Archive for November, 2012

UPDATE at 11:25 p.m.: And that’s it. Ohio has been called for Obama, and it looks likely that Florida will follow suit. A couple of near-billion-dollar campaigns, and it looks like two states (Indiana and North Carolina) will have flipped, maybe three if Romney ekes out a win in Virginia.

We’ll have plenty of time in the weeks to come to talk about what comes next for the GOP nationally. Tonight is for Obama and his supporters.

The silver lining here in Georgia, for me: The charter schools amendment passed, giving students and parents more choices in the near future.

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UPDATE at 9:56 p.m.: With Michigan and Pennsylvania being called for Obama, Romney is right where most people thought he would be: needing to sweep Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio, plus one more smaller state, to win. None of those four has been called yet, and all are within reach. But the hour is getting late, and his margin for error is gone.

Incidentally, and just for the record: Some news outlets …

Continue reading Decision Time! Live blog of results for president, Senate, Georgia races »

With the election results almost upon us, Jay Bookman, Aaron Gould Sheinin and I decided it was time for another chat using Google+ Hangout. Check it out:

Depending on how quickly the results come in tonight, we’ll do another of these either tonight or tomorrow morning.

– By Kyle Wingfield

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Continue reading Election Day Video: Jay Bookman and I discuss who wins and what’s next »

History and the numbers say Barack Obama will be re-elected tomorrow. History and the intangibles suggest Mitt Romney will unseat him. Which will prevail?

Let’s look at each.

The numbers have moved solidly in Obama’s favor. He caught Romney in the Real Clear Politics average of national opinion polls on Halloween after trailing for the better part of the previous three weeks. More importantly, he holds leads — usually narrow leads, but leads nonetheless — in enough swing states to push him past the threshold of 270 electoral votes (EVs).

There’s been much parsing of the polls this year, much of it focused on the partisan-ID breakdowns that various pollsters were using. A poll of “likely voters” inherently tells us something about who the pollster believes will actually bother to vote, and that’s as much art as it is science. Many pollsters have been forecasting an electorate similar to that of 2008, a wave election that saw Obama rack up 365 EVs and the Democrats claim a huge …

Continue reading Presidential prediction: The candidate who defies history and wins will be . . . »

No one among us, if faced with a persistent disease and a physician who’d failed to cure it, would be content to continue consulting only that doctor — and, especially, to be told we could not seek a second opinion.

None of us believe we could live in a place with only one grocery store, selling only junk food, and be expected to maintain good health.

Nobody I know would want to learn a trade but have the opportunity to work for only one employer.

And I’m certain no American would stand for living in a country where just one name, the same name, appeared on the ballot year after year.

Yet that’s exactly the situation we expect thousands of students, parents and even teachers in Georgia to accept. We can take one small but important step toward changing that by approving Amendment One and increasing their educational choices.

This amendment, which would affirm the state’s role in creating public charter schools, is neither a magic potion nor an indictment of all …

Continue reading Amendment One: A chance at a choice for students who today have neither »

I may as well bow to the reality that y’all will spend the entire weekend talking about the election regardless of what topic I write about, so here it is: Your weekend-before-the-election open thread.

The rules still apply — it’s an open thread, not a no-holds-barred thread — but otherwise, have at it.

– By Kyle Wingfield

Continue reading The weekend before Nov. 6, what else would we talk about? »

(Note: The Rev. Joseph Lowery isn’t the only person making dubious claims about the charter schools amendment. I wrote about some other misleading and/or false claims in my Thursday column in the AJC’s print edition. While we’ve covered some of these items in previous comment threads, I almost always try to post my print columns here.)

Georgia offers few election surprises this year. Mitt Romney will take our electoral votes, there are no races for U.S. senator or any of the state’s constitutional officers, and just one U.S. House race — Georgia’s 12th District, where incumbent Democrat John Barrow is trying to fend off Republican Lee Anderson — is competitive.

The only exception is the charter-schools amendment referendum.

There’s been little public-opinion polling about the amendment, which if passed would affirm the state’s role in creating charter schools. But the polling we have suggests a tight race.

How to account for this tightness, given the amendment won the …

Continue reading Tackling some more false claims about the charter school amendment »

The day is almost upon us. It’s time to declare.

After a very long election season, we’re a few days away from learning whether Barack Obama will be re-elected or if Mitt Romney will replace him. Which way will it go?

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Now, you can find any number of data points to support your desired or predicted outcome. National polls, state polls, battleground polls, early voting totals, absentee ballot requests, TV ad spending, campaign stops by the candidates and their surrogates — all point to a tight race, and any can be used to explain why Obama will win or Romney will be victorious. In such a close race, with hardly …

Continue reading Poll Position: Who will win the presidency? »

OK, this is not an actual IRS document: It’s a mock-up of one by Americans for Tax Reform. But it incorporates requirements from Obamacare in the kind of form you can expect if President Obama is re-elected and Obamacare is fully implemented. Bottom line: Your 1040EZ form is getting longer and less EZ.

Yet another reason we should move Tax Day to the day before Election Day.

– By Kyle Wingfield

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Continue reading REVEALED: What the IRS form for Obamacare might look like (click on link to see it) »

Dear Rev. Joseph Lowery: Before you agree to record another advertisement decrying state charter schools as a maneuver to reinstate segregation in Georgia, perhaps you should check out the news about Ivy Preparatory Academy.

Ivy Prep, to which the Gwinnett County school board refused to grant a charter, and which as a result had to resort to the state’s chartering process, was named one the state’s highest-performers among schools with a high proportion of low-income students.

This news ought to be of interest to Gwinnett voters, given that their school system has fought tooth and nail to prevent the state from having a process to approve charter schools in general, and Ivy Prep specifically. The Gwinnett system was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that resulted in the old State Charter Schools Commission’s being declared unconstitutional, and about 20 percent of all the money donated to the anti-amendment campaign has come from administrators in the Gwinnett system …

Continue reading Award for Ivy Prep shows just how wrong Lowery and others crying ‘resegregation’ are »