Delightful, Friendship, Purity, Honesty and Paradise, Greasy Ridge, Hardscrabble, Worstville, Tick Ridge, Fleatown, Hell's Corners, Devil Town, Assumption, Knockemstiff, Lickskillet, Mudsock and Round Bottom:
What do all these towns have in common?
10/21/2012
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| The heart of it all, in the 2012 presidential election |
16 days before the 2012 presidential voting day and it's a great time to be from the Buckeye State, is it not?
The Obama campaign sure thinks so. And why not? It's very likely that Ohio will decide the next four years in terms of who will be President of these United States. It will be the "Florida" of 2012.
As such, the polls in this state have been front and center for a couple of months. President Obama has always been in the lead with his lead contracting from a margin of about 9 points in March 2012, about 3 points, now, in mid-October 2012 .
Ohio is normally seen as fertile ground for republicans. After all, its republican Governor, John Kasich is an old Fox News employee. Regardless, many have attributed the state being in President Obama's corner as due to a few factors including, the effect of the Auto Bailout (auto-making affects 1 of 8 jobs in the state) and the fact that jobs numbers are much better in Ohio in than they are nationwide. This is a fact that even Governor Kasich is touting. Governor Romney must love that.
But the race has apparently been tightening in Governor Romney's favor. All polls show that.
Some people, a group that includes me, feel that 2 things should be remembered when looking at these tightening polls. 1. These polls DO NOT include early and absentee voters. Early and absentee voting in many battleground states like Ohio and Iowa, is booming. and the estimates say it could be as high as 35-40%; 5-10% higher than in 2008. But early voters are NOT polled. That's an antiquated part of the polling system that should be updated. 2. Obama is leading with early voters. A fact the campaign has laid out below. Since early voting started in Ohio on October 4, 2012, every day that Obama is in the lead, he is actually winning.
My personal theory is that Governor Romney has hit his ceiling in Ohio, regarding the polls. Not every statistical tie, is created equal. And there is certainly a difference between a 3 point lead that can be recovered and one that cannot be. I think that the fact that Governor Romney has never lead in Ohio, shows Obama's lead there to be of the latter persuasion. I'm certain people will remind me of this on November 6th, 2012, if I'm wrong.
Regardless of my own sloppy electoral predictions, the Obama campaign has always maintained, from the beginning that this will be a close race. Nonetheless, the campaign has released the following document regarding Ohio, which I received this morning. Four more years:
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Memo from Jeremy Bird, National
Field Director re: Early Voting in Ohio
Democrats are building upon the
historic grassroots organization we built in Ohio in 2008, including our 125
Obama for America offices in every corner of the state. As a result of that
strong foundation and enthusiasm for President Obama, today we are ahead of
where we were at this time against John McCain - and ahead of Mitt Romney.
Republicans are similarly talking up their ground game and early vote numbers,
but their assertions rest on much shakier ground.
Before we address Republicans' claims,
here are some numbers reflecting Democrats' strong position in the critical state of Ohio:
1. All public polling
shows that the President has a double-digit lead among those who have voted:
· Survey USA found
that Obama leads by 19 points
(57/38) among
those who have voted already.
· Rasmussen, a
Republican pollster, found that Obama leads by 29 points (63/34)
among those who have voted already.
· The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that Obama leads by 26 points
(63/37) among those who have voted already.
· PPP
found that Obama leads by 52
points (76/24) among
those who have voted already.
2. Registration numbers strongly favor
President Obama:
· Four in five
Ohioans (81 percent) who
have registered to vote in 2012 are
either female, younger than 30, or African-American or Latino - all
demographics that strongly favor President Obama.
· Nearly two-thirds
(64 percent) of Ohioans who have registered to vote in 2012 - and the same
percentage among those who have already voted -live in counties that President Obama won in 2008.
3. Early vote numbers strongly favor
President Obama:
· More than half
(55 percent) of the early-vote ballots requested so far this year have been
requested by women, 3 percentage points greater than 2008 early voters.
· 582,402 ballots
have been requested this year from
precincts that Obama won in 2008, 33,414 more than in from precincts that
McCain won.
· The total number
of votes already cast this year (both by mail and in-person) from precincts Obama won in
2008 is 261,304 - 55,636 more than from precincts McCain won.
· Democrats'
margin over Republicans in votes
cast has increased by 21,792 compared
with this point four years ago.
Mitt Romney's campaign is touting
"the gains Republicans are making across Ohio since early voting
began," saying that they are "out-performing voter registration in
Ohio's largest counties." But there is a major flaw in this claim, as Professor
Michael P. McDonald explained:
The problem with this assertion is that
Ohio does not have party registration.
"Party" in Ohio is a record
of the last party primary a voter participated in. Naturally, with only a contested 2012 Republican
presidential primary, the number of "registered Republicans" in the
state increased.
It turns out Republicans' mangled math
isn't limited to a mystery tax cut plan that doesn't add up.
Because Republicans had a competitive
primary this year and Democrats did not, as Professor McDonald points out,
Republicans have a 460,000-person edge this year in past primary voters, or what Romney's campaign is
disingenuously referring to as "voters registered as Republicans."
Despite our smaller numbers, however,
Democratic primary voters are outvoting Republican primary voters by a wide
margin across the state. A greater percentage of Democratic primary voters
than Republican primary voters have requested a ballot, have returned a mail
ballot and have voted in person. Altogether, 145,880 Democratic primary
voters have cast ballots, 28,013 more than Republican primary voters.
President Obama is winning early vote
among primary election voters in the
key battleground of Ohio.
