Quote:
Originally Posted by timmynausea
I think you are misunderstanding the premise slightly. I'm saying that independent voters that have Obama as their number 1 choice saw how far ahead he was and decided that their vote could be better spent in the tighter Republican race. So in the polls leading up to the election they showed as Obama voters, and on voting day they went out and voted for McCain or whatever other Republican. Obama does have strong support among independents as does McCain, so it'd make a lot of sense from that perspective.
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Again, I am familiar with the general concept that the two may have been battling for some of the same potential votes.
The trouble with that theory is that lead-up polling showed a pretty comfortable lead for McCain as well as Obama. It's not like there was some clear indication that McCain really "needed" the I votes, and Obama didn't. McCain was pretty clearly going to win, and he did, by pretty much the margins that the polls suggested.
Given the sheer numbers of voters on each side (plenty more D than R voted today), for Obama to have lost 8-10% of the actual D turnout compared to poll data to McCain would have meant something like a 15-20% bump in McCain's numbers compared to poll data, and it just wasn't there. Yes, McCain outperformed his poll numbers a bit... but that swing (winning by 8-9% instead of 4-5%, or thereabouts) not enough to support the idea that there was a simple give-take with Obama voters.
In whatever happened between the latest polls and the actual voting, Obama didn't lose all his votes to McCain. He lost a lot of votes to Clinton, plain and simple.