Reasons to be cheerful

[ciphergoth]

Two recent polls have Obama ahead in Florida by four to five points. The polls currently show Obama having a 74 vote lead in the Electoral College. My lovely graphs are starting to keel over, because all the lines are bunching up at the top: they currently show that Obama would have a 55-75% chance of victory even if he were to lose three percentage points against McCain nationally; on current form they show an 88-99% chance of victory.

This November we could be looking at total meltdown of the Republican party, with wipeouts not only in the Presidential elections but in the House and the Senate too. The Dems could have a sufficient majority to kill off the ridiculous procedural crap the GOP keep pulling. Let's just hope they find enough spine to use it.

Updated: Of course, this is before the coming advertising blitz has its effect. John McCain has announced that he's going to join the Federal "matched funds" programme, which means that he accepts a donation cap of $84.1M in return for a matching $84.1M from the Federal purse, giving him about $170M to spend on advertising in the coming months. This programme has been in place since 1972 and all Presidential candidates have accepted the matching funds in that time.

Except for Barack Obama, who announced yesterday that he will not be taking part in the scheme. This is because the Obama camp anticipate raising up to $500M from donations, largely small donations made online. In other words, starting from a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls, Obama will outspend his rival 3:1.

Oh, and just in case that's not enough, the Democrats are also going to sue John McCain for violation of campaign finance rules he signed into law.

Yee-har!

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

That depends on the consequences of the tactics. If it's something like lying about the other candidate, for example, then using those tactics directly does harm no matter who uses them, and so I'm against my side using them. If it's something like the potential undue influence of money when deciding elections, then the bad consequence is victory for the worse candidate, so there's some point in pushing for changes in the rules that reduce that influence but no point in the better candidate unilaterally not spending their money (or whatever course of action is being advocated here, which I really can't work out).

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

If it's something like the potential undue influence of money when deciding elections, then the bad consequence is victory for the worse candidate

I think that the candidate I support winning because of the undue influence of money, rather than because the majority of people would choose to vote for them without that influence is a bad consequence if you believe in democracy.

I'm not sure that any course of action is being advocated per se, but I don't think that Obama outspending McCain is a reason to be cheerful.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

There are plenty of unfair influences; I'm glad that at least some of them are unfair in our favour.