Some very good news for Barack Obama today on 538. With one (rogue) exception, the national tracking polls look awful for McCain, and the state-level polls look even worse.
With the Republican campaign increasingly resembling Michael Foot's ill-fated 1983 UK venture (and indeed John McCain is much the same age as Foot was back then), there has been speculation that if the polls are wildly wrong, riots could break out - or worse.
If there is an upset, right-wingers will undoubtedly try to blame it on the so-called "Bradley effect" - white voters not voting for Obama on race grounds, after saying they would vote for him in opinion polls. This despite the fact that there is considerable evidence that the Bradley effect has been negligible in any race since 2000, at least.
A far more likely explanation for the upset is systematic and widespread voter fraud - particularly in key states where the Secretary of State is a Republican - which I've discussed before. If that explanation is accepted, brace yourself for widespread civil disobedience - National Guard on the streets, protesters being shot and gassed, that sort of thing. A recreation of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, in other words.
Great blog post here (also mentioned in the Telegraph article linked above) arguing for mass non-violent civil disobedience in the event of McCain election theft. Hard to disagree - hopefully people will have learned from the mistakes of 2000 and 2004, where Bush stole the election twice.
But the only problem is that the US police and National Guard will turn a non-violent protest violent pretty damned quick. As Alex Jones among others has pointed out, America is a police state now. Which may mean that things get ugly very quickly. Although, given that even the Republicans are predicting that the Democrats will keep control (and indeed extend their majority) in both the Senate and the House, McCain and Palin wouldn't be able to get any radical right-wing legislation through anyway - so the impetus for civil disorder is somewhat diminished. The revolution will probably have to wait until the vote-rigging is even more pronounced - which, in the absence of voting reform, becomes more and more likely the longer the Republicans are in office.
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4 comments:
Can you provide a link for the rigging of the '04 election? I agree that voter fraud has the potential to be an explosive issue. To me, the Republican goose is pretty much cooked by the economic crisis confronting the US and the world. When the Democrats take control, how will that pan out? Could we be in for a rerun of the 1930's? Scary times, for sure!
Here's a link from Rolling Stone - "was the 2004 election stolen?"
You must be joking right? A family member of arguably the most corrupt president to hold office (Possibly you could make an argument for Warren Harding in the 1920's)in the last century, who would almost certainly have been impeached had he not been assassinated - this is your 'evidence'? Come on!
So because Kennedy is from a family of corrupt politicians that makes him corrupt as well? Preposterous. You must be one of the people saying that Max Mosley should have been prosecuted because his grandfather was a fascist...
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