Troubled Blue Waters

Despite the widespread damage, I think we can all be thankful that the effects of Hurricane Sandy were not as bad as they initially seemed to be. Clean up will take a while, but there doesn't seem to be anything damaged beyond the ability to repair.

Meanwhile, there is the matter of the election a week from today. For the longest time, Mr. Obama seemed to be narrowly ahead and holding off Mr. Romney. Now, things seem to have changed. Mr. Obama lost the momentum after the first debate and has failed in his efforts to get it back. Still, while the polls narrowed further, Mr. Obama still seemed as though he was in control of the situation to make it tight.

However, two bits of news have trickled out this week that are turning things a bit grimmer for Mr. Obama. The first is that whether because of money advantage or being able to redistribute resources, the Romney campaign is now investing money in blue states, both in advertising and GotV efforts. The two largest investments have been in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Pennsylvania is a frequent Rebublican trap as it always seems tantilizingly close, only to have Philadelphia snap it back to the Democratic column. Minnesota though it interesting. Minnesota hasn't gone red since the Nixon wave of 1972. This may be an advertising play into the bleed over markets of western Wisconsin and northern Iowa, but it has attracted enough attention that the Obama campaign has bought air time to counter the Romney ad buy.

The second, and more significant issue for Mr. Obama, is the Gallup report of early voting. Gallup is reporting in a broad poll that was done, that about 15% of registered voters have gone ahead and cast their ballot and that the percentage of early voting may rise to 33% of all registered voters. This is not groundbreaking as the percentage of votes cast in 2008 also had 33% of them being cast early. What is disturbing for the Obama campaign is that of those 15% already cast, Mr. Romney is leading 52-46. Even worse for the President is that among those who plan to cast their ballot early, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama are tied 49-49. Mr. Romney is leading among those who plan to vote on election day 51-45.

Mr. Obama's strength in 2008 came largely through early voting. In Ohio, John McCain actually beat Mr. Obama in votes cast on election day, but Mr. Obama had already jumped out to a huge lead and Mr. McCain could not make up the difference. If Mr. Obama does not go into election day with the lead, he could be in real trouble.

One caveat to this analysis though. Gallup's report was done nationally and it is quite possible that most of Mr. Romney's support has come from states that he was going to win anyway. By my current calculation Mr. Romney is leading Mr. Obama 248-237 with six states in true toss up status (NH, OH, WI, IA, CO, NV). If any state outside of these six break against their current leanings, I think it will safe to predict an easy win for the man who does it.

Poll Closing Times

Now that we're close to the actual election, here's the list of the poll closing times so we can keep tabs on which states are next. All times are EST:

7:00 PM EST
Georgia
Kentucky
Indiana
South Carolina
Vermont
Virginia

7:30 PM EST
North Carolina
Ohio
West Virginia

8:00 PM EST
Alabama
Connecticut
Deleware
Florida
Illinois
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Mississippi
Missouri
New Hampshire
New Jersey
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Tennessee
Washington DC

8:30 PM EST
Arkansas

9:00 PM EST
Arizona
Colorado
Louisiana
Michigan
Minnesota
Nebraska
New Mexico
New York
South Dakota
Texas
Wisconsin
Wyoming

10:00 PM EST
Kansas
Montana
Nevada
Utah

11:00 PM EST
California
Hawaii
Idaho
North Dakota
Oregon
Washington

01:00 AM EST
Alaska

One minor note. Several states (Florida, Michigan, etc.) cover two time zones and will have polls closing at different times. Rather than posting two different times, I've listed the later poll closing times since the media will not call a state until all polls are closed. So, even if it's well known that Mr. Obama has won Michigan a little after 8:00 PM EST, they won't call the state until the polls are closed on the UP at 9:00 PM EST.

Philadelphia as New Orleans?

We are still five days out, but the cone track of Hurricane Sandy does not look promising for the city of Philadelphia. The center of the cone is tracking to the mouth of the Deleware River on Tuesday morning and if this holds (or keeps to something similar, Sandy could push significant storm surge up the Deleware River and into downtown Philadelphia.

Philadelphia obviously does not have the levy system that New Orleans has, nor is it below sea level. It is a major port with most of downtown being at or just above sea level. Any significant storm surge would meet little resistance as it comes up the river.

Making matters even more interesting is the fact that this storm is looking to come ashore one week before the election. If there is significant damage done to the area, it is possible that power might not be restored to sections of the Eastern seaboard by the following Tuesday. I don't know what kind of back up plans are in place, but alternate polling locations would have to be set up and those polling locations would have to rely on back up paper ballots.

This is obviously a worst-case scenario, but one to keep in mind as Sandy tracks closer to the US over the next few days.

Results

With several contests going on last night, there were multiple results.

First, the San Francisco Giants completed their second big comeback of the postseason, crushing the St. Louis Cardinals in game 7 to earn a date with the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. As the National League won the All-Star Game, the series will open in San Francisco tomorrow.

Second, the Chicago Bears used a brutal defense to beat the Detroit Lions 13-7. Chicago retains first place in the NFC North and more importantly, as Matt Forte and Brandon Marshall failed to score 30 fantasy points, I won my match-up for the week. This was only my second win of the season (2-4-1) but I'm actually not in last place in my division.

Finally, there was the debate. My reading on it seems that it was mostly a draw again. Mr. Obama seems to have been credited with the win, but it doesn't appear that in the immediate reaction that he was able to land any significant blows on Mr. Romney to move the needle much. CBS instant poll showed an Obama win 53-23-24 while CNN's instant poll showed Obama winning 48-40. CNN also had a poll showing that both men scored in the 60's on handling the job of C-in-C, while PPP had a poll showing that for independent voters, the more/less likely to vote for a candidate was 32/48 Obama and 47/35 Romney. CNN had one additional poll asking who the debate made you more likely to vote for: Obama - 24, Romney - 25, Neither - 50.

I did not watch most of the debate, but I did flip over for a few minutes during halftime of MNF. My own personal thoughts (aside from being bored listening to the men) was that Mr. Romney looked fairly confident and a little condescending towards Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama looked frustrated and a bit angry. He knew he had to land a hard blow to move the momentum back into his column and it appeared that he knew he wasn't getting it.

As I said yesterday, I expect the numbers on this debate to be much lower than the first two. I suspect that both candidates knew it too, giving even more rise to the idea that Mr. Romney was playing prevent defense and Mr. Obama was getting frustrated by his lack of ability to score a strong hit on Mr. Romney.

Fourteen days to go.

Final Debate Tonight

Tonight is the third and final debate between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama. The subject of the debate is Foreign Policy and I would imagine that the events in Libya a little over a month ago will dominate the discussion.

I would expect significantly lower ratings for this debate rather than the first two.

First, anyone looking for reassurance in their leanings or curious about a candidate they didn't know that well should have been answered in the first two debates.

Second, Foreign Policy almost always rates lower in issues than economic issues so a number of people will by-pass as they are not interested in the subject matter of the debate.

Third, competition. This debate happens to be going up against both Monday Night Football (Detroit Lions at Chicago Bears) and Game 7 of the NLCS (St. Louis Cardinals at San Francisco Giants). With two fairly big sporting events to chose from, a number of people will turn elsewhere on the tube tonight.

Still, there should be some fireworks tonight as Mr. Obama is still trying to fully right the ship after the first debate. He staunched the bleeding in the second debate, but Mr. Romney seems to still have the momentum. Ideally, Mr. Obama needs a knock down as hard as the one he recieved in the first debate. Mr. Romney, on the other hand, just needs to land a few hard blows and not take too many (i.e. another draw) and he should keep himself in good position.

Even though I have no intention of actually watching the debate, I'll still look things over and try to do some sort of post-mortem.

2006 Redux?

Last night the Tigers eliminated the NY Yankees and won the AL Pennant. Also last night, the St. Louis Cardinals went up on the SF Giants 3 games to 1 and will look to close out their series tonight.

This would set up a rematch of the 2006 World Series which the Cardinals won 4-1. I'm sure the Tigers will be looking to redeem themselves this time around.

One other odd little point about the AL and NL Championship series. This may have been the first time that the last three World Series winners were represented in the Championship series. St. Louis is the defending champion and they are facing off against San Francisco, who won the 2010 World Series. The Yankees had won the 2009 World Series. Only Detroit was the oddball, having not won the World Series since 1984.

It wouldn't have been possible to get all four previous winners in the Championship series as the Philadelphia Phillies (NL) won the 2008 World Series. The best one could have done would have been to replace Detroit with the Boston Red Sox, who won the 2007 World Series.

Cutting the South?

A week ago, I read that Suffolk University was cutting operations in Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. Now it is rumored that several PACs allied with the Obama Campaign are doing the same. Similar rumors are leaking out of Colorado as well.

If this is true, Mr. Obama is playing a dangerous game. The West Coast (78), New England (29), the Altantic Coridor (59), Illinois (20), Minnesota (10), and New Mexico (5) will net Mr. Obama 201 EVs. He is clearly expecting to hold the blue trio of Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (16), and Wisconsin (10), despite the Romney campaign mounting an assault on those three states. That takes him to 247. That then puts the onus of victory on four states: Ohio (18), Nevada (6), Iowa (5), and New Hampshire (4). This is not a large margin for error.

In fact, it effectivly puts the nearly the entire burden of reelection on holding Ohio. If Mr. Obama wins all the states mentioned above but loses Ohio, he only takes 262 electoral votes. If he wins Ohio, he must take either Nevada or Iowa to secure victory. A New Hampshire and Ohio only win would produce a 269-269 tie and throw things to the House where Republicans hold the majority by state allocation.

However, this is all conjecture at the moment. I highly doubt the Obama campaign, or the majority of it's PACs will openly concede either Virginia or Colorado, which are very close in the RCP standings. Conceding Florida would hurt a bit, but it would free up a large volume of resources as Florida is a very expensive media market.

Much remains to be seen over the next two and a half weeks as to how the campaigns conduct their strategies.

Second Debate

For the third debate in the row, I opted to watch baseball instead of the candidates. Watching the Yankees go down 3 games to 0 was far more enjoyable than watching two men bicker at each other.

Still, I caught some of the post debate reaction. The general thought seems to be that it was something close to a draw. CNN's instant poll had Mr. Obama winning 37-30 with the remaining thinking it was a draw, while a CBS poll thought that Mr. Romney dominated the questions on the economy.

The big talking point coming out of this debate seems to be the reaction on the Libya incident. Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama got after each other a bit and the moderator, Ms. Crowley, seems to have interjected herself in it to cut off the debate with an instant fact check. Watching the clip, I think this was a bit of a disservice to Mr. Obama. He seemed to be holding his own at that moment in the debate and would have scored easy points for simply deflecting Mr. Romney's accusations and making him look like a bully trying to turn American dead into a political football.

The appeal to Ms. Crowley and then her statement validating the President's argument had a bit of a "running to mom" feel to it. Regardless of whether or not the facts of the argument favored Mr. Romney or Mr. Obama (and that comes with an extreme parsing of the statement Mr. Obama made in the Rose Garden), the optics of that moment didn't help Mr. Obama and will probably keep the Libya topic in the news up until the next debate.

Overall, I doubt this debate will move the needle much in one direction or the other. Mr. Obama didn't hurt himself as he did in the first debate, but neither did it seem that he did anything that seriously blunted Mr. Romney's momentum. I'm sure that there will be many polls out soon, each saying that things are either swinging back towards Mr. Obama or swinging further to Mr. Romney (and possibly both).

Twenty days to go.

Confidence or Idiocy?

Suffolk University announced yesterday that they were suspending polling operations in North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida as they felt that those states were going to be won by Mr. Romney and would only waste their money.

I don't know much about Suffolk University polling but this strikes me as very, very odd. I can understand North Carolina as I've felt confident that Mr. Romney would win their easily. But Florida and especially Virgina make little sense to me. Florida has always been a bit close and even if you were confident that Mr. Romney (or Mr. Obama) were to win there, why not keep the polling going as it is a good benchmark for the overall election?

Virginia makes even less sense to me. The strong Democratic presence Northern Virginia has made the state a strong purple, counterbalancing the natural Republicanism of the rest of the state. I've seen almost no polling that has Mr. Romney outside the margin of error in Virginia and even if you attempt to correct for any perceived Democratic bias in the polls, the race is still very close. In my thinking, announcing that you are not going to poll Virginia is nearly equivalent to washing your hands of the whole election.

Suffolk University is either very confident in things they are seeing on the ground, very strapped for cash and cutting costs in large states, or very stupid.

Big Bird... Seriously?

Mr. Obama's team has launched a new ad attacking Mr. Romney's proposal to cut funding for PBS:



I am a bit dumbfounded that this is an actual political ad. I like Big Bird a great deal and stand opposed to the cutting of funding to PBS (although Sesame Street's merchandising sales would more than keep it afloat if that ever happened), but this seems like a very trivial thing to try and make a campaign issue.

What's more, even if you did want to make an issue out of it, this seems like a silly way to go about it. I get that it's supposed to be sarcastic and the like, but Mr. Obama would have been far better served to note the miniscule percentage of the budget that funds PBS and use that to paint a class warfare attack on how poor children must suffer to pay for tax cuts to the wealthy or something like that. This feels more like something that SNL would put out.

Baseball Update

So far, the playing the first two games in the lower seed cities hasn't hurt the higher seeds too much.

In the National League, the Cincinnati Reds won both games in San Francisco and will resume playing tomorrow. They'll have three chances to win one game at home and advance to the NL Championship Series. Ideally, they do it in game 3 as that will be the game that I'm at.

Meanwhile, Washington defeated St. Louis in game 1 in Busch Stadium. Game 2 starts about 4:30 EDT this afternoon

On the American League side, the NY Yankees defeated the Baltimore Orioles in game 1 of that series, after waiting out a lengthy rain delay.

The lone exception to the higher seed winning is the Oakland Athletics vs. Detroit Tigers series. Detroit won both games at home and now just have to take one game in Oakland. This takes a little added depth when you remember that the Tigers will probably have Justin Verlander going to the mound again in Game 5. No matter where you play, I give the Tigers the edge in that game.

The Championship Series (for both leagues) start this weekend. Times are not set yet but if the NY Yankees advance, expect the prime time slots to go the AL. A Baltimore victory would probably have MLB tearing their hair out with the propect of no major media market teams left. I personally, would love that.

Going Old School

In the first season of Mad Men, the workers of Sterling Cooper are shown staying up all night and having a part to listen to the 1960 election returns on the radio. The final results weren't available until the next morning.

I was reminded of this scene when I saw this news story that AP has announced that they will not be conducting exit polling in 19 states on election night. The various networks use a combination of the real returns, exit polls, and turnout statistics to help them make a descion on when to call a state for a particular candidate. Without the exit polls, the networks will be relying mostly on the real returns, which will probably push the call of certain states until late in the night.

Now, one caveat in all of this. The news story does not mention which states are losing the exit polls. They could be canning polls in states like California or Alabama where everyone knows who the winner is going to be. However, the context of the article suggest that they will be cancelling the polling in a few close states which are going to have high absentee and early voting (such as Ohio). If that is the case, calls for these states are going to go late into the night, unless they are absolute blowouts for one side or the other.

*UPDATE*

I just found a list of the states:

Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

None of these states (and DC) should be in doubt as to who will win them, so I guess trimming the late night is still possible.

First Debate Beatdown

Mrs. X and I opted to watch the Reds and Cardinals last night rather than the debate, but I did have a comment page open on it and I read a few post debate analyses afterwards. Nearly everyone seems to be of the mind that Mr. Romney soundly defeated Mr. Obama in the debate.

The still pictures I've seen (and the small amount of video I caught while eating breakfast) showed Mr. Romney being quite agressive, hitting with a lot of facts and numbers. Mr. Obama also used a lot of facts and numbers, but was seen as looking very uncomfortable, shifting around a lot, and coming across as rather professorial. Being professorial isn't a bad thing in a job like the Presidency, but it is not the best quality in a debate. Animation and action always give the best impression.

Even the instant audience polls that CNN does showed a belief that Mr. Romney defeated Mr. Obama. Whether that translates into votes remains to be seen, but nearly all the pundits think that Mr. Romney will see a small bump in the polls over the next few days. That will probably dissapate by the time of the second debate.

The big question is how this will set up the final narrative. If Mr. Romney continues to do well and does well in the remaining debates, this debate will seen as the launching pad where he took over. However, if Mr. Obama rights the ship and fights Mr. Romney to at least a draw in the second debate, the narrative will be that Mr. Obama took a hard punch but got off the mat and faught back, relaunching him in his quest for a second term.

Less than five weeks to go.

Baseball Playoffs

Today is the last day of the regular season in baseball and things are still up in the air.

The National League is a bit more settled. The San Francisco Giants have won the West and the #3 seed. The Atlanta Braves and St. Louis Cardinals have secured the wild card spots and will play each other on Friday in the one-game wild card match.

The only thing that is not settled in the NL is the seeding between the East champion Washington Nationals and the Central champion Cincinnati Reds. If Washington wins today (they are leading 2-1 in the bottom of the 6th at this writing), the Nationals take the #1 seed. Cincinnati can only secure the #1 seed if Washington loses and they defeat St. Louis tonight.

So, the odds favor Cincinnati playing San Francisco in the first round while Washington will square off against the wild card winner.

The American League is a bit more unsettled. The Detroit Tigers have won the Central division and the #3 seed and that's about all we can say.

In the East, the New York Yankees have a one game lead on the Baltimore Orioles. If New York wins against the Boston Red Sox tonight, they will win the East and the #1 seed. Baltimore will take a wild card spot regardless of whether they win or not. If the Yankees lose and Baltimore wins, there will be a tie atop the East. That the Yankees haven't clinched regardless, suggests to me that Baltimore would either win the tiebreaker or there would be a one-game playoff for the division crown.

In the West, the Oakland Athletics and Texas Rangers are tied with one game between them. The winner will win the division and the loser will take the wild card. If the Yankees win, the winner will take the #2 seed. If the Yankees lose, there will be a tie in percentage and it will come down to head to head record to see who gets the #1 seed.

My own guess is that the Yankees will end up with the East and the #1 seed and will host the wild card winner. Oakland is hot right now and are playing at home, so I would be inclined towards giving them the advantage in taking the West and the #2 seed for the right to face the Tigers.

We'll see how this actually plays out. Mrs. X and I managed to secure tickets to Game 3 of the Cincinnati first round series so we're excited about that. Hopefully the results will be better than a couple of years ago where the Reds were swept out of the playoffs by the Phillies.

*UPDATE*

National League is set:

#1 Washington Nationals vs. Atlanta Braves/St. Louis Cardinals
#2 Cincinnati Reds vs. #3 San Francisco Giants

*UPDATE*

American League is now set as well:

#1 New York Yankees vs. Texas Rangers/Baltimore Orioles
#2 Oakland Athletics vs. #3 Detroit Tigers