How Obama won
By Luiza Ch. Savage - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - 0 Comments
The stakes were never so high, the battle never so bitter. With America’s future in the balance, Barack Obama overcame a surprising surge from Mitt Romney to re-capture the presidency. The inside story, by Luiza Ch. Savage
As he stood in Chicago, claiming his second victory, Barack Obama had made history yet again.
He was the first president to be re-elected since Franklin Delano Roosevelt with an unemployment rate higher than 7.4 per cent. The jobless rate on Election Day, 7.9 per cent, was actually a notch higher than when he took office amidst the financial crisis and unfolding recession.
But as achievements go, it lacked the magic of 2008. And the man was different too: not the inspiring and redemptive figure—America’s first black president—he then was, but a toughened, hard-knuckled politician who had to scramble to preserve victory. In 2008, ecstatic throngs of Americans had swept him into the White House believing he was the one who would take them to a better place. In 2012, a slimmer majority kept him in office because he had convinced them his Republican rival would take them somewhere worse.
In 2008, Obama offered a broad vision of national unity and a promise of post-partisan healing that appealed to a cross-section of Americans. In 2012, his strategists cobbled together a narrow victory out of pockets of scientifically micro-targeted subgroups of voters across the swing states—women in Virginia, Latinos in Nevada and working-class whites in Ohio who liked the auto bailout. Continue…
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Nate Silver bets MSNBC host $1,000 on an Obama win
By Emily Senger - Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments
Deal? Blogger risks his reputation
FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver is so confident that President Barack Obama will be re-elected that he bet $1,000 on it.
In a Tweet to MNSBC host Joe Scarborough Sliver said:
“.@JoeNBC: If you think it’s a toss-up, let’s bet. If Obama wins, you donate $1,000 to the American Red Cross. If Romney wins, I do. Deal?”
The wager, which Scarborough has yet to publicly respond to, comes after a back-and-forth, which began when Scarborough criticized Silver’s math model, which says that Obama has much better odds of winning than Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
On his show, Morning Joe, Scarborough called Silver an ideologue and a joke saying:
“Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 per cent chance that the president’s going to win. Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73.6% — they think they have a 50.1 per cent chance of winning. Both sides understand that it is close and it could go either way. Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue — they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.”
This, and other criticism saying that Silver is putting his reputation at risk by predicting an Obama victory, had Silver on the defensive all week.
Silver remains confident in his numbers, though. On Thursday, he gave Obama a 79 per cent chance of winning on Nov. 6., an eight-point improvement over his estimation on Oct. 24.
