Proposition 11

Two weeks until the Election: Where do they stand.

So right now everyone is following presidential tracking polls like they were the Dow Jones Industrial Index. The AP has Obama at +1% over McCain while Fox News has Obama at +9. To sum it up every Major national tracking poll has Obama with a comfortable lead. On a state to state basis Obama has recently gained a large advantage (+7 Cnn) in Virginia which only a week ago was a tossup state. North Carolina which was also supposed to be an easy hold for the Republican party has now shown to be leaning Obama (3.1% Zogby, 5% Cnn). As it stands Obama will win three southern states; Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has carried a southern state without having been born or served in the south since Kennedy (Johnson, Clinton and Nixon were all from the south). Anything can happen in the last two weeks but even if John McCain were to win the three aformentioned southern states and Ohio, Colorado and Nevada he still would come up short on the 270 electoral votes need when compared to Obama's safe states. I will follow up in the next few days on some more local polling as they become available. For more election info visit http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/calculator/ and fivethirtyeight.com.

Presidential Debates, do they matter?

It seems like every election cycle we sit in front of the television anxiously awaiting the Presidential debates. As Americans, we have a long history of Presidential debates that include the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 and the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960. The Lincoln-Douglas debates changed the way people thought about listening to their political leaders but the Kennedy-Nixon debates changed the way the American people thought about watching and listening to their leaders running for the Presidency.

The real question is whether the debates really matter? I would argue that YES, they do matter. The Kennedy-Nixon debate was the perfect example of this because for the first time, Americans watched the Presidential debates on television. When asked who won the debate, the people that listened to it on the radio thought that Richard Nixon won or tied and the people who watched the debate on television overwhelmingly thought that John F. Kennedy had won. What could have been the reason for this? It is a well know fact that Kennedy wore make-up for the debate but Nixon had refused. Under the hot lights of the sound stage, Nixon sat there sweating and looking uncomfortable. Kennedy had seemed young and vibrant and Nixon seemed old and tense. After this first debate, Kennedy gained the momentum and later went on to win the Presidency.

In the current Presidential cycle we have a choice between two candidates and often, these debates are the only place that people will get to see where the candidates stand on the issues. In recent polls, more Americans said that they believe that Senator Barack Obama appeared more Presidential in the debates thus far. According to the non-partisan polling projection web site fivethirtyeight.com, since the first debate on September 26th, Senator Obama has continued to rise in the polls. Because perception is so important to the American people and because of the similarities to the Kennedy-Nixon debates, I believe that Senator Obama will continue to look Presidential in the third and final debate on October 15th and go on to win the Presidency.