The Sunday Conservative - 07/27/2008 »

Election Predictions

For my first post, I guess it only makes sense to discuss the most important thing on the political horizon: the 2008 Presidential Election.  As a true conservative, I am not a big fan of either candidate, but, of course, I will hold my nose and cast my vote for John McCain.  Over the next few weeks, I will take some time to discuss the candidates positions on various issues and explain why I am voting for McCain, but, for today, I want to focus on my thoughts about the current status of the race.

Obviously, the mainstream media would love for us to believe that Obama has a commanding lead.  In fact, if you closed your eyes and listened to the news, you might even think that Obama is running unopposed.  However, take a look at some of the most recent polls…

  • Rasmussen Reports - Obama 49-44 (MOE 2%)
  • Gallup - Obama 49-40 (MOE 2%)
  • Wall Street Journal - Obama 47-41 (MOE 3.1%)
  • FOX News - Obama 41-40 (MOE 3%)
  • Quinnipiac - Obama 50-41 (MOE 2.4%)
  • Washington Post - Obama 49-46 (MOE 3%)

So, it seems that its closer than some might have you believe, but, clearly, Obama still has a 5-7% lead.

I don’t completely buy this data for a few reasons:

  1. I think the polls are getting less accurate as time goes on.  Remember the bad mis-reads during the primaries?  I think this is due to the fact that fewer people have home telephones and even fewer answer them.  Thus, it is harder than ever to get a true representative sample of the population.
  2. Young people (Under 30) are overwhelmingly polling for Obama (66-30 in the Post’s poll), and, historically, they don’t turn out on election day.
  3. These numbers, while interesting, don’t matter on election day!!!  Anyone remember 2000?  To get a true look at what’s happening, of course, you have to look state-by-state.  There are a couple of sites that do a great job analyzing this data: RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight.  I will offer my take on some of these so-called battleground states in the coming weeks.

So, don’t despair.  Regardless of what the prObama media would have you believe, its a close race (and getting closer!)…

Your thoughts?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Election Predictions”

  1. [...] have been saying it for a while now, but it appears that the rest of the world is taking notice that Sen. McCain has [...]