In 1988, when Michael Dukakis lose the national popular vote by more than 7 points, he won the state of Iowa by over 10 points, his second highest margin that year (ahead of his margin in Massachusetts and New York, but behind his near 12-point margin in Rhode Island).  Only once since then has Iowa voted Republican, going for George W. Bush in 2004 by just over 10,000 votes (out of approximately 1.5 million cast).

Perhaps that’s because “Iowa Republicans continue to make gains in voter registration, expanding their lead over Democrats to more than 21,000 voters in July“:

The Iowa Secretary of State’s Office reported [in August that] there are now 620,584 voters registered as Republicans, compared to 598,995 Democrats.

. . . .

It’s quite a turnaround from January 2009 when Barack Obama was inaugurated and Iowa Democrats boasted a 110,000 voter registration advantage.

Via Jim Geraghty.  It sure does seem Obama has been spending a lot of time in a state he won by almost 10 points in 2008. (more…)

Yesterday, I caught a post on Stacy McCain’s blog that, well, stuck in my craw.  He joins other conservative blogger’s in questioning Nate Silver’s statistical analysis of the election, to offer an insight, well, from the gut, or as he puts it, in somewhat highfalutin’ terms,  ”from the Hayekian Public Intellectual™”:

Like economic “planners,” Silver succumbs to the illusion of expertise and is seduced by the apparent exactitude of data, so that the Forecasting Model becomes a sort of Five-Year Plan. Silver’s method fails to compensate for situations (not really that rare in politics) where unexpected events falsify the predictive value of polling. Remember that we are talking about the opinions of fallible human beings en masse, as opposed to the behavior of a select group of professional athletes, which is why Sabremetrics cannot be too much help in predicting how the polls will shift in response to events that could not have been anticipated:

1.  The multilayered fuck-up in Benghazi.
2. An utterly lopsided victory by Romney in the first debate

(Read the whole thing.)  Stacy’s “gut-hunch”, that Obama’s chances aren’t nearly as great as Silver imagines forecasts them to be, appears to correspond with Obama’s standing in recent polls.  In three polls released today, the Gallup tracker, the Rasmussen tracker and the NBC/WSJ poll (which tends to skew left), the president stands at 45, 47 and 47, respectively.  The Democrat seems stuck in the mid-forties.

It seems the two stories that Stacy identified, coupled with a sense of economic anxiety and  an increasing awareness of Obama’s incompetence, seems to have kept Obama’s numbers down.

UPDATE:  Yet another national poll shows Obama at 47%.

UP-UPDATE:  Stacy notes today (10.22.12) “that the last time a national poll showed Obama at 50% or better was a CNN poll taken Sept. 28-30.”

This Glenn Reynolds link pretty much sums it up:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: White House ‘lied’ on Libya because they had ‘the media in their pocket.’

They depend the legacy media to cover for their incompetence

Doing my morning blog-read, found the same article linked on one conservative-leaning web-site (Drudge) and on two conservative/libertarian blogs (Instapundit and Powerline), yet neither AOL nor Yahoo! mentions it.  It’s a story with a similar theme to one which surfaced the last time a Democrat ran for reelection and the Washington Post did pick up on it, but a search (without quotation marks for “Obama fundraising web” and “Obama fundraising internet” yields nothing on their site at 9:20 PST (12:20 GayPatriot blog time).

This morning, the New York Post is running a report about absence of safeguards on the Obama campaign’s web-site:

The Obama re-election campaign has accepted at least one foreign donation in violation of the law — and does nothing to check on the provenance of millions of dollars in other contributions, a watchdog group alleges.

Chris Walker, a British citizen who lives outside London, told The Post he was able to make two $5 donations to President Obama’s campaign this month through its Web site while a similar attempt to give Mitt Romney cash was rejected. It is illegal to knowingly solicit or accept money from foreign citizens.

Walker said he used his actual street address in England but entered Arkansas as his state with the Schenectady, NY, ZIP code of 12345.

“When I did Romney’s, the payment got rejected on the grounds that the address on the card did not match the address that I entered,” he said. “Romney’s Web site wanted the code from the back of card. Barack Obama’s didn’t.” (more…)

On Friday, in my neighborhood I saw a car sporting this bumper sticker:

The car had Massachusetts plates.  I might call this guy courageous, but wonder how many Hollywood types would understand his message.

It sometimes seems we are seeing more conservative messaging on cars in LA than liberal slogans.  Last week, when I asked a (gay Republican) friend if he had seen many Obama bumper stickers here in LA, he replied, “Only the old ones.”  Most that I see are those from the ’08 campaign, but there are a few newer ones.

Today the only Obama stickers I saw were in the parking lot at Trader Joe’s.

I saw more Romney bumper stickers on one freeway when I drove to the Glenn Reynold’s shindig in Santa Monica on Thursday than Obama stickers on four freeways when I drove to a Hallowe’en party in Monrovia last night.  Now the paucity of Obama stickers is unlikely to make this “blue” state turn “red” this fall, but I did read a report of  ”Romney signage in Pinellas County [Florida] far outpac[ing] Obama’s.”

FROM THE COMMENTS:  A lot of you have been sharing stuff and TGC offers some anecdotal evidence to back up Mitt Romney’s surge in Florida polling:

Here in Polk County Florida, more Romney signs and bumper stickers and yard signs are turning up. For some reason, they just started popping up the past two weeks or so. Don’t know if it was because of the debate performance or what. Very few Obama signs and stickers.

With Whoopi Goldberg recently confusing Mormons with Quakers, suggesting that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints couldn’t fight for our country, we can expect other media figures, particularly those opposed to the election of Mitt Romney to continue to misrepresent the largest faith indigenous to the United States of America.

Our blog reader bfwebster addressed that misunderstanding in a recent blog post where he reported that not only did Mormons serve in Vietnam, but that a disproportionate (to their percentage in the United States population) number made the ultimate sacrifice for their country:

During the period of the Vietnam War — say, 1965-1974 — the total US population was around 200 million. During that same period of time, LDS Church membership grew from roughly 2.4 million to 3.4 million. That membership is men, women, and children of all ages, both inside and outside of the United States. I have not yet been able to find the actual United States LDS membership for that period, but I will assume that it was on the order of 75% of the total LDS membership, or about 2 to 2.5 million — just a bit over 1% of the US population.

Furthermore, probably only about 50% (if that much) of that membership within the United States represented actively practicing and attending members. So the ratio of active LDS members living in the US to the US population at large during that period was probably on the order of 0.5%, perhaps less.

So, how many self-identified Mormons were killed in Vietnam? 589 out of 58,193, or just over 1% of all US military deaths. In other words, Mormons were at least proportionately represented by population among US military deaths in Vietnam and were likely over-represented.

(more…)