If you don't trust the polls, maybe you want to think of things this way

We are entering the time of the election cycle when we start hearing about how irrelevant things affect our elections. This morning I heard that when the Redskins win on the last day before the election that one party wins and when they lose the other does. It supposedly worked out that way for the last dozen or so quadrennial cycles.

Others have based similar theories on things like hem lengths of skirts, whether the Dow Jones goes up or down the day/week/month before the election, or whether the American League or National League team wins the World Series. If you take a small enough sample you can make any of these work for a spell, and indeed their could be a relationship between stock prices and politics.

But I have observed one thing which nobody seems to have noticed. I don’t know that there is any cause-effect thing here, but I do admit that we are not as geographically united a country as we sometimes seem to think we are.

But the truth I have noticed is this: SINCE 1944 EVERY WINNING NATIONAL TICKET HAS HAD AT LEAST ONE CANDIDATE WHO WAS RESIDENT OF OR NATIVE TO A SOUTHERN OR BORDER STATE, border state being defined as one where slavery was still legal up until the Civil War.

To be specific

1944. Harry Truman [Missouri]

1948. Truman and Alben Barkley [Kentucky]

1952 and 1956. Dwight Eisenhower [born in Texas]

1960 and 1964. Lyndon Johnson [Texas]

1968 and 1972. Spiro Agnew [Maryland]

1976. Jimmy Carter [Georgia]

1980. 1984, and 1988. George H. W. Bush [Texas]

1992 and 1996. Bill Clinton [Arkansas] and Al Gore [Tennessee]

2000 and 2004. George W. Bush [Texas]

So who is it this year?

Palin and McCain don’t qualify, so I guess it will have to be Obama and Biden [Delaware].

Maybe we will know if this holds out some time next week.

ADDENDUM [11/5/08]: Well, it was Obama and Biden, so the string continues for one more cycle.