Get yer polls, bets, numbers & pretty graphs! Elections 2008

Oh, I'm appreciating all of this stuff a lot since it's the kind of thing I'd usually be tracking down myself but can't.

I'm reading a book by Junot Diaz right now and it really drives home something we've already talked about, that "Latinos" are not some monolithic bloc. I lived and worked in L.A. too and definitely saw the black/ Latino tensions -- I've written about it here before -- but that's not necessarily indicative of the country in general. I think there are all kinds of different factors going on, and that Obama can address some of them but not all of them.

Especially, though, he's this close at this point in the game, and after a lot of states with major Latino populations. I think it's very possible that he can win the nomination with about the support he's gotten so far. So then it becomes, would he get Latino support in a general election? And that's where I'm more comfortable. "Democrats" are an institution and a well-known brand just as "Hillary" is. I think that Latinos (with all of the disclaimers about monolithic blocs) are very likely to unite behind the Democratic nominee, whomever it is.

Re: the black vote in CA, I wonder if there was a sense that it wasn't as urgent given early results? Butrflynet and I were wondering about that when the Drudge stuff came out. Black people certainly flocked to the polls in Georgia.

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I'll just be glad when the primaries are over and a final winner is picked on both sides; I just hope the bad vibes (sorry for the word but don't know how to put it) in the democratic party miraculously go away by then. Wonder if it will?

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sozobe wrote:

Oh, I'm appreciating all of this stuff a lot since it's the kind of thing I'd usually be tracking down myself but can't.

OK, I'm glad to hear that because I was starting to feel like I was being too much like a human news feed or something. But then I also use this thread as a personal notebook kinda, like you have your blog here - hard to strike the balance.

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Just how close was it?

Looking at the sum total of votes cast on Super Tuesday, it was very, very close:

"Using CNN's reported results , and rounding to the nearest thousand (both when inputing the numbers into my speadsheet and in the totals) -- and noting that there still some votes still to be counted in New Mexico [..] -- I have [b]a preliminary total of 7.35 [million] votes yesterday for Hillary Clinton and 7.29 [million] for Barack Obama[/b]. Overall, a total vote margin of about 65K despite nearly 15 million total votes cast for one or the other. Ignoring all other stray votes, [b]that gives her 50.2 percent of the two-candidate vote share and him the balance, 49.8 percent[/b]. Stunning, really. And yet, he may win both more states and, by a marginal handful, more delegates. That's just how close it was."
link

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Okay, so has anyone at TNR been pro-Obama? I think not.

TNR has been the DLC website for a long time now; arguing in favor of war, wiretapping, limited torture, consistently against impeachment. It's not surprising to me that 'sobering after sobering' pieces are written there, each with a subtle negative slant towards Obama's chances.

Maybe it's just me...

Cycloptichorn

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Also, there's the money race to keep in mind as well:

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/hillary_loaned_her_campaign_5.php

Quote:

Hillary Loaned Her Campaign $5 Million, Spokesperson Confirms
By Greg Sargent - February 6, 2008, 3:30PM

This morning, Mark Halperin floated an intriguing question: Are the Clintons financing Hillary's campaign with their own money?

Now the Clinton campaign has finally answered: Yes, they are. Hillary spokesperson Howard Wolfson sends over the following:

Late last month Senator Clinton loaned her campaign $5 million.The loan illustrates Sen. Clinton's commitment to this effort and to ensuring that our campaign has the resources it needs to compete and win across this nation. We have had one of our best fundraising efforts ever on the web today and our Super Tuesday victories will only help in bringing more support for her candidacy.

The revelation suggests another emerging dynamic in the race: Now that the campaigns are committed to grinding it out for weeks and weeks, perhaps all the way until the convention. The Hillary camp faces the prospect of being dramatically outspent by the Obama campaign, which has enjoyed huge fundraising success.

In January, for instance, Obama raised $32 million -- well over double the $13.5 million Hillary raised in the same month. This perhaps explains the self-financing loan at the end of last month.

More in a bit.

Late Update: Wolfson confirms to me that the $13.5 million that Hillary raised in January does not include this $5 million.

Whew. That's never a good sign. Looks weak that she had to do that in a month where Obama raised 32 million and tied her on election day.

Cycloptichorn

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One tidbit I picked up a few minutes ago. One of the Washington State Obama volunteers responded to a comment saying that Google people were for Obama and Microsoft people were for Hillary. Her response was "well my husband works for Microsoft here and he says Bill Gates is totally supporting Obama."

Should be an interesting caucus state. Obama has been focusing his organizing on the west side and a weak effort on the east side of Washington. That void is about to be filled by many volunteers flocking to Washington to canvas.

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Butrflynet wrote:

One tidbit I picked up a few minutes ago. One of the Washington State Obama volunteers responded to a comment saying that Google people were for Obama and Microsoft people were for Hillary. Her response was "well my husband works for Microsoft here and he says Bill Gates is totally supporting Obama."

Should be an interesting caucus state. Obama has been focusing his organizing on the west side and a weak effort on the east side of Washington. That void is about to be filled by many volunteers flocking to Washington to canvas.

Paid volunteers. Obama could burn a million a day on it and still have more money the Hillary!

Cycloptichorn

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In a conference call this morning in Virginia Hillary admitted she had loaned her campaign $5 million and called it a good investment judging from the results in California.

It is odd that a candidate would announce that after such a successful election day. I think this is just to get some free advertising about her campaign's need for cash. Unfortunately, most of her donors are tapped out and she has to get new faces who haven't reached the donation limits or resort to PACs to rebuild her coffers.

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Heh.... fine, so we'll concede that Microsoft AND Google prefer Obama! Better?

(I saw it as Mac/ PC, with Obama as the Mac.)

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Has New Mexico been called yet? Last I saw it was 49/48 Obama, but I haven't seen anything official.

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Not called as far as I know. The totals flipped again with Clinton at 49 and 98% reporting last I checked.

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FreeDuck wrote:

Not called as far as I know. The totals flipped again with Clinton at 49 and 98% reporting last I checked.

Read somewhere that a couple of really heavy Obama areas ran out of ballots and had to go all provisional. So...

Cycloptichorn

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Cycloptichorn wrote:

Okay, so has anyone at TNR been pro-Obama? I think not.

TNR has been the DLC website for a long time now; arguing in favor of war, wiretapping, limited torture, consistently against impeachment. It's not surprising to me that 'sobering after sobering' pieces are written there, each with a subtle negative slant towards Obama's chances.

Oh, bullshit.

If you think TNR is just "the DLC website" and is still "arguing in favor of war, wiretapping, limited torture", you must just not have read anything on the site (except possibly Marty Peretz' blog) for a couple of years now.

I'd say that the current editors are about half leaning to Obama, a quarter indifferent, and a quarter for Hillary.

Even Peretz, admittedly Mr. Evil himself but then again luckily no longer the owner of the magazine, prefers Obama. But Peretz is in any case the odd duck out at the whole magazine, he's only got his mini-me Jamie Kirchik, all the other editors are pretty much your typical liberals.

Eg, when about a month back an explicitly pro-Hillary article was published, one of the TNR editors immediately published a counterargument of his own.

Right now the blog is running a series of endorsements for the Democratic race from invited outsiders, and they seem to be pretty evenly spread between Obama and Hillary.

Note that much of the criticism I posted here of Obama from TNR is actually from the left - notably Jonathan Cohn's articles about health care and mandates.

Even these strategic reflections are arguably from a perspective to the left of the Obama's current campaign, emphasising how his current strategies and appeal is too much directed to the upmarket youth, and too little sensitive to what working class whites need to hear.

Well, et cetera. If you read TNR you'd know. Now you're just doing the kill-the-messenger thing, but that doesnt solve anything. It just turns off people who are sympathetic to Obama but sceptical about a number of things.

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nimh wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:
Okay, so has anyone at TNR been pro-Obama? I think not.

TNR has been the DLC website for a long time now; arguing in favor of war, wiretapping, limited torture, consistently against impeachment. It's not surprising to me that 'sobering after sobering' pieces are written there, each with a subtle negative slant towards Obama's chances.

Oh, bullshit.

If you think TNR is just "the DLC website" and is still "arguing in favor of war, wiretapping, limited torture", you must just not have read anything on the site (except possibly Marty Peretz' blog) for a couple of years now.

I'd say that the current editors are about half leaning to Obama, a quarter indifferent, and a quarter for Hillary.

Even Peretz, admittedly Mr. Evil himself but then again luckily no longer the owner of the magazine, prefers Obama. But Peretz is in any case the odd duck out at the whole magazine, he's only got his mini-me Jamie Kirchik, all the other editors are pretty much your typical liberals.

Eg, when about a month back a clearly pro-Hillary article was published, one of the TNR editors immediately published a counterargument of his own.

Right now the blog is running a series of endorsements for the Democratic race from invited outsiders, and they seem to be pretty evenly spread between Obama and Hillary.

Note that much of the criticism I posted here of Obama from TNR is actually from the left - notably Jonathan Cohn's articles about health care and mandates.

Even these strategic reflections are arguably from a perspective to the left of the Obama's current campaign, emphasising how his current strategies and appeal is too much directed to the upmarket youth, and too little sensitive to what working class whites need to hear.

Well, et cetera. If you read TNR you'd know. Now you're just trying the kill-the-messenger thing, but that doesnt make any problem go away. It just turns off people who are sympathetic to Obama but sceptical about a number of things.

Let me put it this way - I've seen plenty of articles on TNR about Obama's problems and comparatively few about his successes. But maybe it's just me. It just gets tiring seeing article after article emphasizing Obama's issues he is going to have to deal with, instead of Hillary's massive problems.

I completely agree that Marty Peretz is the focus of much of my anger towards them, but they've never repudiated anything he wrote and much of it was despicable.

Cycloptichorn

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Well, Marty is an ass hole, on that we can agree Razz

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I have several comments to make.

The first one is that I offer an apology to everyone (specially to buttrflynet) for "calling" Missouri for Clinton.
Either I had wrong data or -more likely- the primary results in Missouri had a bimodal distribution, where candidate support is distributed very unevenly according to the polling place -and also the data arrived unevenly through time.

In other words, if the data was correct (and Obama was trailing by 9 percentage points with one third of the votes left), the late polling places were overwhelmingly pro-Obama. This means there was not a statiscally normal distribution: many prescincts were heavily pro-Clinton; many others, heavily pro-Obama.

Bimodal distribution is very common in US elections (nimh, take note on that: the statistical variance is much higher than in Europe), but I had seen it only in bipartisan elections, not in primaries.
I wonder if it means that the divide among democrats is widening. May be.

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fbaezer wrote:

I have several comments to make.

The first one is that I offer an apology to everyone (specially to buttrflynet) for "calling" Missouri for Clinton.
Either I had wrong data or -more likely- the primary results in Missouri had a bimodal distribution, where candidate support is distributed very unevenly according to the polling place -and also the data arrived unevenly through time.

In other words, if the data was correct (and Obama was trailing by 9 percentage points with one third of the votes left), the late polling places were overwhelmingly pro-Obama. This means there was not a statiscally normal distribution: many prescincts were heavily pro-Clinton; many others, heavily pro-Obama.

Bimodal distribution is very common in US elections (nimh, take note on that: the statistical variance is much higher than in Europe), but I had seen it only in bipartisan elections, not in primaries.
I wonder if it means that the divide among democrats is widening. May be.

The problem is that there's no way to tell how many votes are left; what you were looking at is how many precincts were left to be counted. And the larger precincts tend to be urban areas and they tend to take the longest to count.

So there is very often that sort of situation we saw in MO, where one candidate catches up right at the end. Very rarely do they pass the front-runner at the last second like that!!!

Cycloptichorn

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Yeah, that's the way it works.
But to understand the comeback, one has to suppose that a majority -not all, of course- of the remaining prescincts were for Obama by at least a 2 to 1 margin.

This electoral behavior that differentiates city vs. suburbs vs. countryside is typical of a Democrat vs. Republican race, not so much of a primary. That's what I mean.

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Interesting.

Who were the last responding precincts, do we know? Big cities?

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