31 October 2000

 

Halloween and Presidential Predictions

How fitting that I would post my prediction on the Presidential race on Halloween, since the last few days have seen Gore and Lieberman running around trying to scare the hell out of everyone about the coming Bush administration.  

That's right:  I have thought for almost all of the campaign that the Bush team was going to win this one, and everything I've seen in October reinforces that inclination.  I was going to write a detailed analysis of why that is the case, but I got home from work tonight just way too tired to do so, and I also decided this:  I write detailed analyses of how elections and other political events are going to turn out all damn day at work, with coverage of 112 countries -- and I just didn't feel like working up a detailed analysis here.

So, instead of a detailed analysis, here's the Executive Summary:

Bush wins the popular and electoral vote by a margin that is a clear mandate if not a landslide.  Despite what most mainstream media outlets are saying -- that this race is too close to call, that it's a statistical dead heat, that Bush is trailing in the electoral college, that Bush could win the popular vote and lose the electoral college -- this race isn't too close to call, and indeed isn't close at all as of end-October.  I say this both as a Bush partisan and as a trained political risk analyst who has established a pretty good track record of political predictions (although generally with lead times more like months than days in advance).  If I had any way to get this prediction to our clients in a week's time, it's what I would be writing there as well.

Republicans should also hold control of the Senate and House, especially given the Republican advertising blitz in California in the final weeks of the campaign, which may not win the state for Bush but which effectively ends any real chance of a Speaker Gephardt.  And one final prediction:  that idiot Jean Carnahan will not set foot in Congress as a member even if her dead husband wins in Missouri, as a Republican Senate will never seat her and the Supreme Court will back them (since dead men cannot constitutionally be elected to office).

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