I believe that President Obama will win North Carolina. Seriously, I do, but why? The honest answers to the question are that, I am a hopeless optimist, and there is no penalty for being wrong, but considerable bragging rights accrue to being right. It's a long-shot with a high pay-out.
!. Early voter turnout in North Carolina, which ended Saturday, is higher than it was in 2008.
2. Although more whites voted this time compared to 2008, even more non-whites and Hispanics also voted. The early voter composition of 2012 looks to br more favorable to Obama than it was four years ago.
3. Some part of the fundamentalist religious segment has serious problems with Mormonism, and they will not vote for Romney for that reason alone. It is impossible to say how widespread this is at a distance.
3. The Libertarian Party in North Carolina has grown considerably in the last four years, and it is a mistake to think that the Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson, is inconsequential. I expect Johnson to significantly out-perform Gary Barr in 2008. I have found good reason to suspect that Johnson will draw considerably more votes from Romney than he does from Obama.
4. I do not see that public polls adequately deal with cellphone-only households, which may be as much as a third of North Carolina voters. Cellphone-only voters break very differently between Romney and Obama. Cellphone-only voters are much more favorable to Obama then are land-line voters, and the cellphone only group is generally under-represented in public polls. This is my way of saying that the polls are skewed in Romney's favor.
5. I do not trust party registrations. For all my life I have lived in communities that were dominated by one party or the other. The only real vote for me, on a local level, has been in primary elections. I have always registered with the dominant party, whatever it was, so that I could have at least some say in local elections, whether or not my "official" party designation had any relation to my political beliefs or not.
6. The Obama Get Out the Vote operation is awesome.
Yep. It's a long shot. But, it's been done before.