 Todd DormanTodd Dorman is a columnist for The Gazette. His blog has been bringing smiles to readers' faces since November 2007. |
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Still Excited, and Undecided, in Iowa
I had heard of them, legends mostly. Could they even exist in these polarized conditions?
Then I met one Wednesday. An undecided voter.
So many of us are burned out, polled out and argued out, afraid to answer the phone, just waiting for it to end, one way or the other. Then there’s Karen Clifton, who is still excited, still taking it all in.
“I’m not sick of it yet,” said Clifton, of Mechanicsville, who came to see President Obama speak at Cornell College, where she works. “I’m still listening to all the details and what’s going on.”
If Clifton were in California or Texas, her indecision would not be noteworthy. But she’s an undecided voter in Iowa. And Iowa is one of those few crucial puzzle pieces that Obama and Republican Mitt Romney are scrambling to add to that magical mathematic formula that gets them to 270 electoral votes, and sweet victory.
For Romney, Iowa is a linchpin in several victory scenarios. For Obama, Iowa could save his day should thin leads in other key states prove to be fool’s gold. Then there are those zany scenarios where they tie at 269 apiece, and throw the whole thing into a newly elected U.S. House of Representatives. Iowa figures into those plot twists, too. And we have four close House races.
New York Times polling guru Nate Silver says Iowa has an 8.8 percent chance of casting the decisive electoral votes. Maybe that doesn’t sound high, but that’s better than 45 other states. We’re more than twice as likely to decide this thing as Florida, Florida, Florida.
Silver also has a “return on investment” index, measuring the “likelihood that an individual voter in a state would determine the Electoral College winner with her vote.” Iowa’s score is 7.7, ranking us third nationally. Minnesota, by contrast, scores 0.1. So a vote cast in Iowa is 77 times more important than one cast up north.
Some day, we can assess the unfairness of that. For now though, in your face, Gophers.
In 2000, Al Gore won Iowa by just more than 4,000 votes. President Bush won in 2004 by roughly 10,000, out of 1.5 million cast.
“The election is now up to you,” Obama said at Cornell. He may be more right than he knows.
And that brings us back to Karen, who said she remains undecided after Obama’s speech. No pressure. Just leader of the free world stuff. When might you pick?
“Sometimes I don’t know until I walk in the door and pick up that pencil and vote,” she said.
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Interesting read – I feel very similarly about the state of the battleground after the second debate. Obama’s “path to victory” has many more options open to it compared to Mr Romney and, if he has indeed lost Ohio and Pennsylvania, the election math becomes ever more complicated.
I’ve put together my electoral college map for November 6th: http://tommygilchrist.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/obamas-electoral-path-to-victory/
If Iowa were the state to decide the outcome of the election, Obama is the winner. Romney has lost the bulk of three turned on groups that have to a great extent already voted: women, young people and Latinos.
The last debate on the national stage reflects Romney’s problem and it is not one of getting misunderstood as he tried to frame his last remark. Romney’s problem is that he gets himself understood.
His words on the fair treatment of women came out as an insult by suggesting he wants to get the economy going so good the good-old-boys like him would even consider hiring a woman—imagine that, even maybe think of hiring a woman from a “binder” no less; what a guy.
On Latinos, Romney immediately came out with the word “undocumented.”
And to start with, there was the young college student, Jeremy Epstein who asked the first question and was told by Romney that when he graduated he would give him a job. Epstein, said about talking to Romney after the debate, “I asked him if he’s gonna give me that job in two years and he said ‘Maybe.’”
After this and Epstein being put off by Romney rude interruption, Epstein says he is now leaning toward voting as a vast majority of young Americans already have, for Obama.
Mr. Gilchrist, Your map is just that, your map peppered with wishful thinking perhaps. You said it was based on the state of the race at the moment. What moment? As of last night a National Gallup Poll showed “the state of the race,” was a 6 point lead for Romney but another had Romney up by one. I believe that was Rasmussen. Your assertion that Obama won the second debate is debateable. Is that your liberal opinion? Are you basing it on the fact that at least he didn’t suck as bad as the first debate? Perhaps you missed him walking back his terrorism lie, or using fictitional employment figures and Obama even referred to his presidency in the past tense. Oh back up the bus. Just heard a report that Romney is up by 7. It doesn’t really matter if you adjust your map to include 57 states it was a impressive effort whether you are right or not.
I can vaguely understand why someone would be “undecided” at this time. If someone only heard and/or believed the negative ads/lies run by Obama concerning Romneys record, then I could see it. The little problem with that is they got to actually hear Romney and his plans for the future and realized he wasn’t the demon Obama painted. He is an intelligant, charitable guy who has done some remarkable things in his life and that of others. He has workable plans to help our economy.
For those that chime in to say Obama has a “path to victory,” I have to wonder what he has been waiting for? I really didn’t hear a path worth taking. After the last 4 years I would say Obama is more interested in his path to victory than that of the country.
Sue,
Rasmussen tends to lean Republican and that Gallup poll to which you referred is considered an outlier. Besides that, these polls you cite are national when what really matters is the electoral college map
Polls have been all over the place and best guess is that it has to do with caller ID and cell phones. A more reliable indicator is where Romney and Obama are campaigning and early voting numbers. Early voting puts Iowa Democratic; Republican lack of presence in Pennsylvania means the Democrats have that state as well.
Also,
Obama did not “walk back” his terrorism lie because he didn’t lie. Refer Telegraph 10/20/12 “Early CIA Report . . . ” The initial version of the attack as repeated by Obama (9/12) and Susan Rice (9/16) was based on initial CIA reports that took about two weeks or so to thoroughly vet. The initial information was based largely on eye witness on site reports.
And the most recent unemployment figures (7.8%) are not fictional. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics does not make things up.
With regard to Romney, virtually all of his charitable giving and work is connected directly to his church. Which benefits the rest of us how?
As for his intelligence, while he certainly is not stupid, his intelligence is of a narrow kind. He’s an analytical bean counter. Get him out of his comfort zone and he’s a total dweeb. And this is not anything Democrats have done to him. This is what he’s done to himself. Vision for the future? Which version? And for whom?
Paul Ryan’s Vicious Budget by RALPH NADER
The truth is what has distinguished this fast-talking, glib, Ayn Rand-smitten, congenial young man is that he has a plan for the federal budget. The Ryan budget plan is a Koch brothers’ dream and the American peoples’ nightmare. It leads with a lie – namely to control deficit spending by continuing it for at least 30 more years before his concoction of big tax cuts for the rich, further increases in the already bloated defense budget, and savage cuts in public services for the people, somehow balance the budget around mid-century.
His plan for social security is social insecurity. Make people work longer before receiving curtailed benefits, invest trillions of dollars of these funds in the volatile stock market and make sure that rich people only have to pay social security taxes on a fraction of their earned income.
He would open the floodgates on future Medicare to the rapacious health insurance companies through a voucher system whereby the elderly are fed to these sharks with ever-higher co-pays. His “block grant plan alone would lead states to drop between 14 and 27 million people (the poor and those with disabilities) from Medicaid by 2021,” according to the Urban Institute.
Ryan says that this is the only way to preserve social security, Medicare and Medicaid for future generations. Very well, Mr. Ryan, then why have you refused to civilly debate your proposals and their consequences with any of your critics inside and outside the Congress before a national television audience?
I requested that you have this important exchange in three letters (see Nader.org). Finally, your office demurred on the grounds that you were too busy. Are you really too busy to debate your plan which has passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and has been generally endorsed by Mitt Romney? Or are you too fearful of trying to defend your numbers and their plutocratic values to the likes of Princeton professor and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, who has called the Ryan budget “the most fraudulent in American history”?
He proposes deep cuts in widespread hunger alleviating food stamps. He opposes the minimum wage while he fights to eliminate or reduce taxes on capital gains and other taxes on the already undertaxed very-wealthy who have poured money into his and other Republicans’ campaign kitties.
He professes to be against crony capitalism, but he voted for the giant Wall Street bailouts and other bailouts and giveaways that define what real conservatives find so offensive.
An outraged David A. Stockman, President Reagan’s first director of the Office of Management and Budget, dismisses Ryan’s conservative credentials. “In short,” wrote Stockman in The New York Times, “Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices…. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity – just empty sermons.”
So Mr. Ryan is a closet corporatist who won’t even urge cracking down on the hundreds of billions of dollars that companies defraud the federal government every year, including documented fraud on Medicare, Medicaid and the Defense Department.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/17/paul-ryans-vicious-budget/