Who will win and why

After much speculation and pondering, I now give you my estimate of who will win the 2008 US election and why, merely 24 (12?) hours before we cast our ballots. Perhaps this will also cast a little insight into the odd notion that there is some evil and powerful force that decides the results of the election. I wasn’t procrastinating, really!

First off I’m not basing any of my predictions off of any polls, because I believe that almost all polls are complete bullshit. I would recommend that you guys never listen to the media or any other typical source (especially Fox, oh God) about who is “leading” the race until they are officially released during election night, or at least take them with eight million grains of salt. Meaning hopefully your vote is never controlled or influenced by poll numbers. In fact, a few minutes ago I saw a lady outside of my dorm spamming information for the Obama campaign. There are oversees ballots, hospital ballots, just basically a shitload of different ballots that they have to count until they can even be sure of one state, and that will take until around midnight at least.

I will grudgingly admit that polls are somewhat useful to sort of represent a skewed popularity analysis among the general population, but I often see people either jubilant or completely downtrodden at the fact that McCain is up a few points in one poll, or Obama is down in another. Polls also don’t usefully represent the younger, newly voting population either, because a growing number of them use cell phones, and it is increasingly harder to get adequate and precise data from that certain demographic.

They say that depending on horse race polls too much fucked west American voters in the past few elections, who are a few time zones behind: people in the west would get off work, watch the news, and think that their state has already been “won” by a candidate and not bother voting. Truth is we don’t get real results until the polls in the west close at the end of the night, and all of that horse race crap is just reporters standing outside of some polling areas and reporting on who people SAID they voted for to the headquarters in New York. Apparently this was a significant enough amount of people to cause an outrage with the Democratic Party. I’ll go ahead and negate myself and say that Five Thirty Eight seems to be a good speculation site, with somewhat unbiased and accurate data, but I could just be saying that because it tells me everything I want to hear.

States Gore should have won but didn’t: West Virginia. Up until 2000, West Virginia had notoriously been a blue state. Apparently he made the mistake of campaigning for gun control there and Bush won that year. Har har. If he were able to win his home state Tennessee, as well as Clinton’s, Alabama, both of which Clinton had won in the previous election, he would have won 296 electoral votes to Bush’s 241. See, no Florida needed! Virginia and Ohio are key states for Obama, and while Obama seems to have a grip on Virginia, Ohio will forever remain a perilous swing state. There are other key states of course, but you guys can just google that.

As most of you (hopefully) know, there is more than just the red or blue voter type, meaning that people might actually have logical reasons to be a democrat or republican, other than being a “tree hugging queer” or “incestuous bible thumping hick”. There are also widely varying degrees of political ideologies that seem to correlate demographically, meaning that hating one type of voter doesn’t necessarily mean you are the opposite (cough flamers). Please go to People-press.org if you would like to know more about the varying voter typologies.

If you look at any normal Electoral Map of the United States you’ll see that population-wise, the democrats are already slated to win. Unfortunately much of the democratic population is younger or elderly voters, and they can’t be damned to bother voting. Republicans have the saying, “Let’s hope it rains on Election Day. It’s one more reason for a democrat not to vote.” Over the years, there has been more and more hype about actually going out to vote. Campaigners are renting buses for old people and the voter turnout, especially for young voters has been higher than ever before. This, along with the fact that the public as well the world is massively unsatisfied with the party in current office are why I think Obama will win this election. Let’s not forget the African American voting demographic. Though they are notoriously high anyway, and usually already apart of the Democratic Party, political scientists estimate that they are higher than ever before. This might be enough to win Ohio and a few other swing states.

Face it “real” America. McCain is at the end of his rope. He has a medical record longer than Zero’s e-penis. It’s his time to go to a better place. I can just imagine Palin laughing delicately as she surreptitiously lifts up her skirt and ambiguously talks about “working together” to the world’s superpowers. On the other hand, many of Obama’s supporters see him as the messiah. I can only hope that he will live up to their morbidly high expectations. I don’t blame them for putting that much faith in a candidate though. This leads me to the thought that presidents have way too much power in America, but I will save that for another editorial.

Well, those are my thoughts, though I could be eating them come tomorrow. Either way I will stay up excitedly to discover who our next president will be. What do you guys think?

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