Accidental Harbinger?

by JASmius

First thing this morning I saw this story (via Ace):

New York Times best-selling author Brad Thor, based in Chicago, tells TheBlaze that the Obama campaign may be planning to preemptively announce victory in the presidential election based on early voting numbers in an attempt to “demoralize Mitt Romney supporters.”

Citing a “very solid source” in Chicago, Thor says the Obama campaign is looking to make it appear to voters that they have “this thing sewed up and are less than 24 hours to victory,” according to his source.

 Now I have to say, first off, that I'm baffled at the psychology of such a silly ploy.  As if Romney supporters would (1) believe anybody from Team Messiah telling them that Obama has already won, so they might as well go home, and (2) they'd dociley comply.  I think I can speak for Romney-ans in providing iron-clad assurance that we would claw through flaming walls of rabid rattlesnakes while barefoot on hot coals, broken glass, and rusty razorblades to vote, no matter what anybody told us.  If we're losing, we're going down fighting; if we're winning, we want to run up the score.

And we're not losing.

Which brings me to the second thing I saw this morning:

So says Gannett’s Cincinnati.com, which has the data from the state government posted at its site this morning. I put the question mark on the data because I don’t see anything up yet at the Ohio Secretary of State’s website, but occasionally the media will get updates prior to the website. According to the data, Mitt Romney already has 697,143 votes before the polls opened a couple of hours ago, while Barack Obama only has 605,546, a difference of almost 92,000 votes.  The data is time-stamped at 2:03 ET this morning, and the link on the front page of the site reads, “Early voters: How Ohio has voted.”

 I see three possibilties:

1) This is a (much) shrewder media attempt at GOP voter suppression by utilitzing overconfidence ("Alright, Mitt's got this in the bag, I don't need to bother standing in line all afternoon at the polling place") instead of "demoralization".  Which isn't to say it would be shrewd; just nominally less lame.

2) This was an "oopsie," a mistake that accidentally let the true election direction cat out of the bag way too soon.  or....

3) This number was leaked by somebody in an attempt to pre-empt story #1.

Regardless, if (and yes, it's still purely an if at this point) Mitt Romney is up almost 100,000 votes in early Ohio voting (i.e. 7 percentage points) - which Barack Obama dominated by three times that much in 2008 - and since even John McCain won the election day vote in Ohio last time, then Ohio could be called by dinner time on the Pacific coast, and the election along with it.

Which is irrelevant to y'all's sacred, blood-oathed duty to go vote today if you haven't already.  After all, we want to run up the score so badly that Bobby Bowden would be counseling mercy.