Pollsters on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Here's an interesting New York Times article about the polling websites that so many of us have been checking constantly. You may remember my obsession with fivethirtyeight.com - well, some of the other pollsters go after the site's founder here, and I don't know enough about these sorts of things to accurately assess their claims. I just like seeing people get mad at each other.

Anyway, this all needs to end. Like, now. I can't take the stress anymore.

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How Tina Fey is Saving America

We all love Tina Fey's note-perfect impersonation of Sarah Palin. Enough words have been written about how wonderful and spot-on the impression is, so I can't add much but agreement on that front. Instead, I'd like to point something else out to you: Tina Fey is saving us all.



Take a look at this graph of presidential polling. (Click for bigger, natch.) The first Sarah Palin SNL sketch happened on Sept. 13. At this point, McCain was still up by a couple points. In the polling days following the sketch, Obama went from a 47-45 deficit to a 49-44 lead. His lead began to shrink again, but following the Sept. 27 Katie Couric interview sketch, Obama's numbers began to rise again (and McCain's began to fall more drastically.) And then, in the days after the Oct. 4 VP debate sketch, Obama broke 50% for the first time. Clearly, Tina Fey has (nearly) rescued the American people from the horribleness of a McCain/Palin administration.

Now, a critic of mine might say, "But Brian, correlation doesn't equal causation. Plus, a lot of other stuff has been going on. The economic crisis is obviously going to benefit the party not in power, and McCain's been doing just about everything he can to tank his campaign. Besides, the audience for SNL is primarily younger, who are already more in favor of Obama. Isn't SNL just preaching to the choir?"

To that person, I would say, "Shut your face. Tina Fey is an American hero and I want to marry her. We should all watch 30 Rock when it premieres on Oct. 30 at 9:30 on NBC to show her how thankful we are. That's Oct. 30, 9:30, NBC. You can also watch it on hulu.com and nbc.com. Anyway, she's amazing."




God bless Tina Fey.

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More Like Five Thirty Great!

I just wanted to give a quick heads-up to all of you about an amazing website that deals with two things I desperately love: statistics and politics. FiveThirtyEight.com uses a sophisticated model based on polls and past trends to determine who will win the presidential election. Although they admit to a liberal bias, the modeling seems to be based entirely on actual data.

But here's the cool part: before each update, they run the model 10,000 times. Based on each run, they establish percentages for all sorts of neat things. These range from pretty standard (currently, Obama is projected to win 80.5% of the time, but only with 50.8% of the popular vote) to pretty awesome and minute (14% chance that Obama will win Ohio, but lose Pennsylvania.) There's also a state-by-state rundown of odds. (Most surprising/elating for me: Virginia goes to Obama 84% of the time.) Now, I don't know enough about modeling to assess the validity of their model, but even if it's all wrong, it's still fun to look at.

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Privilege and Politics

Aviva's just full of awesome links - here's a fantastic post about the way white privilege has manifested itself in the presidential campaign. I've excerpted part of it below:

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you’re somehow being mean, or even sexist.


White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it, a “light” burden.


And there's more! This is a must-read.

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Biden My Time

As I'm sure you've heard by the time you read this, Barack Obama has selected Joe Biden, senior senator from Delaware, as his running mate. Honestly, I'm a little bit baffled, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am.

My initial reticence stemmed from the fact that when I think of Joe Biden, I immediately think of two things: plagiarism and unfortunate remarks. As many know by now, when running for president in 1988, Biden borrowed words from a speech given by a British politician, leading to his downfall in the primaries. According to Wikipedia, he correctly gave credit to the Brit on all occasions except for one which was videotaped, so I doubt it was intentional, but the story has stuck around enough that a professor of mine related the story as an all-time great presidential campaign gaffe. Similarly, on the day he announced his candidacy in 2008, he remarked that Obama was "clean" and "articulate." Ouch. Again, I'm sure it was an honest mistake, but that's loaded language.

However, upon further thought, I'm reminded of how fantastic he was during the early debates. He's quite witty, and can speak passionately and knowledgeably about important issues (no doubt a result of being the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.) Also, the quickness of tongue that sometimes get him in trouble is pretty great at times. Example: When Pres. Bush was speaking at the Knesset, he compared Obama's willingness to negotiate with Iran to Neville Chamberlain appeasing Nazis. Biden's response? "This is bullshit." Awesome. Since the environment is my top issue, I'm also happy to see that the League of Conservation Voters has lauded the choice; Biden has a lifetime LCV score of 83%, which is pretty bangin', and he's been strong on climate change.

So, I suppose on the whole, I'm cautiously optimistic about this choice. I still don't really see what voters it will help him pick up, but hey, they know more about campaigning than I do. I'm excited for today's rally to see them together for the first time, and looking forward to what lies ahead.

Besides, on an entirely shallow level, "Obama/Biden '08" just sounds good.

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