Election 2016
gregladen | February 1, 2016UPDATE (Tuesday Morning):
In the Democratic Caucus, Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by an amount so small that the caucus results have to be regarded as tie.
Clinton: 49.86%
Sanders: 49.57%
O'Malley: 0.57%
Lesson learned: Those who caucused for O'Malley for ideological reasons, knowing he could not possibly win, account for a larger percentage of the overall caucus than the difference between the top two contenders. If most of those O'Malley voters would have been Sanders voters had O'Malley not been in the race, then they effectively Nadered Sanders.
Ted Cruz won the GOP caucus.
Cruz:…
gregladen | January 29, 2016UPDATE for Feb 6th debate:
This post was originally written for the previous GOP debate. Here are a few comments on last night's debate.
I watched the debate at a debate watching party of DFL activists, so naturally I saw very little of it because we were a loud and raucous crowd. But this morning I re-watched portions of the debate, and checked out the online commentary and polls.
Once again, most of the commentary by experts has little to do with the on line polls. The on line polls show Trump as having won by a huge landslide, while the experts are talking about this or that lower level…
gregladen | January 18, 2016I have studiously avoided picking a Democratic candidate to support. I will not have to decide until Super Tuesday, when Minnesotans caucus to support one or another candidate. I like Hillary Clinton for a number of reasons, including the simple fact that she has considerable experience in the Executive branch, and is a person who can get things done. If I got to pick the president (skipping the election process entirely), I'd probably pick Sanders because I'm all in on the revolution in American policy. Both candidates are actually in close agreement on most of the key issues. Neither…
gregladen | January 14, 2016I'm going to make this simple. The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks. Everything we are doing now is pre-Primary. Not one person has put pen to checkmark in a voting booth.
Once that process starts, everything changes. Suddenly there is more polling in downstream states. Starting before the first primaries, but then ramping up as we head towards states that matter (and no, Iowa and New Hampshire don't matter despite what you may have been told). Same with campaigning. We've seen a few debates, there's been a lot of speeches, but you ain't seen nothing yet. And…
gregladen | January 11, 2016... maybe they'll actually do something about them.
Remember the Democratic and Republican party debates that were held just before that major international meeting about climate change, participated in by every country in the world? Of course you do. Do you remember the candidates' responses to the questions about climate change posed during those debates? No, you don't. Not a single question about climate change, or any other big science issue, was asked.
When we think about the big science issues, climate change is often one of the main topics that comes first to mind. But there are many…
gregladen | January 8, 2016The Time Scales of Political and Climate Change Matter
The US is engaged in the laborious process of electing a new leader, who will likely be President for 8 years. Climate change has finally become an issue in US electoral politics. The climate policies of the next US President, and the Congress, will have a direct impact on the climate, because those policies will affect how much fossil carbon is put into the atmosphere over coming decades. So it is vital to consider what the climate may do during the next administration and the longer period that will include that administration’s…
gregladen | November 5, 2015The current polling as shown on the Huffpo Pollster, using only "likely voters" and "non partisan polls" shows that Trump and Carson are neck and neck and have been close for a week. Most of the other candidates are so low it is impossible to imagine any of them rising to a level of significance. On the other hand, there are still so many clowns in the clown car that it is hard to say. If eight or nine of the candidates dropped out over the next few weeks, it is possible that someone will rise up.
On the other hand, there is a thing about how the Republicans pick their candidate that may…
gregladen | October 29, 2015The big loser in this debate was CNBC. The network chose to not let anyone who was not a subscriber see the debate live. Then, apparently, the moderators trivialized the debate and annoyed the debaters, who then attacked CNBC and the press in general. Then, today, when we look at the news stories about the debate, there are hardly any. Nobody seems to really care what happened last night.
Another loser was Ben Carson. I've come to think of the online unofficial polls as useful to indicate overall opinions, and to show how those opinions change (we can discuss another time why this is a…
gregladen | October 27, 2015There will be a third GOP debate on Wednesday night. If you don't have the right cable or satellite subscription, apparently, you are not welcome to attend. (Correct me if I'm wrong, in the comments section below.)
But who cares, really? It will be a low information event.
The debate will be split into two parts, lower and higher ranking candidates separately, but the debate involving the higher ranking candidates will include more of them, and only two have anything close to poll numbers that matter. Not that polls are everything, but if you are a candidate that has failed to break 10%…
gregladen | October 15, 2015Top candidates only, non-partisan polls only, likely voters only, graphic updated October 15th, most recent polls October 12.
gregladen | October 15, 2015Clinton vs. Sanders, Likely Voters, Non-Partisan Polls only. Graphic last updated October 15th, shows polls through October 12th only.
gregladen | October 14, 2015Lincoln Chafee, Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley, Bernie Sanders, and Jim Webb faced off in the Facebook-CNN sponsored debate. Who won?
The individual who "won" is the individual whose poll numbers went up the most, and we don't know that yet. But there are other ways to win, and other ways to talk about winning.
Winners
Barack Obama I am pleased to note that the candidates running for the Democratic nomination were not running away from the President. That proved to be a bad strategy for House and Senate Democrats during the last election, and we are not seeing it today. One of the…
gregladen | September 17, 2015Eating your enemies is a time honored method for winning. It is rarely used by American politicians or their supporters.
Here is how you eat your enemy. I'll use a generalized example based on several events during the GOP debates.
Moderator: Mr. Trump, you've said 'bla bla bla bla'. Alternate Candidate, what do you have to say to Mr. Trump about this?
Alternate: Yada yada yada.
Donald Trump: [smiling, nodding giving thumbs up] I agree with all that.
More typically, a politician in this situation would find a way to separate themselves form Alternate Candidate, playing off the moderator…
gregladen | August 11, 2015A couple of days ago I assimilated data from a bunch of on line polls where people could informally and unscientifically express their opinion about who won the GOP debate (the big boy debate only, with ten candidates). I suggested a series of hypotheses to isolate the idea that this sort of on line unscientific effort might reflect reality, with the idea of testing the results of those polls with upcoming formal polls.
Now we have a couple of formal polls to test against. I took the raw percentages for the ten GOP big boy debate candidates, recalculated the percentages, and came up with…
gregladen | August 8, 2015Select one and only one. Or two if you like.
--- see down below for update ---
Megyn Kelly of FOX news went after Donald Trump, the apparent winner of the FOX-GOP Fauxbate. Donald Trump at first declared that he has no time to be politically correct. Later he proved that he does have time to be politically incorrect, when he seemed to imply that Kelly was out of sorts during the debate because she was having female problems.
This led a conservative organization to dump Trump from a keynote speakers spot. We see a crack in the armor form as Erick Erickson, who had invited Trump to…
gregladen | August 7, 2015Trump went into the GOP debate last night with a roughly 20% poll standing. Everyone will tell you to ignore polls early in this race, they never predict the outcome of a primary or a general election. That, however, is a non sequitur. We do not look at early polls to predict the distant future. We look at them to help understand the present, and to get a handle on what might happen over the next few weeks. The meaning of the polls shifts quite a bit before the first primaries, then they meaning of the polls has to be re-evaluated after every primary. At some point the re-evaluations…
gregladen | February 2, 2015If you are running for office, note that the majority of Americans think global warming is real, important, and can and should be addressed by government.
This has been happening since two elections back, when we started to see candidates threatened, if only to a limited degree, based on an untenable position on climate change. Last election cycle this became even more important as organizations like ClimateHawksVote had remarkable successes in supporting climate hawk candidates -- candidates that place climate change at the top of the list of important issues. Since then even more has…