Invisible Hands

Sullivan names my own fear and calms it, somewhat.

Obama is dominating with early voting in Iowa, North Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, and Ohio. I'm unsure of the current polls showing a massive lead for Obama. But equally it would not surprise me if this race actually widened, and that the final result were on a double-digit kind of scale. Just as there is a chance of the invisible hand of racism suddenly undercutting Obama in the polling booth, so there is a chance of an historic one-off turn-out from African-Americans and young people that confounds all the conventional polling expectations. We could be just as surprised on the up-side as on the down-side. There are a lot of young and black people in this country. And they usually don't vote as often as they could.