Back before Joss drank the kool-aid.

It’s 1:47 am MST. I’m in a hotel room in Ogden, Utah, with plans to drive back to Colorado in the morning with my sweet wife. I woke up a while ago and can’t get back to sleep, so here I am posting.

Back in the 70s and 80s — before the Web, before the vast majority of Americans even knew what e-mail and the Internet were — a good friend of mine, A. Christine Baron, and her husband, Tom Porter, ran by physical mail a quadrennial contest among their friends to guess the electoral college outcome of the U.S. Presidential election. I believe we had to have our entries — giving electoral vote totals and anticipated state-by-state victories as tie-breakers — in to Chris and Tom 30 days ahead of the election itself. After the election, Chris and Tom would send the results out to everyone and name a victor (or victors). The reward was bragging rights for the next four years.

The one contest I remember was 1984. Believe it or not, Reagan’s re-election was not considered a sure thing, in spite of the economic recovery from the horrific Carter years. He was still seen as a buffoon, a war-monger, a grade-B actor in over his head, and his basic conservative principles were widely mocked by the Left and the mainstream media. I don’t remember the specifics of my entry into Chris & Tom’s contest; I did have Reagan victorious, but it was not by an overwhelming amount.

What I do remember nearly 30 years later, however, were the specifics of the winning entry. Said entry was submitted by Chris & Tom’s teenage son, and it was very simple: he picked Reagan to win every single state. Period. I don’t know if he did it as a joke or if he was tapped into some Zeitgeist that the rest of us just didn’t sense, but none of the rest of us were even close to the actual results:

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Do I think that Romney’s Electoral College map will look like this? No.

Do I think that Romney’s Electoral College map could look more like this than a lot of the current projections? Yes.

As Mal says above: “No. They’re not going to see this coming.”

Oh, and the vote that dare not speak its name? Select text to see.

Romney Tsunami

You heard the phrase here first.  Unless, of course, you didn’t.

Obligatory caution:

We’ve got less than 72 hours before this is done. Let’s misbehave. ..bruce w..