Humorous John McCain 2008 presidential primary campaign poster parody.  Satirical campaign image shows Senator McCain for the "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) he really is.  Poster is a jpeg you can copy and paste to your own website, blog, forum, or attach to an e-mail and share with others so they can g

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Obama Bounce or Evidence the the leading indicators of presidential electoral success are kicking in?
The two polls in Ohio are enough for Obama to be able to wrest control of the Buckeye state from McCain for the time being. Those twenty electoral votes move from a McCain toss up to an Obama toss up and provide the Illinois s

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Texas Democrats may have stopped publicly counting the March 4 caucus numbers at the 41% mark, but we do know from reports of the senate district convention results that Obama gained support over Clinton compared to the March 4 results. What we know is that Obama improved upon his initial level of support in the senate district

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Part Two in an examination of the effectiveness of the moves (and non-moves) that states made in anticipation of the 2008 primary season. Were states successful in moving their primaries and caucuses and were they more influential as a result? The first ten states alphabetically didn't fare that well in yesterday's post. T

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Well, it doesn't take a genius to figure this out. If you have one candidate calling for a full seating of delegates from Florida and Michigan and another candidate stressing that neither contest counts, you're going to, more often than not, get something in the middle. See, even I can figure it out (and that's saying someth

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Things are starting to settle in to place in the McCain-Obama race, or that has been the mark of the polls during July at least. No poll has come along that has fundamentally changed the averages in any state enough push it from McCain to Obama or vice versa, much less alter its distinction whether favoring the Arizona senator

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Out of the eight Survey USA state polls released yesterday, none of them polled the Clinton-McCain match up. If that is indicative (and last night's results tell me that it will be), then this may be the last week that FHQ includes a Clinton map in the weekly electoral college breakdown. For this week, though, the Clinton map

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What happens to those March maps when the original data set is weighted to discount older polls is vastly different depending on which Democrat is considered the nominee. The Obama-McCain outcome was exactly the same: Obama 273-McCain 265. In the Clinton-McCain scenario, Clinton's deficit was larger than it had been in the ori

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So now it was the calendar that knocked Clinton out in the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination race? State governments and state parties were deciding where to position their primaries and caucuses for 2008 during the time between March of 2005, when Arkansas became the first state to move and December of 2007, when Michiga

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In her 2000 article "The End Game in Post-Reform Presidential Nominations", Barbara Norrander evaluated several indicators of when a nomination campaign is effectively over, specifically, when the frontrunner's last remaining opponent would drop out of the race. Two of these indicators are especially relevant at this point i

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Only Obama, McCain and their inner circles really know who they are targeting, so anyone else is simply guessing. Some of those guesses are more educated than others, but they are still just guesses. Correctly divining who the running mate picks might be is slightly more difficult, so I'll take the far easier route and have a

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The Florida and Michigan frontloading in 2008 is part of the progression of the general frontloading trend. It wasn't inevitable that either state would violate the "window rule" (period within which states could hold their nominating contests) of either party. In the post-reform era, states that wanted to move, moved to dat

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What took voters in the US two months to figure out, New Zealand schoolgirls determined just by looking at pictures. It took over half the country's primary electorate to narrow the field of prospective presidential nominees from both major parties down to three. But that process had already been done between May and August of

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This past Friday, the Macon Telegraph ran a letter to the editor calling on the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees to walk the walk now that each has talked the talk on a post-partisan approach to the presidency. I can take or leave the suggestion of having shadow cabinets or prospective shadow cabinets

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Today is primary day in Georgia and to mark it Southern Political Report has an article up about Obama's chances in the Peach state in November. His success, as Hastings Wyman describes it, depends on one of the standing electoral rules in the South: the 30/30 rule. But it isn't just Obama that needs to meet the goals of atta

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The popular vote isn't how the president is selected just as it wasn't the method in which the Democratic nomination was decided in 2008. That doesn't mean that those rules cannot be revisited and altered though. As sure as the rules governing the ways in which nominees are chosen will be examined in detail prior to 2012, th

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And here we are, five months after we started, at the conclusion of primary season. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I have a tear in my eye at the thought. But hey, talk of states moving their delegate selection events for the 2012 cycle has already begun (Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky and Minnesota). And the

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