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Are you worried that Frankenstorm will restrict your access to up-to-date polling numbers? Do you know more about the state of the race in places you’ve never been to, but haven’t decided what to do for Hallowe’en yet? Then you have come to the right place! With one week to go before Election Day dawns, the race for president is about as tight as it can get, so let's get right to it.
No matter what your political affiliations, I think we can all agree we're getting a little burnt out on Election 2012. "When will it end?" we wonder -- and we don't even live in a state currently under siege in the continuing television ad war. We can only imagine what Ohioans, Floridians, and Virginians must be experiencing right now.
No, this is not going to be a column about Donald Trump, who is apparently trying to get his face in the news again over Barack Obama's college records. Instead, we are going to feature a cartoon about education, from Joshua L. Eisenstein, PhD., in collaboration with cartoonist Sushila Oliphant.
I'm going to paint a picture of how America could scrap the Electoral College system in the next decade, but I make no predictions whatsoever about the chances this could become reality. You'll have to judge that sort of thing for yourselves.
As you can see, the race has tightened considerably since the first debate. There were more states tied during this last week than we've seen in a while, which shows up in white on the above chart. Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire were all tied at one point during the period, although at the end Virginia was the only one left even.
To paraphrase an oldie but a goodie: "What if they had a debate and nobody read the agenda?" Tonight's debate was, ostensibly, supposed to be on foreign policy. However, both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama decided fairly early on that the differences between the two policy-wise were pretty small, so they both decided to hijack the foreign policy debate and instead just continue the debates on the economy, instead.
As always, we are here to bring you the burning questions of the day that nobody else is asking. Today's question: What will we call the 2012 women?
Since everyone else in the punditary universe is rehashing last night's presidential debate, we're going to do something more frivolous and fun today. We're going to run a "predict the election" contest for everyone to step into the pundits' shoes themselves. Consider yourself a wonk? Think you know better than the polls? Ready to publicly state what your predictions are? Well, then, get ready to play!
Since I brought the subject up, however, I will jump into the "winners/losers" fray and give my snap reaction to what we all just witnessed tonight. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both brought their "A" game tonight, unlike Obama's first widely-panned performance. Mitt Romney was not appreciably different tonight than the first debate, but Obama certainly had eaten his Wheaties this morning. Or maybe the more up-to-date version is "drank his Red Bull," I really couldn't say. This provided much more lively television, to put it mildly. Actually, "mildly" isn't the right word, since not much of anything about tonight was mild in any way.
Welcome back to our now-weekly Electoral Math column series. In the introduction to last week's column, I warned that the full effects of the first televised presidential debate had yet to fully appear. This week, the effects showed up in a big way -- which (as you can probably guess) was mostly good news for Mitt Romney and bad news for Barack Obama, as some of his numbers fell off a rather large cliff.