If Presidential Election Held Today, Clint Would Beat Oprah

By Liz Halloran

Published November 1, 2012 at 12:30 PM CDT

A life-sized cardboard cutout of actor, director and politician Clint Eastwood stands next to an empty chair cutout north of Los Angeles, California. Eastwood's 12-minute conversation with an empty chair representing President Obama sparked much attention at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

File this under "I didn't really think there was anything else I could learn about or care about swing state voters, and then came this."

Swing state voters by 42-38 percent would prefer a President Clint Eastwood over a President Oprah Winfrey.

Republican swing state voters would prefer President Stephen Colbert over President Jon Stewart by a 3-to-1 margin. Flip that for swing state Democrats.

And swing state Republicans are more convinced than Democrats that civilization "will be doomed or America will cease to be a great nation" if their candidate loses next Tuesday.

In the flurry of election polls that have buried us all, this one from Upworthy, a start-up founded Eli Pariser, formerly of the liberal Moveon.org, and Peter Koechley, formerly of The Onion, made us smile.

The telephone poll of 930 swing state voters was conducted in late October by Public Policy Polling, the Democratic firm that concentrates on political races but also likes to have some fun.

Were we surprised that the swing state survey showed that a majority of voters said they'd like to suppress someone's vote? Well, yes.

Were we surprised that Democrats were three times more likely to want to supress their boss's vote than Republicans? Not really.

And while PPP found that most swing state voters characterized their vote as "priceless," 20 percent said it is worth $100 or less. There are a number of SuperPACs that might argue the voters are selling their votes short. Way short.

Two other findings worth noting.

The poll had the presidential race in a 47-47 percent tie between Democratic President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney.

And 54 percent of those polled replied "yes" to this question: "Do you think that the media's obsessive and recurrent meta-analysis of polling results and its effects on so-called 'media narratives' is an infinitely-regressing loop of self-conscious navel gazing that diverts attention from the real issues?" (31 percent said they didn't understand the question.)

Five days left, people. Five days left.