With just two and a half weeks remaining until the election, things are becoming very interesting. A couple of items of note:
- In the debates, the president was adequate while Kerry was excellent. I suppose this should be expected given that Kerry started a debate society in college and has been debating pretty much his entire adult life. His performance has wiped out most of the margin created by the GOP convention and left him in a good position for the final push to election day.
- Now it may be just me, but this last week the Kerry/Edwards campaign just hasn't seemed to be at the highest level of decency. First Kerry refers to Dick Cheney's daughter to try to score political points, then Edwards says that if they were elected that Christopher Reeve would get up and walk. Poking your finger in family matters and trying to profit from a man's death. Real classy guys.
- In looking at the states that really matter in this election, I find that the President's margins have held in Florida where he's slightly ahead and Pennsylvania where he's slightly behind. I'm surprised, however, to find that he's slipped in a big way in Ohio. A month ago, polls had him up there in some cases by double digit margins. Now some polls have Kerry winning and nearly all are at least a statistical tie. No Republican president has ever won without taking Ohio. The President won't win without it either.
- The other state that really interests me is Colorado. There is an initiative on the ballot that would divide the state's electoral votes between the candidates according to the percentage of the vote that each candidate gets. This would effectively give the losing candidate four electoral votes and the winner five. Unfortunately, the writers of the initiative made it retroactive so that it would apply to the current election cycle. This opens it up to a legal challenge. Should the election turn out razor thin and this initiative pass, we could be looking at yet another election being decided by the courts. Now this situation is somewhat merciful in that I don't see the US Supreme Court taking on the case, but the prospect of the election being decided by the Colorado Supreme Court is certainly within the realm of possibility. Welcome to Colorado: The New Florida.
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