[Pops]

So the theme is, predict the ramifications of the 2012 US election.

Try to exercise a little restrain in the name calling tho...

[vision-master]

Due to Sandy - Romney WINS!

[Don35]

Obama wins, US and world collapse.
Romney win, US and world collapse.

[careinke]

Obama wins, US and world collapse.
Romney win, US and world collapse.

+1

Whichever party "wins", it will mean the last time that party wins, for a long, long, long, time.

[Pops]

Collapse isn't an end state...


I think O is gonna scrape it out because of the auto bailout inspiring union blue collars to support him in a few swing states. Otherwise uneducated, working class poor and sorta-poor, especially whites, are going to vote against him by a big margin. I'll be greatly surprised if there is the landslide I predicted back when the right wing was on parade in the primaries. The campaign guy was right when he said they'd just shake the screen and switch positions and no one would be the wiser.

The senate Ds will have a couple seat majority and the Rs will keep the house, maybe losing a few seats but because the districts are even less competitive than ever after the post census gerrymandering redistricting, reps and senators will be even less able to compromise. Of course the Ds have done the same: "the margin of victory has been at least 20 points in over 74 percent of U.S. House elections since 2004" according to the Brookings institute. This by the way, is the biggest threat to our country I think, not that one party thinks it can afford to do without government, but that we are stuck with a structurally dysfunctional system that actively discourages from running those candidates who will compromise.


Anyway, O wants to make a deal to bring down the debt and that will play into the negotiations in the lame duck at least. The payroll tax will be re-instituted, it was probably the best stimulus of all but it also needs to be resumed. SocSec is insurance, without premiums it is just welfare. That my be all that gets done the next 4 years.

I'd be surprised if the sequester cuts are allowed to take place. I think O will give on SocSec, maybe means test, raising the limit, maybe the age - I think all are good ideas. That will have to be in exchange for the Bush goodie bag for the rich - it could happen! LOL But as I think about it, I just can't see there being much of anything getting done under the current regime of non-competitive congressional races that produce ideological non-politicians pledged to reject compromise at all costs. Even the Ds are getting tired of the whimps they send to DC and will start electing those less willing to go along.

The Rs want government to do nothing, like Romney said, FEMA is a waste, the states should do rescue and even better would be if the states didn't do it and private companies did.

So maybe that is my prediction, no matter who wins the goal isn't to fix problems, the goal is to keep the other guy from scoring so it's just stalemate.

[Plantagenet]

Pops is right.

I also think the end result of 2 billion dollars of 2012 campaigning will be no change----Romney looks good to win the popular vote, but Obama will win the electoral vote thanks to Ohio. As a result we'll have four more years of status quo policies from an exhausted Obama administration----

I predict another four years of Obama avoiding recognition of the peak oil problem, doing nothing on climate change, further exploding the deficit, and supporting the creation of more Islamist states in the middle east in the name of the "Arab Spring." Obama has already vowed not to compromise with Congress, so we may go over the fiscal cliff in December. If not, then big new Obamacare taxes on businesses and investors and working class folks will kick in Jan. 2013, resulting in a drop in hiring and business and investment activity---. GDP will then go negative and the US will join the EU in recession.

My popcorn is ready!


FORWARD! Over the fiscal cliff!

[vision-master]

Obamacare taxes on businesses and investors and working class folks will kick in Jan. 2013, resulting in a drop in hiring and business and investment activity

Why the drop in hiring and business and investment activity under our current Bush tax cuts P?

[AgentR11]

Election results from most important to least important:

Republicans hold the House with a solid majority.
Democrats hold the Senate... barely. 1-2 vote margin.
Republicans hold majority of state legislatures.
Bob the Dog Catcher wins election for Best Truck Driver.
Doug wins his contested election for Precinct Chair of district 34 of Harris County Texas.
Mitt Romney wins election as President and realizes that with the table laid as it is, he's impotent, so goes on vacation with the Obama's in Hawaii.

No seriously, Pop's is on to the underlying issue; its not so much whether the Feds are big or small, its that they are unable to move any issues of note. They can cut checks to whoever is their favorite group at the moment, but real change, not a chance.

So, under a Romney presidency, we will see no repeal of ZoddCare, no removal of food stamps, no action on climate change. We'll still burn corn in our cars while people are starving, and we'll still monetize even more of the debt. Romney will oversee the first Ice Free Arctic Summer, and may hustle along some drilling permits and LNG terminal permits...

[beamofthewave]

The R's have turned off too many women with their ideas that women should be forced to have the babies of rapists, just too many of them saying such idiotic statements, like someone should ask Mourdoch if he was raped by a man with HIV and then got HIV himself if that too is a gift from God. Anyway Obama will allow sequestration followed by the Repubs screaming to do away with the Norquist pledge as they do the bidding of Raytheon and GE desparate for their military contracts. By by Norquist and any other talk about the deficit being a problem. Obama was a fool to add the Iraq war to the budget, he should have left it on the credit card where Bush had put it so then the budget could be totally balanced without having had to do anything.

[Tanada]

I base my projection on the 2010 election plus the primary elections of 2012. In those elections the silent majority who do not get counted by the Polling organizations for whatever reason came out in large numbers and pushed candidates who were projected to lose over the finish line. In nearly every case the projected loser who won was a conservative or faux conservative sounding Republican. In many of those votes the Poll was 4 points or more off of the final result.

If that happens next Tuesday Romney will win in the popular and electoral college votes, the Republicans will gain seats in the house and achieve parity in the Senate.

In these parts enthusiasm for the Democrats in the Senate and Administration is very low while enthusiasm for the Republicans is high. Enthusiasm is what counts for voter turnout, it doesn't matter if there are three times as many Democrats in a district if 80% of them don't vote and 80% of the Republicans do vote. Obama has not inspired enthusiasm among the independent voters, at least not in Ohio and Michigan.

[evilgenius]

If Obama wins the conservative thinking conspiracy enshrouded right will completely blow a gasket. At the first sign of trouble they will seek a way to protest. The nation will be torn at the seams. If Romney wins Dems everywhere will descend into a state of depression. The rest of the world will marvel at how he can say the things he says with a straight face. The basis of a rift with Europe will have been formed based upon the necessity to recover in different ways, demanding different financial and civil answers.

[Pops]

OT but yeah, the pollsters try to adjust for turnout, I like http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ because Nate mooshes all the polls together and trys to account for their past, cooked-in, "house effect" to come up with a forecast. Good for a junkie.

[vision-master]

Clif High on the Unfolding Machinations of TPTB — 26 Oct 2012 — Topics in this Clif High interview include... how the 2012 US presidential election will end up contested and chaotic, ultimately with Romney being declared the winner; how immigration policy fits into the plans of TPTB; why TPTB will soon throw the Catholic Church under the bus; how chemtrail activity may relate to the ozone layer; the coming war---TPTB against aware individuals and "troublesome" types. (1:24:06)

[Graeme]

'For Whom Will You Vote?' May Be Wrong Question

In the vast majority of pre-election polls, likely voters are usually asked, "If the election were held today, for whom would you vote?"

That's the wrong question to ask, says Justin Wolfers, a political economist with the University of Michigan. He's spent years researching polls, and in a new paper he offers what he says is the right question:

Whom do you think will win?



It's not that polling groups don't ask the expectation question, Wolfers says, it's that analysts pay far less attention to it. A recent Gallup poll of voter expectation gave President Obama a 54 to 34 percent edge. (A number of other voters had no opinion.)

"That's a pretty sizable lead," Wolfers says. "I have a statistical machinery where I can chug that through and try to come up with a forecast for the election."

Wolfers says that machinery shows the president is strongly favored to win, and perhaps by a margin bigger than most pollsters are currently predicting.

"Lots of clever pundits out there have much larger models and they have many more respondents to their polls, so there's a lot information on what other people are doing as well," he says.

"But I think this is an important piece of information that says we may just be surprised by a stronger Obama performance come Election Day."

npr

[azblue82]

Obams wins the Presidency. Repubs maintain control of the House and Dems maintain control of the Senate. The status quo will be maintained for the most part, but we will get to see the changes due to Obamacare. Adding 30 million people or so to an existing health care system that is about to be turned upside down by Peak Oil should be interesting to say the least.

I would definitely like to read what others think about peak oil and changes in health care services due to the changes in law and scientific reality.

[Fishman]

Romney wins 280 electoral , Dems hold Senate by one, House stays Republican. Pops post stated "predict the ramifications of the 2012 US election" Ramifications implies consequences. Romney stays in office at 8 years with Ryan at least another 4. Supreme Court goes 6/3 conservative. Any and all states desiring voter id laws passes, cutting out the dead/ multiple voters, Dems lose 2 -3 % of their electorate. Any and all states desiring immigration laws get their wish. Mass movement of illegals to California, California goes bankrupt. Feds say, want money?, enforce the law. Business surge for at least 12 months. But price of oil goes up. Europe declines even further in the face of the oil costs. Romney carefully lays out peak oil and plans to deal with it. Democratic Party ceases to exist.

[Pops]

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com reports that 19 of 22 polls have O ahead in the tipping point states, 2 ties and one for Romney.
306 electoral votes for O is his guess, 85% probability of a win.

He kinda snarks at the headlines saying it's a tossup.

A tossup race isn’t likely to produce 19 leads for one candidate and one for the other — any more than a fair coin is likely to come up heads 19 times and tails just once in 20 tosses. (The probability of a fair coin doing so is about 1 chance in 50,000.)

Unless of course ALL the polls are wrong.

[Fishman]

"I would definitely like to read what others think about peak oil and changes in health care services due to the changes in law and scientific reality."

Health care is three components, cost, access, quality/technology. Assuming a broke country extends further access, quality will have to plummet. See Greece at present, universal healthcare, broke country, very little access to meds at present.
I'm actually ok with universal access but you have to know the consequences. The VAST majority of healthcare dollars at present go to the last 30 days of life. Want to cut costs? Allow physicians to define futile care, they already do it in Texas.

Election ramifications, tort reform, more defining of futile care .

[Fishman]

Sorry Pops, you have to look at the internals of the polls. Asking 3% more Democrats than actually turned out in 2008, giving Obama a 1% lead? The polls are correct actually, if you read the internals. Romney will win because of the Republican enthusiasm. 2008 + 6 for Democrats, 2012, + 2 for Republicans.

[dinopello]

Well this election was Romney's to win and by historical standard he should win in a landslide. If he just stayed mute and invisible, he would win based on the employment number alone - but I don't think he and the Republicans have kept their collective mouths shut enough.

Romney's promise to go on an unprecedented spending spree on the military is going to win him Virginia in a squeaker. With the voter suppression successes in Florida, I don't see how Romney could possibly lose that state. Ohio though saw the voter suppression efforts mostly thwarted by the courts and worse of all for the Romney campaign - that stupid tactic of using a poorly worded blog post to base a series of false speeches and ads about Chrysler moving Ohioans jobs to China is going to lose Ohio for him. He continues after the author of the blog, the management of Chrysler and the unions have said it was false and the people in Ohio can see for themselves the plant expansions ongoing in Ohio. That ad is pissing off people who would have voted Romney, much less those that were undecided.

So, I haven't done the math but they keep saying that Romney has to win Ohio. If that's true then Obama wins.

Whoever is president next year will enjoy a minor boom. There is a lot of private money on the sidelines and a lot of congress (R's and D's) itching to spend money. An Obama second term or a Romney first term will free the mainstream R's to join the D's in passing the spending bills, neutering the T's. Lots of money on the sidelines including a huge, huge chunk overseas waiting to invest in the best thing going (USA). The overseas money, a lot of which is expats who made lots of $ in Russia and elsewhere and were waiting to see if they would get government that would waive the taxes they would otherwise need to pay to repatriate that dough is going to come back regardless. Can the boom be fueled with energy is the question.