Not a Swing State Watch: Alaska edition
Jonathan Singer at MyDD says that Alaska is a swing state, and so does Kos. I disagree. One poll has come out suggesting that AK may be close. However, that does not make it a swing state. With Obama up by 3-4 points nationally, AK is still several points more Republican than the rest of the country, even if this latest poll is correct. That means that AK is extremely unlikely to make the difference in the campaign (particularly because it has so few electoral votes), and is a poor indicator of who will win the campaign.
When I wrote about how to measure swinginess a couple weeks ago, I didn't comprehend the extent to which many people confuse "swing state" with "close state." Let us be clear -- MN may have been a close state in 1984, but as the safe home state of the Democratic nominee, it was certainly not a swing state.
Labels: alaska, conventional wisdom
posted by Benjamin Schak at 8:03 PM
1 Comments:
I suspect the reason that lots of people confuse "swing state" with "close state" is that in the last two elections, that was true, because those elections were so close on the national level. There seems to be a tendency to assume that an electorate divided 50-50 (or, more accurately, 269-269 or so) is the natural state of things.
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