Election 2016

Top candidates only, non-partisan polls only, likely voters only, graphic updated October 15th, most recent polls October 12.
Clinton vs. Sanders, Likely Voters, Non-Partisan Polls only. Graphic last updated October 15th, shows polls through October 12th only.
Lincoln 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…
The second part of the first amendment requires separation of church and state, and elsewhere, the Constitution requires that there be no religious test for office. Ben Carson requires that there be a religious test for office. This is because Carson is, essentially, an Evangelical Christian, in the sense that he believes, as do many other Gops, that Christian belief and doctrine should be part of our governance and law. In other words, Carson believes first in a higher power, God, to whom he owes primary allegiance and, critically, believes that the belief system that emerges from worship…
Eating 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…
The Republican Party and its handlers, including the right wing talk radio jocks such as Rush Limbaugh, and the bought-and-paid-for media such as FOX news, did not create the Tea Party. Michele Bachmann and a few others did that.* But once the Tea Party got going, mainstream conservative Republicans, including and especially leaders in Congress, went right to bed with it. The Tea Party gave Republican strategists an easy way to garner votes and support. This was especially easy to do because America decided to elect an African American president. Make no mistake. The Tea Party is pro-…
A 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…
I have a few thoughts I want to float on the recent #BLM activism that involved, as of this writing, two takeovers of public events. One takeover was at a Netroots Nation event that included Bernie Sanders, the other at a Sanders rally. First, I think it has to be understood that disruptive actions like this need to be carried out, and carried out more. Unless you can somehow convince me that there is a way to deal with violence in and against the African American community, widespread incarceration, habitual attacks by police on African Americans (and some others), etc. without civil…
Select 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…
Trump 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…
I am sure that by now you know about ScienceDebate Dot Org. It was set up for the 2008 US presidential election by a bunch of people including my friend Shawn Otto. The idea is to simultaneously push for an actual debate focussed on science and science policy as part of the presidential election process, and to make people realize that such a thing, which is not happening, is important. We've had a couple of elections now that were almost overshadowed by major storms, the most recent, Sandy, being as much of a direct effect of Global Warming (a scientific issue) as any large storm ever was,…