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

[henry_the_cow]

From my window I can see one change for the better: a spanking new primary school at the end of the road, replacing a decrepit Victorian building and bunch of sheds used as classrooms. It was built using PPP funding. Critics of New Labour focus on (justified) criticism of the "using PPP funding" part of that sentence, but tend to overlook the "It was built" part, which is actually more important.

If I look out of our flat's front door, I see the flat belonging to the two gentlemen upstairs, who got married last year. Technically, the arrangement is called a "civil partnership", but they call it a marriage and so do the rest of us.

If I actually bothered to leave the flat, I might see more examples. My job, for example, comes from a large and sustained increase in science funding in the UK. But I can see the two above without making any effort at all.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It's much easier to see the bad things they've done (Iraq, racking up a massive national debt hidden as PPP, election fraud, immigration hysteria, a terrifying illiberal agenda) but it won't take much of Tory rule for us to realize how much better they were, and wish again for the sort of administration that brings in SureStart, minimum wage, the hunting ban, the congestion charge, anti-discrimination legislation and so on.

Don't you love the two-party system?