Reality:
Barack Obama will win the Presidential election by a comfortable margin. My prediction is 305 electoral votes and perhaps +3% in the popular voting.
Misperception:
This is a close race, and Mitt Romney will win the popular vote but will lose in a squeaker in the Electoral College.
Ummmm, no. This is clearly a situation of whistling past the graveyard on the part of Republicans who have forced the media by whining and throwing temper tantrums to phony up data and analysis that shows what they want to believe, that Obama somehow loses.
That the media is owned by a series of right-wing nutballs is fueling this misperception. It's just another cheat Republicans throw into the mix whenever they need to rally their troops.
That it's happening at all is the true story of this election and why I feel Obama will win large.
For instance, around November 1, 2008, Barack Obama was pulling around 51% of the popular vote on average. He ended up with an additional two percentage points as "registered voters" suddenly went out and voted. While I do not think that will happen again in such vast numbers, I do believe that Mitt Romney's support has flattened out, and is even decaying amongst Republicans.
Indeed, several suspicious moves by the Romney camp this weekend suggest that the following idea is in play: Shore up the base votes in states like Pennsylvania and Virginia, so as to lay claim that Romney indeed "won" the popular vote and thus invalidating Obama's election by the College.
By making Obama seem to be a split decision, they can safely go back to ignoring the President and gridlocking Congress while setting up another round of Help America Vote acts that will incorporate vote suppression tactics like photo ID and such.
Remember, voting is not a right. It's a privilege. Nowhere in the Constitution is a popular vote deemed a right and it's only through subsequent legislation and amending that voting even *appears* in the United States legal code.
What this sets up is an interminable disaster of butthurt, failing an Obama landslide, which would be viewed as widespread vote fraud....come on, you didn't really think they pursued those just for the sake of stopping people from voting, did you? While that charge would fall on mostly deaf ears nationwide, it would "work the ref" for the next close election.
A close win by Obama now would be viewed as the theft of an election -- we liberals got a lot of traction in 2004 based on the 2000 results, you might recall -- and would be used to focus anger on Obama in particular and progressives in general.
This ten-dimensional chess concerns me a little. While Obama will be able to navigate the minefield of a second term, we liberals tend to poo-poo nonsense from the right wing until it festers and boils over.
Remember, the Teabaggers saw their early roots take hold during the outrages over the Clinton administration, when we could have quashed the burgeoning nutbag right wing movement before it became a blight on the American landscape.
We as a group need to be prepared to argue and fight back here, and we each of us need to take steps now to tamp down the outrage.
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