Thanks, Zim. It’s always nice to be appreciated. The state races are still pretty fluid and one of the serious problems is that the pollsters simply do not poll enough there, so any given poll gets far too much weight.
In Ohio, up to now, the deciding region has almost always been the poor and rural Southeast, and, as was demonstrated in the primary, Obama is weaker there than we would like. But the urban African-American turnout has not really been all that great in Ohio in the past.
The Republicans here thought they would inhibit it by passing a voter ID law, but I strongly expect this to have the opposite effect. Ohio cities have always had a large and growing component of relatively affluent–and very Christian–African-Americans, and it is precisely this population segment that has consistently under voted.
With all the polling place shenanigans of the past eight years, savvy Ohioans have moved more and more toward absentee voting. Somehow [in the dance of things] these shenanigans–such as too few voting machines–always seem to happen more frequently in wards with either large African-American populations or low per capita income. And among the many middle class Blacks that I speak with regularly, the absentee voting option has become well known.
We have a Democratic Secretary of State now, too, so some of these inexplicable polling problems may just vanish, as well. Will it be enough to deliver the State? I don’t know, but I do know that Al Gore lost it 8 years ago only because he didn’t try to win it.
