Sunday, October 23, 2011

Why Obama will win

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2 comments:

Beaumont said...

Interesting Article, although I'd have to disagree as to which keys he won. Litchman seems to award some of the keys pretty generously to Obama.

For instance: Short Term Economy was awarded "undecided", when everyone except Debbie Wasserman Schultz agrees its not in good shape.

Social Unrest was awarded to Obama, when I think many would probably classify much of the left's protests as social unrest, which will likely act as a polarizing factor for him in this election.

Although the media would like to ignore Obama's ties to Solyndra, and the fact that he gave them 535 million dollars when they were obviously a bad bet (they helped his election efforts), public perception is generally not too kind regarding Solyndra. True, its no Watergate, but it could be enough to muddy the water of this key.

And as far as Challenger Charisma goes, there have been numerous polls showing conservatives are much more energized than liberals to vote in this election, implying that a) Obama won't get out the same number of voters that got him elected, and b) conservatives are ready to rally behind whoever wins the nomination.

Many of these things can change, but I think Litchman is being a little too generous in awarding so many keys to Obama.

October 23, 2011 at 6:24 PM
Colin said...

Yeah, I'm skeptical of the actual predictive power of this thing. The keys seem a bit arbitrary in terms of which ones he's "won", as Beau points out (although I would tend to think of Fast & Furious as having more potential to actually damage the administration than Solyndra).

I know I link to 538 all the time, but they had an article a while ago about this very issue which, in addition to pointing out some of the problems with deciding which keys the candidate has won, critiqued its methodology: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/despite-keys-obama-is-no-lock/

October 23, 2011 at 9:12 PM

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