Time for another TBP contest. There are 538 electoral votes up for grabs tonight. You need 270 to become President.
Please provide your guess for the final electoral count tonight.
As a tiebreaker, please provide your guess on the overall popular vote.
The winner of this contest will get an all expenses paid trip to Staten Island and be put up at a 2 star hotel without electricity or heat. As an added bonus, you will receive a FEMA tee shirt made in China that says:
I SURVIVED SUPERSTORM SANDY AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID TEE SHIRT
Don’t forget – vote early and vote often.
In early results from Towamencin PA, Gary Johnson has racked up 1 vote.
The latest Rasmussen Report for the 2012 electorial vote:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/archive/2012_electoral_college_scoreboard
electoral Sorry!
Tweet of the day:
“Experts are predicting an early lead for democrats, at least until the Republicans get off work.”
My guess: 305 Romney
Me: One more vote for Gary Johnson
Romney 308 Obama 230
Overall: ~ 55 mil Obama, ~62 mil Romney
Gary Johnson has my vote, whooo!
Truly, couldn’t care less.
My guess is Obama by a small margin. It’s really too close to call, imho.
I still intend to vote for Ron Paul. And against our local tax initiative.
Is this an election or just a pantomine exercise. I stood in line to first thing. Chatting with a doctor who came here from Paraguay as we waited for the polls to open and I learn we live in the same condo community when we show our ID’s and get issued receipts we must then take to get our ballots. The machine that issues them jams! Not good. We are maybe the 9th and 10th voters and already equipment malfunctions. Poll workers huddle around machine and after a few minutes it spits out our ‘receipts’. We go collect our ballots. Its a lengthy one in Florida this year and it comes in two big hard paper sheets. No chads though, you just fill in the circle for your candidate or vote yes/no on ballot initiatives. I finish mine and take to the lady who runs the machine where the ballots are inserted. Machine says my ballot is invalid and spits it back out. Lady says try again. I do same result. She says try the 2nd ballot paper ( the one that doesn’t have president, senate or congress candidates on it) and machine takes it. Try the first one again and machine again says ‘invalid’.
I’m told to stand to the side as election workers huddle. I’m told I must go and get a new ballot and fill out a ‘spoiled ballot’ form. I do and hand a woman the portion of my ballot the machine wouldn’t take. Another woman hands me a new ballot. I go and fill it out but then realize I both sections of the ballot so if I cast them I would be voting twice on the second portion of the ballot, the portion the machine had already accepted during my first attempt to submit my ballots.
More huddling by poll workers. They take the second portion of the ballot and tell me to go and try and insert just the first half. Machine accepts it but its numbers won’t match the other half of my ballot so I have no idea if my vote will count or not or be considered a spoiled ballot and thrown out. Welcome to third world America where the government cannot even hold an election.
I guess I’ll go with
Obama: 322
Romney: 216
I also think the House will prolly get taken again by the Democrats. The Republicans have lost a lot of ground and a lot of face in pretty key areas around the country in the past 2 years and no matter how much the media feels it needs to pass this off as a tight race, traditional non-tea party republicans spent the better part of the last 2 years face palming every time they turned on the news, and after the past 2 or 3 months of culture war barnstorming and blustery posturing is going to encourage that base to show up to the polls. This is going to be Bush v. Kerry all over again, except the needle will be in the opposite direction.
Disclosure: I hate all the existing options, including 3rd party from Justice to Constitution, and am sitting up thinking about writing in Aqua-man (he’s not the hero America needs, but it’s the hero she deserves) for all my national level votes so I can nail down the important state ballots we have.
Tie! 269-269. Obama wins the popular vote 49.9% to 49.8%. Ballots cast for Gary Johnson and write-in votes for Ron Paul account for the other approximate 0.5% (certain bloggers and their cohorts are alleged to be responsible). The Republicans win the House and elect Romney president. Blacks riot in the fashion of Rodney King getting beaten AND the Lakers losing game 7 in the finals on the same night. The Democrats meanwhile win the Senate and elect Biden as Vice President.
@Zarathustra: What you said…
MA
My best guess is Barry 271, Mitt 267 with even more controversy than in 2000, in an election with virtually nothing at stake.
Gary Johnson will not only become the first Libertarian candidate to break 7 digits, he will get at least 2 million votes. Falls short of the desired 5% percent unfortunately, but not by much, and people do take notice.
Ron Paul will have several hundred thousand write-ins. If GJ got those writeins instead, he might approach 5 percent.
Romney in EC and popular vote.
Serious allegations of voter fraud in NV and OHIO. OHIO toss up, depends on how many felons vote. Illegal aliens carry NV vote for Obama.
PA,NC, NH, IA , FL go to Romney.
Romney takes TX in 20 points and we secede from the Union anyway.
Romney wins by a large enough amount to make democrats cry.Ron Paul gets more votes then Johnson.
Obama -308
Romney -230
Romney wins popular vote
Republicans keep house. Dems keep senate
No riots
“Romney takes TX in 20 points and we secede from the Union anyway.”
Rick Perry’s greatest non-homosexual fantasy.
I helped close down my favorite watering hole last night-they don’t have heat or insulation, so they shut down every year after halloween (It is -20F this morning). I don’t usually talk politics at the bar, but being Nov 5, the topic came up often. Seems like a tough choice for most folks there-GJ or write-in RP. Roughly even numbers. God I love Alaska.
I would love for this election to end in a tie!!
Oh what fun!
XYZ states too close to call. Both parties demand recounts. A few weeks later both parties unhappy and go to Supreme Court. One of the 2 morons loses by 500,000 votes and becomes our president. (Sound familiar?)
Obomney 268, Robama 269. Ron Paul wins 1 vote from Maine as the do proportional by district. Ron Paul wins presidency when the young folks refuse to buckle, forcing the neocons to vote with them. Biden is VP.
Slobs triumphant no matter what the outcome! All power to the slobs!
Bankers proxy 538
America 0
I am going to get SOOOOO drunk tonight.
youcanthavemyglock , a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Obama.
flash, want to elaborate? I’m from NY so in my state any vote is for Obama.
Monday Morning
Peggy Noonan
We begin with the three words everyone writing about the election must say: Nobody knows anything. Everyone’s guessing. I spent Sunday morning in Washington with journalists and political hands, one of whom said she feels it’s Obama, the rest of whom said they don’t know. I think it’s Romney. I think he’s stealing in “like a thief with good tools,” in Walker Percy’s old words. While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. He’s quietly rising, and he’s been rising for a while.
Obama and the storm, it was like a wave that lifted him and then moved on, leaving him where he’d been. Parts of Jersey and New York are a cold Katrina. The exact dimensions of the disaster will become clearer when the election is over. One word: infrastructure. Officials knew the storm was coming and everyone knew it would be bad, but the people of the tristate area were not aware, until now, just how vulnerable to deep damage their physical system was. The people in charge of that system are the politicians. Mayor Bloomberg wanted to have the Marathon, to show New York’s spirit. In Staten Island last week they were bitterly calling it “the race through the ruins.” There is a disconnect.
But to the election. Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.
I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.
Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West Chester, Ohio, Friday It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning: People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the cold. His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s caught his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been positive, future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one about what’s going on at the rallies is moving.
All the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a longtime Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a patriot, I’ll join up But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him and I care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.
Something old is roaring back. One of the Romney campaign’s surrogates, who appeared at a rally with him the other night, spoke of the intensity and joy of the crowd “I worked the rope line, people wouldn’t let go of my hand.” It startled him. A former political figure who’s been in Ohio told me this morning something is moving with evangelicals, other church-going Protestants and religious Catholics. He said what’s happening with them is quiet, unreported and spreading: They really want Romney now, they’ll go out and vote, the election has taken on a new importance to them.
There is no denying the Republicans have the passion now, the enthusiasm. The Democrats do not. Independents are breaking for Romney. And there’s the thing about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.
Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us.
And there is Obama, out there seeming tired and wan, showing up through sheer self discipline. A few weeks ago I saw the president and the governor at the Al Smith dinner, and both were beautiful specimens in their white ties and tails, and both worked the dais. But sitting there listening to the jokes and speeches, the archbishop of New York sitting between them, Obama looked like a young challenger—flinty, not so comfortable. He was distracted, and his smiles seemed forced. He looked like a man who’d just seen some bad internal polling. Romney? Expansive, hilarious, self-spoofing, with a few jokes of finely calibrated meanness that were just perfect for the crowd. He looked like a president. He looked like someone who’d just seen good internals.
Of all people, Obama would know if he is in trouble. When it comes to national presidential races, he is a finely tuned political instrument: He read the field perfectly in 2008. He would know if he’s losing now, and it would explain his joylessness on the stump. He is out there doing what he has to to fight the fight. But he’s still trying to fire up the base when he ought to be wooing the center and speaking their calm centrist talk. His crowds haven’t been big. His people have struggled to fill various venues. This must hurt the president after the trememdous, stupendous crowds of ’08. “Voting’s the best revenge”—revenge against who, and for what? This is not a man who feels himself on the verge of a grand victory. His campaign doesn’t seem president-sized. It is small and sad and lost, driven by formidable will and zero joy.
I suspect both Romney and Obama have a sense of what’s coming, and it’s part of why Romney looks so peaceful and Obama so roiled.
Romney ends most rallies with his story of the Colorado scout troop that in 1986 had an American flag put in the space shuttle Challenger, saw the Challenger blow up as they watched on TV, and then found, through the persistence of their scoutmaster, that the flag had survived the explosion. It was returned to them by NASA officials. When Romney, afterward, was shown the flag, he touched it, and an electric jolt went up his arm. It’s a nice story. He doesn’t make its meaning fully clear. But maybe he means it as a metaphor for America: It can go through a terrible time, a catastrophe, as it has economically the past five years, and still emerge whole, intact, enduring.
Maybe that’s what the coming Romney moment is about: independents, conservatives, Republicans, even some Democrats, thinking: We can turn it around, we can work together, we can right this thing, and he can help.
Flash, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. I take issue with the math. Even if your moronic statement was somehow correct in principle, it’s only 1/2 a vote. Back to the 3rd grade with you!
FSA controls California, so voting for GJ or RP is just a feel good thing to do.
What happens in California today might be just as important as the national election. California may not be a battleground state as it was back in 1978 when the passage of Proposition 13 ( a measure to limit skyrocketing property taxes) but if Proposition 30 ( an effort to raise taxes to fund public employee unions) fails then it would signal another tax revolt is coming.
Prop 30 is supposed to be about ‘education’ , a buzzword the left loves because it makes public employee union raids on the taxpayer seem altruistic, but it is really just a last ditch effort to prevent the state from overt bankruptcy. Without the $ 6 billion in additional income and sales tax revenue this measure is supposed to generate its game over in Sacramento. Thus Governor Brown and the public employee unions have poured millions into its passage. Symbolically one of the main opponents is the Howard Jarvis group that led the fight to pass proposition 13 when Jerry Brown was spraying insecticide on Californians in his battle with fruit flies and earning his nickname of “Moonbeam’ during his first appearance as Governor of California.
If even today’s far more liberal Californians won’t pass prop 30 then the jig is up everywhere in the US for more government.
youcanthavemyglock and Wyoming Mike ,
This is the most important election ever and every vote for Johnson is a vote taken away from Romney.
Romney is the last chance for saving our Republic .
If Obama is re-elected , sharia law will supplant our Constitution and Iran will get a nuclear bomb and use it to control the MENA oil flow which will cause American commerce to grind to a halt.
Obama is the anti-christ and not supporting Romney is the same as throwing your full support behind Satan!
Do you want to support Satan?
If you do then vote Gary Johnson,
I shouldn’t have to explain the perils of third party support to purportedly sane individuals…SHEESSHHHH
Let’s just say I’m putting a deposit down on a shiny new AR-15 in an hour or so to lock in the price for 90 days.
BTW – Whipped out my Johnson in FL.
It would appear that glue-sniffing has replaced baseball as the national pastime in the USA. Granted, I haven’t lived there since ’98, so… But even so!
Tote dat barge/Lift dat bale…
Y’all are fugged no matter how this farce turns out. Think of chinless Leon in “Blade Runner”: “Wake up! Time to die!” Except that no one is on hand to shoot him.
The Death of a Thousand Cuts awaits you, just as it does nearly all of us: the boot falleth and your neck is beneath it.
Obama – 271
Romney – 267
Obama wins Ohio by 0.2%
Romney wins the popular vote 50.5% to Obama’s 48.8% vote, with 0.7% to third party candidates.
Ms Freud voted early yesterday.
No one checked/asked for any sort of ID … not even a drivers license. No one else was checked either. You could have been from Mars, and voted.
She estimated almost half the people there were black. Gee, I wonder who they voted for. Oh …. Scotch Plains is 5% black.
I guess — due to hurricane Sandy — that any person from any town/state/country/planet can vote where ever the fuck they want ….. probably as often as they want, also.
Romney cannot beat the fraud factor.
FSA will get Obama home, and FSA will never lose an election again. Too big to fail.
Republican sweeps with massive landslide, takes The WH, House and Senate in the most massive voter turnout in American History.
Obama locks himself in the White House and refuses to come out.
The Republicans send John McCain in the pull him out by force. The Secret Services flees the building.
All is right with the world.
It will be stolen. John
“A vote for Ron Paul is a vote for Obama!”
“A vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Obama!”
I’m getting sick of this shit. I can’t wait for the “election” to be over.
Flash, go have another kool-aid with Hope. Me? I’m not playing anymore. I watched Romney steal the nomination first hand, and I’m not voting for someone on the off chance they’ll steal less from me than the other guy. I have a choice, your advice or John Quincy Adams…”Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” How do you think I’ll go??
I will proudly make several liberty minded votes this afternoon including a few for school board which is a much more important race than the Giant Douche vs the Turd Sandwich.
I know for a fact there is at least one vote for principle here in California.
I personally guarantee this prediction:
1% wins 100%
My prediction: we won’t know who “won” until Friday.
Only an anti-American communist would not vote for Romney.
If you don’t like this country then leave it.
Many soldiers died to protect your duty to vote responsibly
There are only two parties and the American people must choose either liberal Dem or conservative Repub.
There is no other path to political power
So you can either choose Obama’s dedicated path to turning the county over to a Marxist government or choose Romney’ trailbazing US back to a freedom loving ,pro-capitalist nation .
Your choice….
Wyoming Mike, Hope drinks that family dollar discount swill that comes in a gaudy box and I take my scotch neat.
But, if she’s serving kool-aid while getting those B-52s warmed up I ‘m in like Flynn.
Flash you are a fucking idiot. And thats the problem we face, the majority of Americans think like you.
It’s to late to really give a shit who wins because it’s game over for this once great country. But I do believe the 3 hours I spent putting holes in targets today will come in real handy in the future.
Anyone who owns an AR type rifle I highly recommend getting a 6.8 SPC upper receiver for there rifle. Put 300 rounds through my new purchase and I really like the results so far. Now my AK just might be pushed to the back of the shelf.
For the record, this vote for Gary Johnson was not a vote that otherwise would have gone to Romney and never had a prayer of going to Romney.
If the Republicans wanted my vote, they should either nominated Ron Paul or Gary Johnson.
It looks like if TBP was the nation, Johnson would have won in a landslide, with Ron Paul in 2nd place.
Well said FT!
Two things:
1. Does it matter?
2. Regardless of the outcome, the U.S.A. and it’s citizens will lose.
Oh yeah, which one is the Giant Douche and which one is the Turd Sandwich? Oh, never mind!
I_S
You know what I am so fucking tired of hearing? “Battleground State”
I believe someday in the future Battleground State might have a whole new meaning.
Now I must go cast my vote. Chalk one more for Gary Johnson in the “Battleground State” Florida.
Off to whip out my Johnson!
On a side note, I’m kind of pulling for Mittens Obomney, just to watch all the crying, bitching, and rioting that will go on from the ignorent masses. Mittens will still continue the path, but at least the FSA will be pissed.
FWIW, 3 of my friends who voted for Johnson this time voted for B.O. in ’08.
I’ll bet it will be weeks before we know the winner.
I_S