Shhhh! Don't tell Mama Grizzly. She'll shoot ya, doncha know?

I suppose that if future presidential elections are projected to be as close as they were predicting for 2012, then it would make sense to fight over Alaska if it became competitive. But three electoral votes is a small prize, and campaigning so far from the lower 48 would be very time consuming and costly.

Alaska becoming a swing state because the population is really becoming more liberal in it's outlook or is it just because the GOP is so batshit crazy?

We need liberals, not corporate Democrat drones who are nothing more than GOP lite.

After magic man Nate called the electoral college, I believe everything he says. He's the Howie Mandel of pundits.

Hahahahahaha. Not gonna happen.

@2: To be fair, had Alaska gone for Gore in 2000, the electoral vote would have been 269 to 268 in favor of Gore (there were only 537 votes that year).

Big difference on that one.

Where are those new Alaskans coming from? Many are from liberal states on the West Coast. Between 2005 and 2009, about 4,300 Californians moved to Alaska per year, making it the top state for domestic emigration to Alaska. So did 4,200 residents per year from Washington and 2,200 from Oregon.

They turk our peepl.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com…

@3 Which means we need a liberal analog to the teabaggers to mount effective primary challenges to DINOs. The teahad has three important elements: enough ideologically-motivated voters to control a primary election , large-scale partisan media to stir them up, and wealthy astroturfers who fund the think tanks that provide the first two element with their talking points and the campaigns.

On the right, this system succeeds in at least some Congressional districts in almost every state. On the left, it's practically non-existant, at least that I can see.

@ 6, good point.

I'm cautiously optimistic, though, that 2012 represents a kind of death-blow to the hard right, and that near-future elections won't be so divisive. They aren't dead yet, and of course they'll never really go away, but people want governance and if it's only coming from one party, the demographics are just going to keep changing. Some current swing states will become dependable blue states, while current red states will become competitive. But there won't be any new red states, so the swing states won't matter as much.

Also, I think that whatever happens with the Republican Party - whether they actually purge the teabaggers and make themselves a real mainstream, competitive party again, or if they self destruct like the Whigs and are replaced by a new party - in the future, they're only going to be competitive by running real moderates* who can work with the Dems. Because I believe that liberal ideas are now ascendent in in American politics, just as conservative ones were for the past 30+ years (well, roughly 1980-2006; there's a reason the only Dem president in that time period was a blue dog). So even if presidential elections through 2028 or so remain close, there's going to be less at stake because the GOP are not going to be going after all those big "entitlements" or proposing their old failed tax cutting schemes anymore.

I dunno... Alaskans tend to vote the same Republicans into office over and over again, no matter how corrupt they are (See: Don Young, Lisa Murkowski, Ted Stevens). By and large they have deeply held socially/financially conservative views, mixed with the desire to preserve the environment (as long as it doesn't effect them financially, of course). In that way the state is filled with weird Republican/hippy hybrids- think a state filled with Ted Nugents and you get the idea.

#9

I agree about purging the archaic "conservatives" who don't really want to preserve the status quo in effect since the 1960s (abortion, birth control, sexual and racial equality, acceptance of all sexual preferences).

What I think gets missing in this argument of Our Stupid versus Your Stupid are the really, real issues. So it's either be (anti-gay and pro-car) or (pro-gay and pro-fixed rail transit). Or, well, if you support charter schools then you must be a voyeur or if you support public schools then you must not be aware of the new evolutionary synthesis of Evo-Devo.

Meanwhile all current stats and technological progress is ignore.

Pffft, what does this "Nate Silver" character know about anything?

There is no fucking way this will happen. Alaska is just getting crazier and dumberer.

No, god, no. Their polls are open so fucking late, if Alaska were a swing state, and something like 2000 happened again, we'd be up all fucking night waiting for their stupid exit polls.