just wondering how many people have already decided to blow it off.

what

United States midterm election

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Midterm elections are elections in the United States in which members of United States Congress (including all 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives and full terms for 33 or 34 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate), and some state legislatures and governors are elected, but no presidential election is held. Thirty-four of the 50 U.S. states elect their governors to four-year terms during midterm elections, while Vermont and New Hampshire elect governors to two-year terms in both midterm and presidential elections.

Thus, 36 governors are elected during midterm elections. Many states also elect officers to their state legislatures and county offices every two years, in both mid-term and presidential election years. Special elections are often held in conjunction with regular elections, so additional Senators and governors may be elected to partial terms.

Midterm elections occurs on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November (Election Day) in between the quadrennial (four-year) elections for the President of the United States.

The next midterm elections are scheduled for November 2, 2010:













MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2010

Midterm Elections 2010: Latest Updates on Key Midterm Races

With the midterm elections now just nine weeks away, a group of political scientists gathered for a conference in Washington D.C. this weekend forecast significant losses for the Democrats. Three of the five forecasts predicted that Republicans will gain majority control of the House of Representatives.

The annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), which featured nearly 5,000 participants and close to 900 panel and roundtable sessions, was about far more than election forecasting. Those most interested in the 2010 campaigns, however, gravitated to a Saturday session in which five political scientists presented the latest results from their forecasting models, some of which have been in development for 30 years or more.

Democrats currently hold a 256 to 179 seat advantage, so Republicans need to win at least 39 seats to gain majority control. Three of the models, two of which draw on national polls measuring whether voters plan to support the Democrat or Republican candidate in their district, point to Republicans picking up between 49 and 52 seats in the House, more than enough to win majority control. Specifically:


Alan Abramowitz of Emory University forecast a Republican gain of 49 seats, based on current polling showing Republican with a roughly five percentage-point lead on the generic House ballot.

Joe Bafumi of Dartmouth College presented his forecast of a 50-seat Republican gain, based on a model and paper co-authored with Robert Erikson of Columbia University and Chris Wlezien of the University of Pennsylvania (and summarized last month in the Huffington Post). Their model also rests heavily on national polling on U.S. House vote preferences.

James Campbell of SUNY Buffalo predicted a gain of 50 to 52 seats for the Republicans, using a model that combines assessments of the number of "seats in peril" by the Cook Political Report with the recent job approval rating of president Barack Obama.

Why so much variation in the forecasts? Another speaker, Gary Jacobson of the University of California San Diego, pointed out that the number of previous elections typically used by forecasters (typically between 16 and 32) is "not a very big number," while a great many "plausible" predictive measures exist. Moreover, the national polling numbers used by the modelers are often "really, really noisy."

Jacobson also noted the differences between the "fundamentalist" models of Cuzan/Bundrick and Lewis-Beck/Tien that assume that views of the the economy and the Obama administration drive voting, and the others that use vote preference questions which, as he put it, "add in the information that's already the product of these fundamentals" as well as "the other stuff that's going on" with voter preferences.

Lewis-Beck argued that the "the best models are based on theory ... things that we know [or] that we're pretty certain we know," which in this case means the belief that "people vote about the main direction of the economy, and they vote about big macro political issues," especially in midterm elections.

At least one of the academics noted the apparent gap between what the fundamentals alone predict and what the polls are picking up. "Republicans are polling a lot better than they should be," Bob Erikson argued, "by [the] fundamentals."


click here for link

oh

I was debating the midterm vote. After seeing this thread I may just decline.

I'm voting. I always do.

but

Originally posted by: pudge

I'm voting. I always do.

also...bad time to "blow it off." all the teabagger subnormals are super excited about "taking their country back," and will probably show up pretty strong.

One of my customers is sitting in jail because of Joe Sesstak

for?

It's a long story but she is the VP of some bank that he had accounts in and he had traces of illegal campaign funds from unions and such in his account. She shows all this evidence to the president of the bank and two days later she gets fired, the bank says she was embezzling. They have had death threats and have gotten their tires slashed multiple times. FBI says they can't do anything about the evidence till after the election. She gets a call that her arraignment date is the next day. They show up to court and their lawyer is nowhere to be found and will not answer their call. Judge says since her lawyer isn't there she must be guilty. They don't even give her bail so she's sitting in prison till her trial. This lady and her husbands life has been hell since she found that evidence. I guess it's the price of doing the right thing.

i never vote. who cares

Originally posted by:slutpunch

One of my customers is sitting in jail because of Joe Sesstak

guy is an incredible asshole.

"Nightmare" is how Politico and Slate sum up the consequences to the Republican party of Christine O'Donnell's victory in the Delaware Senate primary.

With the win for O'Donnell, who is backed by the Tea Party but viewed by her own party as unelectable, Politico said: "The path to a Republican Senate takeover narrowed to the point of vanishing Tuesday night."

On Slate, David Weigel is similarly pessimistic about her prospects in the Senate election: "I see a lot of conservatives arguing tonight that Christine O'Donnell's victory shows that she can upset the establishment and win this seat. These conservatives are not from Delaware . Her victory was only possible because, for the first time, political donors and activists from outside our little state picked a target, froze it, and polarised it. But the message I am getting tonight is clear - neither the state GOP nor the NRSC [National Republican Senatorial Committee] will spend any resources on O'Donnell."

Karl Rove, the veteran Republican strategist, was also doubtful that O'Donnell would be able to win in a general election. Speaking on Fox News, he said: "There's just a lot of nutty things she's been saying that just simply don't add up. I'm for the Republican, but I've got to tell you, we were looking at eight to nine seats in the Senate. We're now looking at seven to eight. In my opinion this is not a race we're going to be able to win."

The LA Times says the Republican establishment was "vanquished" by the Tea Party, pointing to another upset in New York where Carl Paladino, a millionaire developer, defeated former Republican representative Rick Lazio. It writes: "The Tea Party movement had already claimed two Republican incumbents in the Senate and two in the house. In several other races, candidates favoured by party insiders were beaten by outsiders who said they were more conservative.

"The dynamic has left the GOP in a state of upheaval, even as polling shows the party likely to make strong gains in Congress in November. In Delaware, state Republicans worked openly against O'Donnell's candidacy. They eagerly pointed to reports of her personal financial struggles, allegations that she had used campaign funds to pay her rent, and the fact that she didn't secure an undergraduate degree until this month."

The Washington Post describes Mike Castle, whom O'Donnell defeated in Delaware, as "one of the most popular politicians in the state": "O'Donnell is viewed as a far weaker candidate, and Democrats say she is too conservative for the state. But her victory was a reminder of the unpredictable forces at work in politics this year and the power and energy of the anti-establishment sentiment among voters nationwide that could be aimed at Democrats."

Salon puts the matter simply: "Republicans in Delaware faced a very simple choice in Tuesday's primary: Did they want to win Joe Biden's old Senate seat in November, or did they want to lose it? They went with the latter option."






lol

fuck this gay earth

i'm neutral in worldly politics