Obama rides his landslide machine

[babylonsister]

Obama rides his landslide machine
The Democrat is heading for a huge win, thanks to a masterful courting of new voters
Andrew Sullivan


To talk to Democrats these days is to witness a strange mix of enormous anticipated relief and near nervous collapse. They haven’t cared about an election this much for a long time. They went through the interminable agony of 2000 and then the crushing whiplash of election day in 2004, when they thought they’d won and realised, as the night went on, that they’d lost.

To put it bluntly: they simply cannot believe the polls right now. The numbers are too good for a Democrat running for the presidency from scratch. They just don’t feel right. A clear lead for a nonincumbent black guy from Chicago against a war hero and a Barbie doll? Shurely shome mishtake. But in fact there is no obvious mishtake.

The cold reality – measured as these things have been measured in the past – is undeniable. If you put every poll into the blender, if you include all the psepho-logical data and run the model as many times as you can, the statistical likelihood of Barack Obama winning the election, if it were held today, is well over 90%.

And that’s deeply unnerving. There is, in fact, very little recent precedent for such a comfortable victory. The last Democrat who won the White House as a nonincumbent was Bill Clinton, and he ran in a strange three-way race in 1992 and won only 43% of the vote, which is roughly what John McCain is getting now. Jimmy Carter was the last one before that, and his margin of victory in 1976 was 2%, in the wake of Watergate. Lyndon Johnson inherited the office from a martyred Kennedy, and Kennedy won it by a mere sliver in 1960. So the idea that a nonincumbent Democrat could win the White House by a landslide is indeed strange. It hasn’t happened in my lifetime. In fact, it hasn’t happened since Franklin D Roosevelt.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article4967569.ece

[DavidDvorkin]

1. For a long time, I've been hoping for a repetition of 1932

I hoped for it four years ago and eight years ago. I still think it happened both times, and if that's so, then there's still reason to be worried about the official vote numbers this time around.