Latest Thoughts On The Election

I've believed for a long time that John McCain would win the election in November, assuming that people would have a hard time voting for Obama given a variety of factors (mostly having to do with apparent lack of experience and race). Please note - I'm not saying that I wanted McCain to win, just that I've felt he would.

Given recent events (Sarah Palin's disastrous Katie Couric interview (see Part I and Part II) and economic turmoil), I'm starting to think it could be impossible for McCain to win. I was therefore interested to see this chart from the intrade prediction market in a Paul Krugman blog post today: Politics of Crisis. I'm not sure I buy his point that Paulson's decision to let Lehman Brothers fail 'may have delivered the White House to Obama', but the fact remains that it's been a tough couple of weeks for the McCain campaign. As context for Krugmans, point, check out the excellent article on Lehman in today's Wall Street Journal: Lehman Triggered Global Cash Crunch.

On the intrade web site, you can see that McCain is down 25% in the past two weeks while Obama is up a similar amount.



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