"Paul Begala on the Swing Voters Who Will Pick the President" by Paul Begala at the Daily Beast [View all]

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Paul Begala on the Swing Voters Who Will Pick the President

by Paul Begala at the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/07/15/paul-begala-on-the-swing-voters-who-will-pick-the-president.html

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But of course not everyone in those closely divided states will make an electoral difference. We can almost guarantee that 48 percent of each state’s voters will go for Obama, and another 48 percent will decide for Romney. And so the whole shootin’ match comes down to around 4 percent of the voters in six states.

I did the math so you won’t have to. Four percent of the presidential vote in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado is 916,643 people. That’s it. The American president will be selected by fewer than half the number of people who paid to get into a Houston Astros home game last year—and my beloved Astros sucked last year; they were the worst team in baseball. Put another way, there are about as many people in San Jose as there are swing voters who will decide this election. That’s not even as many people as attended Puerto Rican cockfights in the past year—-although there are obvious similarities.

And, oh, the lengths we will go to reach those magical 916,643. The political parties, the campaigns, the super PACs (one of which, the pro-Obama Priorities USA Action, I advise), will spend in excess of $2 billion—mostly just to reach those precious few. That works out to $2,181.87 per voter—or as Mitt Romney might call it, pocket change.

Who are these people, these few, these proud? Well, pollsters tell us swing voters are mostly women. They are younger—which blows away the myth that the president has the youth vote locked up. Older voters, like older consumers, are just more set in their ways. Young people are more persuadable about nearly everything. Many swing voters have a high-school diploma but no college degree. And a chunk of them are Hispanic.

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