Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Convention Bounce for Obama puts him back in the lead

Although some media outlets are still reporting a "dead heat", it's pretty clear that Obama is enjoying a post-convention bounce and probably remains a few points ahead of Romney.   If the election were held today, Obama would be the very likely winner both in terms of total vote and, more importantly, the electoral vote.

2012 Electoral votes may come into play again, though at this time it appears Obama's likely to take both the popular and the electoral vote, the latter by a larger margin.

Many of us have our fingers crossed that we will not again see a fiasco like the Gore v Bush election.   Gore won the popular vote in that election by about 500,000 votes nationally, but lost in the electoral college when all of Florida's electoral votes went to GW Bush after a series of court challenges that wound up in the Supreme Court.    Many fail to note that the exit polls from that election were *very* accurate in suggesting that Gore "won" the election, but in addition to other less important errors, the ballots in Palm Beach county was so confusing that people who thought they voted for Gore wound up as "overvotes" and were discarded - most because they had a vote for both Gore and for Pat Buchanon.