I wanted to get this post up before any real voting is done or there is any hint of how today will go. I want you to have my personally biased assessment before the fun begins tonight!

Here’s how I see things. McCain certainly has an uphill battle. There are some key states that he really needs to win like Florida and Ohio, and recent polls show him clearly in contention there. If Obama wins PA and NH (which recent polls show likely) then McCain really has his work cut out for him. There are a number of states he needs to win, like NV, NM, and CO to name a couple, and the polls in all of those are either very close or have Obama slightly ahead.

Speaking of polls though, I think the polls have overstated Obama’s lead for a while now. When pollsters come up with their polling numbers, they determine what percentage of the electorate will be Democrat and Republican. Many pollsters are giving Democrats a 6% advantage this year…but that hasn’t happened in the last 8 years! Over the last few election cycles the number of Republicans and Democrats that showed up were either tied, or Democrats showed up 2-4% more frequently, but never 6%. The last Presidential election was a tie, and to assume that four years later will be a huge Democrat turnout might be wishful thinking. Another promsing nugget is that several times in the primaries Obama was expected to win handily, sometimes by as much as double-digits, but he lost to Hillary in some of those states. Over and over Obama hasn’t been able to close the deal, and with some polls showing almost 10% of people unsure of whom they will vote for, that means McCain can still have a lot of votes in play. Since most of my readers are on the West coast, make sure you ignore any exit polling you hear because it consistently overstates support for the Democrat, and make sure you get out and vote. Here in California we’ve got other important things on our minds like Prop 8!

But either way, it should be interesting tonight. I’ve got some sausages to grill and some beers to drink, but whoever wins tonight wins. Obviously I think an Obama win would be bad for the country, but I’ve never had a blog while someone of the opposing party was in the White House. That might be fun, but I’ll certainly trade that for McCain and his supreme court nominees.

Here is my “guide” as requested by a couple people. Thanks to GeekyWeekly for doing the work on the Judicial nominees. Those are always a pain. Have fun tonight everyone!

Federal and Statewide
President/Vice President – John McCain/Sarah Palin
House and Senate Seats – Republican

Judicial
Office #72 – Hilleri Grossman Merritt
Office #82 – Thomas Rubinson
Office #84 – Pat Connolly
Office #94 – Michael J. O’Gara
Office #154 – Michael Jesic

Propositions
Prop 1A – No
Prop 2 – No
Prop 3 – No
Prop 4 – Yes
Prop 5 – No
Prop 6 – No
Prop 7 – No
Prop 8 – Yes
Prop 9 – Yes
Prop 10 – No
Prop 11 – Yes
Prop 12 – Yes
Measure R – No

I love listening to Medved and Hewitt right now and listening to people duke it out over Huckabee and Romney. Now that Huckabee is up front he’s being scrutinized. It looks like Romney and Huck are back in a battle for Iowa. But clearly this race can go anywhere.

Something that boggles my mind though are the head-to-head matchups between Democrats and Republicans. McCain is one of the most competitive Republicans, and Obama has big leads against everyone except Giuliani.

There are only a couple weeks until voting starts in Iowa, but this race can go anywhere!

Oh how I pine for the Christmas vacation. Thee are too far away from thy present. Please hurryeth.

Nothing going on really. Rachel gave a shot out for my blog, so I’ll give a shout out for hers. New post up about Presidential election stuff. Suppose I should go over there and make my voice heard!

Kevin has some snippets from his quickly growing library of work. The second post down on his site has a link to his myspace page. Go check out the stories. Some intense stuff!

I’ll go completely random on this post. So far the Dodgers haven’t made any big moves this off season, and I couldn’t be happier. We’ve got some amazing young players, so let them play.

Is it Christmas vacation yet?

Had a good weekend over here. Got to see Stacie a lot, so that’s always a plus. The monitor is now firmly secure inside the arcade. We’re still waiting for a video card to come that I ordered from England. It’s a Radeon 9200 that’s been modified specifically for outputting aracade resolutions and timings. We haven’t even plugged the monitor in yet, so that’s killing me. Otherwise we just need to finish wiring the control panel and paint a few spots, then that’s it.

This week is VERY exciting. Our next presidential election is on Tuesday, and I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to this. Of course I’ll be a much happier camper if Bush wins, but it should be exciting whatever the outcome.

Ryan and I are going to see SAW in a couple hours. I think watching a scary movie on Halloween is my favorite part of the “holiday.” Carving a Jack-O-Lantern is fun too though. This year we used a stencil off of HomestarRunner and it came out super cool.

That’s all for now. Back to working on The Burn website.

This recent story about John Kerry really struck me as odd. If you read it, you’ll see that John Kerry is claiming President Bush will call up more troops after he gets elected in November. The article goes on to show several people who have no idea what he’s talking about, and one person who claims he’s heard about this. Not surprisingly that person is a Democrat, but we’ll come back to that.

I’ve found it to be a constantly recurring theme that I must decipher and critically think about everything people say this election year. If John Kerry says President Bush is fighting the “wrong” war, what does that mean? John Kerry supported the war at one point, so does he just not like the way it’s turning out? Or is he trying to separate himself from Bush? What the evening news doesn’t tell you is that Kerry has had a 100 stances on the war in Iraq. It stems all the way back to the Democratic primaries. Good ‘ol Howard Deam was completely anti-war, so to distinguish himself from Dean, Kerry was pro-war. Well, Kerry won that battle…but now he’s got a problem: Bush is pro-war…and he can’t have the exact same stance on one of the most important issues to voters. Therefore, like he did in the Democratic primaries, he’s trying to find a new stance to “market” himself. If you don’t believe me check out www.kerryoniraq.com.

Something else in that article that blows me away is when Kerry says “Doesn’t George Bush watch the evening news?!” In other words, doesn’t President Bush see the body count reported every night?. This is an important point, because I think it’s what separates Liberals from Conservatives. Liberals think primarily with their emotions, and Conservatives think primarily with their brain. A Liberal can’t look at Iraq, see a death toll, and then decide “is it worth it?” Instead they just gawk and wail that a US Soldier died. I’m not demeaning the value of life, and in fact I’d say that is what the liberals are doing. I say when a soldier dies they have served their country and worked to secure freedom in Iraq. A liberal on the other hand will say they died fighting a pointless war and it’s all President Bush’s fault. They can’t even support our troops now because that’s indirectly supporting Bush.

Ultimately I think the majority of voters will be able to decipher all the coded messages being transmitted this election year. Democrats have been hoping for Iraq to turn into Vietnam, but that’s not happening. Republicans have been wanting the economy to boom like crazy, but I’d say it’s just in a regular recovery. In the end, look at what people say and decide for yourself if it’s the truth. You’ll be smarter for it.