Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator

In the Hungarian article it was written about the reform of the Republican party by Ronald Reagan (originally started by Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson), where they laid down the principles of the republican ideology based on religionist, family oriented, patriots of the country, etc. A party customized for the majority of the people could win all time elections. Also if you win once you can simply win for the second term as we saw it in the past 20 odd years.

I have no clue how it works elsewhere on the world but in Hungary the majority of the voters are Socialist oriented retired people (who gladly remember communism as a good thing) and the only time the Soci's lost election when the elder suffered some economic package due a financial crisis of the country back in '95 and affected until the '98 elections. They didn't vote for the other side but they just didn't go vote and it was enough for the opposition to win it.

You may be right about Hungary, but you miss a very important point. I just googled and found out that voter turnout in Hungary is pretty constant above 70%. In America, it is always around 50%.

Why is voter turnout in America so low? Who benefits from that? Who are the voters who don´t vote? Isn´t it true that the Republicans go a long way to make sure turnout is low, for example by purging people from the lists?

The point is that Repubs do indeed have a "natural majority" in the one half of the electorate who usually shows up at the polling stations. But! The core of Obama´s strategy is to bring new voters to the polls, i.e. register new voters. There is strong evidence that this was very, very successful so far. Add to that that Hillary didn´t drop out of the primaries until the bitter end, resulting ti the fact that two Democarats had to build up a strong organization (and register as many voters as possible) in every single state. Obama´s campaign now benefits a lot from that.

The point is that we will see a record turnout this time. The point is that we have a very different (bigger) electorate that we have seen in the last decades. Who are the 50% who didn´t vote so far? So far, voter turnout was lowest among ethnic minorities, working class, urban areas, African Americans. If that isn´t the case this time - and there is evidence for that - the "natural majority" of the Republicans is gone. Q.E.D.

Before anyone would doubt my intensions, I'd vote for Obama

No worries mate, I never assumed you agree with the article you posted or you would vote McCain. Sorry if I didn´t make that clear enough.

if I could or do anything to avoid another miserable failure but having a clear point of view about things, try to be more realistic to calculate chances for any odds could happen. Also a bit sceptic as that miserable failure won. Twice. It would never happen in a normal country but it did happen in the US.

No, he did not win twice. Gore got more votes and Florida was a farce. Bush did not win in 2000, that is a matter of fact. There are some strong doubts if everything went right in 2004. Besides that, Kerry is a retard who said the most stupid things; you would want to think he didn´t want to win.

I've also heard about the polls about it is 49-44 odds in favour to Obama but it is falling just under the statistic probability

You´re basically right about that, but it doesn´t matter. The winner has to carry enough states to get to 270 electoral votes. If you like Risk, you will love this site:

http://www.electoral-vote.com/

To win the game, you need 270 electoral votes. Kerry got 252. The map on this site has every single poll of every single state and calculates the average of them. If you look at the map closely, you´ll see that Obama leads with at least 10 points in every single state Kerry won (only exception: New Hampshire, where he is only 8 points up). In addition to the Kerry states, Obama is also more than 10 points up in Iowa and New Mexico.

So: would you agree that a difference of more than 10 points is not any more within the margin of error - especially if these results are not from only one poll, but the average of many? Can all the polls be that wrong?

The states where Obama is up by at least 10 points add up to 260 electoral votes. He needs 270 [actually only 269 - if it´s a tie congress decides, which has a Dem majority]. For a McCain victory, he needs to win everything which is not dark blue on that map - including NH (Obama 8 points up in 4 polls), VA (Obama 7 up, 7 polls), OH (O 7 up, 6 polls) and CO (O 7 up, 3 polls).

That seems very, very unlikely to me.

When the McCain campaign was still optimistic, their strategy was to defend all the Bush-2004 states and have a serious shot at New Hampshire and Michigan (2 states Kerry won). That´s all. That´s a very defensive plan to start with, innit? In the meantime, they have already pulled out of Michigan (Obama is 18 points up there!) while New Mexico and Iowa alre almost certainly lost. Their strategy is now to flip Pennsylvania, another Kerry state where Obama is 11 points up (OK, he lost spectacularly there in the primaries). Translate this into a game of Risk: you do that sort of thing when you are tired and desperately want to go to bed and when you´re drunk enough to try an offensive against a superior opponent who you loathe, just to show him you prefer to go down fighting before he wins anyway.

I love to follow that race because the rules are so weird that they give every hobby strategist something to rack one´s brains.Obama is the Michael Schumacher in this race: superior car, better staff, better strategy and little hope for anyone he ever makes a stupid mistake.

Let´s see next Tuesday, but to me, this is a done deal.This race could be over very soon. The polls first close in Virginia. If Obama wins there (7 points up there now, seven polls) there is almost no plausible scenario how McCain can still pick up 270 electoral votes.
IMHO, this is only about either a modest Obama victory with around 300 electoral votes or a full-blown landslide, with Repub home turf like Georgia voting blue. The ultimate humiliation for McCain would be losing in his home state Arizona, where he is only 6 points up right now.

and just remembered the same thing happened 4 years ago, so even then the Republicans still have a chance to cheat the elections. We saw that at the last two elections, will see what's gonna happen in a week.

Would a Michael Schumacher forget about something like that? The Obama campaign has already hired 5000 lawyers to make bloody sure nobody cheats. Leaflets with telephone hotline numbers have been distributed, voters have been told to bring their cellphones to the polling stations. People with cameras will be there. Next tuesday, the coverage on YouTube will be far more interesting to watch than any calble news network. The troops are well prepared! :)

Let's hope there will be enough people who remember Bush's 8 years but as I've heard 17% of the people in the US still think Bush id doing a great job. :confused: Also don't forget that Obama is racing against a "maverick" who is still puppeted by Karl Rove.

I heard it was only 10% who think Bush is doing a good job -- did it go up? :confused:

I've also heard about the polls about it is 49-44 odds in favour to Obama but it is falling just under the statistic probability and just remembered the same thing happened 4 years ago, so even then the Republicans still have a chance to cheat the elections. We saw that at the last two elections, will see what's gonna happen in a week.

There are efforts to have citizen election monitoring this time. Technology makes it easier:
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2008/10/23-14

I think CNN has a voter fraud hotline.
Not sure if it will help -- they're already purging a lot of voters:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/9/8/0144/73374/148/589714

They just tried to purge 200,000 voters in Ohio. The Supreme Court said it was illegal to purge them. So the White House stepped in and tried to override it...

I think CNN has a voter fraud hotline.
Not sure if it will help -- they're already purging a lot of voters:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/9/8/0144/73374/148/589714

They just tried to purge 200,000 voters in Ohio. The Supreme Court said it was illegal to purge them. So the White House stepped in and tried to override it...

Banana Republic. Enough said.

Banana Republic.

Banana Republicans :)

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