Politics III

[xthread]

I read a fair bit of daily political news.
I do not regularly read The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, Talking Points, or their conservative counterparts (gomijacogeo and shoutingboy, feel free to recommend those as well). But I do watch the electoral math closely. This post details the sites that I do watch, and where I'm getting the data upon which I base my analysis of the actual situations on the ground in US politics.

First and foremost, Andrew Tannenbaum's Electoral College site, which is updated near daily, and closely tracks the various poll organizations to try and determine what's actually happening in the races on the ground. If you only read one political site, read this one.

Second, Rasmussen Reports is the leading non-partisan polling organization. Their polling and analysis skills are exceptional. They sell very, very detailed polls and analysis to political campaigns, but they also make their summary data available to the public. Also, they've partnered with one of the politicals futures markets to track the current projections of coming elections, which is also extremely interesting.

Third, of temporary interest while the democratic primary process is still in flight, CNN is running a Delegate count watch and Forbes is running a predictive calculator that you can use to look at various possible scenarios for how each candidate could win the Democratic nomination. I really hope that Forbes or Andy Tannenbaum put up one of these for the general election as well. (Two side observations: even with yesterday's victories, it's going to be extremely difficult for Clinton to win the nomination - if she wins commanding victories in the remaing states, she will need to get an even more significant majority of the 'superdelegates' to secure the nomination; Also, CNN's commercial fortunes are looking significantly up this quarter, apparently because they're recieving a lot more traffic than usual because people are watching the election process play out... on CNN)

Fourth, I mentioned political futures markets a few paragraphs back. There are three relevant ones: The grandaddy of them all, the Iowa Electronic Market; The European based Intrade market; and Rasmussen's market, which is a partnership between Intrade and one of the best US polling companies. Each one of those is a real-money market, where people are actually putting cash on the line. hey clearly have some predictive value . If the polls are saying one thing, and the futures markets are saying something different, then we know that something strange is going on. If the polls and the futures markets are agreeing, then we can believe that we actually know something about how things would turn out if we were to hold the election today. (Another aside: Right now on both Intrade and IEM, Mrs. Clinton's prospects for being the Democratic nominee have improved dramatically since yesterday morning, but Obama is still favored to win both the Nomination and the General Election)

Comments

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

why do you do this? will you phonecall or otherwise work for your candidate of choice if they seem to need support?

[xthread.livejournal.com]

why do you do this?

Because I'm strongly in favor of being informed enough to make rational decisions.

will you phonecall or otherwise work for your candidate of choice if they seem to need support?

I do now. Many people seem to believe that voting is the key political action that they can take; I feel that it is much, much more important to spend one's time being active in one's community and talking with people about what they want and how their political choices will affect their world and their opportunities. Voting is what we do at the end of the game, not what we do at the beginning.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

glad to hear it :)

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

will you phonecall or otherwise work for your candidate of choice if they seem to need support?

I know you didn't ask me, but I feel like saying this anyway. Hope you don't mind :)

I've done phonebanking and precinct walking before. I found it utterly exhausting, intimidating, scary and awful. I made myself do it on the theory that it would get easier, and there WERE a few good moments and good conversations, but it was very very few. I've been trying to motivate myself to do it again this round and I just haven't been able to. I feel guilty about this. I still donate money to candidates I believe in and I volunteer* as a pollworker on election day (on the theory that we need young clueful tech-savvy pollworkers to make sure elections stay fair) but I'm not sure that's enough. *sigh*

* technically I do get paid for this but I'm spending a day of vacation from my highly-paid engineering job to get approximately minimum wage to work the polls. It costs me money to do this so I count it as volunteering, even if I do have to report it as income on my taxes

[xthread.livejournal.com]

I'm also of the opinion that it is much more important to spend time talking with people who don't agree with you than it is to spend time talking with people who do. A lot of what's wrong with American policy and government these days is the natural result of people realizing 'hey, we don't actually need any votes from people who don't already agree with us,' and we need to stop rewarding that kind of politicking. (And when I say 'talking with,' I mean 'with' not 'at' - it doesn't do me or them any good for me to spend time yelling 'but why don't you agree with me, I'm' I need to spend time asking 'what leads you to think what you do,' and then asking how that integrates with what I already think that I know. It's more respectful, and it's more persuasive. It just takes longer.)

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

thank you for answering; it is a question i am curious about in general.

i did doorbelling for a somewhat controversial bill once (the no-on-9 anti-queer bill in oregon) and it was indeed exhausting, though i also (being a talky sort) rather enjoyed a lot of it. but everybody's different, and you put your resources where you want them to go. money is good and being a pollworker TOTALLY ROCKS. so, thanks for doing what you do :)

(my voting place is in an old folks' home and the poll workers are all old folks, but we have simple paper ballots around here and the poll workers seem to understand their jobs and the limited technologies quite well.)

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

I volunteer at the polls for the same reason, and yeah, the clueful and tech-savvy are needed. Since it's a long day for little money, they don't necessarily get the cream of the crop, skillwise.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

you should join our poll_workers community! And tell anyone else you know who is a pollworker to join. It would be nice to see the community expand beyond just people I know and especially to people who work the polls in states other than CA :)

Conservative links, if you want 'em

[shoutingboy.livejournal.com]

Instapundit is a great link-source, from a hawkish-libertarian perspective.

National Review's Corner is a great group blog, from a more traditional conservative POV but with a lot of variation (including one cranky anti-Iraq-War Ron Paul supporter). And NR's Jim Geraghty runs Campaign Spot, a great campaign-news blog from a conservative POV.

One thing to think on: Conservative eminence gris Michael Barone thinks the old red state/blue state map we saw in 2000/2004 could be up for serious revision. He thinks the dynamics of an Obama/McCain race would be very different than either Bush/Gore or Bush/Kerry (which were very similar to each other), and as a result, he thinks a lot of states we haven't been thinking about much could be really important. It isn't just a matter of "keep the map in place but flip Ohio (or Minnesota)". Details here: "Throw Out The Old Electoral Map"

Re: Conservative links, if you want 'em

[gomijacogeo.livejournal.com]

Love Instapundit! And the NRO stuff is really good too.

I'd add http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ to the list.

I guess Hot Air would be the righty equivalent to Huffpo.