So, I've been reading Electoral-vote.com obsessively for the last few weeks, and have come to the same conclusion everyone else has come to: who will win will depend on turnout, specifically turnout in these states:
Minnesota (10)
Iowa (7)
Wisconsin (10)
Michigan (17)
Ohio (20)
Pennsylvania (21)
Florida (27)
The guy who maintains Electoral-vote.com is predicting a Kerry win of 291 - 242, with Kerry winning all of the battleground states except Ohio. I've read all sorts of stuff lately about how the traditional polling techniques don't work any more, lots of new voters are going to vote Kerry in, if the Washington Redskins lose, the incumbent loses, etc.
I'll believe it when I see it. The reason the pollsters try to account for "likely voters" is because it doesn't matter how many people register to vote, it only matters how many people actually go to the polls. Everyone I know thinks this a very important election (for a wide range of reasons), but the people I know are not particularly representative of the US population in general.
So, here's what I think. I figure my opinion is just as valid as any TV talking head, and it's certainly more valid than Ann Coulter's, who is a psychotic just-this-side-of-Attila-the-Hun partisan. Disagree with Ann and you're branded a traitor. Anyway, I digress...
Kerry wins:
Minnesota (10)
Iowa (7)
Pennsylvania (21)
Bush wins:
Wisconsin (10)
Michigan (17)
Ohio (20)
Florida (27)
This will give Bush a win by a 306 - 227 margin. And we spend the next 8 weeks watching recounts and court battles. Again. And we get to listen Bush - Cheney talk about a "mandate" for their nutso agenda. Again.
But I could be wrong, I figured Al Gore was toast, and he actually got more votes than Dubya.
Don't know how I missed this one, but Electoral-vote.com summarizes all the polls it can find and parses the data into some kind of half-assed election predictor. I have no idea how accurate it is, but it's certainly fascinating to look at.
Polling Report is another one.
So, which poll is correct? Gallup is predicting a relatively easy Bush victory, with W taking pretty much all the battleground states that Gore took in 2000.
However, the Zogby/Reuters poll has the race in a dead heat.
Who's right? Apparently, Gallup makes some attempt to correct their poll for voter turnout trends. Since Republicans have had better turnout in recent years than Democrats, the Gallup poll is somewhat biased toward Republican voters. Thus, the stronger showing by W.
This outcome could potentially be thwarted by strong voter turnout in the swing states, plus high voter turnout among the newly registered, since Democrats seem to be registering new voters at a greater rate than Republicans.
Good grief. As if there were any doubt TV People (particularly Political TV People) take themselves way too seriously, now we have a genuine TV People Feud.
Tucker Carlson is mad at Jon Stewart.
In case you're wondering, Tucker Carlson is one of the partisan yahoos who yells his way through Crossfire. I haven't watched Crossfire since Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan left, so I wasn't sure who he was either.
Gotta side with Stewart on this one. The Daily Show is funny as hell, and Carlson comes across as an uptight butthead.
They're gone! All 3000 spam comments are finally gone.
It took upgrading to Movable Type 3.11 and installing MT-Blacklist, but I managed to get rid of them all. Sure hope the Blacklist thing works. I had given up on trying to delete the comments from online casinos and erection enhancers. I just don't have the time to delete over 500 comments a day.
The down side is that now I don't have any comments to read...
Just testing, hoping I have not screwed up my mysql database...
Cuz that would suck.
I've upgraded to MovableType 3.11. I sure hope it worked, because I'm tired of sitting in front of this damn computer!
Installing MT-Blacklist did not work, however. More work to be done to figure that out.
All this effort to keep people from spamming my site with bogus comments. What a waste of time.
There have been 2935 comments posted against this weblog. Almost all of them are "comment spam." Looks like I'm going to have to figure out how to block these kinds of comments, it's impossible to keep track of them manually. I may have to start over, try to import all the old entries into a new weblog, and not allow comments at all. Which won't really be a big deal, nobody really posts interesting stuff any way.