endorsement and predictions

[mellowtigger]

The famous American intellectual Noam Chomsky has endorsed Jill Stein, my chosen candidate. I'm happy to see someone of his caliber agree that great progress is still possible within our current political system.  It gives me hope.  I'm also pleased that he chose the same opportunity that I did.  I'm looking forward to casting my vote for her tomorrow.

I admit that I'm doing less research for all of my other decisions this year than I have in previous elections. I may let party affiliation of the candidates (rather than their history and their published platform) determine my choice more than usual this year. I've been tired, as usual. And distracted. I've been much more worried this year with the integrity of the election process than the integrity of the candidates themselves.  I've been directing my attention to that problem.  More on that topic in later weeks, I hope.

Prognosticators are trending toward an Obama victory tomorrow.  The recently famous Nate Silver is forecasting an Obama second term.  He predicts only a 50.9% chance of Obama winning the popular vote, but a 92.2% chance of Obama winning the electoral vote.  InTrade contracts are forecasting an Obama victory by 67.4%.  Not to be left out of the fortunetelling, the GayGamer forum predicts an Obama win by 72.9%.  I don't understand why gay people vote Republican, but there are gay sexists and dark-skinned racists, so I guess anything is possible.



I'm still worried that the electoral wins may be too close tomorrow to depend upon, so we won't really know who is president until the Electoral college votes on December 17th.  How is anyone supposed to celebrate when the apocalypse is just 4 days later?  ;)

Comments

[furr_a_bruin]

I think you may have mis-read Nate Silver's site - though I admit it's easy to do. The 50.9% is his prediction of what percentage of the popular vote Obama will win - not the chance he'll win the popular vote. If you scroll down to "Scenario Analysis" he puts the chances of Obama winning the popular vote at 87.9%, with a situation where Romney wins the popular vote and Obama the Electoral College at only 4.7%.

[mellowtigger]

Worse than that, actually. I read it correctly but then reworded it incorrectly without recognizing it. My bad. :(

Not exactly related, but it's unfortunate that any president can win the popular vote with less than 50% of the votes. Someday, in my dream world when we have instant runoff voting throughout the USA, that outcome will no longer be possible.

[furr_a_bruin]

It's an artifact of the Electoral College ... when they came up with the idea, there was a population imbalance among the various states, but nothing like what we have now with California having 65 times the population of Wyoming. (Heck - Washington D.C. has more people than the entire state of Wyoming.)

It would take more than IRV to fix this - it would take a constitutional amendment to do away with the Electoral College - or a nationwide agreement for all states to apportion their EC votes by the popular vote in that state, which is perhaps easier than a constitutional amendment, but has its own problems. (Like different states having different methods or rounding rules.)

[mellowtigger]

I'm not entirely comfortable with moving to a direct democracy. It looks uncomfortably like what conservatives are trying with state ballot initiatives in recent years, bypassing representational "barriers" to appeal directly to the citizenry who are more likely to pass measures that affect only "those people" (redirect "those" to whatever constituency you dislike).

But I do like the idea of electoral college representation proportional to the popular vote in each state.