Predict the electoral vote of the US Presidential Election

Kerry - 276
Bush - 262

(I also sold Bush at 266 for $4 a point, so I have a monetary stake in this as well.)

Kerry is doing better than Gore had done in the polls of 2000, and if he can anything like replicate Gore's surge in getting the vote out, he should at least manage to win the popular vote, however narrowly (if Bush's organisation was at the 2000 level, one would say this would be a very easy call to make...).

And the key thing in the big picture seems to be:

Both candidates are doing better in certain states than the 2000 Gore/Bush standings. But Bush's improved leads are likely to be in the more Republican southern states, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and the more conservative Western states (Idaho etc.), with the odd surprise improvement: New Jersey, Hawaii, Pennsylvannia (which will all go Kerry anyway no doubt). Kerry is clearly doing much better in Ohio than Gore, and with the trend in polls going his direction, I think we'll see Michigan and Minnesota become reasonably comfortable victories. He is going to do much better in New England than Gore; increasing the victories in Maine and Vermont and taking New Hampshire in all probability... and on the West Coast, Oregon seems to be a much more comfortable win than in 2000. There'll also be some closer margins (though likely Bush wins) in Colorado and Arizona...

The two I'm not sure about are New Mexico and Florida (and I would still not call Ohio yet for Kerry, as tricks are afoot, and the polls aren't quite showing him with consistent 1-3 point wins, are they?)... why would Bush be doing better in NM than in 2000? Kerry seemed to be walking this state earlier in the campaign.

And does anyone remember what the polling numbers were like in Florida in 2000 days before the election itself?

In the event of a tie, the Dems best bet is to "shed" votes in the house to a third canidate.

What are we going to ... *do*?

lolz so much rong in this thred.

It's true that almost everyone on the thread predicted a Kerry victory, which we didn't get. Clearly the thread looks full of tragic miscalculation somehow.

But I think it's useful to see how many people - a majority of ilxors here, and they were drawing on many ongoing polls and opinions - thought, right to the end, that Kerry was likely to win. They didn't think his campaign was pathetic, or doomed, or that he was obviously a useless candidate, or that after xyz event he didn't have a chance.

I think it's useful to have that confirmed, because so much BS is retrospectively spun saying those things. 'Kerry's sluggish camp never overcame the swift boat fiasco'; 'as a NE liberal, Kerry never had a chance'; 'Kerry was always clearly a loser'. If any of these things were true, then this thread would not have looked the way it did.

I have read that there may have been very significant electoral fraud, in Ohio? - I think Suzy said so too. I think that, whichever way an election goes, we have to take in the possibility that many votes have not been properly counted, either through incompetence or confusion or corruption. If this is true, then it makes the calibration of opinion, popularity --> votes etc more problematic. This is true of the UK too, where electoral fraud seems a major problem.

Was the 2004 election stolen? by Robert F. Kennedy Jr
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

Thank you, Mordy. I read something like this in a bookstore in NYC.

[After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)]

The question that always arises for me is -- if this is true (certainly some will say it isn't), then doesn't it make a nonsense of the whole previous year + of campaigning, fundraising, arguing, debating etc? Why not just call the 2008 election off now and give it to McCain?

[On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)]

Well, in part because you can only pull off this kind of fraud if it's reasonably close. Also, because hope is not entirely snuffed out, yet.

lolz so much rong in this thred.

I, for one, was completely otm.

Those farm signs were killer.