My response was purely with respect to the idea that spending does not drive turnout. Spending does in fact drive turnout.
It’s fine that you have an opinion, but “annoying” or “unnatractive” are perhaps not very good measures. Nixon was certainly unattractive, and this did not interfere with voter turnout. Appearance demonstrably affects whom you vote for, but to my knowledge, there is no empirical support for attractiveness driving turnout.
And when did you stop beating your wife? This is not a fair question. Economists predict things all the time, and quite often, they are right. Political scientists are hired by election campaigns to calculate the optimum amount of spending per district to deliver elections. Are they always right? No. But formal political science has only been around for about 50 years. Give us a little more time. Physicists have been tooling around for the past 2300 years or so.
More hints of a Daily Show Effect in today’s Atlanta paper. Georgia voter registration is way up, much more than can be accounted for by population growth. One possible explanation (my own, not the paper’s) is that the baby boomlet of the 1980s, now swelling the enrollment of our universities, may also be swelling our voter rolls.
If young voters are serious about participating in the process (as Iowa seems to suggest) I think this bodes well for Obama.
In the months leading up to the 2000 election, this board was almost unanimous in its voice that a Gore victory was inevitable. (That was foolishly wrong, in my view, no matter the Supreme Court did, because the actual results were a statistical dead heat, not the runaway Democratic victory that the most vocal pundits then active here foretold).
In the months leading up to the 2004 election, it was again widely held around here that a Kerry victory was inevitable, because, after all, look how badly Bush had done, and how incompetent he obviously was!
Now it is with no great surprise that I’m seeing the first steps towards Inevitable Victory 2008, and it’s the same sort of confirmation bias and partisanship that informed the last eight years.
I don’t yet have a prediction for 2008. I hope, though, that I come to believe it’s going to be a Republican victory, because I have a feeling that there’s some bet money to be made here – again.
More anecdotal info: that same day, we had a Special Election here in Minnesota.
It was won by the Democrat, despite the seat being held by the Republicans for the past 17 years, and the Republican candidate having been a officeholder (State House & School Board) for the past 15 years or so vs. a Democrat without such name identification, and despite the Republican Governor scheduling this election campaign during the holidays.
Much of the winning margin came from votes by young people; especially students at the colleges in Northfield. There were so many new voters registering at the polls and voting for the first time that the Northfield results were delayed for hours. (In fact, I went to bed thinking that we had lost narrowly, only to find out the next day that we won 55%-42%.)
Seems like young people are finally getting serious about taking part in deciding how their country is run. Hooray!
That’s silly. One can make an entirely fact-based analysis of likely election results without knowing which candidate will be the nominee of either party. One way is to look at polling: except for McCain v. Clinton, none of the plausible Republican candidates are beating the plausible Democrats.
I’m a little more cynical. I expect one of the most common phrases to be used on November 5, 2008 will be “Dude, the election was yesterday!. We totally missed it” My explanation for the mismatch between the exit polls and the final results in the 2004 elections is that younger voters (who skewed Democratic) were more likely to get their news from the internet. The internet sources reported early exit polls and a lot of young people figured their votes weren’t needed. Older voters who stuck with TV for their results continued to show up.
I’m not sure if you were trying to illustrate a particular point on politics or not but this link goes to a Kohler page on high efficiency flushing systems…
The Republicans seem to me to be in disarray. I don’t see any way they can come up with a candidate who can unite all their factions. Some set of Republicans is going to be excluded and angry at the end of the nomination process, no matter who the nominee may be. If Huckabee wins, the old-guard money Republicans are going to be pissed. If Giuliani or McCain wins (give it up, Mitt), the “values voters” are going to be pissed.
Whatever else you can say about Bush, he was well-positioned to unite both wings of the party. He came from an old-money eastern family, and yet sported a southern accent and embraced “born again” Christianity.
None of the candidates in the race now are in position to unite the party, and that may leave a lot of Republican voters sitting at home (or casting a protest vote) on election night come November.
As a Democrat, I’m really hoping Republicans nominate Giuliani or Romney. With either of those candidates at the top, I think Obama might have a real chance of peeling away some Southern states.
And I know there’s a lot of cynicism about young voters and whether or not they will actually vote, but I really sense that they are energized by Obama this year. I believe they will turn out. The combination of The Daily Show Effect and a candidate in the race who actually inspires young voters will bring them to the polls. Polls of young voters in New Hampshire show that Obama has a huge lead over his Democratic rivals in that demographic.
If I insisted that a Republican were going to win, but refused to bet, THEN my mouth would be wider than my wallet. Right now, I take no position on who might win.
But Bricker, analyzing the “common knowledge” of the Dope, then predicting that the election will turn out the opposite because the last two times the common knowledge was wrong is just silly.
Of course the Dope is more Democratic than a random sample of likely voters. Just because Dopers as a body supported the democratic candidate, and both times the democratic candidate lost, is no reason to suppose that because this year Dopers are supporting the democratic candidate and therefore the democratic candidate is likely to lose this year.
If Dopers suddenly started supporting the Republican candidate, or showing tepid support for the Democrat that would be evidence that a lopsided Republican victory was brewing. But the converse isn’t true, strong support for the Democratic candidate doesn’t mean the candidate will win or lose, it means that Dopers generally support the Democrats.
So if all you’re saying is that just because lots of Dopers are going to vote for the Democrat doesn’t mean that the Democrats have a lock, well, sure. But the fact is, the Republicans are in pretty sorry shape this year. National polls in 2000 and 2004 showed the Republican and Democrat running neck and neck. That’s not the case this year, is it?
Of course, the big difference is that this is the first race since 1952 Eisenhower vs Stevenson where one of the candidates isn’t an ex vice president or a sitting president. Usually one party’s candidate is a given, and so it’s easy to match up each candidate from the other party against the annointed front-runner of the other party. But the three main Democratic candidates (Clinton, Edwards, Obama) all outpoll all the Republican candidates. There’s still a chance for the Republicans, but if they manage to keep the presidency it’s going to be against the odds.
One of my fears is that the Dem’s will pull a “Kerry.” Suddenly A candidate is electable and everyone locks step behind the non-Bush.
I like Obama. I plan on voting for him. But…
I think we need more of a process than two states to decide who the candidate will be. Just four years ago Kerry “couldn’t lose.” Let’s not be naive. He’s smart, charismatic, articulate, and a new face… all things that attract votes.
He’s still vulnerable. To a Dem, to a Repub, and… to a gaff of his own making (however unlikely that seems now).
I want a longer contest. And I’m tired of Dem’s all being so relieved they have a non-Bush candidate. They’re ALL non-Bush.
btw… I’m politically independent and identify with neither party.
