Are you even capable of reasoned argumentation anymore? At least MsRowena made some sense in her reasoning. Lately you’re work just comes off as playground bullying. Are you suffering from an ego-trip? Cause it’s really tarnishing your work.

A 26 percent chance of a Romney win in Ohio, is pretty much a sure bet that Obama is going to win it. I find it HILARIOUS that you (so it seems) just couldn’t bear to write 26 % but had to phrase it in terms that look better for Romney. A 1 in 4 chances of winning sounds better, I suppose, but it doesn’t change the fact that he only has a 26 percent chance of winning the state. Pretty rare for anyone to win a state that at 7 weeks out is only a 26 percent chance of them winning.

And I wouldn’t count on them eliminating the filibuster. We’ve heard that tune before…

“The state is polling 50% Obama, 44% Romney and only 5% undecided on 09/14. Ohio is over.”

Nope. Obama is leading by just 3.5 % in the most recent state poll average, and political guru Nate Silver of the NYT is still giving Romney a 1 in 4 chance of winning the state. To say Obama has locked up the state with 7 weeks to go before the election is silly. He has locked up New York and California, not Ohio.

But the Dems don’t need Florida, as long as they take the ECVs of every state which has been solidly blue for months (PA, MI) or for years –and Ohio. Virgil Goode’s presence on the ballot may well help return Virginia to Obama’s ECV count, but he doesn’t need them to reach 270.

The GOP ticket has no path to 270 ECVs without Ohio’s 18. Even if the GOP wins all the other 7 “battleground” states –and that won’t happen either– they still can’t hit 270. They must win Ohio, and this year they won’t. The state is polling 50% Obama, 44% Romney and only 5% undecided on 09/14. Ohio is over.

Voter suppression only works effectively when the state in question polls as within the margin of error of an aggregate of non-partisan polls, right up to election day. Once a state’s voters have firmly decided for one side or the other by any amount beyond that MoE, voter suppression no longer works.

Note also that it is difficult to apply in most states successfully if the DoJ is watching closely, and then agressively fighting each state’s attempts in federal court. It always has to be narrowly and unequally targeted against Democratic-leaning voter blocs while sparing GOP-leaning groups, and that is always easy to spot and to rule against.

In Florida, in 2000, the GOP openly and completely illegally purged 15,000 black voters from the roll of eligible voters and the Democratic Party failed to challenge those purges effectively pre-election. It would have been simple to challenge, based on the decades-old civil rights/voter suppression judgements against Florida and other Southern states.

Nader didn’t defeat the Democrats in 2000 and the butterfly ballot didn’t do the trick either. The Gore campaign’s failure to challenge those 15,000 purges did the job of leaving Florida (with an illegally stopped recount shut down by threat of violence) close enough for those SCOTUS members who will forever be known in future legal history as the FFD to do what the SCOTUS of 1876 wouldn’t have dared to attempt.

Ohio in 2004 needed to suppress or completely deny the votes of both poor and middle class blacks, college students and working women, by selectively denying voting machines to those strongholds, and the Dem-leaning state had to be within the MoE for the complex of tactics used to successfully throw it to the GOP. The outcry over that made the state institute changes in 2008 that prevented those tactics from being deployed, and the Dems took Ohio’s ECVs.

This year, the state GOP’s attempt to roll back the reforms of 2008 have been vigorously and successfully challenged by the Dems in federal court. The attempt itself, along with other GOP overreach and a despised-by-Ohioans R/R ticket, have all backfired against the GOP and placed Ohio well outside the MoE. Voter suppression won’t factor into who wins Ohio’s ECVs this year.

Winning the House is iffy, but the Dems are, for a number of reasons, better positioned to take it back than the GOP are to retain it. I’d only bet 5 bucks on Dems taking the House, but I’d bet 25 on them keeping the Senate, and a grand on never ever hearing the word president followed by the name Mitt Romney. At this point Mitt’s father has a better shot at the presidency than he does.

None of my conclusions are based on or informed by optimism. They are based on a lifetime of successful interpretation of pre-election data. There are factors at work in 2012 that make this a likely wave year: The GOP have stonewalled government while being in government for 3 and a half years. American voters have noticed that, and are somewhat annoyed about it.

The R/R ticket’s most signature achievement is to give the impression of producing a disaster a day, and the candidates haven’t even debated yet. The pool of undecided voters is historically low historically early. Although the economic numbers should doom Obama’s re-election chances, the GOP would have had to produce a at least halfway credible plan and promoted it. They are now stuck with both the Ryan budget and denying the Ryan budget, sometimes in the same sentence.

Thanks to the Koch-fueled Tea Party, the daily more outrageous and transparent lies of both Romney and Ryan, the GOP’s clearly missing alternative for the recessed economy and lost jobs and the GOP’s inability to win women, latinos, blacks or young people, the Republicans have snatched defeat from the jaws of a victory that should always have been theirs for the taking. Turns out, they can’t pick that ripe fruit because they’ve cut off their own hands.