Barron’s magazine has made some eyebrow-raising predictions in recent years, calling GOP gains in Congress in 2002 and 2004… and then getting it wrong last year, predicting the GOP would hold the House by 1 vote. (I’m not pointing fingers, as I thought it would be in that neighborhood, almost 50-50.) But they’ve just made another eye-opening prediction, suggesting they’re either farsighted geniuses… or insane:
With the primary set for April 22, Clinton’s support among Jewish voters is one reason most experts think Clinton has [Pennsylvania] sewn up. We beg to differ: Obama should rally enough of the state’s various voter groups to narrowly pull off an upset.. We are influenced by that seasoned campaign guru John Morgan of Applied Research Coordinates in Reston, Va., who owns a highly detailed database of voter behavior that stretches back many decades. Morgan, a Republican adviser, predicts that Obama will be carried to victory on the shoulders of the state’s black voters and “the left-wing lunatics who show up at Democratic primaries.”. He expects black turnout to eclipse even the heavy showing in 2006, when an estimated 56% of the state’s 523,000 registered African-American voters cast ballots. More than 853,000 blacks in Pennsylvania are eligible to vote…. Morgan, however, says the question is not how the Jews and blacks will vote, but how Democratic Catholics of German, Irish and Hungarian extraction will react to the candidates. “Some of these people are very liberal,” he says, “and they’re the reason I expect Obama will take Pennsylvania.”
If they’re right, I’ll salute them… if they’re wrong, well, it’s easy to over-think these things…