Anticipating the election fallout

Andrew Sullivan wonders if the delusional elements on the American right will come to their collective senses post-Tuesday:

Yesterday, I tried not to think about the election for a day. The off-grid-because-no-grid experience helped me see there was little use at this point in obsessing about the tiniest of details that will be washed away by whatever reality flushes out on Tuesday or thereafter.

But that flush will be instructive. The narrative in the GOP blogosphere is of imminent triumph, even landslide. All the independents are surging toward Romney, the swing states are trending Romney, and the total failure of Obama’s four years is so obvious you have to be a liar to believe that deficits have slightly declined on his watch, despite a collapse in revenues caused by the Great Recession. And so state after state is falling to Romney even as I type. Hinderaker – who still believes that George W Bush was a great president – sees one outlier poll in Pennsylvania as something that will be “sending chills down David Axelrod’s spine”. It’s one poll – and the only one that doesn’t give Obama a clear edge. The poll of polls puts Pennsylvania as 50 percent Obama, 45 percent Romney, and it’s been very stable. Minnesota? That’s also got Hinderaker atwitter: he thinks both Minnesota and Pennsylvania could both “very possibly end up in the red column.” All the polling suggests otherwise – but I guess they’re all rigged.

It’s not so much that the polls can’t be wrong — they can — but that the narrative Sullivan references above is so at odds with the overwhelming statistical consensus that, barring a very big surprise on Tuesday, truth will have to be reckoned with on the conservative end of our political spectrum. And it’ll be a long time in coming.

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About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

2 thoughts on “Anticipating the election fallout

    1. Here’s hoping that he wins by a big enough margin that the GOP gets the point and starts looking for ways to compromise again, like a normal political party.

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