- Just completed a 2.60 km walk – Walk with Dad. http://t.co/7Fi9Q6nY #RunKeeper #
- Reading – At Clifton's Cafeteria, someone left a neon light on. For 77 years. (Bob Pool) http://t.co/81PsN1CN #
- Reading – Romney’s Big Fat Wet Kiss to Keynesian Economics (Jonathan Chait) http://t.co/7iS5hqX9 #
- Reading – Pirate Bay Ready For Perpetual IP-Address Whac-A-Mole (Ernesto, TorrentFreak) http://t.co/HO4i6Mrb #
- Reading – Frustrations as U.S. and Pakistan Fail to Mend Ties (Steven Lee Myers and Eric Schmitt) http://t.co/WtlfUMVL #
- Reading – In Race against Carbon Catastrophe, Solar Power is Making Strides (Juan Cole) http://t.co/6wC2DCFr #
- Cynthia graduated a few minutes ago. Woo! #
- finished Heavy Planet: The Classic Mesklin Stories by Hal Clement http://t.co/82YZfDla #Kindle #
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At my graduation in 1993.
At Cynthia’s graduation in 2012. They don’t do caps and gowns at Oberlin (at least most of them didn’t, including Cynthia), but Cynthia none the less has now graduated. Next up is veterinary school at Tufts in Massachusetts starting in the fall. Cathy said she didn’t like how I made all the people orange and blotchy on Saturday’s pictures, so even though I sometimes like how they look, today’s pictures are all straight off the iPhone camera without any “enhancing” filters… except for cropping. I did crop most of these.
Cathy makes a funny face because I was taking her picture, while Dad looks on.
Cynthia and Grandfather Sunshine having a staring contest. They both started laughing seconds later.
Dad looking through the guide to this weekend’s events.
Cathy at one of the receptions.
A thing at a store.
Cynthia eating.
Cynthia’s house.
Cynthia looking at parts of dead animals in a jar. (Hey, biology and stuff.)
Cathy and Cynthia.
Cynthia’s grandfather Jim moderating a Q&A session between the Class of 1946 and current students.
Dad, Cathy, Cynthia and me after Cynthia’s Phi Beta Kappa induction.
Dad and Cathy at dinner.
Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate. Both show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney. Two states changing status today, both moving toward Obama:
First up Florida (29). Bottom line is Florida is too close to call. It has been too close to call for almost all of the last year. (The exception was two whole days in April where Obama’s lead in the five poll average went over 5%.) The rest of the time, one of the swingiest of swing states. Most recently, from May 10th until today, Romney was every so slightly ahead in the five poll average. Now Obama is ever so slightly ahead (0.3% actually). The next poll could move it back over the line to Romney. Bottom line, don’t put too much weight on what side of the line the too close to call states are on at any given moment. There is a reason I color them all the same on the map.
Next we have Virginia (13). Obama’s lead in the five poll average gets up to 5.0% which means by my classification it is no longer a swing state, but now gets listed as a “Weak Obama” state. Generally speaking that means he has a healthy lead at the moment, but not so big a lead as would allow him to take the state for granted and ignore it. Virginia no longer being a swing state takes the possibility of winning it out of Romney’s best case in the summary, which leaves us in a fun place…
Yes, we are once again in a situation where even if Romney won all the states he is ahead in, plus all the states Obama is ahead in by less than 5%, the result would be a TIE in the electoral college, which would throw the election to the House. In such a scenario, given the makeup of the House, Romney would almost certainly win. It is a fun scenario to think about. It is however an unlikely scenario. My model doesn’t produce odds, but Darryl’s at HorsesAss does, and in his latest analysis he has the odds of a 269/269 tie at just about 0.05%. So about 1 in 2000. So pretty long odds. Which is a shame, because that would be really fun to watch. It hasn’t happened since 1824, isn’t it about time? More to the point though, Romney is back to the very weak position he had in mid-April, and it seems that a lot of the gains he had been making in May have evaporated. For now anyway.
Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate. Both show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney. Two states change status today. One moving toward Romney, one moving toward Obama:
First up, Georgia with its 16 electoral votes. Like Texas a couple days ago, Georgia is one of those states that nobody thinks will be a swing state, but some polling was showing it closer than one might expect, leading one to think that Romney might have wanted to spend at least a little time and money on shoring it up. The latest polls though have Romney’s lead there in my five poll average going over 10%. This moves it into the “Strong Romney” category which generally are quite safe for Romney and therefore can effectively be ignored in the campaign. These moves from Weak to Strong don’t change the range of outcomes in my model, but they do show Romney’s consolidation of his base states.
Second we have Arizona. This has been bouncing back and forth, over and under the Romney 5% lead line in the five poll average. With today’s update, the 5 poll average drops below 5% again, so we once again classify it as a Lean Romney Swing State. Now, the five poll average in Arizona has never shown Obama actually ahead in Arizona (although a couple individual polls in the last year have), so Arizona is not as swingy as, say, Florida or North Carolina, where the actual lead keeps changing hands. But it is close enough that the lead could be wiped out in a few days depending on the news cycle. So, for the moment, Arizona swings again. In terms of our summary, since Georgia was never considered a real Obama possibility, only Arizona causes a change, improving Obama’s best case by 11 electoral votes:
Note 2012 Jun 8 15:00 UTC: A correction noted June 8th moved a Tennessee change from “Weak Romney” to “Lean Romney” from March 2nd to May 24th, which would have been the day before this post. Updates between March 2nd and this post therefore incorrectly classified Tennessee.
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