quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
Obama at fundraiser yesterday

“[T]his shouldn’t be close, but it’s close,” Obama told a group of donors in New York City on Tuesday. “The presidential race we should win, but Donald Trump got the nomination, so weird stuff happens.”

“The stakes are really high.”

Obama mocked Republican party for their divisions, pointing out that he didn’t even have to veto very much legislation.

Under Speaker Paul Ryan, he noted, House Republicans “can’t even pass their own priorities”


“I don’t generally even have to veto anything because they can’t get organized enough even to present the cockamamie legislation that they’re interested in passing,” he said, as the audience laughed.

“It is a cliché that every election is the most important in our lifetime,” he said. “But I got to tell you, this one? This one counts.”

Earlier in the day, Obama campaigned for Clinton in Philadelphia urging his supporters to back her.

“I am really into electing Hillary Clinton,” he said. “This is not me going through the motions here. I really, really, really want to elect Hillary Clinton .”

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-...ens-trump-might-win/

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quote:

Hillary Clinton’s newest book, “Stronger Together,” which provides a policy blueprint for where she hopes to take the country if she is elected president, sold just 2,912 copies in its first week on sale, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Both Mrs. Clinton and her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, have promoted the book on the campaign trail, but the sales figure, which tallies about 80 percent of booksellers nationwide and does not include e-books, firmly makes the book what the publishing industry would consider a flop.

First-week sales typically account for around a third of the total sold, thanks to the publicity blitzes that accompany publishers’ biggest releases. By comparison, Mrs. Clinton’s 2014 memoir, “Hard Choices,” which also fell short of expectations, sold more than 85,000 copies in its first week.

Mrs. Clinton’s more revealing 2003 memoir, “Living History,” about her years in the White House, sold about six times as many copies in its first week as “Hard Choices.”

Candidates often release hurriedly-written books during their campaigns, often aimed at spreading their message and attracting publicity, rather than topping the best-seller charts.

In 2006, Senator Barack Obama published “The Audacity of Hope,” which laid out his vision for the country. In February 2008, when Mr. Obama’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against Mrs. Clinton gained momentum, the book averaged sales of more than 35,000 a week.

Others cash in after an election. Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue: An American Life” sold 469,000 copies in its first week in November 2009.

“Stronger Together,” whose cover shows Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kaine waving, arrived closer to Election Day than most of these types of books.

Named after the campaign’s slogan, “Stronger Together” offers readers, according to the book jacket, “specific and practical solutions, while also articulating a bold and expansive vision of change and renewal.”

Its roughly 250 pages intersperse bullet-point policy ideas, like “launch a national initiative for suicide prevention” and “humanely address the Central American migrant crisis,” with photographs of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kaine on the campaign trail, charts in the campaign’s signature chunky font and highlights from Mrs. Clinton’s speeches.

Aides said that the proceeds were going to charity, and that the release was part of a larger plan to more clearly communicate Mrs. Clinton’s vision for the country, rather than just her case against Donald J. Trump, her Republican opponent.

Timed to the Sept. 6 release of the book, Mrs. Clinton “will do a series of ‘Stronger Together’ speeches over the course of the next several weeks,” a campaign spokesman, Jennifer Palmieri said. (A case of pneumonia caused Mrs. Clinton to postpone the first of those speeches, on an “inclusive economy,” initially scheduled for Tuesday in California.)

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kaine held the book up at campaign rallies last week.

At one point, Mrs. Clinton greeted reporters on her campaign plane holding a copy of the book. “We’re putting out a book tomorrow, called ‘Stronger Together,’ which is our blueprint for America’s future,” she explained. “We wanted voters to be able to find, in one easy place, all of the various plans and policies that I’ve been talking about throughout this campaign.”

A spokesman for the publisher, Simon & Schuster, which also published Mrs. Clinton’s earlier books and Bill Clinton’s best-selling memoir, “My Life,” declined to comment about the first-week sales.

quote:

September 12, 2016, 06:03 pm
Why a Trump victory in November is a virtual certainty
By Helmut Norpoth, contributor

To venture the prediction that Donald Trump is a sure bet to be elected President in November sounds about as outlandish, perhaps even ludicrous and delusional as anything coming out of the mouth of the candidate.

Polls, on the average, as tracked by RealClearPolitics and the Huffington Post, along with prediction markets like PredicIt and the Iowa Electronic Market, as well as several models featured at the recent meeting of the American Political Science Association all agree that Hillary Clinton is the heavy favorite to win.

One model, however, begs to differ. It is one that, with slight variations, has accurately predicted the winner of the popular vote in each of the last five presidential elections, ever since it was introduced in 1996.

Dubbed the “Primary Model,” it puts much stock in using primary results to forecast the vote in the general election. It also takes advantage of a historical tendency of the electoral pendulum to swing back and forth between the two parties. Both factors favor Trump over Clinton in 2016.

Trump proved to be the stronger candidate in primaries, according to the metric used by the model, and the electoral pendulum is poised to swing back to the Republican side after two Democratic terms in the White House under Barack Obama. The Primary Model predicts that Trump will defeat Clinton by 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent of the two-party vote. It is 87-percent certain that he will be the next President.

How does the model produce this forecast?

To begin with, the predictive power of primary elections was revealed, though not noticed by anyone, the first time a significant number of states used them for the presidential nomination. The year was 1912. That they have been around so long may come as a surprise to many. Republican William Howard Taft was in the White House, seeking a second term. Theodore Roosevelt challenged Taft for the GOP nomination and beat him soundly in the party’s presidential primaries.

The Republican convention nonetheless handed Taft the nomination. On the Democratic side, Woodrow Wilson was the winner in that party’s primaries, received the nomination and went on to win the general election. Lesson: the party with a primary winner beats the one with a candidate loser. The 1912 case is no fluke. In general, the party with the stronger candidate in primaries tends to win in November.

My forecasts of the 2000-2012 elections used only the first primary, the one in New Hampshire, making it possible to offer a forecast early in the election year. That may prove to be a risky choice, however, for an election in which one of the candidates has strong support in a group of voters that barely exists in New Hampshire.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was such a candidate with her support from African-Americans. So to assess primary performance in 2016, I also included the second primary, the one in South Carolina, where African-Americans make up a large portion of the Democratic electorate.

For the record, Clinton lost in New Hampshire and then won in South Carolina. On the Republican side, Donald Trump won both.

According to the standard metric of the model, which calculates primary performance of a candidate as a percentage of votes cast for the top two finishers in a primary, Trump wound up with a higher average based on the returns from New Hampshire and South Carolina than did Clinton. Trump’s superior primary performance bodes well for a victory over Clinton in November.

In addition to primaries, the swing of the electoral pendulum generates predictive power. Even a casual observer of presidential elections may have noticed a distinct pattern: the party in the White House wins re-election after one term almost all the time, but much more rarely after two terms. In fact, during the last 65 years, the party in power has managed to win three terms in a row only once: in 1988.

Over the long haul since 1828, according to my statistical estimates, the White House party has averaged 2.6 terms in office. A third term is not out of the question, but not very certain either.

It depends on how well the White House party did in winning a second term compared to its winning the first term. Doing better in the re-election makes a third term more likely; doing worse makes change more likely.

To return to the 1988 case, Ronald Reagan defeated President Carter in 1980 by about 10 points and then won re-election in 1984 by nearly double that margin. The Reagan revolution was still churning, which was good news for George H.W. Bush, the GOP nominee in 1988.

In contrast, Obama won re-election in 2012 with a margin half the size of his win in 2008. The appeal of “Hope and Change” was wearing off. Bad news for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

So from the start, Republicans could count on the swing of the electoral pendulum to recapture the White House in 2016. With his superior showing in early primaries Donald Trump markedly raised the chances of victory in November. The prediction formula of my model, based on elections from 1912 to 2012, gives Trump 52.5 percent of the two-party vote, making it all but certain (87 out of 100) that he will be the next President.

The forecast, to be sure, is about the popular vote, not the vote in the Electoral College. But with a 5-point popular-vote lead it is virtually impossible to lose out in the electoral tally.

Norpoth is professor of political science at Stony Brook University. He is co-author of ‘The American Voter Revisited’ and has published widely on topics of electoral behavior. His book, “Commander in Chief: Franklin Roosevelt and the American People,” is forthcoming. He can be reached at helmut.norpoth@stonybrook.edu.

quote:

Originally posted by SapperSteel:
Hoping this isn't just cheerleading: LINK

quote:

September 12, 2016, 06:03 pm
Why a Trump victory in November is a virtual certainty
By Helmut Norpoth, contributor

To venture the prediction that Donald Trump is a sure bet to be elected President in November sounds about as outlandish, perhaps even ludicrous and delusional as anything coming out of the mouth of the candidate.

Polls, on the average, as tracked by RealClearPolitics and the Huffington Post, along with prediction markets like PredicIt and the Iowa Electronic Market, as well as several models featured at the recent meeting of the American Political Science Association all agree that Hillary Clinton is the heavy favorite to win.

One model, however, begs to differ. It is one that, with slight variations, has accurately predicted the winner of the popular vote in each of the last five presidential elections, ever since it was introduced in 1996.

Dubbed the “Primary Model,” it puts much stock in using primary results to forecast the vote in the general election. It also takes advantage of a historical tendency of the electoral pendulum to swing back and forth between the two parties. Both factors favor Trump over Clinton in 2016.

Trump proved to be the stronger candidate in primaries, according to the metric used by the model, and the electoral pendulum is poised to swing back to the Republican side after two Democratic terms in the White House under Barack Obama. The Primary Model predicts that Trump will defeat Clinton by 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent of the two-party vote. It is 87-percent certain that he will be the next President.

How does the model produce this forecast?

To begin with, the predictive power of primary elections was revealed, though not noticed by anyone, the first time a significant number of states used them for the presidential nomination. The year was 1912. That they have been around so long may come as a surprise to many. Republican William Howard Taft was in the White House, seeking a second term. Theodore Roosevelt challenged Taft for the GOP nomination and beat him soundly in the party’s presidential primaries.

The Republican convention nonetheless handed Taft the nomination. On the Democratic side, Woodrow Wilson was the winner in that party’s primaries, received the nomination and went on to win the general election. Lesson: the party with a primary winner beats the one with a candidate loser. The 1912 case is no fluke. In general, the party with the stronger candidate in primaries tends to win in November.

My forecasts of the 2000-2012 elections used only the first primary, the one in New Hampshire, making it possible to offer a forecast early in the election year. That may prove to be a risky choice, however, for an election in which one of the candidates has strong support in a group of voters that barely exists in New Hampshire.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was such a candidate with her support from African-Americans. So to assess primary performance in 2016, I also included the second primary, the one in South Carolina, where African-Americans make up a large portion of the Democratic electorate.

For the record, Clinton lost in New Hampshire and then won in South Carolina. On the Republican side, Donald Trump won both.

According to the standard metric of the model, which calculates primary performance of a candidate as a percentage of votes cast for the top two finishers in a primary, Trump wound up with a higher average based on the returns from New Hampshire and South Carolina than did Clinton. Trump’s superior primary performance bodes well for a victory over Clinton in November.

In addition to primaries, the swing of the electoral pendulum generates predictive power. Even a casual observer of presidential elections may have noticed a distinct pattern: the party in the White House wins re-election after one term almost all the time, but much more rarely after two terms. In fact, during the last 65 years, the party in power has managed to win three terms in a row only once: in 1988.

Over the long haul since 1828, according to my statistical estimates, the White House party has averaged 2.6 terms in office. A third term is not out of the question, but not very certain either.

It depends on how well the White House party did in winning a second term compared to its winning the first term. Doing better in the re-election makes a third term more likely; doing worse makes change more likely.

To return to the 1988 case, Ronald Reagan defeated President Carter in 1980 by about 10 points and then won re-election in 1984 by nearly double that margin. The Reagan revolution was still churning, which was good news for George H.W. Bush, the GOP nominee in 1988.

In contrast, Obama won re-election in 2012 with a margin half the size of his win in 2008. The appeal of “Hope and Change” was wearing off. Bad news for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

So from the start, Republicans could count on the swing of the electoral pendulum to recapture the White House in 2016. With his superior showing in early primaries Donald Trump markedly raised the chances of victory in November. The prediction formula of my model, based on elections from 1912 to 2012, gives Trump 52.5 percent of the two-party vote, making it all but certain (87 out of 100) that he will be the next President.

The forecast, to be sure, is about the popular vote, not the vote in the Electoral College. But with a 5-point popular-vote lead it is virtually impossible to lose out in the electoral tally.

Norpoth is professor of political science at Stony Brook University. He is co-author of ‘The American Voter Revisited’ and has published widely on topics of electoral behavior. His book, “Commander in Chief: Franklin Roosevelt and the American People,” is forthcoming. He can be reached at helmut.norpoth@stonybrook.edu.

quote:

Originally posted by Mainframe Coder:
. . .I've been preaching this for months. The "electoral pendulum" does indeed favor the GOP this cycle. It would be an amazing feat for ANY Democrat to win the White House this year. This has always been Trump's election to lose.

quote:

Originally posted by lastmanstanding:
I agree with Sap and I have said this here before, be prepared for the most fraudulent election in American history.
Clinton will stop at nothing, NOTHING, to win this election.
The corruption in all areas of government has been increasingly brazen without regard for how obvious it is as long as the desired result is reached.

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:


excellent trend

note the numbers at the top left of the chart have not been updated to the latest data in the plot.

Trump 47.2%
Clinton 41.3%

data from LA Times

quote:

Originally posted by PD:
In sports and politics - overconfidence is not good.