In 2012, Obama seizes control of the battlegrounds
Where the electoral votes are (2000 census)
As everyone who followed the 2000 Bush-Gore election knows, American presidents are chosen not by direct votes but by electoral college votes allocated to each US state.
Which means that national “horse race” polls don’t always tell us that much about the state of a campaign. National polls generally show Barack Obama leading by fairly narrow margins, between 1 and 7 points.
So I’ve spent a few hours, poring over polls for big battleground states, the kind of “purple” territory that general defines presidential contests.
The takeaway? So far at least Barack Obama holds a much more commanding position across the map than national polls suggest.
Going back as far as polls conducted in late February, Mitt Romney is running strong in Georgia, holding a 7-point lead over Obama. He’s also dominating Arizona, leading by 11 points.
That’s crucial. If those states were slipping away (as some have suggested they might) Romney’s path to victory would be problematic indeed.
But the latest polls still hold plenty of sour news for Romney. A recent survey in Wisconsin has the President up 14 points over Romney. In Virginia, Obama is up 17 points. And in Ohio, Romney is losing to Obama by 12 points.
In Pennsylvania, Obama is up by 1 to 7 points, depending on the poll. (I’ve used Romney as his match-up because Obama polls even better against Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul.)
And in Forida and North Carolina, the Democrat is up by 3 points.
If Obama holds those leads, or even a significant number of them, he wins re-election handily.
Indeed, if the election occurred today and the polls proved exactly right, Obama would capture at least 327 electoral votes.That’s a whopping 57 more than he needs to snag a second term.
Even more difficult for Republicans is the fact that Obama could also put some additional western states in serious play, including Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada.
Whoever the Republican nominee is, I think it’s fair to say that he will have a much narrower path to victory than the one Obama must walk.
The GOP standard bearer will have to flip at least two or three important states, pulling them back into the GOP camp.
That’s a tough thing to do in any election against an incumbent president. If disarray persists in the Republican primary, opportunities for Romney (or the other GOP candidates) to reclaim the high ground will dwindle fast.
Tags: analysis, election12, politics
Mervel, your guess is as good as mine as to what the world will be like twenty years from now, that is, not much. But I didn’t mean that religion would be a footnote twenty years from now, rather that the current desperate attempt to prove that Christianity is essential to the well-being of the United States will be a footnote. I’m guessing that over time U.S. Christians will become reconciled to the idea that the U.S. is irretrievably a multi-cultural nation with a steadily dwindling proportion of regular church goers. But I acknowledge that I could be very wrong.
And is Christianity truly growing in Russia today or is it simply re-emerging from attempts to suppress it? Will the level of participation return to pre-1917 levels? It would be interesting to know, but I imagine it would be a very difficult question to answer.
As for the lack of social pressure to go to church or to be a Christian in the U.S., there may be a reduction of such pressure, but I don’t think it’s gone by any means. When are we going to elect an openly atheist president? And the rise of the megachurch strikes me as contrary to your vision of church attendance becoming more directly linked to faith.
“And your wealthy white man point is weak.” Actually the original Bill of Rights protected only land-owning white men.
Exactly which of the Founders’ principles are secularists fighting against? The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights?
By head count Christianity is the dominant religion in the US. And you think Christians are being persecuted or their rights infringed upon? How are you personally prevented from practicing your religion?
“And the fact that President Obama, the topic of this thread, isn’t lining up well with the Founders’ intentions.” What is your basis for making that outrageous claim?
All I keep hearing is a bunch of vague phrases like Founders intentions (and your certainty of them) and Christian principles with no specifics of what they are or how they are being denied by secularists or anyone else?
Ultimately ones faith is a matter between the individual and God. Churches are free to promote their brand of religion – it is not the government’s role to do so.
Ohh ok walker.
I would agree with you.
The history of political activism by Christians is very interesting. It is a relatively new trend since the 1980’s actually.
I do think countries that have a rich religious spiritual traditions are more interesting than those who don’t. I hope Christians/Muslim’s/Buddhists/Jews etc. don’t totally retreat from the public square in our country. Every country needs some sort of antidote to the relentless press of materialism and commercialism.
I would agree that religious spiritual traditions help to make a country interesting, but my what dreadful things have been done in the name of one religion or another! And I wish that those traditions worked more effectively as an antidote to materialism and commercialism.
It would be interesting to try to discover whether atheists were more or less materialistic than religious people. I suspect that there is little connection. It is, at the very least, intriguing that those who are most intensely opposed to taxes and social programs simultaneously trumpet their religiosity.
There is a lot of interesting info at that link, like the graph showing that the prevalence of church attendance is inversely correlated with a nation’s welfare spending. I think this must be related to the just world hypothesis. It makes perfect sense: if you believe that the world is governed by a just god, then those who suffer must deserve to suffer.
Well it depends on the data set you are looking at. I think in the US in recent years; yes there has been a move among a subset of Christians, largely evangelicals since the 1980’s to become more interested in traditional politically conservative principles, including less spending on welfare programs.
But for example the largest Christian Church in the US has favored increased spending on the poor for a long time and does now and even with the current rift due to mandates, favors universal single payer health care.
I think that spiritual devotion itself increases our ability to reject materialism. I also think many atheists are actually very spiritual in some ways, the sense of awe from creation itself is a form of religious devotion.
I don’t think there is always a connection between believing something politically and spiritually. Thus people may be conservative for a variety of reasons and liberal for a variety of reasons and these may cut across spiritual beliefs.
I just think Bhutan is more interesting than China for example. Theocracies don’t always mean oppression, sometimes intense secularism is just as oppressive.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bhutan expelled or forced to leave nearly one fifth of its population in the name of preserving its Tibetan Mahayana Buddhist culture and identity. The Lhotshampas, the ethnic group persecuted by the Bhutanese government, were subject to “harassment, arrests and the burning of ethnic Nepali homes.” The government enacted discriminatory citizenship laws against the Lhotshampas, stripping about one-fifth of its population of citizenship. A harassment campaign escalating in the early 1990s ensued, and afterwards Bhutanese security forces began expelling people after making them renounce claims to their homes and homeland. A refugee recounted, “The army took all the people from their houses. As we left Bhutan, we were forced to sign the document. They snapped our photos. The man told me to smile, to show my teeth. He wanted to show that I was leaving my country willingly, happily, that I was not forced to leave.”
Here is a quote from Ravi Zacharias.
“Postmodernism tells us there’s no such thing as truth; no such thing as meaning; no such thing as certainty. I remember lecturing at Ohio State University, one of the largest universities in this country. I was minutes away from beginning my lecture, and my host was driving me past a new building called the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts. He said, ‘This is America’s first postmodern building.’ I was startled for a moment and I said, ‘What is a postmodern building?’ He said, ‘Well, the architect said that he designed this building with no design in mind. When the architect was asked, ‘Why?’ he said, ‘If life itself is capricious, why should our buildings have any design and any meaning?’ So he has pillars that have no purpose. He has stairways that go nowhere. He has a senseless building built and somebody has paid for it.’ I said, ‘So his argument was that if life has no purpose and design, why should the building have any design?’ He said, ‘That is correct.’ I said, ‘Did he do the same with the foundation?’ All of a sudden there was silence. You see, you and I can fool with the infrastructure as much as we would like, but we dare not fool with the foundation because it will call our bluff in a hurry.”
Nice quote, but I’m not sure what you’re taking it to mean.
Yeah but walker we could also start comparing intensely secular countries like China, the old Soviet Union, Cambodia under Pol Pot and so forth.
Bhutan certainly has been no model, but they have also been a closed kingdom and have certainly tried to preserve their country and their environment from the ravages of western expansion and commercialism.
Mervel, I’d be more impressed if the Bhutanese people had chosen to reject commercialism. Like the Amish.
Its still a cool country.