September 25, 2012

Obama’s Lead Is Starting to Look Insurmountable

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Nate Silver has an epic post today about late September polls from past years and how well they predict the eventual winner of a presidential race. Here are the highlights:

  • Obama is currently up by 3.7 percent. No candidate in the past 50 years has lost a lead that big.
  • No candidate with more than 47 percent of the vote in late September has ever lost. Obama is currently at 48.3 percent.
  • Big changes in the final month aren’t impossible, but they’ve gotten rarer in the past 20 years.
  • It’s not true that undecided voters tend to break for the challenger in the last few weeks of a race.

Read the whole thing for more. At the moment, though, the race is pretty clearly Obama’s to lose. And Sam Wang agrees: his latest electoral vote forecast has Obama winning 347-191. Given all this, I’ll make two predictions of my own:

  • The mudslinging from the Romney campaign is going to get really, really nasty and desperate over the next few weeks.
  • The smart money is shortly going to start deserting Romney and focusing downballot instead. The conservative base never liked Romney all that much to begin with, and I don’t think it will take much for them to abandon him.

Make your own predictions in comments!

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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