Today the Struggle

I think that it was when Republicans started breaking for Obama over the last couple of weeks, perhaps epitomised by Colin Powell's talk about how alienated he felt from a campaign that bandied about the term 'Muslim' as if it were a slur.

Sure, politicians aren't the electorate, but many of them are also standing for re-election, and it's clear the way they saw the wind blowing - hence their repudiation of the McCain campaign's tactics.

Anyway, exit polls so far tonight are suggesting that the economy is voters' number 1 priority; that a vast majority of them thought McCain's attacks on Obama unfair; and that the race issue isn't playing as strong a role as people thought - except perhaps in persuading a vast swathe of politically disenfranchised people to register and vote.

I'll pull up the numbers once I remember which news site I got them from.

Based on what assumptions? What's your dataset? What're the correlation coefficients? What other variables have been tested for?

Because if it's based on drawing a straight line out of a previous trend, it probably doesn't take into account myriad other factors that probably will change by the time these 8 year-olds reach adolescence.