"Drive for Obama on Election Day!"

Senator Obama has reiterated his pledge to drive up African American turnout by 30%.  He also said that he'd drive up the youth vote by similar numbers.  

http://news.yahoo.com/...

If he can pull it off he will obliterate John McCain.  I cannot stress this enough.  If there's anything that the Obama campaign has been able to do it has been to drive turnout.  I think he's probably on the money here.

A storm is gathering...

As much as the media narrative screams "close race" and tries to make us believe that there is some sort of rallying of the republican faithful taking place around Grandpa John -- it's all bullshit, and they know it.

I am a long beaten down Democrat, living in a deeply red district in Washington State, seriously disheartened by the disasters of two Bush terms, and 16 years with Doc Hastings as my representative, and I am telling you right now, Obama is going to win in a landslide.  It won't even be close. He'll win at least 300 electoral votes, probably more.

The difference will be turnout.  No opinion poll can tell me what a likely voter will look like in November, just as they couldn't have predicted the record shattering showing Democrats had in the primary race.  In 2004 we had 125 people show up at the county wide convention for John Kerry.  This year we had almost 700. This in a Bush +10 congressional district.  College campuses have become incubators for the largest turnout among the youth in history - probably even eclipsing that of 1972 when 18 year olds could first vote.  And, think of this -- the 50 state voter registration drive the campaign is planning hasn't even started yet.

Conservative icon and Pulitzer prize winning syndicated columnist George F. Will stopped by Morning Joe today. He made some pretty bold predictions about the general election, saying that Obama's edege in the polls is even greater than the current polling indicates because it doesn't take into account the probability for turnout. He says that Barack Obama has energized the voting public in a way that makes the current gloomy poll numbers even gloomier for conservatives.

George Will also had some frank words regarding the state of the Conservative movement in today's America. He said that today the Conservative movement is in a state of deep but not terminal confusion. He says that while it may be cliche "we came to Washington to change Washington... and Washington ended up changing us".

Check out the highlights from the interview:

I just got off the phone with a pro-Obama PDP leader in Puerto Rico.   He told me that they expect turnout to be low, as low as 200,000.  He also confirmed what others had told me that lower turnout can only help Obama due to the strength of the pro-commonwealth PDP machine under the leadership of Gov. Acevedo-Vila.  Publicly, pro-Obama PDP leaders have been predicting turnout at around 400,000.

Afterwards, I called a pro-Clinton NPP leader.  He told me that he believes turnout to be 750,000 (34% of registered voters), assuming prior primary data (e.g., the Kennedy-Carter primary turned out 800,000).  But he says that he has been telling the press 500,000 to err on the conservative side.    He agreed that the higher the turnout, the more likely it will be that Hillary will win.  

Both agree that Hillary is likely to win, but the pro-Obama leader told me that depending on turnout, it could be a squeaker.

George W. Bush and his republican cronies are desperate to keep as much power as they can.  Even with the horrible situation with which they have run this country into the ground, the Republicans continue ot fight to regain their lost power and to put McSame into the white house.  It will take all of us to fight back, but we can do it.  

a cartogram reminder.

Here is a reminder of what the 2004 electoral map really looked like from the University of Michigan.  In this map, counties are not only shaded from red through many purples to blue, they are also sized based on population.

Anybody watching for new voters enrolled in West Virginia or turnout forecasts?

This will be an uncontested election and HRC is expected to win in a walk.  

But the question to me is whether HRC attracts new voters - or many voters - as happens in Obama-land.  In the many elections that went uncontested by HRC I think we saw enrollment and turnout surges.

If turnout and new voter lists in WV are very low on Tuesday - that would be a big takeaway from me.

Never Give UP, Never Surrender

From the NC Board of Elections website:

Mike Huckabee 12.17% 63,061
Alan Keyes 2.63% 13,631
John McCain 73.99% 383,401
Ron Paul         7.22% 37,392
No Preference 3.99% 20,667
TOTAL VOTES 518,152

The Republican vote was less than 1/3 of the Democratic vote of 1,593,335, and McCain's total was only 43% of Obama's 897,017.

The popular vote is a fallacy, as I've written before.  A brief recap:  1) Candidates would camp out in large urban areas like LA and Brooklyn and never spend so many millions trying to split 200,000 votes in the whole state of NH; 2) No state would rationally hold a caucus, thereby disenfranchising its say in the nomination selection; and 3) unlike the general election concept of one person, one vote, allowing independents or Republicans to vote in some states but not others badly skews the simplistic moral argument underpinning popular vote.

Tuesday night, I am watching two numbers.  First, if Obama takes down a combined 98 pledged delegates then pledged delegate checkmate can officially be declared, with the remaining 37 proportional races guaranteed to give Obama at least a minimum 1 vote and thus put him over the top on the minimum viability alone.

Second, I want to see Obama erase Clinton's PA popular vote gain, which would finally drive a stake into that argument.

This diary is a straightforward analysis of what it will take to regain 214,224 votes.

This isn't gonna be much of a diary. It's mostly just a couple questions that I'm hoping you guys can answer. I know North Carolina is still looking pretty good for Obama, and most people are still expecting a win for him. But something is just kinda bugging me .... a little, gnawing doubt that I need to ask about...

This is an update to "The Cult of Popularity" from April 11 about the final ten contests in the Democratic Presidential Preference elections. Since we are just under one week until the Pennsylvania Primary - I thought now would be a good time for us to visit that "popular vote" strategy that Senator Clinton is trying to employ to sway delegates (both superdelegates and elected delegates) to her side.

I will repeat the same response I have whenever someone tries to rewrite the rules. The DNC determines the Democratic Nominee by only one measure: Delegate count in sanctioned, legitimate elections. However, to quell the cries, I've laid out the math of the popular vote scenario. Since the first post, Clinton has made a little headway in the projection (about 11,000 votes) due to a .8% increase in her Real Clear Politics average lead in PA and a new SurveyUSA poll in Kentucky. However, at the same time Obama has tightened the race in Indiana and increased his numbers in Montana and South Dakota while losing a smidgen in North Carolina.

Rasmussen and Survey USA are responsible for the vast majority of polling data that we've seen so far on the general election. Fortunately for us, they also happen to be two of the historically most accurate pollsters.

However, as I've alluded to a couple of times, there have come to be some systematic differences in the numbers each Democrat has received from each agency. The difference is particularly notable for Hillary Clinton.

There has been some cringing and agonizing over Obama's drop in the national polls in the last week.  This is no doubt attributable to the relentless coverage of Reverend Wright's remarks from the pulpit.  

Well, I'm here to tell ya boys and girls, those polls mean nothing.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.  Wanna know why?  Follow me below the fold...

It was an odd time to hit adolescence, both physically and politically: in the middle of the Iraq war and the subsequent re-elections of both the parties who perpetrated it.  In the United Kingdom, cynicism was loud in 2005.  The Bush/Blair master-and-poodle meme was rife even before the weight of the realisation had dawned on most of us.  Our governments had lied to us. Innocent men and women died because of those lies.  

Today, Tony Blair’s Labour party has never recovered from the mere association with the current President of the United States.  That party’s demise in 2009-10 is inevitable.

But what of America?  Citizens suffering similarly the abuse of civil rights, the projected fear of terrorism, what would they do?  What precedent would they set for, not just the U.S, but the world?  This question became increasingly important when news of the primaries first trickled into public consciousness.  A woman and a black man running for President!  Surely this was an opportunity for American citizens to oust the guilty Government as stylishly as possible.

As the primaries have gone on, however, the reality of the opportunity in Americans’ hands has grown more poignant. I shall hope to shed some light on the issue in this diary.

"Let's get real" is a great catchphrase until reality steps in and smacks you upside the head with a 2X4.

Hillary Clinton seems to have dropped the phrase, "Let's get real" since the Potomac primaries, and for good reason. Instead she's gone to the kitchen and grabbed the sink, along with the gargage disposal, and thrown it at Barak Obama to claim her inheritance. Seemingly out of desperation to win at any cost. If she were to take her own advice and "get real", she'd drop out yesterdat and realize that unifying the Democratic party as soon as possible is the best possible way to deafeat "Bush Term 3". Apparently she has a different point of view on all this because she believes she was somehow destined to become the Democratic nominee for 2008.

But, let's take a realistic look at what lies ahead..... "let's get real" about it.

At this point, it is totally unrealistic that she is going to win approximately 70% of the remaining delegates to take the lead in the delegate count before the convention in Denver. So, her only realistic plan is to stay as close as possible and then convince the superdelegates to annoint her and undermine the majority of the voters to secure the nomination. But that is neither here nor there when it comes to "getting real".

Last Friday, in the wake of the SUSA 50-state head-to-head polls, Clambake posted an almost-totally ignored diary called Fun with Numbers - General Election that posed a pretty basic question:

I decided to test some of the conventional wisdom regarding the effect of a Clinton nomination seen to be somehow less than legitimate or satisfying.  My assumption was that this would have a horrible influence on African American turnout for the general election, and would cause defections among non-African Americans to McCain.

Following the SUSA numbers, even working with a somewhat more realistic voting split, I agreed with Clambake on his bottom line: depressing AA turnout across the board by 3% cost Clinton Pennsylvania (and thus the hypothetical election) but there was no other consequence until over 25% AA depression.

I found it interesting, and decided to focus on the sunnier question of what an increase in AA voting would mean for Obama, but given the events of the past week, I think Clambake's scenario, while gloomier and less interesting from a playing-with-numbers standpoint, is much more important to the primary.

I live in Memphis, TN and thus did not vote today.  But part of Memphis Metro did.  DeSoto County, Mississippi.

Bush got a whopping 72% of the votes in 2004 in DeSoto County.  During this primary, the Dems got ~8000 total votes.  The wing-nuts got only ~11000 total.  Wow.  And this came with the fact that a high-profile GOP House race was going on between the Southaven mayor and former Tupelo mayor (link), a seat that was fallout when Trent Lott's senate seat was replaced this year.  Double wow.

The Commercial Appeal is reporting that the Democrat Primary turnout was unusually high, leading some DeSoto County polling stations to run out of ballots.

Commercial Appeal Link

Follow me below the fold for more, including excerpts from the story linked above.