Uncategorized
-
How to predict the general election
The usually savvy Matthew Yglesias gets things a bit wrong in this post on the utility of state-level polling: It’s really too bad that the folks behind Five Thirty Eight.com have gone and created such a compelling website based around state-by-state general election polling. It’s all really well done and, as such, I can’t really
-
This American Life on the financial crisis
If you’ve had a hard time making sense of the financial crisis that came out of the housing bubble, This American Life co-produced an entertaining show on the subject with NPR News that does a great job of making the story understandable. Highly recommended.
-
Tucker Carlson for president?
Via Mike Munger, my department chair here at Duke and the Libertarian candidate for governor of North Carolina, there are rumors that Tucker Carlson may take a shot at the Libertarian presidential nomination. I’m not sure if this is for real or not, but I’m not as surprised by the idea as you might think.
-
NYT corrects Obama myths in FL
The New York Times has a nice article today correcting various misperceptions about Barack Obama that were reported by older Jewish voters in Florida: Because of a dispute over moving the date of the state’s primary, Mr. Obama and the other Democratic candidates did not campaign in Florida. In his absence, novel and exotic rumors
-
Hillary’s outlandish FL/MI rhetoric
Like Rick James, Hillary Clinton is a habitual line-stepper. The latest: comparing the non-recognition of the Florida and Michigan primaries to slavery and civil rights along with Zimbabwe. How long will this scorched-earth strategy go on?
-
The 22nd Amendment strikes back
I have no idea if the report out of Israel that President Bush wants to attack Iran before leaving office is true (the White House denies it), but the fact that we’re debating it should highlight the problem with the 22nd Amendment, which removes democratic accountability from second-term presidents. President Bush is deeply unpopular, but
-
How bad was MS-01 for the GOP?
American University’s Brian Schaffner has a nice graph illustrating the implications of the GOP’s defeat in the special election in Mississippi’s first district. He plots the vote for GOP House candidates in open seat elections in 2006 against President Bush’s vote total in the district in the 2004 election and then superimposes the MS-1 result
-
Quick KY and OR results analysis
Updating my series on the state-level predictors of Obama support, the graphs below (which include 95% confidence intervals around predicted linear fits using data from before yesterday’s primaries) show that white support for Obama in Oregon and Kentucky fits the pattern we expect by education but not by black population:
-
The insipid Iran threat debate
Are the presidential candidates actually going to have a debate about whether the threat posed by Iran is comparable to the previous threat posed by the USSR? Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of inexperience and reckless judgment for saying Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the United States as the
-
Why Al Gore’s favorables improved
I’m obviously sympathetic to Ezra Klein’s critique of the “gaffe-hunting, sound-bite-obsessed media,” but I have to take issue with this passage: Filtered through the lens of a couple of awkward turns of phrase and an oratorical style that could seem tendentious, Gore was seen, in 2000, as a condescending, exaggeration-prone prig. But in the ensuing