In her CNN post, “GOP’s Obama obsession will lose it the election,” TDS Advisory Board member Maria Cardona has a few choice comments about the GOP’s xenophobic rhetoric, including: “As an American Latina born in Colombia, I recoiled at this language, the same way I did in 2008 when Bachmann used it. It reminds me — and I suspect it reminds many other Latinos in this country — of the lengths to which many in this Republican Party have gone to marginalize those who represent the new and changing demographics in the United States…Given that experts say Romney needs at least 40% of the Latino vote to win, this is an odd strategy for someone who enjoys Latino support in the low 20s…”
Concerning Elizabeth Warren’s challenge to defeat Se. Scott Brown in Mass., Adam Carlson reports that “HuffPost Pollster’s current trend estimate of the race, which takes into account all available public polling, shows Warren ahead by 2.5 points (43.5 percent to 41.0 percent), which is essentially unchanged since the beginning of 2012,” which is within the margin of error. This race is a top priority for GOP fat cats, who fear Warren’s savvy about their financial shenanigans. Dems who want to help elect one of the smartest progressive candidates of 2012 can do so at Warren’s ActBlue web page.
It’s a little late, but good for eBay and UPS for recently joining the growing list of advertisers to quit sponsoring Rush Limbaugh. According to Jason Easley’s report at PoliticusUSA, Limbaugh’s remaining sponsors include Lifelock, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Kia, Papa John’s, Home Depot, Angie’s List and NBC-TV. More on the boycott at the StopRush Project.
Although Jews are a fairly small demographic group in the U.S., they could well be a pivotal voting bloc in Florida, where they are an estimated 7-8 percent of the overall turnout in recent years, with a turnout rate of 96 percent of eligible Jewish voters in 2008, when Obama received 78 percent of the Jewish vote, Reuters reports. Nearly a half-million Jewish voters reside in South Florida.
And at HuffPo, Chris Weigant speculates that it’s just possible that GOP voter suppression may backfire in Florida, because of it’s disproportionately large senior population.
Nate Silver’s latest calculations at his FiveThirty Eight blog bring some good news for President Obama: “…As of Tuesday afternoon, President Obama’s lead in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls was 1.3 percentage points over Mitt Romney….Mr. Obama led by a mean of 3.5 points in the RealClearPolitics averages for the 10 states (Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, Michigan, New Hampshire and Wisconsin) that are most likely to determine the election outcome, according to our “tipping point index.””
Ron Brownstein’s National Journal article, “Public to Congress: Bend, Don’t Break” reports on the latest United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, indicating “a notable uptick in the share of Americans who said they prefer political leaders who “make compromises with people they disagree with” over those who “stick to their positions without compromising.”” Perhaps it’s a measure of false equivalency conflict-aversion on the part of the pollsters that they apparently didn’t even ask the rather important question, “So, which party do you blame for the lack of compromise?”
Scary headline of the day: “New GOP-Backed Voter ID Law Could Keep 43 Percent Of Philly Voters From Polls” by Talking Points Memo’s Ryan J. Reilly. The story also notes that “the percentage of Philadelphia voters who lack a current form of Pennsylvania-issued identification far outnumbers any other part of the state.”
Stat comparison of the Day, via Mother Jones: Between 2000 and 2010, there were 649 million votes cast in general elections, 47,000 UFO sightings, 441 Americans killed by lightning and 13 credible cases of in-person voter impersonation.
In his post at Media Matters for America, “Note To WSJ: Romney Didn’t Build The Olympics On His Own,” Simon Maloy collars the Wall St. Journal for shamelessly gushing that Romney’s leadership as CEO of the ’02 Winter Olympics “remains one of the clearest examples of how he sought to transfer his corporate-restructuring experience to a public institution, a theme that runs through the heart of his challenge to Barack Obama.” The WSJ article conveniently neglected to mention that the games were supported by hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government.