All praise Obama. Seriously. I know I've given him flack in the primary but that's long gone in my mind, and his GE campaign has been pretty flawless. If he governs like he runs a campaign we will all be happy. That said, this election is bigger than Obama. The challenge for Obama was to make the country comfortable with a black man with limited national exposure. His campaign crossed that hurdle. His embracing the 50 state effort and people financing of his campaign were what made it possible to win against the Republican machine, and Obama's personal ability to come across as a 21st century American made it happen. The winning message was change vs more of the same.
McCain: More of the Same, A Third Bush Term, Change-- from all of that to something different. It's the rejection of Bush Republicans and all they have not done to make the world a better place. Beating Bush is why I got involved in politics in the first place. It took a few years longer than I had hoped, but it is now going to happen. All I can hope for is that the Democrats fulfill on their promise to be different, because if they don't... I don't even want to think about it.
OK, onward. Here are the predictions.
Presidential: 52.2 to 45.8-- a 6.4 percent margin. The last days national trend in every poll thus far (there are a few outstanding) is toward Obama. TIPP had undecideds breaking 2:1 in Obama's favor. Battleground started moving to Obama, Zogby too... I'll predict we have a blowout: Unheard of in my lifetime for a Democrat. Well, actually, I was born in Feb '64, but I don't recall Johnson's blowout. 44 long years, and we finally have a Democratic blowout of the Republicans at the national level.
At the EV level, MyDD's counter has 338-200, which sounds good. I am a little bit nervous that IN, MO, and NC have all flipped back to McCain during the last week. McCain also has increased numbers in FL and OH, both of which I could see him winning. In VA, Obama has fallen below 50 percent on RCP, which could mean trouble. Both NV and CO have had recent polls showing it close. In short, all of the toss-up states seem to have tightened in McCain's favor the last week. This, even though the late-breaking undecideds, as picked up by the national tracking polls, are breaking to Obama. There's usually a lag from national to state, but McCain & the RNC have put all eggs into the toss-up states. My worst case scenario is that VA & PA are "too close to call" by the networks and we are up late waiting for the NV results to come in... the best is that Obama hits 400 by winning all the toss-ups, plus upsets in GA and AZ.
The MyDD EV map is now wiped clean for election day, and along with some really cool Google gadgets, I plan on calling each state and blogging the whole night.
Senate: A pickup of 9 seats. 60, yes! The trend has been for Senate toss-ups to all go one way or another, and not splitting. Since that's the case, I'll go with it. I've had the pleasure of working with 7 Senate races this cycle, and we are going to win all them:) Realistically, 58-59 would be terrific.
House: A pickup of 26 seats. Its probably the case that many of the seats we hope to win are in too red of gerrymandered CD's to actually win in a GE. Plus, we are going to lose seats-- this is a 'throw them out' election. We start with 235, and though I think we will takeaway 30 again, we will likely lose about 4.
After the election, I'm headed to Bahia Honda in the FL Keys for a week. Ah. Then it's on to 2009, and on with making sure that Brian Moran wins the governorship of Virginia. And for 2010, MyDD will be getting involved in a number of efforts to hold Democrats accountable.
Policy-wise, what I am most looking forward in the federal Democratic agenda is a gigantic move toward removing the American addiction to foreign fossil fuels. That has to happen. Even bigger though, I'm looking foward to the USA being a part of the world again; instead of going solo we go global. If the above predictions all play out today, can you imagine how transformational our policies could become that Jan-March of 2009?
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