the making.

Or by the Way, Barack Obama cut your taxes. He also has created more jobs in the private sector than George W did in eight years. So I know why corporations want to buy this election, I can not understand anyone in the middle class falling for this nonsense.

Best political ad of the day. In Connecticut, where Linda McMahon is running and has spent $45 million, a billboard:"LINDA"
"..because she's bought everything else."

The big spender ladies--Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Linda McMahon--together have spent over $200 million--all look like they are going down to defeat.

An observation, all these candidates and Rick Scott in Florida, Art Johnson in Wisconsin, and Raese in West Virginia are campaigning on "I know how to create jobs." You are going to see this with Mitt Romney in 2012. The problem is that all of these people actually got their CEO jobs in order to fire or outsource jobs. None of them--none of them--ever created jobs.

There was more news today that white women are shifting over to the Republicans. It's clear that Democrats have been zeroing on what they have done for women, but it would be disheartening to see women actually voting for candidates that are radically against reproducive rights, children's health care and against education. This I will have to see. While evangelicals are a large sector of our population, I can't see how they would swamp non-fundamentalist women at the polls.

Harvard has released data on the youth vote. By and large, they put it at about 21%, roughly the same or slightly lower than 2006. The problem with their study is that they didn't distinguish between registered young voters and just the youth population at large. Their study was refuted by another that showed that the millenial vote this year would be about 40%, larger than 2006 but about 20% less than 2008. If true, that would still be significant.

In a calm moment, I will post an analysis of what a Republican House would mean for the next two years and also who will get real money returns. The massive investment by the Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove's billionaires and various industries in this election is relatively small compared to the money they have spent lobbying against all of Obama's legislation. They quite properly calculated it was far less expensive to buy their own Congress than to keep spending money on futilely lobbying a Democratic Congress.

One business group is playing Russian Roulette. The Health Insurance Industry wrote the section of the healthreform bill, which called for individual mandates--thus openly a new market of about 40 million Americans. The Left was outraged because this was at the expense of the Public Option. Now the Health Insurance industry has decided to back Republicans 100% with the goal of trying to amend the bill and strip out the remains they object to. Too clever by half. Because Mike Pence made it clear to the Hill that one of the first things a Republican House will do is repeal the entire Health Bill. This is the price that was eacted by the teabaggers.

Why the problem? When the health industry met to lobby against the bill, their policy wonks and accountants held their own conference in Washington. There they explained that if the Health Insurance Industry does not have access to this expanded market in a very short time-frame, the whole industry will be in catastrophic shape and have to raise premiums astronomically and start cutting people off, who are too expensive. The insurance pool would shrink in order to maintain their profit margin but they would be in a death spiral. When you see these conservative Republicans suing on the grounds of the individual mandate, they clearly have not got the memo or simply do not care.