Butterflies and Jitters

Thursday morning Bob will have a barium swallow test done. Since the hematologist doesn't want him having invasive procedures this seems the most benign way to check his stomach. He is continuing to lose weight. It is not loss of appetite. He looks forward to eating but only eats a few bites before he feels too full to eat anymore.
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The closer election day comes the more butterflies and jitters I have.

I'll admit it, I am a poll watcher of the worst kind. I'm a belt and suspenders person. I need a plan and then a backup plan. There are polls and then there are polls if you get my drift.

Barack Obama ran probably the best campaign ever in 2008 and again in 2012. He's the first president to use everything available in this age of the Internet. This election I followed on Twitter the people that ran his two campaigns. I figured I could trust their opinions.

Nate Silver from 'Five-Thirty-Eight' is the pollster at the top of my list as well as the WSJ/NBC poll. It's a real jungle out there for polling. You can find a poll to agree with you for just about anything, but are they correct?

In 2012 Republicans were stunned when Mitt Romney lost. I well remember watching Karl Rove melt down on TV. I was stunned they didn't know they were losing. I wondered what polls they'd been watching.

Because it's jitters time I looked this week to see what I could find to explain how they got their numbers so wrong. Apparently the polls they were seeing were not wrong, they just chose not to believe them. I can imagine Karl Rove looking at a poll and saying it had to be wrong because blacks would not vote in high numbers a second time for Obama, that kind of thing.

In the past Hillary has not run good campaigns but this time around it's been much better. She got rid of the sleeze like Mark Penn that ran her campaign in 2008. She brought in some very sharp younger people with the expierenced John Podesta and it's gone very well. Some are veterans of Obama's campaigns.

Donald Trump is constantly announcing the polls show him winning, really? That's when it's good to know the difference in good polls and bad polls. Frankly I don't know how the Trump campaign would know anything given it's state of disorganization.

Looking back at history there were some surprises on election day but surely not these days

Do you have butterflies and jitters?

Living the Charmed Life

For a political addict I am living a charmed life.

Oregon and Washington have been the only states that vote 100% by mail. (It may be that Colorado has now joined them.) I was appalled this week reading about early voting in North Carolina where it was an hours long wait time to vote. Our ballots arrived on Friday or Saturday. Sunday we read the Voters' Guide that had arrived in the mail a few weeks ago and voted. Bob walked up and dropped our ballots in the mail this morning. Voting was such a nice experience for me. Politically Oregon is a good place for me to live.

Up until the George W. Bush administration I actually believed those the country elected actually went to Washington with the good of the country first in their minds. Realizing that was not true was difficult for me.

This election season is about over but I refuse to let the ugliness take away my childlike faith in our country.  I have a stack of wonderful coffee table books about the White House, former First Ladies and Presidents. In the coming days I'm going to look at those books again and pretend Donald Trump never happened.