Month: March 2008
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Bob Herbert reads Hillary’s mind
It’s time to get the swami graphic out again because Bob Herbert is pretending to read minds (my emphasis): More serious was Senator Clinton’s assertion that she was qualified to be commander in chief, and that John McCain had also “certainly” crossed that “threshold,” but that the jury was still out on Mr. Obama. In
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Using social pressure to get out the vote
There is a cool article in the new American Political Science Review reporting the results of a field experiment in which different mailings were randomly sent to voters. It turns out that making voting turnout public knowledge has a dramatic effect on turnout — here’s the abstract: American Political Science Review (2008), 102:33-48 Social Pressure
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Journalists squabbling on the air
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reporter and an anchor insult each other on live television before: Note: The first part of the clip is a prosaic news report about apartment maintenance — stay with it until it gets good (about a minute in).
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The 1968 analogy
Kevin Drum suggests that Democrats should calm down about the possibility of a long nomination fight hurting their chances in the fall: The hot topic of conversation right now is the proposition that a long, drawn-out Democratic primary runs the risk of destroying the party and putting John McCain in the White House. So for
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Updated Obama support graphs
Updating my posts analyzing the correlates of Obama support at the state level, here are some new graphs using the currently available numbers. In a linear regression predicting Obama’s proportion of the two-candidate vote (i.e. his vote plus Hillary’s) in contested non-home states (i.e. not FL, MI, AR, NY, or IL), the statistically significant factors
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Hillary exaggerates primary victories
After her wins last night, Hillary Clinton is engaging in simplistic primary->general election extrapolation: “No candidate in recent history — Democratic or Republican — has won the White House without winning the Ohio primary,” Mrs. Clinton, of New York, said at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “We all know that if we want a Democratic
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Marshall insinuates National Journal bias
What is this elliptical comment from Josh Marshall supposed to mean? [I]f John McCain would be the big winner of a result tonight that would insure a continued and hard fought Democratic primary race, you have to figure that a big loser would be the National Journal who would be faced with the possible need
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McCain, Obama, and the fundamentals
Ezra Klein flags a new Pew poll showing that John McCain is becoming a much more polarizing figure: Via the new Pew Poll comes evidence that McCain’s broad coalition of People Who Like Him is beginning to polarize by party as he moves towards the Republican nomination. His favorability numbers among Democrats have tanked, and
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Bill and Hillary: Overhyped
Jon Chait has a nice piece in the LA Times that echoes the points I’ve made about Hillary’s overrated 2000 victory in New York: The real reason Clinton will lose is more prosaic: Obama is a far better politician. Republicans have long had a kind of black-magic fear of the Clintons’ political potency. From the
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Another Obama smear from Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh, who has already said that Barack Obama looked like Osama bin Laden in a picture in which the Democratic presidential candidate was wearing Somali clothing, added on “The O’Reilly Factor” this week that Obama was “looking like [Osama bin Laden’s chief collaborator] Ayman [al-]Zawahiri.” On a related note, I heard Limbaugh ranting today