outside the glass the whole world is magnified

[lotesse]

Reading the comments on Scalzi's election post-mortem got me wondering if the Republicans aren't right, in a way, about Hurricane Sandy playing a decisive role in the election. The thing is, they say that like it's not a legitimate factor - but it totally is. Days before the election, people got to see Obama gracefully handling a crisis. I might be a cynical bitca, but watching him interact with Christie definitely got to me - it was so decent, so mature, so responsible, on both sides, and it was like seeing how government could be. And then, in sharp contrast, Mitt Romney giving "volunteers" "donations" they could "give" to those effected by the storm. Fake charity, a sense of partisan one-upsmanship. With the spectre of Katrina hanging over everything, people's memories of how it went down when there was a Repub in office. You start thinking about what it would be like to ride out a crisis with Mittens on the blower, and you realize that in fact that would suck. And then you vote on the strength of that realization. I don't see how that's in any way a bad method of choosing a candidate.

Comments

[giandujakiss]

Nate Silver thinks Sandy didn't do much; the polls didn't seem to change direction after Sandy.

[lotesse]

Welp, I can't let narrativization get in the way of math. So much for that theory!

[giandujakiss]

Well, maybe I overstated - here's his post. He says it may have played a role but (likely) not a large one, so take it as you will.

[melannen]

I was thinking the same thing!

The reason Sandy didn't help the president is that Nate Silver is God, okay.

(To be a bit more analytical: the Republican narrative around Sandy is that Obama wouldn't have won without it, and I think that's clearly wrong, because anyone looking at reality, pre-Sandy, knew that Obama was already winning. I think you're right that if Sandy *had* led to Obama's win, that wouldn't be a bad thing - ability to manage a crisis at home is a good thing to judge by - but I also think that Obama was already far enough in the lead that Sandy couldn't make much of a difference in the positive direction, which is the orthodox Democratic/Silverian narrative right now.

...I think Obama doing dramatically poorly with Sandy might have been enough to lose him the election, but then again it might not have, because he had a pretty solid lead all through the election cycle.)

[icarus]

While I appreciated seeing the president at his best, Rachel Maddow pointed out last summer that people had already made up their minds how they were going to vote. I found that to hold true among those I knew.

[schemingreader]

I hope you are right, but I fear you are wrong. If you're right, it means that ordinary, undecided voters paid enough attention to the news to see Obama behave like a person in the crisis, AND, that they thought this was a good thing. I fear that anyone who was attentive and compassionate enough to be swayed by Sandy was already a committed Obama voter.