Open thread for Sunday, October 28th: Ohio edition

  Here is the open thread for Sunday, October 28th: please feel free to leave links to interesting articles and to discuss whatever issues come up during the course of the day.

  Over the last couple of weeks I have heard many political pundits say that the candidate who won Ohio would win the election but I found this hard to believe so I started fooling around with one of those electoral map aps and it turns out they are right, although Barack Obama seems to have an easier path to victory if Mitt Romney wins Ohio.

  The map I used included Florida as a swing state but gave Pennsylvania to Barack Obama so if Mitt Romney could somehow pull out a win in Pennsylvania it would make his bid for the presidency a whole lot easier. But for the sake of this post let us give Florida to Romney to sort of offset Pennsylvania for Obama. (If Romney doesn’t win Florida it is probably all over anyway.)

    If Barack Obama wins Ohio Mitt Romney would almost have to sweep the states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin. If we give Mitt Romney the states I feel his is most likely to win out of those mentioned above–New Hampshire, Iowa, North Carolina, and I threw in Wisconsin for the Scott Walker factor–Mitt Romney loses the election by a margin of 270-268, which means Barack Obama can lose Ohio and would only need to capture Nevada and Colorado.

  It is true that things are trending nicely for Mitt Romney right now both nationally and in the individual states but the race remains extremely tight in Ohio and I do believe that state is going to decide who our next president is. This is concerning when you read stories about truck loads of Somali voters being driven to the polling places and helped through the ballots with the help of Democrat interpreters with no Republican interpreters there to help.

  There is one fascinating scenario where Barack Obama wins Ohio, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin and we end up with the highly unlikely scenario of a 269-269 tie with the election being thrown into the new Congress in January to pick our next president and vice president. If the Republicans hold onto the House Mitt Romney would become the president, but if the Democrats held onto the Senate we could actually see Joe Biden remain as vice president.

  I have been very confident since the first debate that Mitt Romney was going to defeat Barack Obama but Ohio is very worrisome and I have the gut feeling Barack Obama is going to win that critical state and manage to hold on and win reelection. We must now begin preparing ourselves for the fight for the future of our country over the next four years–or as long as the internet remains open.

  On that depressing note, on to the musical selection: Many of you have probably figured out what today’s musical selection is, and you would be partly right. I don’t particularly care for The Pretenders or for this song but I have decided to sacrifice for the common good (I better get used to it now) so I give you a cover version of the song ‘My City Was Gone (Ohio)’ that I managed to find on You Tube.