A Lot of Empty Space Voted for Cheetoh Twitler

Alan Cole‏Verified account @AlanMColeMore






This map is a brilliant data visualization. Here's a brief thread on why it's so much better than past efforts. https://xkcd.com/1939/

Kill the Electoral College.  Do it now.

The FBI Committed Treason to Get Trump Close Enough to Steal the Election

Hillary won, by three million votes.  The Electoral College is an inexcusable remnant of the Slave Power, which 150 years after being outlawed is still undermining Democracy.

A rogue FBI is the consequence of Democrats letting repugs get away with treason for the past 42 years: pardoning Nixon, letting Ronnie Raygun and Bush Sr. skate on Iran-Contra, Pelosi and Obama refusing to prosecute Smirky-Darth for war crimes.  All in the name of "moving forward."

The result is we are sprinting backward toward the feudal brutality the Kochs and Exxon-Mobil have finally achieved.

Kevin Drum:

Here's a quick review:

• Goaded by rabid congressional Republicans, the FBI spent prodigious resources on Hillary Clinton's email server, even though there was never a shred of evidence that national security had been compromised in any way.
   
• In July, Comey broke precedent by calling a press conference and delivering a self-righteous speech about Clinton's "carelessness." Why did he do this, when FBI protocol is to decline comment on cases after investigations are finished? The answer is almost certainly that he wanted to insulate himself from Republican criticism for not recommending charges against Clinton.
   
• Weeks later, Comey finally released the investigation's interview notes. Only the most devoted reader of bureaucratic prose was likely to suss out their real meaning: there had never been much of a case in the first place, and contrary to Comey's accusation, Clinton had never been careless with classified material. Like everyone else, she and her staff worked hard to exchange only unclassified material on unclassified networks (state.gov, gmail, private servers, etc.). There was a difference of opinion between State and CIA about what counted as classified, but this squabbling had been going on forever, and had driven previous Secretaries of State nuts too.
   
• As Podesta notes, the FBI took a preposterously lackadaisical attitude toward Russia's hacking of the DNC server. Outside of a badly-written novel, it's hard to believe that any law enforcement organization would do as little as the FBI did against a major assault from a hostile foreign power aimed at one of America's main political parties.
   
• Even when plenty of evidence was amassed about Russia's actions, Comey downplayed it in private briefings. This gave Republicans the cover they needed to insist that Obama not mention anything about it during the campaign.
   
• Two weeks before Election Day, Comey authorized a search of Anthony Weiner's laptop, even though there was no reason to think any of the emails it contained were new, or that any of them posed a threat to national security. Then he issued a public letter making sure that everyone knew about the new evidence, and carefully phrased the letter in the most damaging possible way.

Any one of these things could be just an accident. Put them all together, and you need to be pretty obtuse not to see the partisan pattern. In every single case, Comey and the FBI did what was best for Republicans and worst for Democrats. In. Every. Single. Case.

If you want to believe this is just a coincidence, go ahead. But nobody with a room temperature IQ credits that. The FBI has spent the entire past year doing everything it could to favor one party over the other in a presidential campaign. Democrats ought to be in a seething fury about this. Instead, they're arguing about a few thousand white rural voters in Wisconsin and whether Hillary Clinton should have visited Michigan a few more times in October.

The People We're Supposed to Make Into Allies

Ain't happening. 

David Atkins at Political Animal"

The fact that 44% of Republicans either think Trump won the popular vote or aren’t sure is disturbing on its own. But perhaps more disturbing is the situational ethics: not only have many Republicans changed their mind about the electoral college, but they know their insistence on it is rigging the election against the winner of the popular vote, and they don’t care.

Currently, 19% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents favor basing the winner on the popular vote, down from 49% in October 2004 and 54% in 2011. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents already widely favored having the popular vote determine the winner and are slightly more likely to do so now than in the past.

This is all part of the post-objectivity trend in Republican politics. There is no objective truth, no objective morality. It’s only about what it takes to win. The ends justify the means.

We used to define that as moral evil. It still is.

Meanwhile, the real president-elect is winning by a landslide

If the results were reversed and Hillary had won the Electoral College with a minority of the popular vote, there would be genuine riots in the streets and the media would be screaming for her to concede to the vulgar talking yam.

International Business Times, via Crooks and Liars:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory continued to grow Monday as millions of ballots remained uncounted, according to the latest ballot tally published by the Cook Political Report. The first female major-party nominee has secured nearly 2 million more votes than her opponent, billionaire Donald Trump, despite an Electoral College vote in his favor.

Trump managed to secure well over the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency, but Clinton appears to have soundly won the popular vote by an ever-expanding margin. She received about 63,600,000 votes to the president-elect's 61,900,000, according to the Cook Political Report. Updated ballot counts show her receiving at least 48 percent of the national vote compared to Trump’s 46.7 percent.

Clinton’s lead has already exceeded the 540,520-vote gap former Democratic candidate Al Gore maintained over former President George W. Bush before the former conceded in the 2000 election.

Empty Land Handed Election to the Orange Menace

This is what the Electoral College does: gives more power to millions of acres of dry land empty of people than to cities full of millions of people.

 

Via Digby:

Why Your Vote for Obama Counts - Even in Red States

Because if the national popular vote goes to Romney, repugs will use that to deny President Obama's electoral vote victory. Even if they fail to throw the election to Romney - having 2000 flashbacks yet? - they will use the popular vote to attack and impeach President Obama for his entire second term.

Yes, even an Obama landslide won't stop the repugs from obstructing everything the President tries to do, but a close election will make it exponentially worse.

Digby:

It will be very interesting to see what the legal moves will be if any of these swing states are very close. But it almost doesn't matter. If Obama wins with anything other than a decisive victory in both the popular vote and the electoral college, we will see a collective right wing primal scream. They don't think he's legitimate in the first place, but to eke out a close victory when they already believe that many of "those people" are voting illegally is likely to provoke an emotional response.

This is why I very much doubt that we are going to see a chastened and reasonable GOP in the next congress. Their base is going to be wild with the belief that the election was stolen from them.

Steve M:

Yes, it's true that the Electoral College is ridiculous. But it's also true that both campaigns have been trying to win 270 electoral votes, not 50% of the popular vote plus 1 -- and Mitt Romney is on the verge of losing that contest. If this were a popular vote race, the candidates wouldn't be practically living in Ohio and other swing states -- Mitt Romney would have taken up residency in Texas, or somewhere else in the Deep South, and he'd be trying to run up the score there, while the president would be spending so much time here in the Northeast that they'd assign him his own traffic lane in Midtown Manhattan.

But this is why it's going to be a problem if Obama loses the popular vote. The "hypocrite Democrats" message is going to be the polite edge of the Republican election-stealing wedge, while nastier right-wing operatives burrow into whether some poor Democratic elector in Ohio or Wisconsin ever had a tax lien or missed a mortgage payment or drove drunk. Maybe the GOP won't be able to steal the election, but it won't be for lack of trying.

So let's hope Kos is right when he says registered-voter polls are more accurate than likely voter polls. Let's hope RAND and TIPP are right and Gallup is wrong. Let's hope Obama's get-out-the-vote operation is as amazing as it claims to be. Because it's going to get ugly otherwise. 

 
Vote. Vote Early. Vote Early for President Obama.

And make sure every Democratic voter you know does the same.

Road to 270: Kentucky

Fivethirtyeight.com, the go-to-site for Electoral College and campaign analysis this year, turns its attention to Kentucky.

As noted at the outset, Barack Obama's advantage in partisan self-identification is deceptive. Particularly in rural areas and Eastern Kentucky, Obama was wiped off the map. Obama failed to win a single Democratic convention delegate in Kentucky's 5th district, the only district in the entire nation where that happened. One thing Obama does have going for him in Kentucky is the state is on the tougher end of economic times, ranking 10th in unemployment rate. As the economic crisis has helped tilt the race in Obama's favor, Kentucky would seem a place where Obama might close ground, even if it's not enough to win.

The analysis unfortunately beings with some unecessary stereotypes, but includes a fascinating demographic breakdown with stats I haven't seen anywhere else.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Summer's Over - It's Poll Time!

It's after Labor Day, so put away your white shoes and check out these polls!

A new set of polls has good news for Barack Obama in four key battleground states:

• In Iowa, which voted narrowly for George W. Bush in 2004, a new CNN poll has Obama ahead of John McCain by a 55%-40% margin.

• In Minnesota, which went narrowly to Kerry, CNN has Obama up 53%-41%.

• In Ohio, where President Bush's narrow 2004 win sealed his overall victory, the CNN poll gives Obama a 47%-45% edge, within the ±3.5% margin of error.

• In North Carolina, which hasn't voted Dem since 1976, a Democracy Corps (D) poll gives John McCain a narrow advantage of 47%-44% -- and gives Democratic Senate challenger Kay Hagan a 50%-45% lead over GOP Senator Elizabeth Dole.

If Obama's leads in Iowa and Ohio were to hold through November, it would be impossible for John McCain to win unless he could pick up some Kerry states.

To help you play along at home, here's an interactive Electoral Vote map that lets you manipulate the states to produce dozens of scenarios. Start with the 2004 results, and keep adding states to Kerry's total. See how fast Obama beats McCain to 270 and keeps on going!

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.