Weekend Digest: An Electoral Tie And Romney & Obama Go Motown

For our weekend political readers:

COULD THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE BE A TIE?
With the tightening of the Presidential race, some have started to speculate that the Electoral College could end in a tie. What would happen then?

Center For Politics contributor and well-known national political scientist Larry Sabato’s blog, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, explains that a tie would go to Mitt Romney.

Partisan control of the individual states’ congressional delegations is a largely meaningless statistic — until, one of these days, it isn’t.

In the event of a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, the president of the United States would be selected by the U.S. House. In a rather archaic tradition, each of the 50 state congressional delegations would get a single vote to cast, and whichever candidate won more votes in the House would win.

If there was a tie this November — which is not an impossibility — the new, 113th Congress would pick the president. And that would be Mitt Romney; a state-by-state analysis shows why.

Read the full scoop here.

SWING SHIFT
Over the years, so-called “swing states” have played a huge role in deciding the outcome of presidential elections.

Recent elections have placed a heavy emphasis on “swing states” — Ohio, Florida, and a handful of other states most-easily swayed from one party to the other.

Ohio and Florida are considered the most traditional of the swing states, but many others have swayed back and forth over the decades.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com uses very interesting graphics to take a closer look at key swing state predictions and forecasts for this election, as well as how some of those states moved during past presidential elections.

To take a closer look, go to this link.

HOW DID BIG BIRD GET IT IN ALL OF THIS?
A couple of days after the first 2012 presidential debate, Big Bird appeared on Twitter pictured outside an Obama rally with the hashtag, #ProtectSesameStreetNotWallStreet.

The Big Bird attacks started to take on a life of their own. The following week, the Obama campaign introduced a tongue-in-cheek ad that compares Big Bird to Bernard L. Madoff and other corporate criminals.

So who was behind this clever marketing campaign of “damage control” for President Obama?

Go to this link to learn more about how a tweet to 43 thousand followers then spawned a national media following, and how one woman “has become a popular but polarizing face of a campaign that until recently had been largely dominated by middle-aged white men.”

TOWN HALL DEBATE GOES MOTOWN
Did you see Mitt Romney dancing at the last debate? How about Obama’s doo-wap? You may also have missed moderator Candy Crowley’s keytar musical riff.

This YouTube video parody takes excerpts from the candidates and the audience and “songifies” them.

As one YouTube commenter said about this video, “hahah this is the only version of the presidential debates i can stomach.  the elections are a joke, and a video making a mockery of the debate is very much needed.”

Heads up: Despite your party affiliation, you’re guaranteed a pretty good laugh on this one. Watch the video below.