The media’s moved on from Election Day 2012, but Jonathan Bernstein reminds us that the final vote totals are still coming in and Obama’s lead has only kept growing:
The Cook Report’s David Wasserman has been keeping tabs on the current vote totals, and finds today that Obama’s lead is up to 3.1% nationally, and still rising. That’s up from 2.3% the morning after election day; I’m not sure what it was when the networks closed up shop on election night. That’s a pretty large swing! It seems pretty likely that Obama’s lead will wind up a full percentage point higher than it was at that point. Of course, no one really cares that much is a national lead goes from 2.3 to 3.1 percent, but they sure might if it were to go from a 1% GOP lead on Election Day to, say, a half a point lead for the Democrat when all was said and done.
Meanwhile, Colorado was at 4.7% on the morning after and is now at 5% even (actually a 4.98% lead, just below Obama’s 5.02% lead in Pennsylvania as of now).
“Of course, no one really cares that much is a national lead goes from 2.3 to 3.1 percent, but they sure might if it were to go from a 1% GOP lead on Election Day to, say, a half a point lead for the Democrat when all was said and done.”
That’s all apples-and-oranges. No one (especially GOPers) would care if Romney’s lead had gone from 2.3 to 3.1% either while Dems (among others) WOULD care if there’d been a 1% Obama lead on Election Day and it suddenly went to a 0.5% GOP lead. (Even the math is a bit stupid here. The difference in the 2.3 to 3.1 is merely an increase of 0.8 points; the hypothetical switch is an increase of 1.5 points–almost DOUBLE the difference. But I digress….)
The simple fact here is that the party that was in the LEAD on Election Day is STILL in the lead albeit by a slightly larger margin.
(I went to Bernstein’s full post and it makes no more sense than what was quoted above. He starts hypothesizing about Romney’s having a “5-point swing uniformly” the morning after the election which makes absolutely NO sense–especially for a blog that describes itself as “A plain blog about politics.” A REAL “plain blog about politics” wouldn’t engage in a lot of nonsensical hypothesizing on the election results any more so than a “plain blog about football” is going to engage in how the team could’ve won the game if the quarterback had just passed the ball to that other *covered* player or if the kicker had made that last field goal from a closer point instead of where the line of scrimmage was when he kicked. I mean, if we want to engage in some real hypothesizing, why not go all-out and imagine what the results would’ve been if the Greens and Libertarians had managed to score majority votes in 1/3 of the states–equally taking away states from both the Dems and GOP.)
What’s your point?