CBS News has a report out that President Obama leads in three key “swing states”: Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. I’m not sure that Pennsylvania could be considered a swing state these days, since it last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1988. In all three states, Obama is way ahead.
I wish someone in the major news organizations would say, that if President Obama is consistently racking up leads in states that give him 332 electors in total, then this contest really isn’t competitive. Over on Nate Silver’s site at the New York Times, Obama has a 96% certainty in what is called the “Now-Cast”: the estimate if today were election day. (80% otherwise.)
The news is assuming a bounce, or an up-and-down. But why not a trendline? A trendline that means that late September is a landslide campaign just taking off. By early November, it could be several weeks of the polls and the public telling ourselves that Romney is about to be buried deep.
All the pieces are there for this election to be a repeat of Johnson-Goldwater. The Republicans—never mind Romney—are unacceptable to broad swaths of the American public outside of the Old Confederacy, the deep South. This was the exact voting pattern of 1964.
Hoofin 