""Fasicst" applies to those who believe in the union of state and corporate power, by definition.
NO! Fascism is by definition a system of government where the state is exalted in every way above the individual and all other groups (including corporations). It has it's roots in the syndicalist branch of socialism.
"Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato." ("Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State".) - Benito Mussilini, Speech October 28, 1925
"The State not only is authority which governs and molds individual wills with laws and values of spiritual life, but it is also power which makes its will prevail abroad.... For the Fascist, everything is within the State and... neither individuals or groups are outside the State.... For Fascism, the State is an absolute, before which individuals or groups are only relative." 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana - attributed to Benito Mussilini
Fascism included the idea of "corporatism" but don't let the name mislead you. It refers to a system of corporate decision making NOT decision making by for-profit corporations. "Corporate" in this context does not refer to businesses but to decision making by a body (corpus) consisting of all interested parties. A similar concept today is expressed in the term "stakeholders" where everyone is represented in decision making - businesses, employees, contractors, customers, consumer advocates etc. all making decisions "corporately". As one would expect from a movement arising out of syndicalism trade unions were a big component of this corporate decision making. The 22 "corporations" of the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni that served as the fascist legislature were NOT for-profit corporations but trade associations governed by councils where labor and management had equal representation. Imagine a council where the National Association of Manufacturers and the AFL-CIO each have an equal number of representatives - that would be the manufacturing "corporation" and there were other "corporations" for other categories (other economic sectors, farming & "peasants", the different professions, etc)
No it's not... it's to report the truth to the best of their ability and if that effects the election so be it.
Uncritically running a story where critical facts are not yet established, where the source has sat on OLD information in order to time the report for political impact is already highly suspect. However in itself that is NOT CBS's fault... the partisanship is on the part of their source and they can report it with a (somewhat) clear conscience. But they didn't report on it when they got it... they planned to sit on it themselves to time it for the maximum political impact. THAT is not journalism... that is naked partisanship. The NYT did the (for the most part) right thing, they reported it when they got it, they didn't time their report for political effect.
Actually blogger Glen Reynolds (Instapundit) made a point about this. Bloggers individually (and as a group) have NO credibility. The "blogosphere" (hate that term, but it's useful here) is a low trust environment... bloggers are anonymous, they have obvious axes to grind, you'd be crazy to trust them to tell you the unvarnished truth. So they (the worthwhile ones at least) make a serious effort to PROVE their assertions, or at least to argue them logically and engage in debate about them. They provide links to their sources, they even provide links to their critics. They are usually quick to post corrections or updates when they get it wrong. And finally they are often experts on the issues they blog about - the knowledge they bring to their arguments, and the quality of the sources they link to often reflect this.
The mainstream media on the other hand are (or were) trusted. We trust(ed) them to get it right. So they usually don't bother to prove their assertions. They usually don't have the column space or the airtime to do so even if they were inclined to. They are usually NOT experts on the issue they are reporting on. They only rarely have the time to really investigate the story before their deadline. They get it wrong ALL THE TIME! On the rare occasion that they correct their errors they are relegated to a small rarely noticed "corrections" section days after the error was made.
We have all complained about how clueless the general media is about technical matters... What we usually don't realize is that they get EVERYTHING just as wrong. Do you think their political reporting is really significantly better than their technology reporting?
Senators weren't directly elected by the people until the 1920's.
And that was probably a mistake. The original idea was to combine the advantages of being a small country (government is closer to and more accountable to the people) with the advantages of being a big country (you can't easily be conquered). The constitution set up a by a group of SOVEREIGN states that would continue to do most of the governing and which had very few constitutional limits on their powers. While the central FEDERAL government would jointly handle defense, foreign affairs and any interstate governance that came up. The central government itself was set up half as a democratic government of the people (The House of Representatives with proportional representation) and half as a federation of sovereign states treated equally (The senate where every state gets two senators) - with the Presidency a little of both: an elector for each senators and representative allocated as the state government decides.
The direct election of senators screws all that up... State governments no longer have representation at the federal government and their "sovereignty" is now a joke - an empty platitude - the federal government is seen as the one with unlimited governmental power and the states as limited. The federal government is seen as the source and the states as the recipients of power. The states are quickly becoming little more than administrative subdivisions by which the federal government exerts it's authority. And it's not like the direct election of senators is really any more "democratic" since Montana has the same two senators that California has - something that made sense when California and Montana were perceived as two equal states despite their unequal populations.
All the numbers I've ever seen from this and past elections seem to show the Democrats getting either end of the educational spectrum and Republicans getting the middle. Democrats do better with those that didn't graduate high school AND those with graduate degrees. The Republicans do better with high school and college graduates.
It's not yet time for Republicans to despair or Democrats to celebrate. These early numbers are notoriously unreliable. There has already been a significant shift from the mid-day numbers released at 2:00 to the afternoon numbers we are looking at now. For instance PA went from Kerry by 20 at 2:00 to Kerry by 9 in these late afternoon numbers from Slate - right now it's down to a 4 point lead. In 2002 there were double digit shifts from mid-day early numbers to the final results.
It's a poll. The early numbers aren't not even a scientific poll... just some of the raw data that will eventually end up in a scientific poll. To coin a phrase: "If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane."
No one wanted to "bar poll watchers". The issue in question was voter eligibility challengers. It's a different thing.
No it IS the same thing. In most states poll watchers have the right to raise complaints to election officials about any irregularities they witness INCLUDING the right to challenge the eligibility of a voter they suspect of voting fraudulently. Both parties do this though Democrats have been downplaying it since they feel they benefit more from weaker fraud protections.
To be fair that doesn't necessarily mean they benefit more from actual fraud (though that is the conventional wisdom) but that they feel the checks against fraud are more confusing or intimidating to Democratic voters.
With optical scanner machines you vote at a private station but feed your ballot into one common machine. You have a sleeve that you can hide your ballot in. In my state the top of the ballot (with no information on it) sticks out so you can put that into the machine & it will suck the ballot out without anyone being able to see your vote. However it's often easier to take the ballot out of the sleeve and feed it in which might allow the person behind you to see your vote if they're nosy.
I think OBL probably sees this as a win/win for him. He probably does hope that another Bush term would lead to continued overreach in foreign affairs that may help him in the long run. On the other hand he probably would spin a Bush defeat as a "victory". He probably also sees a Kerry victory as leading to a premature retreat from Iraq that leaves it a failed state which at worst (for him) is a breeding ground for Islamist radicals and at best may become another "Islamic Republic"
Personally i think Kerry is the better bet for OSL. Despite the insurgency in Iraq I think it is still too early to consider the Neocon strategy of liberalization & democratization a failure. I don't think it was a wise strategy (far too ambitious) but now that we have started down that road I think the worst possible move is to abandon it. Our best hope is to see it through and do everything we can to make it a success. I think Bush will try to do this with at least some small chance of success... I think Kerry will "declare victory" and pull out as quickly as he can leaving the place pretty much as it is now: a mess.
The idea that nearly one in five voters can select a candidate and still not have a singe electoral vote to represent their wishes.
This is silly. There is only one president. At the end of the day only one person can be president so it is a winner take all election no matter how electoral vote is divided up among the losers. The winner can't be an amalgam of 43% Clinton, 37% Bush Sr, 19% Perot
The electoral college tends to translate thin pluralities into clear majorities and a mandate to govern for the next four years. Even with that clear mandate it's not like the voters cease to matter... Clinton's 43% was translated by the electoral college into a clear majority but he overstepped his mandate and in some cases governed contrary to it... so his party was punished (probably in many cases by that "unrepresented" 1 in 5 who had gone for Perot) in the off-year election forcing him back into the centrist track he originally campaigned on and which his mere plurality of the popular vote dictated.
Granted there are exceptions... 2000 obviously which translated a very thin popular vote loss into a thin electoral vote victory. But these exceptions are rare... and not what you were complaining about.
I feel that it would be impossible for Bush to win the popular vote yet lose the election, due to the lock he has on a number of small states with much greater elector/population ratios.
By the exact same token Kerry has a lock on the electoral votes of a number of large states no matter what the margin of victory is. The extra votes that small states get are NOT what causes the potential for a disparity between the popular and electoral vote. It is the fact that all states are winner take all regardless of the margin of victory. The small states tend to be won by large margins (in EITHER direction don't forget tiny RI, VT, DE, ME, HI and DC) so how those "extra" votes go may be more reflective of the popular vote than the allocation of votes from a single big swing state. All the "extra" votes of ALL the small states don't add up to the 27 electoral votes of just Florida.
Can anybody make up a scenario where this is remotely possible?
Yes, the scenario that current polling indicates at this very moment. The national polling shows bush up 49% to 46% to 1% (third parties). But in Ohio and Florida he is ahead by less than 1% and is well below 50% . As it stands right now if the undecided voters break 2:1 for Kerry as expected Bush would squeak by with a plurality or even a very tiny outright majority BUT he would lose both Florida and Ohio and thus the electoral vote.
In 2000 Bush could have picked up the entire popular vote difference in California alone without changing the outcome there. More realistically he could get slightly bigger victories (by a point or two) throughout the south and west while holding Kerry to slightly smaller victories (by a point or two) in the Northeast and west coast and come out a point or two ahead in the popular vote. But that doesn't mean anything if he loses a few thousand cuban votes in Miami (as it seems he may) and the socially conservative blue-collar votes in economically hard-hit Ohio (as it seems he may)
Oh come! When was the last time you saw a big Republican protest? Thousands of white men in business attire marching down the street with giant paper maché puppets chanting slogans? It just doesn't happen.
I wonder how much impact these have on the outcome, do sites like this have a detremental effect on the election by creating a self fulfilling prophecy?
With all the lawyers already filing lawsuits and the potential for another contested election I think it would be perfectly rational for undecideds to pick whoever looks like they are winning. Someone undecided at this point obviously doesn't have a strong preference about the candidates for their own sake... but they may want to avoid another constitutional crisis and a president hobbled by another contested election. Pile on at the end to put it out or contention.
But do you have any reason to suspect that the cell-phone toting population is more inclined to vote for Kerry over Bush? Or that they might not have a tendency to be found in already solid "blue" states?
I do have a hunch that the election will not end up being as close as the polls are indicating right now. I'm just ambivalent about which way it goes. Either the polls are missing the extent anti-bush intensity and Bush loses all the battlegrounds, or all that anti-Bush rage does for Kerry what it did for Dean... I go back and forth on which way it's going.
What makes electoral-vote.com kind've special is that he's going out on a limb and declaring that "undecided voters" (currently something like 4%) will go out and vote for Kerry by a 2:1 ratio
The problem with this "undecided's always break for the challenger" analysis is that generally it is ONLY true of the very last poll. Polls a few days out do not display such a consistent "break" to the challenger. In fact they just as often "break" towards the incumbent.
I don't think anyone knows which way this election will break in the closing week. The RCP poll average has been showing a surge towards Bush. Perhaps this is just Bush regaining lost ground after the debates as Kerry regained his lost ground during them bringing us back to square one. Even more interesting is that while Bush has gained ground in the national polls some of the key battleground polls have shifted towards Kerry. It looks like we might end up with a mirror image of 2000 with Bush winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote. It will be amusing to see how the two parties would spin such a result.
Bull shit, Bush talks about both of those all the time... And points out that Kerry differs with him on these matters (particularly on the ICC part).
Only in the past week or so. It came up as a new line of attack in the debates. Bush has NOT been talking about the ICC before this and still hasn't said anything about Kyoto presumably because Kerry shares his same position on it. Prior to the ICC's recent emergence as a talking point from the Bush campaign it was not a particular topic of conservative conversation because from the conservative point of view both it and Kyoto are moot points... They're policy disputes conservatives won overwhelmingly several years ago. Being on the winning side of the dispute they don't have any resentments about it and no particular reason to talk much about it. On the liberal side of the aisle it a a cause célèbre... a constant complaint about the Bush administration and a defeat they are actively (if innefectually) seeking to reverse. For those reasons it is an issue frequently discussed by liberals but of little interest to conservatives.
Unless you can point out some bias in these questions (none is apparant to me)
Here is the bias. These two issues are ones that are the focus of liberal resentment and complaints. They are a frequent topic of discussion by liberal pundits and politicians. Conservatives won this round and have moved on. Conservative pundits and politicians rarely talk about either issue and do so only in response to initial liberal charges.
I would imagine that Bush supporters would be slightly more likely to know that the Senate unanimously (including Kerry) rejected the Kyoto treaty - though this is the kind of specific legislative arcana that the general public on both sides might not know.
Sadly the study appears to focus on questions that conservatives are likely to get wrong and liberals are likely to get right without being any better informed. It would be just as easy to ask a different set of questions to produce the opposite result. (Does the Bush administration advocate instituting a draft? Did Senior Iraqi Intelligence officers meet with Bin Laden? Did Iraq sponsor any terrorist groups?)
It would be really interesting to see a more even-handed study using only questions that have irrefutable answers and where 1/3 of the questions are ones a conservative might be inclined to get wrong, 1/3 ones a liberal would be inclined to get wrong and 1/3 questions with no obvious partisan tilt. It would also be interesting to include undecideds/moderates to see how they compare. I suspect that both sides would get questions wrong where the answers are inconvenient to their ideology and nail the answers where they support their ideology. The question is do they get the right answers because they are well informed and really know the facts? Or do they just get them right because the right answer just happens to correspond to their ideology? This study doesn't answer that question because it focusses only on question a Kerry supporter would likely get "right" no matter how uninformed they may actually be because the right answer is the ideologically comfortable one.
Such a study is easy to spin based on the questions you ask and it looks like it was in this case. A bunch of misconceptions almost exclusive to the conservative side of the spectrum were used and not surprisingly the conservatives did poorly on the test. It would be just as easy to use misconceptions that might be more common on the liberal side (some questions relating to the draft or Bush "knowing" about 9/11 before hand). Even in this one-sided exercise the "right" answer may be just as much a matter of faith without real knowledge of the facts as the "wrong" answer.
I put the scare quotes there because in some cases the truth of falsity of the answer is open to interpretation. For instance from the PIPA press release "48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found". It is PIPA that is mistaken here: the 9/11 commission report mentions several links but said that they do not appear to have resulted in a "collaborative relationship" An informed person aware of these findings would probably get a question about "links" wrong.
Furthermore this aspect of the 9/11 report is brief and as the Washington Post pointed out it "it did not specifically address two of the other pieces of evidence the administration has offered to link Iraq to al Qaeda: Zarqawi's Tawhid organization and the Ansar al-Islam group."
On another link the 9/11 report said there was "substantial uncertainty" about AL QUEADA'S ties to the first Trade Center which Iraq does have a pretty irrefutable link to Iraq in the person of Abdul Rahman Yasin... An informed person might find the 9/11 commissions "uncertainty" puzzling on account of the close operational and family relationship between Ramzi Yousef (the mastermind of the WTC bombing who hired Yasin to build the bomb) and Yousef's UNCLE(!) Khalid Shaikh Mohammed which the 9/11 Commission called the "principle architect of the 9/11 attack". Might a well informed person aware of the connection between Khalid Shaikh Mohammed of Al Queada -> his nephew Ramzi Yousef -> Yousef's bomb builder Yasin -> Yasin's finding shelter and a government pension in Iraq get this question "wrong"? Would a less well informed person get it "right"? I suspect the answer is yes in both cases.
Oh, I should have followed the link first... Not just well known left wing foundations but the TIDES FOUNDATION in particular! That is just too funny: Study funded by liberal foundation funded by $8 million from the Heinz foundation (Theresa Heinz Kerry, Chairperson) discovers that conservatives are ignorant! Next story: Hillsdale University study funded by the Barbara Bush Foundation discovers Kerry voters "less patriotic!"
You should have just said something along the lines of "they're associated with a state university, that can't be biased" Instead you provide a link to an "about us" page that looks like the kind of "web of connections" the New York Times sees as proof positive of collaboration.
Slashdot Mirror
NO! Fascism is by definition a system of government where the state is exalted in every way above the individual and all other groups (including corporations). It has it's roots in the syndicalist branch of socialism. Fascism included the idea of "corporatism" but don't let the name mislead you. It refers to a system of corporate decision making NOT decision making by for-profit corporations. "Corporate" in this context does not refer to businesses but to decision making by a body (corpus) consisting of all interested parties. A similar concept today is expressed in the term "stakeholders" where everyone is represented in decision making - businesses, employees, contractors, customers, consumer advocates etc. all making decisions "corporately". As one would expect from a movement arising out of syndicalism trade unions were a big component of this corporate decision making. The 22 "corporations" of the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni that served as the fascist legislature were NOT for-profit corporations but trade associations governed by councils where labor and management had equal representation. Imagine a council where the National Association of Manufacturers and the AFL-CIO each have an equal number of representatives - that would be the manufacturing "corporation" and there were other "corporations" for other categories (other economic sectors, farming & "peasants", the different professions, etc)
The role of the media is to influence elections.
No it's not... it's to report the truth to the best of their ability and if that effects the election so be it.
Uncritically running a story where critical facts are not yet established, where the source has sat on OLD information in order to time the report for political impact is already highly suspect. However in itself that is NOT CBS's fault... the partisanship is on the part of their source and they can report it with a (somewhat) clear conscience. But they didn't report on it when they got it... they planned to sit on it themselves to time it for the maximum political impact. THAT is not journalism... that is naked partisanship. The NYT did the (for the most part) right thing, they reported it when they got it, they didn't time their report for political effect.
Actually blogger Glen Reynolds (Instapundit) made a point about this. Bloggers individually (and as a group) have NO credibility. The "blogosphere" (hate that term, but it's useful here) is a low trust environment... bloggers are anonymous, they have obvious axes to grind, you'd be crazy to trust them to tell you the unvarnished truth. So they (the worthwhile ones at least) make a serious effort to PROVE their assertions, or at least to argue them logically and engage in debate about them. They provide links to their sources, they even provide links to their critics. They are usually quick to post corrections or updates when they get it wrong. And finally they are often experts on the issues they blog about - the knowledge they bring to their arguments, and the quality of the sources they link to often reflect this.
The mainstream media on the other hand are (or were) trusted. We trust(ed) them to get it right. So they usually don't bother to prove their assertions. They usually don't have the column space or the airtime to do so even if they were inclined to. They are usually NOT experts on the issue they are reporting on. They only rarely have the time to really investigate the story before their deadline. They get it wrong ALL THE TIME! On the rare occasion that they correct their errors they are relegated to a small rarely noticed "corrections" section days after the error was made.
We have all complained about how clueless the general media is about technical matters... What we usually don't realize is that they get EVERYTHING just as wrong. Do you think their political reporting is really significantly better than their technology reporting?
Senators weren't directly elected by the people until the 1920's.
And that was probably a mistake. The original idea was to combine the advantages of being a small country (government is closer to and more accountable to the people) with the advantages of being a big country (you can't easily be conquered). The constitution set up a by a group of SOVEREIGN states that would continue to do most of the governing and which had very few constitutional limits on their powers. While the central FEDERAL government would jointly handle defense, foreign affairs and any interstate governance that came up. The central government itself was set up half as a democratic government of the people (The House of Representatives with proportional representation) and half as a federation of sovereign states treated equally (The senate where every state gets two senators) - with the Presidency a little of both: an elector for each senators and representative allocated as the state government decides.
The direct election of senators screws all that up... State governments no longer have representation at the federal government and their "sovereignty" is now a joke - an empty platitude - the federal government is seen as the one with unlimited governmental power and the states as limited. The federal government is seen as the source and the states as the recipients of power. The states are quickly becoming little more than administrative subdivisions by which the federal government exerts it's authority. And it's not like the direct election of senators is really any more "democratic" since Montana has the same two senators that California has - something that made sense when California and Montana were perceived as two equal states despite their unequal populations.
All the numbers I've ever seen from this and past elections seem to show the Democrats getting either end of the educational spectrum and Republicans getting the middle. Democrats do better with those that didn't graduate high school AND those with graduate degrees. The Republicans do better with high school and college graduates.
It is also way up in Rep precincts... both sides have unprecedented GOTV efforts.
The future markets are responding to these exact same exit polls - they aren't an independent source of data that can confirm them.
It's not yet time for Republicans to despair or Democrats to celebrate. These early numbers are notoriously unreliable. There has already been a significant shift from the mid-day numbers released at 2:00 to the afternoon numbers we are looking at now. For instance PA went from Kerry by 20 at 2:00 to Kerry by 9 in these late afternoon numbers from Slate - right now it's down to a 4 point lead. In 2002 there were double digit shifts from mid-day early numbers to the final results.
It's a poll. The early numbers aren't not even a scientific poll... just some of the raw data that will eventually end up in a scientific poll. To coin a phrase: "If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane."
These may be a bit moot now but the national atlas is cool - click on "history" and you can get county by county popular votes from 2000.
Fairdata2000 doesn't have all the states but it is MUCH more detailed going down to the precinct level with tons of demographic data.
No one wanted to "bar poll watchers". The issue in question was voter eligibility challengers. It's a different thing.
No it IS the same thing. In most states poll watchers have the right to raise complaints to election officials about any irregularities they witness INCLUDING the right to challenge the eligibility of a voter they suspect of voting fraudulently. Both parties do this though Democrats have been downplaying it since they feel they benefit more from weaker fraud protections.
To be fair that doesn't necessarily mean they benefit more from actual fraud (though that is the conventional wisdom) but that they feel the checks against fraud are more confusing or intimidating to Democratic voters.
With optical scanner machines you vote at a private station but feed your ballot into one common machine. You have a sleeve that you can hide your ballot in. In my state the top of the ballot (with no information on it) sticks out so you can put that into the machine & it will suck the ballot out without anyone being able to see your vote. However it's often easier to take the ballot out of the sleeve and feed it in which might allow the person behind you to see your vote if they're nosy.
... but honest to goodness could his record be any WORSE than Dubya's?
This comment reveals a profound lack of imagination.
I think OBL probably sees this as a win/win for him. He probably does hope that another Bush term would lead to continued overreach in foreign affairs that may help him in the long run. On the other hand he probably would spin a Bush defeat as a "victory". He probably also sees a Kerry victory as leading to a premature retreat from Iraq that leaves it a failed state which at worst (for him) is a breeding ground for Islamist radicals and at best may become another "Islamic Republic"
Personally i think Kerry is the better bet for OSL. Despite the insurgency in Iraq I think it is still too early to consider the Neocon strategy of liberalization & democratization a failure. I don't think it was a wise strategy (far too ambitious) but now that we have started down that road I think the worst possible move is to abandon it. Our best hope is to see it through and do everything we can to make it a success. I think Bush will try to do this with at least some small chance of success... I think Kerry will "declare victory" and pull out as quickly as he can leaving the place pretty much as it is now: a mess.
The idea that nearly one in five voters can select a candidate and still not have a singe electoral vote to represent their wishes.
This is silly. There is only one president. At the end of the day only one person can be president so it is a winner take all election no matter how electoral vote is divided up among the losers. The winner can't be an amalgam of 43% Clinton, 37% Bush Sr, 19% Perot
The electoral college tends to translate thin pluralities into clear majorities and a mandate to govern for the next four years. Even with that clear mandate it's not like the voters cease to matter... Clinton's 43% was translated by the electoral college into a clear majority but he overstepped his mandate and in some cases governed contrary to it... so his party was punished (probably in many cases by that "unrepresented" 1 in 5 who had gone for Perot) in the off-year election forcing him back into the centrist track he originally campaigned on and which his mere plurality of the popular vote dictated.
Granted there are exceptions... 2000 obviously which translated a very thin popular vote loss into a thin electoral vote victory. But these exceptions are rare... and not what you were complaining about.
Actually immortal too... Christopher Reeves was already dead when that particular campaign promise was made.
I feel that it would be impossible for Bush to win the popular vote yet lose the election, due to the lock he has on a number of small states with much greater elector/population ratios.
By the exact same token Kerry has a lock on the electoral votes of a number of large states no matter what the margin of victory is. The extra votes that small states get are NOT what causes the potential for a disparity between the popular and electoral vote. It is the fact that all states are winner take all regardless of the margin of victory. The small states tend to be won by large margins (in EITHER direction don't forget tiny RI, VT, DE, ME, HI and DC) so how those "extra" votes go may be more reflective of the popular vote than the allocation of votes from a single big swing state. All the "extra" votes of ALL the small states don't add up to the 27 electoral votes of just Florida.
Can anybody make up a scenario where this is remotely possible?
Yes, the scenario that current polling indicates at this very moment. The national polling shows bush up 49% to 46% to 1% (third parties). But in Ohio and Florida he is ahead by less than 1% and is well below 50% . As it stands right now if the undecided voters break 2:1 for Kerry as expected Bush would squeak by with a plurality or even a very tiny outright majority BUT he would lose both Florida and Ohio and thus the electoral vote.
In 2000 Bush could have picked up the entire popular vote difference in California alone without changing the outcome there. More realistically he could get slightly bigger victories (by a point or two) throughout the south and west while holding Kerry to slightly smaller victories (by a point or two) in the Northeast and west coast and come out a point or two ahead in the popular vote. But that doesn't mean anything if he loses a few thousand cuban votes in Miami (as it seems he may) and the socially conservative blue-collar votes in economically hard-hit Ohio (as it seems he may)
Oh come! When was the last time you saw a big Republican protest? Thousands of white men in business attire marching down the street with giant paper maché puppets chanting slogans? It just doesn't happen.
I wonder how much impact these have on the outcome, do sites like this have a detremental effect on the election by creating a self fulfilling prophecy?
With all the lawyers already filing lawsuits and the potential for another contested election I think it would be perfectly rational for undecideds to pick whoever looks like they are winning. Someone undecided at this point obviously doesn't have a strong preference about the candidates for their own sake... but they may want to avoid another constitutional crisis and a president hobbled by another contested election. Pile on at the end to put it out or contention.
But do you have any reason to suspect that the cell-phone toting population is more inclined to vote for Kerry over Bush? Or that they might not have a tendency to be found in already solid "blue" states?
I do have a hunch that the election will not end up being as close as the polls are indicating right now. I'm just ambivalent about which way it goes. Either the polls are missing the extent anti-bush intensity and Bush loses all the battlegrounds, or all that anti-Bush rage does for Kerry what it did for Dean... I go back and forth on which way it's going.
What makes electoral-vote.com kind've special is that he's going out on a limb and declaring that "undecided voters" (currently something like 4%) will go out and vote for Kerry by a 2:1 ratio
The problem with this "undecided's always break for the challenger" analysis is that generally it is ONLY true of the very last poll. Polls a few days out do not display such a consistent "break" to the challenger. In fact they just as often "break" towards the incumbent.
I don't think anyone knows which way this election will break in the closing week. The RCP poll average has been showing a surge towards Bush. Perhaps this is just Bush regaining lost ground after the debates as Kerry regained his lost ground during them bringing us back to square one. Even more interesting is that while Bush has gained ground in the national polls some of the key battleground polls have shifted towards Kerry. It looks like we might end up with a mirror image of 2000 with Bush winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote. It will be amusing to see how the two parties would spin such a result.
Bull shit, Bush talks about both of those all the time... And points out that Kerry differs with him on these matters (particularly on the ICC part).
Only in the past week or so. It came up as a new line of attack in the debates. Bush has NOT been talking about the ICC before this and still hasn't said anything about Kyoto presumably because Kerry shares his same position on it. Prior to the ICC's recent emergence as a talking point from the Bush campaign it was not a particular topic of conservative conversation because from the conservative point of view both it and Kyoto are moot points... They're policy disputes conservatives won overwhelmingly several years ago. Being on the winning side of the dispute they don't have any resentments about it and no particular reason to talk much about it. On the liberal side of the aisle it a a cause célèbre... a constant complaint about the Bush administration and a defeat they are actively (if innefectually) seeking to reverse. For those reasons it is an issue frequently discussed by liberals but of little interest to conservatives.
Unless you can point out some bias in these questions (none is apparant to me)
Here is the bias. These two issues are ones that are the focus of liberal resentment and complaints. They are a frequent topic of discussion by liberal pundits and politicians. Conservatives won this round and have moved on. Conservative pundits and politicians rarely talk about either issue and do so only in response to initial liberal charges.
I would imagine that Bush supporters would be slightly more likely to know that the Senate unanimously (including Kerry) rejected the Kyoto treaty - though this is the kind of specific legislative arcana that the general public on both sides might not know.
Sadly the study appears to focus on questions that conservatives are likely to get wrong and liberals are likely to get right without being any better informed. It would be just as easy to ask a different set of questions to produce the opposite result. (Does the Bush administration advocate instituting a draft? Did Senior Iraqi Intelligence officers meet with Bin Laden? Did Iraq sponsor any terrorist groups?)
It would be really interesting to see a more even-handed study using only questions that have irrefutable answers and where 1/3 of the questions are ones a conservative might be inclined to get wrong, 1/3 ones a liberal would be inclined to get wrong and 1/3 questions with no obvious partisan tilt. It would also be interesting to include undecideds/moderates to see how they compare. I suspect that both sides would get questions wrong where the answers are inconvenient to their ideology and nail the answers where they support their ideology. The question is do they get the right answers because they are well informed and really know the facts? Or do they just get them right because the right answer just happens to correspond to their ideology? This study doesn't answer that question because it focusses only on question a Kerry supporter would likely get "right" no matter how uninformed they may actually be because the right answer is the ideologically comfortable one.
Sorry to pile on... I hit reply before seeing all the other replies beating up on you for this.
Such a study is easy to spin based on the questions you ask and it looks like it was in this case. A bunch of misconceptions almost exclusive to the conservative side of the spectrum were used and not surprisingly the conservatives did poorly on the test. It would be just as easy to use misconceptions that might be more common on the liberal side (some questions relating to the draft or Bush "knowing" about 9/11 before hand). Even in this one-sided exercise the "right" answer may be just as much a matter of faith without real knowledge of the facts as the "wrong" answer.
I put the scare quotes there because in some cases the truth of falsity of the answer is open to interpretation. For instance from the PIPA press release "48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found". It is PIPA that is mistaken here: the 9/11 commission report mentions several links but said that they do not appear to have resulted in a "collaborative relationship" An informed person aware of these findings would probably get a question about "links" wrong.
Furthermore this aspect of the 9/11 report is brief and as the Washington Post pointed out it "it did not specifically address two of the other pieces of evidence the administration has offered to link Iraq to al Qaeda: Zarqawi's Tawhid organization and the Ansar al-Islam group."
On another link the 9/11 report said there was "substantial uncertainty" about AL QUEADA'S ties to the first Trade Center which Iraq does have a pretty irrefutable link to Iraq in the person of Abdul Rahman Yasin... An informed person might find the 9/11 commissions "uncertainty" puzzling on account of the close operational and family relationship between Ramzi Yousef (the mastermind of the WTC bombing who hired Yasin to build the bomb) and Yousef's UNCLE(!) Khalid Shaikh Mohammed which the 9/11 Commission called the "principle architect of the 9/11 attack". Might a well informed person aware of the connection between Khalid Shaikh Mohammed of Al Queada -> his nephew Ramzi Yousef -> Yousef's bomb builder Yasin -> Yasin's finding shelter and a government pension in Iraq get this question "wrong"? Would a less well informed person get it "right"? I suspect the answer is yes in both cases.
Oh, I should have followed the link first... Not just well known left wing foundations but the TIDES FOUNDATION in particular! That is just too funny: Study funded by liberal foundation funded by $8 million from the Heinz foundation (Theresa Heinz Kerry, Chairperson) discovers that conservatives are ignorant! Next story: Hillsdale University study funded by the Barbara Bush Foundation discovers Kerry voters "less patriotic!"
You should have just said something along the lines of "they're associated with a state university, that can't be biased" Instead you provide a link to an "about us" page that looks like the kind of "web of connections" the New York Times sees as proof positive of collaboration.