The most epic night in politics in my generation (I’m mid-30’s ish) deserves some photo documentation. Thoughts from me on this election and Obama’s speech in an upcoming post. In the meantime, one pic of me and what I wore to an election night party in jest. The other of downtown Boulder, Colorado at midnight. This was Broadway and Pearl and the Boulder PD had to close down Broadway (the main street in Boulder).
v* with (Todd!!) Palin for prez sign
Boulder CO downtown midnight Nov 4
My shocker so far is this: the Indiana exit polls (with 2336 respondants) show 9% of voters decided whom to vote for TODAY. Today. Really. Ok, that’s — well, maybe not shocking, but close to it. But more suprising is that people who decided for whom to vote today or within the past week are going strong for Obama. I expected McCain to shore up in the waning days, not Obama. I see it as very good news for O. In addition, independents are also going very strong for Obama. If the Indiana exit polls are prescient Obama will “upset” McCain there on his way to a major national victory.
I am hesitant to believe that widespread voting “irregularities” are as bad as the media wants to portray. That said, if even 0.1% of stories like this are true
VIRGINIA: Dozens of polling places are experiencing varying degrees of machine malfunctions. Some polling places are either completely closed or have been closed for hours. Thousands of voters may have been turned away illegally by polling workers. Voters have illegally been issued with provisional ballets where machines have been broken.
Students at Virginia Tech, previously the victims of misinformation, have seen their polling place suddenly and unexpectedly moved six miles to a location with little parking.
PENNSYLVANIA: Voting machine malfunctions are widespread and at least a dozen locations, mainly focused on Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Election Protection has received reports of campaign materials being illegally distributed at polling locations in Pittsburgh. Voters across the state are reporting that they never received their absentee ballots, which is creating additional chaos at the polls.
Several other states like Florida, Ohio, Colorado and Michigan are reporting long lines due to problems with registration lists and poll locations.
we really have to ask “why?” Why does this happen in the most technically advanced country in the world, one that beat China to the moon by four decades? Why does an interested populace tolerate this? We have a long history of certain groups trying to suppress votes of other groups. Why do we continue to allow it to happen? To allow partisan state elections officials to “manage” elections in a way favorable to one side? To allow local officials to blindly grope along without replacing them when their incompetence directly affects voters?
Four things will get us past this mess:
1- Compulsory voting. You vote by law and you’re fined for not voting. If we can even approach a constitutional amendment outlawing flag-burning, then we can certainly discuss forcing everybody to vote as a price of citizenship in the USA. Compulsory voting automatically removes the completely artificial “eligible” and “ineligible” voter fraud. (And by “fraud” I mean the fact that ordinary citizens who have registered to vote at some time or another are arbitrarily declared ineligible for technical reasons. This situation is a travesty.)
2- The Oregon model of 100% vote-by-mail. No polling lines, no malfunctioning machines.
3- The Boulder County (Colorado) model of voter-verifiable ballot approval. Here in Boulder County you input your name and birth date on the county clerk’s website and find out whether they’ve received and approved your ballot.
4- Unique, randomized ballot verification number that allows you to make sure that the people and issues you voted for were recorded correctly. The county clerk posts election results publicly with the votes listed by unique random ID number. Only you have your random number, which you can then match to the listed vote. This also allows anybody to verify that the clerk actually summed the votes correctly (assuming enough people are going to check to keep the clerk honest).
(Not surprisingly, the CO Springs Gazette would respectfully disagree with me.)
Enough is enough. Why we put up with “irregularities” election after election baffles me. Let’s move on.
Assuming not much changes between today and tomorrow, here are the “predicted” outcomes in the key states by poll averager. I’ll update on Wednesday what the actual outcome was in that state. “538″ is fivethirtyeight.com, “RCP” is realclearpolitics.com, and “Pollster” is pollster.com. You’ll see each has its own number for every state. That’s because each does its own blend of averaging or other statistical massaging.
Here’s one guess from me: the traditionally red non-midwestern states will go closer for McCain than the poll averages suggest. My guess is that Obama will win Colorado by 2-3 and that McCain will win North Dakota by 5-8. The midwestern states are harder to see. McCain probably pulls out Ohio but Obama’s machine there may be way underappreciated, McCain probably pulls Indiana by 5-ish and Missouri will be too close to call into Wednesday morning. I have no idea how to handicap NC, but it is another state where Obama’s ground game may be underestimated and if it is, he could win by 2-3. Florida is setting itself up for another fiasco with how close it is. All in all I see the poll averages overpredicting for Obama by a tad, but in all he should still be able to get into the 300+ EV realm.
[UPDATE: prelim results by state below and will be updated with new results. I was wrong about CO and right about ND. I was right about Missouri and wrong about IN and OH, probably right about NC. The states that were furthest off in poll averages were North Dakota and Nevada, with Pennsylvania also a few points off.]
With hundreds of polls spread throughout almost every state in the U.S., the POTUS08 landscape can seem a daunting challenge to keep up on. Here’s how I’m looking at things.
As I’ve said from the very first issue of this (well, it started as an emailed newsletter to a few contacts), individual polls at best give minor guidance and at worst are horribly misleading. When you catch a news story you are almost always hearing the results of a single poll, and that often a national tracking poll. But we don’t elect the POTUS by national voting, we elect by state. And when each poll in each state hits at most 0.01% of the electorate, you need to keep a very skeptical eye on what you see. So what’s a poor politco to do?
You could average the polls. This is essentially what pollster.com does and while I think straight poll averaging is a recipe for statistical disaster, it is a decent guideline for what’s going on in a race. A better analysis takes past performance of individual pollsters along with other factors to create a weighted average, which is what fivethirtyeight.com does a very good job of. Even that analysis, though, can be misleading.
The best method right now, in my opinion, is to step back and look at the polls in “scan” mode. Not to trust single-number averages or regressions, but to take in all available information to see the most obvious patterns. Do this on all of the “close” states and this is what you see:
So, all that noted, where are the candidates competitive? In quite a few states, actually. The problem for McCain is that they are all red states that he should have locked up. Those true “toss-up” states that have thoroughly mixed poll results, with both candidates winning different polls (with some ties thrown in for good measure), are:
The last state, Virgina, really should be in the upper list, as McCain hasn’t led a poll there since Sept. 28th. But McCain led many of the September polls, so isn’t necessarily dead there.
The upshot? The early returns will tell you all you need to know. The east cost returns will come in first, and you should key in on VA and NC. North Carolina is really the bellwether state. If both VA and NC go Obama, the rout is on and he’ll get an Electoral College number in the mid-300’s. If ND and MT go Obama, he could approach 400 EV’s.
I’m just wondering how the Republican party became the party of voter suppression and why anybody who truly loves “freedom” and “liberty” can find it acceptable to make it as hard as possible for people to vote?
I’m not naive, I understand that the Republicans think that making it hard to vote in general makes it harder for the downtrodden (and ostensibly Dem-leaning) to vote. I’m also not opposed to requiring a form of official identification at the polls to try to ensure one-person-one-vote. But seeing as a legitimate path to “victory” the suppression of voter registrations to try to keep legitimate voters from being able to vote is as slimy and dishonest as it gets. At least in this and the past few major elections the Dems have become the party of registering as many as possible to vote while the R’s have become the party of purging roles and throwing up roadblocks to voting. The coverage of this in Montana and Colorado alone is so extensive that I won’t bother posting news links here. Clearly it is also happening across the U.S. as a directed tactic.
The bigger problem though is illustrated by the situation here in Colorado. The person in charge of overseeing voting is a partisan, elected official. This gives one party — whoever wins the Secretary of State election — just about unlimited power to make, interpret, and enforce rules on voting and registering to vote. Fortunately the situation in Colorado has not been nearly as bad as that in Montana (where voters were purged only in Dem “strongholds”), but nevertheless Colorado SoS Mike Coffman has shown Katherine Harris-like tendencies of late. It should be the goal of both parties that everybody votes and votes once. It should not be considered a legitimate political tactic to declare perfectly sound and able voters ineligible to vote on technical whims.
Here’s an idea: how would it change the landscape to implement an Australia or Brazil model where voting is compulsory and results in a fine for not doing it? Freedom isn’t free and voting shouldn’t be optional. Require everybody to vote and we can dispense with this mockery.
Well, a week of elk hunting proved frustrating. Fun as hell, but ultimately unsuccessful. I love being at 11,500 feet on an open pass in a 40mph blizzard at 25F and hiking 10 miles and 5000 vertical feet in a day with a .308 on my back just as much as the next sportsman for Obama, but it would have been nice to be looking toward a long winter with 100 lbs of elk in my freezer. Oh well.
While I was gone the race played out its predictable patterns: Obama opening a bigger lead and the McCain campaign responding by running harder and faster to the substanceless. McCain realizes that despite his well-delivered “I am not George Bush” line at the final debate, he is not offering a clear path to change here, and he will lose because of it. The Robert Draper cover article in the NY Times Sunday Mag did a good job of laying out what has been the McCain campaign’s meanderings of message as they’ve tried tack after tack just groping for something to stick.
The fact that Obama is running on his own ideas while McCain (and more so, Palin) is running on Barack Obama makes it very clear that McCain has little of substance to offer here. So the only thing left is to try to tear down the opponent with repeated salacious gossip or just outright lies (as if Bill Ayers, repeated often enough, is an actual story). No problem, this is just politics in America and if the shoe was on the other foot, the Obama campaign would likely be doing the same thing. But I think that McCain is secretly disgusted by it. We see glimpses of McCain’s dignity when he occasionally corrects people at his rallies or back away from strong statement by others in his team, but unfortunately for McCain he is now tied himself to the worst elements of his party. And the further problem for McCain and the Republican party in general is that while McCain would clearly repudiate the morons in his rally line, Sarah Palin probably wouldn’t. (Well, she clearly wouldn’t, as all she has left is to try things like this.) She very likely agrees with them, even if on a more subtle level.
McCain wants out. He probably genuinely does not like Obama, but he hates being caught up in the nastiness. Both men have oodles of dignity, the dignity that so many smaller party operatives (both sides) will never have. In some way McCain might have run to try to rid his party of the small-minded sleaze that brought him down in 2000. It’s not going away, at least for now, John. But in the last five days you could go a long way to taming the wild dogs on your side of the fence.
I’m off to go do my Sportsmen For Obama thing and hunt for elk and deer on the west side of Colorado’s Continental Divide, but before I go I just picked up this story on InTrade and market manipulation. I was highlighting InTrade results frequently back in the primaries and in general they did a fairly good job of prediction. However, the market is clearly too small to be completely insulated from large-volume manipulation, as shown by InTrade’s internal investigation. I already had my doubts based solely on the fact that the barrier to entry into the market is very high — no credit card transactions allowed (thanks to Bill Frist), and so a burdersome process to get actual skin in the game. This means a much smaller market and thus much less likely to have “honest” trading outweigh intended or unintended manipulation.
I guess if you’re a blogger you can tell the world in late August/early September that Barack Obama is still going to win in a landslide even when John McCain seems to have a small lead in national polling. (Especially if you’re an anonymous blogger?) I suppose if you’re a big media machine you have to be more circumspect, so it has taken this long for CNN and Politico to realize that in three weeks Obama-Biden is going to make McCain-Palin look silly. But obvious it has become. So obvious that Richard Lugar just endorsed Obama.
Here is what has seemed obvious to me since the conventions:
Fact is, McCain started in a big hole and doesn’t have a shovel to get himself out.
In other news, I love to see that the Bush Administration is practicing socialism and fascism at the same time. Is it January 2009 yet?
To be honest I’ve let slip coverage of the POTUS race over the past week because I’m getting bored of it. McCain is being drilled into a hole by the
economy and his running mate, Obama is pulling away into landslide territory, and the only thing left for a bored media is for Fox to run salacious stories that they know are false, and for the rest to hype up any insignificant bit of news they can into a “story.” The story this morning? Bill Kristol is writing that McCain should throw a grenade into his campaign. This is clearly yawn
material, but what’s behind it? Probably a preview of McCain gimmick to come. Read Nate Silver’s insightful analysis of this and related issues here.
As the POTUS race gets less interesting to me, the market situation and the Administration’s neo-socialistic response to it gets more so. At one time the Republian party could frame itself as the party of holding strong values and sticking to them. All pretense of that is now gone with Hank Paulson’s schemes and Dick Cheney’s back-room support of them. As history very obviously repeats itself repeatedly, I’ve been searching for some analysis to explain what’s going on now. So currently, this is what I’ve latched on to:
A book that Jim Goulding wrote in 2003 and other material on his site
The fact that Robert McHugh called the Sept 29th crash and today’s (Oct 13) major rally weeks in advance
The Black Swan and watching people who don’t really get it try to use it to explain the mob rule we are currently seeing in the markets
The fact that if you believe the Black Swan then you believe that McHugh is getting lucky
Yep, that’s really me. i voted NO on everything. Ok, not really. Out of the 16 different candidates available for POTUS on the CO ballot I steered clear of the USA Socialist Party, the Objectivist Party and the Boston Tea Party (no joke) and instead chose a candidate from a major party. I noticed that McCain/Palin is top line and Obama/Biden second. Not sure what the placement rules are in Colorado, but if McCain is top line on every ballot in CO then, according to some research, he gets an automatic 3-point handicap.
I did vote NO on almost every proposed state constitutional amendment, out of principal more than anything else. I am not opposed to direct citizen democracy in theory, but in practice here (and elsewhere in the west) it is not constrained well enough to be intelligent, efficient and effective. The bar to getting proposed amendments on the ballot is absurdly low, which all but guarantees that each ballot will have some vaguely or poorly-worded amendments, purposefully confusing amendments (like Amendment 46 this year), and even different amendments that directly contradict each other (as in 2006). The constitution of the state should be a clean and minimal guiding document that sets forth the high-level goals and aspirations of the state. It shouldn’t be filled with legal gobbledygook concerning whether state sales taxes are spent on people with developmental disabilities.
Partly it’s the economy, mostly it’s just the fundamentals. Obama was always a stronger candidate in this election. The fundamentals favoring Barack and hindering McCain were the obvious things like
The R talking box machine got a few days of play out of McCain pulling essentially even with Obama in the national polling and even in the electoral college polling. The standard talking point then was, “Obama should be crushing McCain right now and he’s not. They are tied. Therefore Obama’s a much weaker candidate than people think.”
Those salad days for the R’s are gonzo. As I said before, McCain was going to get a good and temporary bounce from his youthful energy Palin pick. He did, but that bounce quickly fizzled and now the rout is on. Back on September 17 I wrote that McCain was peaking in Colorado and nationally. I said that his then 2-point polling edge in Colorado was soon over. It clearly is over now, with Obama pulling ahead strongly. But if Colorado is a bellwether state in this election, so are Pennsylvania, Florida and New Hampshire, and Obama is starting to pull away in all, even after recent leads by McCain.
Typical swing states are one thing, traditionally red states are another. Obama is polling ahead in Virgina, North Carolina and Ohio, and making Indiana and Missouri competitive. This all adds up to one thing: the rout is on and as I said weeks ago, Obama is going to crush McCain on November 4th. The 344-194 number fivethirtyeight has up right now wouldn’t surprise me (note that the number changes daily, so might be different when you’re reading this).
It’s not even going to be close, and that’s very good for the country. We need an election that’s not decided by a thread so the new prez can have some moral authority to claim the “uniter not divider” mantle that W abdicated on the day after his inauguration. How big does the spread have to be to get some semblance of unity? Bill Clinton won 370-168 in 1992 and that didn’t exactly lead to kisses and hugs all around. But Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton and might do more to force civility where Clinton was a strong partisan fighter. In any case, what we definitely do not need is another “effective tie” to stoke the political hate. Time for a change (I think) also means time for people to cool off. Hopefully a big win will help that along.
A while back I took a flier on a Australian stock tip and had to find an American broker to trade for me. I hooked up with Euro Pacific Capital and aside from the high commission, the only thing it got me was an endless stream of dire emails from Peter Schiff on the coming economic catastrophe (and this was well over a year ago). The tone was always so dire that I tuned most of it out. Turns out he was about as right on as anybody has been about this mess (and he wrote a book last year discussing his views).
Right now I’m listening to him and the previously-mentioned Robert McHugh. Here’s what Schiff wrote recently about the bailout in context of the situation we are in:
Liquidity is in Eye of the Holder
We are being told loudly and repeatedly that the gargantuan mortgage bail-out package is necessary because illiquid mortgage-backed securities are clogging our financial arteries, threatening the economic equivalent of cardiac arrest. The idea of the plan is to transfer these supposedly valuable, but currently unmarketable, assets to the government so that private institutions can freely lend once more. The monumental flaw in this argument is that the mortgage backed securities are in fact highly liquid, just not at the prices the owners would like to receive.
Mortgage bonds are just like houses. They won’t sell if the owners stubbornly refuse to drop the price. However, they can find buyers if they acknowledge reality, and lower their expectations accordingly.
The government tells us that if these assets are held to maturity their full value will eventually be realized, and that it is only because of a lack of current liquidity that their value is not reflected in the market. However, as many private transactions have shown us in recent months, these assets will find buyers at the right price. These are not overly exotic assets but relatively straight forward mortgage obligations. The inability to find buyers is not a function of liquidity but simply of price. The government is seeking to “create liquidity” by overpaying.
Wow, did Sarah Palin really pull that off? Well, sorta.
As most figured she could, Palin “won” by not losing. Every D in the land was hoping for a performance along the lines of her horrid interview series with Katie Couric. Palin not only did not bomb, she held her composure throughout the spate. Many commenters figured that anything but a clear bomb would have the R’s shouting victory.
Not quite. Palin reinforced her greatest strength: her folksy likability. She also reinforced her lack of command of complicated issues and of political history. If you’re watching the debate for the attention to detail, for how the candidates handled the actual issues, then Biden cleaned her clock. But Palin not only didn’t wither, she shined throughout the debate as confident, sincere and spirited, and I’m sure many people picked up on her general confidence more than on her actual words.
The only “gotcha” I’ll take from the affair is the exchange on climate change. As she did throughout the debate, Palin dodged the real question: “is climate change natural or man-made?” Her answer was that climate change is real but I don’t really want to debate what caused it, it doesn’t really matter. Biden nailed her to the wall with his answer: if you can’t agree on the cause of the problem then you can’t agree on the solution. And he’s absolutely right. It makes no sense for Palin to agree that we should cap emissions (while also drilling baby drilling to depletion?) while thinking that climate change is due to natural causes. I wish Biden would have gone further than his strong acknowledgement of his own view that climate change is human-caused by bringing up the IPCC and really delving into it. Biden could have made Palin look silly on the topic but let her off easy and I don’t expect many picked up on the exchange.
In all, Palin did well enough to staunch the bleeding from the Couric interviews. She wasn’t technically good, but she was confident in her presence, made the points she wanted to make and probably gave most R’s a sigh of relief. Biden won the debate without a doubt, but again, perhaps Palin won by not losing.
The Palin bounce (down the stairs) effect is now confirmed. After seeing acts like this, Dems no long need to point out Palin’s total lack of qualification to be veep, because the R’s are doing it for them. Palin is now an anchor on John McCain’s boat, no longer the helium helping him rise. The McCain/Palin numbers will only drop from here, and the downtrend will be due both to McCain’s economy-managing fiasco as much as from Palin’s stunning unsuitability for the job. The McCain campaign is clearly shielding her from further public interviews and contact with the press as they can’t afford more Couric-type interviews.
As far as the markets, the left/right divide on the $700B Paulson power grab has been fascinating to watch. In Colorado the voting outcome was mixed. Those on the left and right in safe seats voted Y (Degette, Perlmutter and Tancredo) and neither of these players are necessarily considered moderates. The Nay votes were both from contested races (Udall and Musgrave) and from a D (Salazar) and R (Lamborn) in safe seats. In other words, there’s no real pattern here. The media has made much of the fact that rank-and-file R’s voted against the plan across the country (and they did by 2-1) just as 40% of rank-and-file D’s did, showing (supposedly) that conservatives and liberals both are in agreement on hating the compromise Paulson Power Grab, just for different reasons.
Are the reasons really that different? R’s, D’s and moderates all around see the same things here: just two weeks ago Paulson, Bernanke, Bush, McCain, etc. were all spouting that the fundamentals of the economy were strong and that everything was roses. Now they are asking for $700 billion in taxpayer money in a panic rush, telling us that if they don’t get it the economy is gonzo. Voters are very rationally asking the WTF question while their reps are squirming around, ready to push the nuclear button after about two days of debate. Again, it’s times like this I am thankful we have a slow Congress designed to make sure we don’t make panic decisions.
Finally, speaking of the Paulson Power Grab, if you thought the weekend compromise bill ameliorated the No Longer Invisible Hand provisions, think again:
What attracted far less notice in the bill was a set of provisions that would have given Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson virtually unfettered authority to set up and run the new organization designed to stabilize the financial system — bypassing federal acquisition rules and competitive hiring procedures in the process.
The 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act would have allowed Paulson and his eventual successor to waive provisions of the Federal Acquisition Regulation “upon a determination that urgent and compelling circumstances make compliance with such provisions contrary to the public interest.”
“It’s unprecedented in American history and American government,” said Donald F. Kettl, a political analyst and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “The blank check is blanker still given that we don’t know who will be signing dollar bills on Jan. 21.”
The department would have had to notify the House Financial Services and Oversight and Government Reform committees, as well as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committees of any waiver within seven days. But the bill would not have granted the panels explicit power to block any such contract.
And it goes on and on….
