Romney Looks Like the Next Pres

Thanks jem for the article which confirms my previous post about the built in incumbent lead that the polls dont show.I said 5-10 and it has actually been an average of + 7 for the incumbent



http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/do-presidential-polls-break-toward-challengers/



The other anomaly has been in the summer months — June, July and August. In these months, the polls have tended to low ball the position of the incumbent party’s candidate. In July polls, for instance, the incumbent-party candidate has trailed by an average of 4 points in elections since 1968. However, the incumbent-party candidate has actually won these elections by an average of a little more than 3 points. In other words, there has been a seven-point swing on average toward the incumbent party’s candidate from the July polls until November

 

Of course the money doesn't matter, right?

 

The money is, of course, important, but not for the reasons some think. The absurdity of the concept that we now have to live in America where one or a few can simply buy an election is outrageous. Both sides have to counter, much like the the cold war, is that where we really want to go with all this?

 

Why post that stuff if you leave out the part that negates your whole point. (which is why I did not post it... outside of what I posted - it shows a net nothing.)

"What accounts for this? It may be the effects of the party conventions, which can produce sharp — but ultimately ephemeral — “bounces” in the polls toward the party holding its convention. The challenging party always holds its convention before the incumbent party, and until the most recent years, it often held its convention in July. So it gets its bounce first, making its numbers artificially high for a month or so.
I do find that there is some tendency for the incumbent-party candidate to overperform his summer polls even after attempts have been made to account for these convention effects — but accounting for the conventions reduces that quite a lot. Whatever residual effects there are probably do not amount to much more than statistical noise from a small sample, in my view. Still, this certainly cuts against the notion that the polls necessarily break toward the challenger."

 

Of course the money matters its why dems and republicans prostitute themselves to insurance companies and wall street and cant' pass single payer or a new glass steagle but pass drug and insurance company care - called medicare part d and obamacare. (sp).

I think we need to get all money out of races except for small individual donations. Donations which are tied to each donor but a third party but their identity never revealed to the candidate.

Then since airwaves are licensed we can demand the networks give the candidates time for free.

 

Thank you for admitting it. I didn't think the Koch brothers, or Sheldon "I'm against very wealthy people attempting to or influencing elections, but as long as it's doable I'm going to do it" Adelson didn't know what they were doing. Now, let's revisit the WI recall vote, shall we? ; )

 

The Wisconsin recall vote would have been almost equal money if democrats didnt have to drop such a large sum to simply get the recall..... I believe i read an article that stated they spent 20 mill just to get the election(dont know for sure)......

Thats the disadvantage of a recall.....

 

There are downsides to your proposal.

You can't legally stop a candidate from spending his own money on a campaign. Thus, very wealthy individuals would always have a large advantage. Just look at the GOP primaries this year. Without larger donations, Romney wins after just a couple states because Gingrich and Santorum didn't have the cash to stretch it out.

It isn't as problematic in the generals, because smaller donations increase once a candidate is embraced by the electorate. But only the wealthy candidates would ever get through the primaries.

As far as air time is concerned. Where is the cutoff? There are over a dozen political parties in this country. Do each of them get equal air time? If they did, then there would be literally hundreds of groups forming new parties. The only reason that they don't now is that they don't have the money to buy advertising. If advertising was given free, there would be no barriers to entry.

 

Much more than that if you count the effort overall, eg, if you consider so many of their members missing work going around the place to scare up votes, etc.

 

And yet capital spent five times that, much more if you count the effort overall.