The last Republican nominee to win the Presidency without North Carolina was Dwight Eisenhower.

Everything would have to go right for him and wrong for the eventual Republican nominee. Call it an inside straight. If he were going to be President, then he had opportunities from 1988 to 2004. '88, '92, '00, and '04.

He must be in good health without qualification. He must face an unusually weak Republican nominee for President or one who proves 'damaged goods' after being nominated. Barack Obama must be widely recognized as one of the better Presidents in American history at the time. It would not be enough for President Obama to be as good as Dwight Eisenhower; he would have to be seen about as good as Eisenhower is seen today. "Somewhat successful", like Bill Clinton in 2000?  Were that enough we would have had President Al Gore... and most likely the Twin Towers still standing as well.   

 

Blank map.



Red is for Democrats and blue for Republicans. Even is white. Districts of Maine and Nebraska will be colored to match the PVI for the respective districts for 2014.  



Even -- 10% yellow (which is white)
   +1 or  +2    20% saturation
   +3 or  +4    30% saturation
   +5 or  +6    40% saturation
   +7 to  +9    60% saturation
+10 to +15    70% saturation
+16 or more  90% saturation

Extremes are DC (D+40) and the Third Congressional District of Nebraska (+23). Extremes for States are Hawaii (D+20) and a tie between Utah and Wyoming (R+20).

I don't really see that many swing states in there. Take GA for example. In 2000 it had a GOP lean of 12.2 (Bush won by 11.7 points, lost by 0.5 nationally). In the most recent election it still had a GOP lean of 11.7 (Romney won by 7.8, lost nationally by 3.9). So not that much of a change. I'd say the polarization in some of these states is too set in its place and only some sort of massive influx of Hispanics and northerners can upset it. I suppose that means TX may at some point be blue and Montana could be an upset special with a Democrat from the state on the ticket.

The 2008 and 2012 elections have been extremely polarized. That could be Barack Obama, whether people depend upon or reject FoX News Channel, GOP front groups, race... whether visceral issues matter that much in a subsequent election is to be seen in 2016. 

Obama gets a modest Boston-bump:

Approval today is 52/53% vs. 40/43% disapproval.

This is up from ca. 47-47 approval before Boston.

5% is huge.

[well regulated]

Once upon a time:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Emphasis mine.

Precisely. That does not mean the Bloods, Crips, Aryan Brotherhood, or MS-13.

[60% or higher maroon (70% saturation)55-59% medium red (50% saturation)50-54% pink (30% saturation)45-49% orange -- Obama ahead (30% saturation)]

Quinnipiac, Ohio

President Barack Obama's job approval rating in Ohio has dipped to a negative 45 - 51 percent, compared to 48 - 47 percent in March and 54 - 42 percent last December.

http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes--centers/polling-institute/ohio/release-detail?ReleaseID=1884

Slipping shows in Ohio.


60% or higher maroon (70% saturation)
55-59% medium red (50% saturation)
50-54% pink (30% saturation)
45-49% orange -- Obama ahead (30% saturation)
45-49% yellow -- exact tie (30% saturation)
45-49% aqua -- Obama behind (20% saturation)
40-44% blue (50% saturation)
under 40% deep blue (70% saturation)

I can't see Hillary win a general election. She's been around too long, too polarizing, not to mention the women going into the voting booth, crying because they are scared of Bill Clinton..

She gets the Obama vote -- and the vote of people nostalgic for Bill Clinton who could never vote for Barack Obama. She has proved herself competent. 40-state landslide.

[green]

April 11-14, 2013
Survey of 500 Colorado voters

Colorado Survey Results (PPP)

Q1 Do you approve or disapprove of Governor
John Hickenlooper’s job performance?

53% Approve

44% Disapprove

4% Not sure

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_CO_417.pdf





tie white
1-3%       20% saturation
4-7%       40% saturation
8%-20%  60% saturation
over 20% 80% saturation

Behind, yellow the colors to green for Republicans  and orange for Democrats. Dark shades of orange are really brown.  Ties are yellow.


Qualification: The lowest level of saturation  (20%) now applies for any incumbent Governor whose positive margin of  approval is under 8% but whose approval rating is under 50%. The second-lowest level of saturation (40%) now applies to any Governor whose approval rating is under 50% but whose margin of difference is 8% or higher. No change applies to any Governor whose approval is lower than disapproval. A governor is not in a strong position until he has at least 50% approval. The rationale is to avoid giving a recently-elected Governor credit for a "honeymoon".


Governors who die, resign, are defeated in bids for re-election, retire at the end of their terms, or are impeached and removed from office will be whited out. Independent governor or no governor -- white.











[/quote]

Checks with large denominations will be cut today, payable to re-election funds. May they prove futile!

Shoulda, woulda, coulda. With the information the government had in 2003, the Iraq War was the right choice. It's easy to sit here in 2013 and complain.

Corrected:

Shoulda, woulda, coulda. With the information the government (suppressed) in 2003, the Iraq War seemed the right choice. It's easy to sit here in 2013 and complain. 

We must never elect another President so dishonest and hollow as Dubya again lest we get a calamity even more severe because the enemy has more powerful resources. When we get leaders who lack caution, kindness, and caution we get the potential for pointless apocalypse.

Rand Paul: German

Paul also has Irish ancestry.

Anyway, what about Scott Walker?  I can't find anything about him.

And does this field of candidates have the least English ancestry of any group of presidential contenders in recent memory?  Throughout most of history, we've had a bunch of WASPs who can trace their ancestry to the British royal family.  This group, OTOH, is filled with German/Irish/Italians, many of whom are Catholic.  It "looks more like America", so to speak.  Granted, Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner, and she has the most "conventional" ancestry of the group.

The Roosevelts were Dutch. Hoover and Eisenhower were mainly of German extraction.

And having a connection to the British royal family isn't really anything to write home about. Just about anyone with an Ancestry.com membership and some spare time can find out they're related to someone important. Isn't Obama tangentially related to Queen Elizabeth somehow through his mother's family?

The Roosevelt family was originally Dutch. TR's mother was Scots-Irish; FDR was more English than anything else, but he had Dutch (of course), French Huguenot, and German ancestry.  He was a fairly close relative of Sir Winston Churchill and knew it. 

The maternal side of Barack Obama is more English than anything else. Oddly he is related to Dick Cheney.

Rand Paul: German

Paul also has Irish ancestry.

Anyway, what about Scott Walker?  I can't find anything about him.

And does this field of candidates have the least English ancestry of any group of presidential contenders in recent memory?  Throughout most of history, we've had a bunch of WASPs who can trace their ancestry to the British royal family.  This group, OTOH, is filled with German/Irish/Italians, many of whom are Catholic.  It "looks more like America", so to speak.  Granted, Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner, and she has the most "conventional" ancestry of the group.

The Roosevelts were Dutch. Hoover and Eisenhower were mainly of German extraction.

And having a connection to the British royal family isn't really anything to write home about. Just about anyone with an Ancestry.com membership and some spare time can find out they're related to someone important. Isn't Obama tangentially related to Queen Elizabeth somehow through his mother's family?

The Roosevelt family was originally Dutch. TR's mother was Scots-Irish; FDR was more English than anything else, but he had Dutch (of course), French Huguenot, and German ancestry.  He was a fairly close relative of Sir Winston Churchill and knew it. 

...If the universe isn't random, if it was put here solely for us, who put it there and why did they make it for us?

It isn't. In another time the Earth was made for sabertooth cats. In an earlier time it was T Rex who existed at the top.

There's some question about what the most supremely-intelligent land animal is. The elephant may be smarter than us. Top of the food chain? The dog may be just above us. Dogs will force you to change your behavior if they don't like it.   

We have been in existence as a species for only a short time in the existence of the thirteen-billion-year-old universe.  If something goes wrong with us and we wreck ourselves it could be pigs who rule -- maybe with dogs as enforcers. That is not a new idea. Orwell came up with that one. 

It is metaphor anyway.

Judges. It's stupid to elect your coroner, but at least it doesn't set up a clear conflict of interest.

Elected judges*, DAs, and sheriffs can become pawns of people who want lax law enforcement to the detriment of the community as a whole. Election of such people is in itself a good reason for keeping felons off voter rolls. Other bad ones -- anyone with responsibility for administering an election. Such is ideally non-partisan. 

*This is not to be confused with some "county judges" who administer roads, drains, and other local public works but have no judicial responsibilities.

 

And making a million dollars an hour shouldn't seem strange or repugnant -- it's what every person should strive for. I'm disappointed that for somebody out there it does.

People should strive to be humble, helpful, joyful, and unworldly, Vosem.

Ultimately, what people strive for is their own decision that they should be free to make.

That's not what you said last post.

But neither is it contradictory. What people strive for is their own decision to make. My personal ideal is that, for your own future and the future of any dependents you may have, making a s***load of money is the best thing you could strive for. But others disagree, and certainly there are certain lines striving for money probably shouldn't cross.

One of those lines is not being hated as an exploiter who makes life miserable for others.

Speaking in the context of economics, of course the best thing you can do is strive to make as much money as possible. But you may have another goal in mind.

The others are all self-explanatory, but I'm not sure 'unworldly' has a place on a list of positive qualities. I'm listening to your explanation though.

If one is worldly, one is capable of being disappointed by such worldly setbacks as not making a million dollars an hour. To strive to be unworldly is to strive to not care whether one makes a million dollars an hour or not, so long as other goals, not linked or linked only through metaxy to the vicissitudes of quotidian careers and such, are within reach.

But, again, so that you're motivated to do your very best one should care by worldly setbacks. 'Unworldliness' as you define it, as a trait, affects those having it and those around them, generally, quite negatively.

It's great to be the Tsar -- until the Bolsheviks appear.
 

How very disgusting it is to have several people in the field of medicine in a single family. Also, while this isn't something I've read about extensively, I kind of doubt internship programs are a 'major contributor to out of control healthcare spending'. I suppose I'd be willing to accept that if you cited it. But I suspect within a few posts, like on the Ben Carson thread, you will be insisting your post was a joke.

Pretty sure he's accusing you of self-interested careerism of a sort that has no place in the medical field, Vosem.

Not only does it, it's a big part of the reason so many talented people are attracted to medicine; and the generally higher pay here is a big part of the reason talented doctors from around the world move to the US to practice. Such 'self-interested careerism' doesn't merely have a place in the medical field, but permeates it through and through -- and thank goodness for that.

Anyone motivated solely by the prospect of material gain in a profession is a scummy person.

Is there any reason TVA should be privatized? There doesn't seem to be any justification for it.

Those who advocate privatization   insist upon higher prices for others whose low-cost supplier be turned into a profiteer.

The current model for business success is higher prices through captive markets -- great for profits, and bad for people.

Most countries have long nationalized electrical power.

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: Americans will always want some level of inequality because it's a representation of a meritocracy. People who work hard and sacrifice and save their money and make major contributions: we think that they should earn a little more. And they should have more resources. And that's fine. But we also however have to have a floor under which nobody falls. And if you're below that, especially if you're a child and you're below that, we are not going to accept that.  You do have the right to health care, and to education, and to decent housing and to quality food at all times.

I don't see anything wrong with this? Seems like a sensible, mainstream position.

And no one has any rights, intrinsically, by simply existing as a human-being. All rights/privileges are created by the state. The question is which rights/privileges the state should enforce and which it should not. The positive/negative rights distinction is also nonsense. Any right can be positive or negative depending on how you rhetorically frame it.

The Corporate Right acts as if the common man owes the economic elite everything yet that the economic elite owes the rest of America nothing.  Life without dignity  is a nightmare. Life  without a reasonable expectation of sustenance is a lethal sham.

Say Obama was going for a 3rd term...i wonder how early polling would look like for him.

At 44% approval nationwide he would have roughly a 50% chance of winning the popular vote. The average incumbent gains 6% from approval from early polls. Challengers can carp at will at an incumbent not yet campaigning, and most issues are so polarized that almost everything is controversial. But once the campaign begins the incumbent who has been sniped at for some time shows why he was elected in the first place. So it is for an incumbent Governor or Senator, and probably an at-large House Representative. Because the Presidential election is fifty statewide elections (equivalent to Gubernatorial and Senatorial contests), five contests over Congressional districts, and one race to win a large city, the dynamics that elect a Governor or Senator apply nationwide. Also worth noting -- members of the House of Representatives and mayors of large cities do badly in Presidential campaigns.

There's one huge qualification: the incumbent must have been elected to begin with for the advantage to appear. Appointed Governors and Senators have a poor record of winning re-election in part because they have never shown the ability to win the office. Example: Gerald Ford wasn't a truly-bad President, but he still lost. Explanation: he had never won a statewide election, and had no idea how to run for President. Jimmy Carter at least knew how to do that.  

http://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/2010/03/nate-silver-debunks-another-polling.html

We saw many people convinced that because President Obama had approval ratings in the high 40s throughout 2012 that he would be defeated. That was without allowing for President Obama being an unusually-strong campaigner and a good strategist as in 2008. Obama might not have quite been in the league with FDR or Lincoln -- but he didn't have to be. The significant fact was that he never had a credible poll giving him less than 45% approval nationwide. If he had had approval ratings in the low 40s he would have likely lost.

It is easy to see in retrospect what would have put his approval ratings in the tank -- scandals, military or diplomatic debacles, or poor stewardship of the economy. Elected officials with those as a rule have low approval ratings and are extremely vulnerable. Scandals? They usually break a re-election bid before they are exposed because the media get cold to some pol who seems corrupt. Media give attention to those that they like, and someone who collects bribes or uses public funds to pay off a single mother who has his child turns journalists cold. Journalists know enough who is going down for such a scandal, and know enough to not treat them sympathetically.  Journalists rarely ride dead horses, and someone like Tom Brokaw is more likely to pump Barack Obama than Rod Blagojevich even though both might have seemed at one time to have similar chances to be President of the United States to the layman who 'knows' only what the media say.   



      

It never began.

This. It was just the conservative movement flexing its muscles under a different name.

Yep. I was back in school (getting my 2nd degree) when the Tea Party got started. I attended one meeting on campus and it was full of exactly the stuff he complains about in the article: the racism, the pro-Republican hypocrisy, the social conservative bigotry, the anti-science echoes of the Know-Nothings; it was all there right from the start.

That is why it is fading as an influence.

[60% or higher maroon (70% saturation)55-59% medium red (50% saturation)50-54% pink (30% saturation)45-49% orange -- Obama ahead (30% saturation)]

Kentucky Survey Results

Q1 Do you approve or disapprove of President
Barack Obama’s job performance?

35% Approve

62% Disapprove

3% Not sure

Q2 Do you approve or disapprove of Senator Mitch
McConnell’s job performance?

36% Approve

54% Disapprove

11% Not sure.

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_KY_040913.pdf

The political war is hurting both. Of course President Obama won't be up for re-election... but Mitch McConnell will. 

PPP will be polling Colorado and North Carolina this weekend




60% or higher maroon (70% saturation)
55-59% medium red (50% saturation)
50-54% pink (30% saturation)
45-49% orange -- Obama ahead (30% saturation)
45-49% yellow -- exact tie (30% saturation)
45-49% aqua -- Obama behind (20% saturation)
40-44% blue (50% saturation)
under 40% deep blue (70% saturation)

If one party were to collapse, I don't think one party rule would follow.  Look at what happened to the Democrat-Republicans after the collapse of the Federalists.  Fairly soon, the 'winning' party will split apart.

Most likely we would have a split between Social Democrats and Christian Democrats.

The Republican Party needs to return to its roots, the party of Lincoln, the party of Teddy Roosevelt, the party of Reagan, a big tent party, the party that champions individual liberty and equality, as in the fact the Republican Party was the party that championed the cause of the abolition of slavery, the party that  champions the principle that people are better qualified to make decisions than is the government, the party that believes that it is better to teach a man to fish so he will be able to eat for a lifetime rather than a party that believes it is better to give a man a fish so he can eat for a meal.

All that garbage has been completely discredited Winfield.

The truth never goes out of fashion my friend.

The truth is... that the Republican Party has become an elitist party on economics while dredging the electorate for superstitions and primal fears.  It has little to offer anyone else.

People who don't think it's all about money are kidding themselves. I suppose a Starbucks barista with a Masters in Early Modern English Literature may like to think of herself as better than a plumber.  Whatever gets you through the night.

So you don't think education is connected to social class?

Mere possession of huge amounts of cash does not put one in the upper class. An adjunct professor of art history almost certainly is higher on the SES scale than a bookie even though one of them struggles to make ends meet and the other can buy every vulgar status symbol around.

Reality may be that the adjunct professor makes ends meet with a part time job selling cosmetics in a department store and may make more money in six hours of work  on non-teaching days than by teaching one course at a community college... but guess how she identifies herself? If she got a full-time position her only involvement with cosmetics would be as a consumer.