Kos-poster Meteorblades gets medeival on so-called ‘Democrats’ who say they are going to vote for McCain because their candidate isn’t getting nominated. The whole article is worth a read, but this excerpt in particular lays out cold what such a vote would really mean:

…you McCainocrats are premeditating ballot support for an exclusive club of racist, union-busting, woman-suppressing, bedroom-peering, rights-scoffing, warmongering, torture-backing, buccaneering, global warming-denying, privatizing, public land-grabbing, Supreme Court stuffing, empire-building, Constitution-shredding raptors. All for self-indulgent revenge. You’re unhappy that your candidate has not won the nomination. I understand that. Mine didn’t win either. But you’re not just unhappy, you’re also willing to contribute to the election of someone who stands against most of what your candidate has been promoted as standing for. That, I don’t comprehend at all. Emotionally, intellectually or morally…

‘Nuff said. Apparently ‘Blades has struck a nerve here, with some 872 comments thus far.

As the primary season comes to a close and the focus turns to the battle between the nominees apparent, it seems like a good time to wonder which, if any, tools have a credible track record in predicting the outcome of presidential races. In his post at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Alan I. Abramowitz argues that, yes, there is one device that has a very impressive track record, and one better than horse race polls — the “electoral barometer.” Abramowitz says of early horse race polls:

The problem…is that they are not very accurate predictors of the actual election results. Polls in the spring of 1988 showed Michael Dukakis with a comfortable lead over George H.W. Bush and polls in June of 1992 showed Bill Clinton running third behind both Bush and H. Ross Perot. So recent polls showing a close race between McCain and Obama may not tell us much about what to expect in November.

There is a better way to go, as Abramowitz explains:

Instead of using early horserace polls, political scientists generally rely on measures of the national political climate to make their forecasts. That is because the national political climate can be measured long before the election and it has been found to exert a powerful influence on the eventual results.
Three indicators of the national political climate have accurately predicted the outcomes of presidential elections since the end of World War II: the incumbent president’s approval rating at mid-year, the growth rate of the economy during the second quarter of the election year, and the length of time the president’s party has held the White House.
…These three factors can be combined to produce an Electoral Barometer score that measures the overall national political climate. The formula for computing this score is simply the president’s net approval rating (approval minus disapproval) in the Gallup Poll plus five times the annual growth rate of real GDP minus 25 if the president’s party has held the White House for two terms or longer. Mathematically, this formula can be written as:
EB = NAR + (5*GDP) – 25.
…A positive Electoral Barometer reading generally predicts victory for the incumbent party while a negative reading generally predicts defeat.

As for the track record, Abramowitz notes:

The Electoral Barometer has predicted the winner of the popular vote in 14 of the 15 presidential elections since World War II. There were five elections in which the Electoral Barometer was negative and the president’s party lost the popular vote in all five of these elections: 1952, 1960, 1976, 1980, and 1992. There were ten elections in which the Electoral Barometer was positive, and the president’s party won the popular vote in nine of these elections: 1948, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1984, 1988, 1996, 2000, and 2004.

Not too shabby. Abramowitz points out that the second quarter GDP figures needed to fill out the electoral barometer formula won’t be available until August. But preliminary stats look very encouraging for Dems:

…Based on President Bush’s net approval rating in the most recent Gallup Poll (-39), the annual growth rate of the economy during the first quarter of 2008 (+0.6 percent), and the fact that the Republican Party has controlled the White House for the past eight years, the current Electoral Barometer reading is a dismal -63.

Abramowitz argues that such an electoral barometer reading would result in a “decisive defeat” for the GOP, which could only be avoided in “an upset of unprecedented magnitude.” The ‘smart money’ crowd at Intrade.com, which also has a more impressive track record than early horse-race polls, seems to agree, with a 61.0 bid for Obama vs. 37.2 for McCain.

One of the key political terms in which variable definitions cause a lot of confusion is “battleground states.” In the context of a presidential general election, the term ultimately means states that the two major party candidates target with time and money, particularly as election day nears. In earlier stages of the presidential cycle, the term is more speculative, as reflected in the inveterate promises of this or that candidate to “expand the battleground” by placing more states into play. Early general election polling–particularly now that state-by-state polls have become more common–is often the source of such speculation; that’s why you hear talk from the Obama campaign that the Democrat will at least throw a scare into McCain in such previously invulnerable GOP bastions as Georgia or North Carolina, and why McCainiacs like to tout outlier polls showing him well ahead in PA or competitive in CA.
Over at OpenLeft, Chris Bowers has made an effort to identify the likely 2008 battleground states by a more scientific method: using the close 2004 race as the baseline, and adjusting the numbers to reflect recent demographic trends, with the final ranking also reflecting polling evidence and common sense. Chris also takes the simple but often forgotten step of stipulating a very close general election, not just because he thinks that’s likely, but because the very term “battleground” becomes misleading in an electoral blowout. That’s why he assigns such states as Florida and Pennsylvania–almost invariably described as battleground states in most lists–to McCain and Obama, respectively, on the theory that if McCain’s leading in PA or Obama’s leading in FL down the homestretch, the candidate is probably going to be well ahead nationally. (He also views IA and MN as Obama states in a close race, and WV and MO as McCain states in a close race). This doesn’t mean the campaigns will ignore such states in the general election; it is, instead, a prediction of where the big effort will and won’t be made in the final push.
Chris comes up with a list of eight likely battleground states, with five (CO, NH, OH, NM and WI) leaning to Obama, and three (MI, NV and VA) leaning to McCain.
You can quibble with his list, which Chris acknowleges as very preliminary, but it is based on a sound methodology that generally avoids the pro-Obama temptations of overinterpreting positive 2006 election results or making outlandish assumptions about turnout, and the pro-McCain temptation of giving the Arizonan a thumb on the scales in every state where Obama did poorly in this year’s primaries.
One important point that Chris doesn’t explicitly address, but that we might as well get used to, is the recurring possibility of an election in which the popular vote winner loses the electoral vote, and thus the election. It obviously happened (with an assist from the Supreme Court) to the benefit of Republicans in 2000, and could well have happened to the benefit of Democrats in 2004 (in the latter case because Kerry’s percentage margin of defeat in states like OH, IA and NM was a lot smaller than his overall popular vote deficit). Given the likelihood that Obama will run better in solid red states than is usual for a Democrat, you’d have to guess–and it is just a guess–that he’s the more likely victim of this sort of miscarriage of political justice. But you wage election campaigns with the system you have, and those who fear an electoral vote/popular vote split better get behind the state-based National Popular Vote initiative (which would reward EVs to the national popular vote winner) pronto.

One of John McCain’s most important political assets is his reputation as the scourge of congressional porkmeisters. It represents a nice “three-fer” for the Arizonan, by (1) reinforcing his “maverick” image as a man unafraid of malefactors in either party; (2) appealing to conservatives who are convinced that runaway federal spending is the Bush-era GOP’s great sin, evidencing the betrayal of “conservative principles;” and (3) enabling him to support tax policies even more irresponsible than Bush’s, on grounds that he will pay for old and new tax bennies with a brave and vicious attack on federal spending.
That’s why I strongly recommend a short but efficient piece by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic that takes a sledgehammer to McCain’s carefully constructed edifice of fiscal responsibility, built almost entirely on the foundation of the GOP nominee’s famous antipathy to congressional appropriations “earmarks.”
First, says Chait, McCain conflates “runaway federal spending” with domestic appropriations that are in fact the least of our fiscal problems:

In fact, the growth of government under Bush is mostly due to higher spending on defense and homeland security, which have grown from 3.6 percent of the economy to 5.6 percent. Domestic discretionary spending (that is, programs other than entitlements) has fallen as a share of GDP, from 3.1 percent to 2.8 percent.

Second, McCain conflates “excessive domestic appropriations” with earmarks, those infamous “special projects” inserted into appropriations bills by self-promoting members of Congress:

McCain is promising to cut taxes by $300 billion per year on top of the Bush tax cuts, which he would make permanent. In addition to this, he promises to balance the budget in his first term. When asked how he could possibly pull this off, McCain has asserted that he could eliminate all earmark spending, saving $100 billion per year.
I don’t find this explanation persuasive. The first point I’d make is that $100 billion is, in fact, less than $300 billion. The second point I’d make is that McCain won’t even cut $100 billion, or anywhere close. By conventional measures, earmarks only account for $18 billion per year. McCain gets his number by employing an unusually broad definition of what constitutes an earmark. McCain’s definition includes things like aid to Israel and housing for members of the military that are not “pork” as the term is understood. When asked if he would eliminate those programs, he replied, “Of course not.”

Third, when pressed on any particular earmarked project, McCain invariably retreats into an attack on the earmarking process, instead of attacking the project as pork, making his claims of vast future savings completely illusory:

The Washington Post recently did a long reported story on the bear DNA project that McCain has made the butt of so many jokes. (“Three million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Unbelievable,” scoffs one McCain ad.) The Post found that the project is a tool for measuring the bear population in Glacier National Park and has a sound scientific basis. When contacted by the story’s author, McCain’s campaign gave a familiar reply: “Senator McCain does not question the merits of these projects; it’s the process that he has a problem with.” If McCain won’t even commit to zeroing out his single favorite example of government waste, it’s not clear that he’ll save any money at all.

In other words, that brave pork-fighter and spending tightwad John McCain is actually the worst kind of conventional Washington politician when it comes to fiscal policy, supporting very specific tax cuts that create huge budget deficits, and then railing against “pork” and its congressional purveyors in the abstract, and by meaningless anecdote. In this respect, as in others, he resembles no one as much as George W. Bush.

Just as everyone is still struggling to absorb the import of the yesterday’s loud but murky DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee ruling on MI and FL, the votes are largely in for the Puerto Rico primary, which Hillary Clinton won by a bit more than a two-to-one percentage margin, and by roughly 140,00 popular votes.
This outcome will once again create a dialogue-of-the-deaf over the officially meaningless but symbolically significant (at least according to HRC supporters) total popular vote issue. Most pro-HRC counts exclude four Caucus states where raw votes were not officially tabulated, and also give Obama zero votes in MI, where his supporters were forced to vote for “Uncommitted.” Most pro-Obama counts include estimates of the four caucus vote totals and either exclude MI as tainted or give Obama all the “Uncommitted” votes. (Another, by RenaRF at DailyKos, excludes primaries or caucuses in jurisdictions that don’t participate in the general election, denying HRC her PR margin and Obama some small victories elsewhere).
There is no such thing as an “official” popular vote count, since again, it really doesn’t matter in the official nomination process. But with only SD and MT–two small states where Obama is expected to win but not overwhelmingly–still left to vote, it’s reasonably sure that both campaigns will claim a total popular vote victory after Tuesday. The two things no one can deny is that it was, in retrospect, an awfully close race, but one in which Barack Obama will finish with a lead in pledged delegates, and barring some implosion in his general-election standing, the nomination. The general feeling is that he’ll cross the threshold to a total majority of pledged and announced-superdelegate votes by the end of this week.

The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee did a good job of resolving the dispute over what to do about the Florida and Michigan delegates. The compromise, which seats their entire state delegations and allows each delegate to cast a half vote, looks like one which an overwhelming majority of Democrats can live with. I would expect that a tiny percentage of Democrats at most will vote for McCain or stay home in November because of it. That’s probably about as good a compromise as could be expected.
Some Clinton supporters feel she deserved better. According to the NYT wrap-up, she gets 19 more FL delegates than Obama, giving her a total of 52.5 percent of FL’s 211 delegates, close enough to her 49.8 percent of Florida’s Democratic primary voters. But she only got a 5-delegate pick up in MI, for a total of 53.9 percent of MI delegates, close enough to her 55 percent of MI voters in the Dem primary, especially considering that Obama was not on the ballot. The argument that ‘Hey, he took himself off the ballot’ didn’t count for much. Nor should it. He should not be penalized for following the spirit of Party rules. Clinton supporters can argue that she deserved a few more MI delegates, while Many Obama’s supporters feel the Committee was generous in giving her any edge in MI delegates. In all, the Committee awarded Clinton a net gain of 24 delegates.
The Clinton campaign can’t gripe much about the composition of the deciding committee. They had an edge in terms of their supporters being a at least a plurality of the Rules and Bylaws Committee, and probably a majority. And the two chairs of the committee, Alexis Herman and James Roosevelt were both former Clinton Administration officials. That should put a chill on making too much of the “we wuz robbed” argument.
Bottom line is that there was no compromise that would make everybody happy. This one seems fair enough.
The contest may continue at the convention, starting with the credentials committee. It’s a close race and both campaigns would be remiss if they didn’t press their respective cases throughout the process. Both Obama and Clinton seem poised to support their Dem opponent if she/he is the Party’s certified nominee.
As for the future, the DNC and all Democrats should press the case for primary reform, starting the day after the general election, so we don’t have to go through this divisive exercise again. Senator Levin has a fair point in arguing the injustice of letting New Hampshire and Iowa have disproportionate influence in every presidential election. Other states should have a fair opportunity to go first, and the Rules and Bylaws Committee should begin moving in that direction.
Given the experience of the ’08 primary season, however, we may soon see some jockeying on the part of the states to see who goes last. Imagine the clout CA, TX or NY could wield if their primaries were the last in the nation.