Presidential election minus 21 weeks

Duke it out here. Those participating in the US election threads are advised that they do so at their own risk.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,623 comments on “Presidential election minus 21 weeks”

Comments Page 30 of 33
1 … 29 30 31 … 33

  4. Bonjour Psephsters,

    Sun June 22:
    http://news.yahoo.com/edcartoons/doonesbury;_ylt=Aho.toFdxaG5hL65obR77Q3b.sgF

    Sun. June 22: Reincarnations of Willy Loman are on the case……
    Coming soon, a Sea Sale for fish and a Sky Sale for birds.
    http://news.yahoo.com/edcartoons/jeffdanziger;_ylt=Aink2G0ydhFbzqk.FOtzsZ5X_b4F

    THE GUTS OF THE GOPPER & ALLIED FREAKOUT IN A NUTSHELL:

    “Here is an upstart candidate(Baz) – like Dean in 2003 – with a powerful grassroots funding base that goes way beyond the corporate sponsors of the nightly news. To the old-line media establishment, that’s scary.”

    i.e. The bastards can no longer control THE MESSAGE.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-cohen/news-flash-anchor-stands_b_108467.html

  5. Bludgers

    This ain’t a good sign. Short of a revolution, Mugabe is going to stay until he dies of natural or not-so-natural causes. And the Information Minister issues a challenge to Britain and the US. Is The Imbecile going to take it on the chin? I report, you decide.

    “It is an election of the people of Zimbabwe against Britain and America,” he said, returning to the government’s theme of portraying Tsvangirai as a puppet of Western powers out to recolonize Zimbabwe.

    Zimbabwe Opposition leader quits contest
    http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,23906146-5006301,00.html

  6. Kristol confirms what we already knew, which is that McCain would be Bush III if elected. He says Bush might bomb-bomb Iran if it looks like Obi will win. Evidently, he doesn’t need to do it if McCain is going to win because Macca would do it anyway.

    Kristol: Bush Might Bomb Iran If He ‘Thinks Senator Obama’s Going To Win’
    http://thinkprogress.org/2008/06/22/kristol-bush-iran/

  7. An interesting blog on the Advertiser website yesterday about the doctors resigning in SA. Note the name of the blogger.

    Come here we have the best health system. You all know that we’re the wealthiest country in the world and have some of the best equipped hospitals anywhere. There is an MRI machine on every street corner and we all love using them.. For that we spend a whopping half as much more of GDP than the Aussies. But since the government doesn’t pay – we pay for it ourselves. We have plenty of lawyers to hire if you aren’t happy with the doctor you’ve chosen. Too bad that 10% of patients are completely uninsured., we have the highest rates of obesity, malpractice premiums are astronomical, health costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy and the private health system controls everything we do with the highest administrative overheads in the Western world. But what really cheeses us off is that we aren’t actually any more healthier that those backwater Canadians up north.
    Posted by: Mike Moore of US of A

  11. GG

    I’ll add it to my collection. Kristol is a moron but he’s still “influential” using your definition pertaining to Krauthammer. Although I agree the latter has a bit more cred than the former.

    I strayed onto the Oz thread yesterday. They’re very sensitive about any criticism of the Ruddster over there. It reminded me of home (the US thread).

  12. GG 1459

    That’s a good article. The main difference between the race problem and the age problem is that it is possible to turn race to Obama’s advantage (by getting lots of black votes and appealing to whites to help remove a blight on their society). McCain can’t really turn being old into a cause celebre. I doubt that ageism is something he will campaign on and he won’t energise the zimmer frame vote to turn out.

  14. EC
    #1435

    Your post was a triffle pompous worrying about a comma and misunderstood the points of my post on Ad Asta which was to oppose the opinion of enemy marsupial’s article and the 30 posts that supported him including yours The ‘GroupThink’ aregument put bullsh.t & was unsuported by any evidence whatsoever , whereas I put up an opposing case , supported by the consistency of political leanings an their varying levels , of political presenters & journos over much of their careers over their writing careers The reality is rthe politial ‘news’ of any day of the week and of any day in any year any year is the ‘news’ , it can not be created by ‘Groupthink’ Now I post that and spend a lots of time to editing it so intelligent readers of that site , as opposed to this site , might look at my view & substance , without worrying about the pedentics of people on this site , so the post wasn’t for this site at all Anyway the ‘leanings’ bit is worse in the US than ‘oz’ , which is why I critisise the Pancho on that crappy ‘left progressive’ DailyKos rag source he quotes all the time , its skewed to obama just like shawn Hanity is skewed to the Mccain Strongly left wing leanings newspapers & media is just as bad fr the public as right leaning media And as for the lingos I know the intelligent & educated amigos FINNS and GG read the without editings off the cuffs forays and , the Amigos may actually think yous are the ‘past’ re that english language bit , as well as seeing if there’s maybe a gem here to throw at the obamabotic ivory Towers inhabited by tulips butterflys , so never fear the ‘old style politic’ languages with editings are still in my back pockeys to use eloquently moving from ist to second gear
    http://thepossumbox.wordpress.com/2008/06/14/is-the-media-in-australia-suffering-from-groupthink/

  15. 1459 Greensborough Growler Yes it is good thats why I posted it yesterday. I espescially like this bit.

    “Numerous polls, for example, have indicated that McCain’s age may be a bigger detractor than Obama’s race. And more are now concerned that McCain will heed too closely the interests of large corporations than said so about Obama and the interests of blacks.”

    And GG where the racist whites are matters, as they will be far outweighed by the concentration of black voters.

    http://216.55.182.132/FairData/Historical/map.asp?command=scope&map=0

    So GG in the long run it dosn’t help Bush III at all.

  17. I will repost this bit if you missed it earlier.
    In a Post-ABC News poll last month, nearly nine in 10 whites said they would be comfortable with a black president. While fewer whites, about two-thirds, said they would be “entirely comfortable” with it, that was more than double the percentage of all adults who said they would be so at ease with someone entering office for the first time at age 72, which McCain (R-Ariz.) would do should he prevail in November.
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/21/AR2008062101825.html

    So it looks like the USA is more ageist than racist.

  18. I’m suprised that age is a greater issue than race. Obama’s advantage is that the 10% of whites who would not be “comfortable” with a black pres would never vote Dem anyway, and wont be pleased with McCains immigration stance so wont turn out

  19. Ron

    Are you saying that Possum’s readers are more worthy than PollBludgers? You elitist intellectual butterfly!!!

  24. Ron, let me leave aside the substance of your response to the article at Possum’s and just address this line

    I critisise the Pancho on that crappy ‘left progressive’ DailyKos rag source he quotes all the time

    You seem to have a problem with sources of information that do not align with opinions that you hold. Previously it was the Huffington Post, and now DKos.

    A couple of points about DKos. Obviously there is much ranting on there, and it overall it is a very partisan source. It supports Obama and draws Obama supporters. But it is also small ‘d’ democratic. Thousands of unique bloggers post there, receive responses, link to outside sources, and crosspost articles that they have written elsewhere. To the discerning user, it remains a very useful central repository of information. Dismissing everything that is at, or travels through that site as “crappy left progressive” is a pretty lazy critique. Because there is no central editor and thousands of amatuer contributers, the analogy to Hannity – an editorially driven commercial partisan source – is also false.

    I don’t believe that I have ever posted raving editorials from DKos, but I am prepared to stand corrected if you can find anywhere that I have. My last use of that site as a source was between posts 1200 and 1300, where I used an article which flawlessly cited pages of RCP polls disputing your incorrect assertion that Obama led Hillary by 8 points coming into Indiana. Your response then, as now, was to attempt to rubbish the ‘crappy left progressive’ rag without anything substantial to back you up.

  26. A fascinating review article of Electing FDR by Donald Richie on the Devil’s Kos, probably best found via this link: http://dhinmi.dailykos.com/

    In the wake of the psephs and the future talk above, this is a timely look backwards drawing some parallels between 30s and now. The author tells us that

    Mark Twain was on to something when he quipped that “history doesn’t repeat itself…but it rhymes.”

    I particularly liked this bit:

    [FDR] was widely criticized by intellectuals, writers and party elites for the vagueness of his proposals and the lack of bold pronouncements in his campaign. He did, however, have his “brain trust” of professors, mostly from Columbia, who were key in drafting his speeches in which he advocated for government intervention in the economy and a more vigorous effort to move the country forward than that advocated by Hoover. But Roosevelt kept many of his more conservative financial backers molified by advocating a balanced budget, and he eschewed many specifics. As he told his brain trusters, he was running a campaign and not an adult education program, and that in office he could educate the public and harness their support for his initiative, but as a candidate he “had to accept people’s prejudices and turn them to good use.”

    Of course you have figures like Bill Clinton who rurned the other way after being elected, but to the snipers ready to write Obama off for campaign tactics at this stage, I’d say that history warns you to look beyond electoral tactics. Obama’s longer history in Chicago, at the Harvard Law Review, with advisors like Sam Power, and guys like Axelrod and Plouffe stand him in good stead.

  27. Pancho,

    “You seem to have a problem with sources of information that do not align with opinions that you hold”.

    There are a whole lot of black kettles and pots banging around in your kitchen.

    LOL.

  28. Possum at 1475

    But I’ve just whacked up the time series of the simulations as well which show a surge in Obamas state implied probabilities, as well as the mean, median and mode of the ECV simulations.

    Nice – gives a good overview of what is happening over time.

    I found the probability distribution graph harder to read this time – seems that the data is presented differently to last time. The thing that is missing is the ability to easily look down the vertical lines to see the values.

    But thats fixable isn’t it?

    🙂

  29. GG, the difference is that I’m always prepared to back up my arguments with facts, polling or similar – as you can see above – rather than just referring to leftist rags or right wing machines or anything else as equally rediculous. If you want to attack the substance of what I have written, by all means hop to it. Otherwise, I rest my case.

  30. Cat, use this one instead:

    You can read the Electoral Votes from the bottom, the probabilities from the left and the embedded stats box is for the blue line representing this weeks data.

  31. Ooh, should add:

    Those two graphs are actually identical – one does a histogram view and the other is a graph of what the histogram would look like if you added all the data up as you went from left to right (or right to left).

    Contains exactly the same information.

  33. Poss at 1481
    I agree that the two graphs are mathematically identifcal but they are also miles apart in terms of message delivery. The bell graph (to me) has much more substance because at both extremes I can visualize live-boys/dead-girl scenarios, then move to the point of focus (mode) and feel the result. The other graph is just a case of giving me the info without the passion.

  34. 1479 Pancho. You are quite correct in what you say about backing yourself up with fact, wheras the siamese triplets do not. They do infact back each other up. So does that make it fact?

  41. Pancho,

    So you think you are the best person to evaluate whether you are unbiased? Pardon me while I laugh hysterically.

    Look, you are fun to engage, but you do move the goalposts when you critique other bloggers, you tend to bluster when sprung and get all defensive, and you do tend to draw your sources of inspiration from the left wing biased blogs (nothing wrong with that).

    But, criticisng Ron for only being interested in sources that he agrees with is neither fair nor accurate. Ron has his biases like everyone, but he reads everything and tries to evaluate same on their merits.

  48. GG – Not what I was saying at all. Bias? Guilty as charged.

    The only point I made above was that DKos is a democratic source of much information, and it is a weak critique to label anything that comes from there as ‘crappy left progressive’. Ron has levelled the charge on several occasions. His call, but to my mind flawed.

  49. Pancho,

    No need to pout.

    It seems the “screaming harpies” are in your corner. That settles it.

Comments are closed.

Comments Page 30 of 33
1 … 29 30 31 … 33