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Who will win the 2012 US Presidential Elections?


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Who will win the 2012 US Presidential Elections?  

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US electoral college maths favours Obama SA Aiyar 16 September 2012, 06:05 AM IST With less than two months to go for the US presidential election, most opinion polls suggest that Barack Obama is a clear favourite to beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney. A Gallup poll last Thursday gave Obama 50% of the popular vote against Romney’s 44%. However, a Rasmussen poll showed Romney nosing ahead by 47% to 46%. So, an Obama victory is not certain. The US president is not chosen by popular vote. The country has an electoral college system, with each state having votes in an electoral college in proportion to its population. The winner in each state gets all its votes. A candidate needs a majority of electoral college votes—at least 270—to become president. Most states are unambiguously Republican or Democratic. Since the outcome in these is a foregone conclusion, the campaign focus is on just eight battleground states that could swing either way. The New York Times recently estimated that Obama probably has 237 electoral votes in the bag, 185 from states with solid support plus 52 from states leaning strongly towards him. Romney probably has only 206 assured electoral votes (158 from solid states plus 48 leaning towards him). Of the remaining 95 electoral votes in the battleground states, Obama needs to win only 33 to become president, and this does not look too difficult. By contrast, Romney needs to win 64 of the remaining 95 electoral college votes, a very stiff task. Florida, with 29 votes, is easily the most important of the eight battleground states. Romney absolutely has to win this state. If Obama wins this, he is virtually assured of becoming president. Obama carried this state in 2008, but earlier Republican George W Bush carried the state in 2000 and 2004. Opinion polls suggest the state could go either way this time. Florida has suffered from an especially painful housing bust, which could hurt Obama. Ohio, with 18 votes, is another crucial state that was carried by Bush in 2000 and 2004 but by Obama in 2008. The last 12 presidential winners have won this state, so it qualifies to be called the supreme swing state. Although the US economy is suffering from a very tepid recovery, farmers in this agricultural state have done well because of high farm prices, which have sent farmland prices up too. That may give Obama an edge. The other battleground states are Virginia (13 votes), Wisconsin (10 votes), Colorado (9 votes), Iowa (6 votes), Nevada (6 votes), Indiana (6 votes) and New Hampshire (4 votes). If Obama does well in these six states, he can afford to lose both Florida and Ohio. That gives him a lot of elbow room, and explains why he is ahead in the race right now. In some ways, his strong showing in opinion polls is astonishing. The economy is still sputtering four full years after the Great Recession of 2007-09 , and unemployment is still a stratospheric 8.1%. However , unemployment was over 9% when Obama came to power, so things have got slightly better, and that may be enough for him to scrape through. It’s worth remembering that Roosevelt too got re-elected in 1936 despite very high unemployment, since it was even higher when he came to power. It helps to have got elected during a terrible downturn: after that, almost anything looks like an improvement. But what matters is not just unemployment but incomes of those who are employed . The US median income has been falling steadily in recent years: those getting jobs are getting lower wages. Romney’s key electoral plank is that the middle class is getting wiped out by Obama’s economic failures. This sentiment is shared by many voters, yet the middle class has not turned decisively against Obama. Romney’s chances will improve greatly if the economy slides downhill in the next two months. Sadly for him, the economy seems to be picking up. Romney has attacked Obama for his healthcare reforms, and for being soft on illegal immigration. However, it’s far from clear that these are election-losers for Obama. Romney’s own healthcare reforms when he was governor of Massachusetts bore a close resemblance to what Obama has done at the national level. Obama has opted for class-warfare rhetoric, painting Romney as the sort of rich financier who caused the last economic bust, who avoids paying his fair share of taxes, and who wants to benefit billionaires (through tax cuts) at the expense of the poor. This has put Romney on the defensive. Public antagonism to rich financiers, plus the slight improvement in the economy, may suffice for an Obama victory. But Romney still has an outside chance. llink

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Mitt’s Mortification By FRANK BRUNI Published: September 24, 2012 That bloodied appendage? The one riddled with holes? It belongs to Mitt Romney, and we now know that his onetime support for gun control was all that was keeping him from shooting himself in the foot. Throughout this campaign, he has misfired so repeatedly and phantasmagorically that his wounds make those visited upon Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway at the end of “Bonnie and Clyde” look like paper cuts. But that’s been noted, and there’s a bigger discussion beyond it. How did someone so politically maladroit — a cardboard cutout crossed with an Etch A Sketch — get this far? We need to remind ourselves that the alternatives were Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann. And we need to ask whether we now have an electoral process so vacuous, vicious and just plain silly that most people in their right minds wouldn’t go anywhere near it. It chews up candidates and their families, spits them out and cackles with hyperpartisan glee all the while. Yes, those candidates volunteer for it, but still. The process doesn’t necessarily serve some wondrous purpose of culling the herd and toughening the survivors, as the people invested in it — including those of us in the news media — often like to argue. Maybe it just sours them, befouls the atmosphere in which they operate and encourages voters to tune out. It encourages would-be candidates, watching from the edge of the battlefield, not to step onto it. Mitch Daniels took a pass. So did Jeb Bush. It’s not certain that either of them, in the final analysis, would have been better than Romney. But it’s beyond doubt that the strafing they and their families would have received, along with the compromises they would have been pressured to make, influenced their decisions. To what bliss can the person who chooses to run look forward? Relentless tedium, for starters. A candidate typically repeats the same 10 to 25 minutes of remarks at least three times a day in at least two time zones a week for at least 10 months on end, if you count the primaries. To embrace that, he or she has to be a narcissist, an automaton, an ideologue or an idealist of the very highest order. And I don’t think the idealists are exactly overrepresented these days. A candidate must be craven about asking for money and do it round the clock, because at this point so much of it is required that for all Romney’s sterling connections and platinum panhandling, he’s still apparently coming up short. That may be the scariest story of the season. Due to the differences between a primary and general-election campaign, a candidate must be willing to waffle, and if he or she gets too accustomed to that, it can lead to moments as mortifying as one on the most recent “60 Minutes.” Scott Pelley, pressing Romney on which tax loopholes he’d close: “The devil’s in the details.” Romney, refusing to provide any: “The devil’s in the details. The angel is in the policy.” The hell has no end. The 140-character limit of Twitter, the acceleration of the news cycle and the proliferation of proudly biased newscasts have intensified the patrol for gaffes, heightened the hunger for tiffs and tidbits, ratcheted up the invasiveness. Over recent days I stumbled upon a headline about Romney’s “enlarged prostate” and, separately, a tasteless examination of the contracts that one of his sons had with a gestational surrogate. There was also chatter about the orange hue of either his tan or his makeup, though I admit to my own ignoble fascination with this. Halloween’s on the horizon. Is Romney pandering for the pumpkin vote? The zone of privacy around a candidate has vanished, thanks to prying smartphones — poised, yes, to capture important tells, but poised as well to document meaningless ones. From strategists and pundits comes a daily vivisection: smirk less, laugh more, fewer neckties, tighter pants. Bit by inevitable bit, a candidate surrenders all spontaneity, along with some of his or her authentic self and a certain measure of joy. President Obama was also on “60 Minutes,” and what I saw as he answered questions about his record wasn’t the audacity of hope. It was the annoyance of being put through these paces and being second-guessed. Romney’s bleeding has plenty to do with his intrinsic shortcomings and his shortsightedness: how does a man who has harbored presidential ambitions almost since he was a zygote create a paper trail of offshore accounts and tax returns like his? But I wonder if we’re not seeing the worst possible version of him, and if it isn’t the ugly flower of the process itself. I wonder, too, what the politicians mulling 2016 make of it, and whether, God help us, we’ll be looking at an even worse crop of candidates then. New York Times

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Obama Without Romney Imagine, for a moment, that the 2012 election really was the pure referendum that Mitt RomneyÃÔ campaign strategists apparently expected it to be. Imagine that both the Republican challenger and his party were completely invisible on the campaign trail, that the press was only allowed to cover the incumbent, and that on Nov. 6 the choice was whether to vote ÅÖp or ÅÅown on President ObamaÃÔ performance. How would the last three weeks have played out for the president? Not necessarily all that well. They started with ObamaÃÔ lackluster convention speech, which seemed to put a ceiling on the bounce that the rest of the Democratic Convention had created for him. They continued with another mediocre jobs report, followed by the Federal ReserveÃÔ announcement that it would make a third attempt to stimulate the still-stagnant economy with massive bond purchases a decision that boosted stocks and consumer confidence but also served as an implicit indictment of this administrationÃÔ economic stewardship. Then came a weekÃÔ worth of grim news from the Middle East and North Africa, during which time the White House whose Libya policy has been sold with evasions and dishonesties from the beginning alternately stonewalled and dissembled on what exactly happened at the American embassy in Benghazi. This unrest in the Arab world coincided with the official end of the Obama-ordered American surge of forces in Afghanistan, which attracted little press coverage but probably deserved more: The surge was one of the presidentÃÔ biggest foreign policy gambles, and it produced few obvious benefits at a high cost in lives. Finally the president took to the airwaves for a pair of interviews with Univision and 60 Minutes that included a number of awkward moments: a weird attempt to distance himself from his own negative ads; a weirder suggestion that heÃÔ learned as president that ÅÚou canÃÕ change Washington from the inside? and a too-casual dismissal of Middle Eastern unrest and American deaths as mere ÅÃumps in the road. There was more than enough material, in other words, to tell the story of a president adrift: Overshadowed by Bill Clinton and Ben Bernanke at home; uncertain how to respond to strategic failures abroad; and lacking any obvious vision for what a second term might offer the country beyond a continuation of the current large-deficit, slow-growth slog. (ŵhis is not the time, David Axelrod said on MSNBCÃÔ Å®orning Joe when asked about the White HouseÃÔ plans to deal with Social SecurityÃÔ looming shortfalls.) But instead the story of the last few weeks has been all about Mitt Romney his campaignÃÔ infighting, his weakening swing-state numbers, his muddled message, his dismissal of 47 percent of Americans as pathetic supporting characters in an Ayn Rand melodrama. Is this focus just a case of media bias, as many conservatives have alleged? Yes, in the sense that the White House has been getting too free a pass on its absentee domestic policy and shifting foreign policy narratives. As Howard Fineman of the Huffington Post noted this week, Obama is campaigning for re-election ÅØithout having to seriously and substantively defend his first-term failed promises or shortcomings, and without having to say much, if anything, about what, if anything, he might do substantially differently if he is fortunate enough to win again. Yes, too, in the sense that the horse race coverage has sometimes helped ratify the sense that 8 percent unemployment and trillion dollar deficits are a new normal for which the current president doesnÃÕ actually bear that much responsibility. But no, in the sense that Romney could have avoided almost all of his current difficulties, media bias or no, through the simple expedient of running a modestly more competent and creative campaign. Instead, the Republican nominee seems to be running to prove two points about political science and the presidency. First, that every presidential campaign is actually a referendum on the challenger as well as on the incumbent, and second, that itÃÔ entirely possible for voters to ultimately reject a challenger even when they think the incumbent might deserve to be defeated. In the second point, though, lurks the only remaining hope for the Republican ticket: Their dislike for Romney notwithstanding, voters really are still open to the possibility that Obama might not deserve re-election. This is why 2012 still looks more like 1976 and 2004, when the country split almost down the middle on the question of whether the incumbent should be returned, than it does like the re-election cakewalks of Reagan, Clinton, Nixon, Johnson or Ike. Romney trails but only by a few points. Obama leads but with approval and ÅÓe-elect numbers that are only brushing up against the necessary 50 percent. The country has been tilting toward the Democrats but only for a few short weeks. There are six weeks to go. In 2004, John Kerry made up about 4 points in the polls between late September and election day. In 2000, George W. Bush gained a similar amount of ground between the conventions and November. Since 1968, Sean Trende points out, in presidential races featuring an incumbent president, the polls have moved an average of 3.7 points toward the challenger between the incumbentÃÔ convention and the actual vote. As of this writing, Romney trails in the RealClearPolitics polling average by almost exactly that figure 3.8 points. He has squandered almost two seasons worth of opportunities and allowed his failures as a candidate to eclipse his opponentÃÔ failures as a president. But as he prepares for the debates that offer his last best chance, he has one reason to be hopeful: The case he has failed to make is still there to be made. New York Times

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Its not over' date=' not by long shot. :fear:[/quote'] Maybe Mitt is purposely raising the odds so he can finally make some money of his $10,000 :giggle: On a serious note, the odds are surprising considering the margin in swing states isnt that much. Why do you think the gap is so wide in the betting odds ?
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