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I can't believe I'm losing to this guy.” This Presidential election has the Republican Party feeling like Michael Dukakis contemplating George H.W. Bush in the famous Saturday Night Live skit.

Yes, all the recent polls are within the margin of error and anything could happen. And, yes, some pundits have bravely predicted a Mitt Romney victory—with Michael Barone [Going out on a limb: Romney beats Obama, handily] perhaps the most surprising, no doubt because he has finally counted up America’s still-dominant white voting bloc.

But the GOP presidential contender should not be in this mess. Take the forecasting model from the University of Colorado. In contrast to many other polls, it stresses state-level economic data. It has accurately predicted the winner of every Presidential election since it was first developed in 1980. It projects over 330 electoral votes for the Republican challenger.

There's also unemployment. Only Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to be re-elected with unemployment this high. Republicans have repeatedly argued that the jobs crisis alone should guarantee Obama's defeat.

Finally, it's a truism of that if an incumbent cannot crack a 50% favorable rating in the polls close to an election, he’s sunk. In poll after poll, even in the battleground states, Obama fails to obtain a favorable majority.

What is actually happening: the decades’ long effort to elect a new people is finally coming to fruition. The old rules no longer apply. Barack Obama can afford to lose a few swing states, whereas Romney has no room for error. Even his Southern flank is weak, with states like Florida and Virginia still very much in play. Even a full-scale surrender on immigration issues won't save

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, appeared on many TV channels October 30^th, the day after Hurricane Sandy passed through his state. 

Early in his lengthy statement, he reported

The 2012 presidential election is almost here.  But there’s another election we should keep our eyes on: the Puerto Rico status referendum, also scheduled for November 6^th.

Puerto Rico is a Caribbean island which has been a U.S. territory since 1898. In English its official designation is the “Commonwealth of Puerto Rico”. But in Spanish, its official designation isn’t a translation of “commonwealth”—it’s Estado Libre Associado de Puerto Rico, literally translated “Associated Free State of Puerto Rico.” I’d guess this is a sop to Puerto Rican pride.

I’ve repeatedly argued on VDARE.com that Puerto Rico is a distinct society and ought to be independent. See

• ¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre! Free Puerto Rico (And The U.S.) Now! ,
• Dialoguing Puerto Rico’s Destiny With Puerto Ricans  
• Doesn’t Puerto Rico’s Passionate Support For Its Olympic Team Tell Us Something? 

Joe Guzzardi, who spent his youth in Puerto Rico, agrees—and quite rightly argues that Americans should be asked whether they want Puerto Rico, and its debts, in their Union.

On November 6, Puerto Rico is also electing its governor, its Resident Commissioner (the territory’s non-voting representative in Congress) and other offices.

There are six candidates for governor. The two front-runners:

• incumbent governor Luis Fortuno of the pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progesista de Puerto Rico [New Progressive Party—PNP];
• challenger Alejandro Garcia Padilla of the Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico (PDP), which seeks an enhanced continuation of the current status.

The other four parties running gubernatorial candidates: the Puerto Rican Independence Party, (pro-independence) the Movimiento Unión Soberanista, (pro-independence) the Puerto Ricans for Puerto Rico Party (no position on political status) and the Working People’s Party (no position on political status).

In the Resident Commissioner contest, incumbent Pedro Pierluisi, also of incumbent governor Fortuno’s PNP, is pitted against five challengers.

Governor Fortuno (who is white, like most of the Latin American elite) is also a Republican and a Romney supporter.  [Pictured right]

Interestingly, there are both Republicans and Democrats in the PNP. Thus Fortuno and Resident Commissioner Pierluisi belong to the PNP, but Fortuno is a Republican and Pierluisi is a Democrat. They both support Puerto Rican statehood.

The status referendum has been criticized, even by members of the PNP party which set it up, for its incoherence.

The ballot consists of two parts (here—the entire text will be given in both Spanish and English).

The first question:

Do you agree that Puerto Rico should continue to have its present form of territorial status?

To which the voter answers

Sí /Yes No /No

Then the voter goes to the next segment, where he must choose between three options:

• Statehood
• Independence
• “Sovereign Free Associated State”.

Wait, isn’t Puerto Rico already, in its Spanish-language designation, an “Associated Free State”?

Well, according to the ballot

Puerto Rico should adopt a status outside of the Territory Clause of the Constitution of the United States that recognizes the sovereignty of the People of Puerto Rico. The Sovereign Free Associated State would be based on a free and voluntary political association, the specific terms of which shall be agreed upon between the United States and Puerto Rico as sovereign nations. Such agreement would provide the scope of the jurisdictional powers that the People of Puerto Rico agree to confer to the United States and retain all other jurisdictional powers and authorities.

That’s still somewhat, probably intentionally, vague. But it appears to be less than

I just DON’T KNOW whether Governor Mitt Romney [R] or President Barack Obama [D] will win the November 6 2012 election—and neither does anyone else.

This has one comforting consequence: the great bulk of Main Stream Media horse-race commentary can safely be ignored.

They will wake us (alas) when it’s over.

But this can be predicted with absolute certainty:

• If Romney wins, it will be attributed to his Etch-A-Sketch post-convention move to “moderation” (or, more accurately, what in British English is known as “wetness”—cowardly, appeasing me-tooism—a useful term that unfortunately has not made it past America’s cultural gatekeepers).

And on immigration, Romney has indeed quietly signaled to those with eyes to see that he will try for some form of illegal immigration amnesty; and also go the full Chamber of Commerce pigout on skilled immigration.

• If Romney loses, it will be attributed to his “harshness” towards illegals (remember “self-deportation”?) and his failure to “reach out” to Hispanics—for example by passing over Senator Marco Rubio for VP.

It can also be predicted with absolute certainty that Romney, obviously a deeply conventional man, will believe either/ both.

As an immigrant, I always find it touching how earnestly Americans deliberate over their presidential vote. The brutal fact: in most states, it just doesn’t matter—the presidential contest is simply not that close.

But this is liberating. You can act as a single-issue voter to Send Them a Message (in the immortal words of George Wallace—whose American Party candidacy in 1968 did send a message that the South, and the white working class, were fed up with the Democratic Party). You do this by voting for a minor party that has a key position at odds with the bipartisan majority-party consensus.

The bland jellyfish who run the generic, content-free major-party campaigns don’t have beliefs. But as marketing professionals, they know a market niche when they see one. One recent heroic example: the right-to-life movement, which—regardless of what you think of its issue, on which VDARE.com takes no position—has terrified the GOP munchkins that it is absolutely prepared to bolt if not paid at least lip-service.

(Of course, getting more than lip-service is another story. But lip-service is a start.)

Our position at VDARE.com: the most important single issue facing the U.S. is its post-1965 immigration disaster, both legal and illegal. The bipartisan Permanent Government is literally Electing A New People. Among other problems caused by this utterly selfish and irresponsible policy—immiseration of the working class, cultural dispossession, linguistic balkanization, increased crime, overpopulation,   etc. —there is the amazing fact that within 30 years, the U.S. will be majority non-white. The U.S., as it has been known to history, will simply cease to exist within the lives of children now born (including my own).

My own very blue state of Connecticut is part of the Portland-ME-to-Portland-OR Greater New England that the GOP (or a GAP—“Generic American Party”) ought to be carrying easily, but isn’t, basically because it isn’t appealing to the white working class. It appears that Obama will carry

Arthur Jensen, who died on October 22 at the age of 89, was ranked in a respected survey as 47^th out of the top 100 psychologists in the twentieth-century [Review of General Psychology, June 2002]. But none of his peers matched the stir he caused with his 123-page paper in the Harvard Educational Review, How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? [Winter 1969]. Jensen once told me that--ironic in view of the subsequent furor—the paper was actually solicited by the editor of the Review.

Jared Taylor well described last night Jensen’s extraordinary essay, which basically reasserted the significance of intelligence and its systematically differing average distribution by race—and the even more extraordinary reaction to it, which might be taken to mark the start of a Reign of Terror now ten times longer, and vastly more serious, than the much-mythologized McCarthy Era.

Jensen’s essay is now one of the most cited in the history of the Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and has been listed as a “citation classic”. Google Scholar says it has been cited by 3,403 other papers. (In total, Jensen had four “citation classics” to his name!)

But, paradoxically, it has had virtually no effect on public discourse or on the Education Establishment, which has continued to pursue one fad after another in the extreme egalitarian belief that “The Gap” can be closed with more teachers, smaller classes, charter schools, Ebonics, integrated classrooms etc.

The human cost has been enormous. It’s worth contrasting with Jensen’s wise and humane conclusion to his essay 43 years ago:

If diversity of mental abilities, as of most other human characteristics, is a basic fact of nature, as the evidence indicates, and if the ideal of universal education is to be successfully pursued, it seems a reasonable conclusion that schools and society must provide a range and diversity of educational methods, programs, and goals, and of occupational opportunities, just as wide as the range of human abilities. Accordingly, the ideal of equality of educational opportunity should not be interpreted as uniformity of facilities, instructional techniques, and educational aims for all children. Diversity rather than uniformity of approaches and aims would seem to be the key to making education rewarding for children of different patterns of ability. The reality of individual differences thus need not mean educational rewards for some children and frustration and defeat for others.

Jensen received enormous Main Stream Media coverage. It irritated him that the MSM would typically portray the “IQ controversy”, as Newsweek put it in March 1969 as a “debate”—“Is intelligence inherited or determined by the environment?” [Born Dumb?” Newsweek, March 31, 1969] It was as if the question was never settled and a consensus never reached. In fact both nature and nurture, in varying degrees, are accepted in the field as influential factors.

The MSM also obsessed on the racial aspects of the “controversy,” even though only eight pages of Jensen’s 123-page paper cover race differences. (Exactly the same happened with The Bell Curve 25 years later—two chapters sparked most of the book’s controversy).

One Newsweek article reported that Jensen favored integration, noting, “I think it can have social benefits. But I also believe in looking at all the relevant variables in conducting a study.” It also noted that Jensen voted for LBJ in 1964, for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 primary, then for Richard Nixon in the general election; and quoted him as saying that he refused to think in “liberal or conservative terms”. [The New Rage at Berkeley, June 2, 1969]

However, this proof of moderation did Jensen no good: for his conclusion that genetics accounts for 50 percent of racial differences in intelligence, he was treated as a pariah.

In 1970, Jensen testified before Congress on pending school aid legislation. He was one of seven IQ experts, including Nobel Prize recipient William Shockley, who offered criticism of selected provisions of the Emergency School Aid Act of 1970. The experts offered testimony that various studies showed integrated classrooms had virtually no effect in closing the black-white IQ gap.

Jensen’s 1980 book, Bias in Mental Testing, which debunked the idea that IQ tests were inherently biased against minority groups, generated another round of publicity, with stories in the New York Times and Time magazine. Jensen once told me that the campus bookstore at his own University of California at Berkeley refused to stock the book, even though his publisher, The Free Press, had hosted a book launch event there.

Then, four years after the publication of the mega-bestselling The Bell Curve, the Free Press rejected Jensen’s 1998 magnum opus, The g Factor. Thereafter, some 50 publishers turned down

In June, a diffident and self-deluded President Obama claimed that "the private sector is doing fine." Last week, the private sector responded: Speak for yourself, buster. Who needs an "October Surprise" when the business headlines are broadcasting the imminent layoff bomb in neon lights?

"Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence."

So wrote John Jay in Federalist No. 2, wherein he describes Americans as a "band of brethren united to each other by the strongest ties."

That "band of brethren united" no longer exists.

No longer are we "descended from the same ancestors."

Indeed, as we are daily instructed, it is our "diversity"—our citizens can trace their ancestors to every member state of the United Nations—that "is our strength." And this diversity makes us a stronger, better country than the America of Eisenhower and JFK.

No longer do we speak the same language. To tens of millions, Spanish is their language. Millions more do not use English in their homes. Nor are their children taught in English in the schools.

As for "professing the same religion," the Christianity of Jay and the Founding Fathers has been purged from all public institutions. One in 5 Americans profess no religious faith. The mainline Protestant churches—the Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian—have been losing congregants for a half-century. Secularism is the religion of the elites. It alone is promulgated in public schools.

Are we attached to "the same principles of government"?

Half the nation believes it is the duty of government to feed, house, educate and medicate the population and endlessly extract from the well-to-do whatever is required to make everybody more equal.

Egalitarianism has triumphed over freedom. Hierarchy, the natural concomitant of freedom, is seen as undemocratic.

Are we similar "in our manners and customs"? Are we agreed upon what is good or even tolerable in music, literature, art?

Do we all seek to live by the same moral code? Abortion, a felony in the 1950s, is now a constitutional right. Homosexual marriage, an absurdity not long ago, is the civil rights cause du jour.

Dissent from the intolerant new orthodoxy and you are a bigot, a hater, a homophobe, an enemy of women's rights.

Recent wars—Vietnam, Iraq—have seen us not "fighting side by side" but fighting side against side.

Racially, morally, politically, culturally, socially, the America of Jay and the Federalist Papers is ancient history. Less and less do we

The calcifying influence of Democratic talking points on Main Stream Media [MSM] minds can be measured using Google News. Just type in

“War on Women” Romney

and you will find about 11,400 recent articles. In turn,

“Gender Gap” Romney

brings up 17,900 current news stories about this massive problem for Republicans.

On the other hand, enter into Google News

“Marriage Gap” Obama

and you’ll get a half dozen hits.

Yet the Marriage Gap in the 2012 election will be much larger than the Gender Gap—just as it has been in numerous previous elections, such as 2008 and 2004.  In the 2008 exit poll, the Gender Gap was five points while the Marriage Gap was 19. Few commentators noticed, however, in part because the Gender Gap was the first result cited by CNN’s exit poll website, while the Marriage Gap was the 37^th.

Barack Obama will win in a landslide among singles (i.e., never married, cohabitating, divorced, or separated). In contrast, Mitt Romney will cruise to victory among the married / widowed. (The widowed tend Republican, although not as much as the married do. I’m grouping the widowed in with the married in this analysis because widowhood is a natural outcome of marriage.)

There are several reasons why the Marriage Gap is so little discussed—some technical, some profound.

• Technical

In the past, it’s been hard to check under the hood of polling data. The right to crosstab data the way you want to see it has typically been restricted to paying customers. Campaign professionals, such as Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg, have long been dissecting the data to advise their clients on the centrality of the Marriage Gap. But that’s too much work for the MSM.

Fortunately, Reuters now offers a free site that allows crosstabbing. In conjunction with Ipsos, Reuters has been running an Obama v. Romney poll all year, with a healthy sample size of 11,000 respondents per month.

To convert the Reuters graphs into useful answers to important questions requires a fair amount of number-crunching, so I’ve built a spreadsheet to do this. The two charts in this article come from my analysis of Reuters-Ipsos online polling for the first three and a half weeks of October.

For what it’s worth, Reuters-Ipsos showed Obama enjoying a thin lead during the first three weeks of October, Romney then eked out a microscopic 50.2 to 49.8 lead in the current, incomplete fourth week. Overall in October, Obama led Romney 51-49 among likely voters.

(By the way, Obama is preferred 69-31 among the sizable number of people who told Reuters that they are unlikely to actually vote, presumably because they are felons, foreigners, or just not into that whole civic responsibility scene. The Gender Gap is particularly large among nonvoters. But…nonvoters don’t vote.)

My analysis won’t tell you who will win the election. Yet it will tell you with a fair degree of accuracy, well before the exit polls are in, who is going to vote for whom.

To present the demographic splits as simply as possible, I will leave out all respondents who told Reuters they were undecided, unlikely to vote, or will vote for a third party. That leaves a sample size of exactly 7,500 likely voters who have chosen between Obama and Romney.

The expedient of leaving out all the miscellaneous responses declutters the data. It means that the two candidates’ percentages must add up to 100 percent. The fellow with over 50% is, by definition, the favorite of that demographic niche. My graphs, therefore, just tell you Romney’s share of each demographic group and ignore Obama’s. If you want to know what Obama’s percentage is, just subtract Romney’s from 100.

Thus, the Gender Gap is, as I calculate it, six percentage points: Among likely voters, 52 percent of men and 46 percent of women favored Romney.

That’s the simplest way to present the magnitude of that gap. But many journalists like to double the size of the Gender Gap by double-counting: Obama leads among women 54-46, so that’s eight points, and Romney leads among men 52-48 so that’s four points; add eight and four together and you get a Gender Gap of 12 points! That sounds a lot more important than 52 minus 46 equals six. But it’s actually the same thing, just presented more confusingly.

That Gender Gap of six points must be put in perspective, though. Note that Romney was favored by slightly over 57 percent of the married likely voters, versus less than 37 percent of the unmarried.

That’s a Marriage Gap (expressed my way) of 20 points. In other words, the gap in favoring Romney between the married and unmarried is well over three times larger than the much-touted Gender Gap.

Yellow Bars Indicate Size of Gap

In the graph above, the yellow portions of the bars represent the Gender and Marriage Gaps. Note that the Marriage Gap is immense among women, approaching