Election Pessimism

To the uneducated election follower, president Obama's victory in the recent presidential election came as a surprise. Romney was winning in both electoral votes and the popular vote up until close to the end after all. However, even someone who is uninterested in politics and doesn't have TV like me could tell that odds were by far in Obama's favour. I personally was rooting for Romney because I am sort of curious to see how he would do so I whipped out a spreadsheet and figured out what states he would have to win and kept track of which ones he already had. After Florida started looking pretty hopeless I called it over and posted my opinion on facebook.

To my surprise, I got a lot of reactions from other people like, "don't give up," and "its not over yet" as if people felt like I was pessimistic and thought that America had failed. I'll admit, it was still possible for Romney to miraculously win all of the other remaining states and win by a hair, but it was also possible for him to unveil a secret army and have a military coup, or for a giant meteor to hit the earth and kill us all, or any number of other election altering things to happen. The fact is though, that the probability of all of those events is really small. The question I have running through my head though, is this: which is more pessimistic, to think that Romney will not win the election, or to think that Obama winning means that America is doomed. I'm not going to get into the candidates policies and garbage in this blog and  frankly I'm not interested in anybodies opinions with regard to policies in my comments, but I just want to throw out there that there's nothing wrong with saying a candidate is going to win when you're pretty sure he's going to win.

Also, even if you're sure Obama will be horrible, its not like its the worst loss of the year. The worst loss was obviously the BYU vs Utah football game. It was a lot closer, and its outcome actually affects my life.