Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Something else y’all might notice about Stewart is he’s a tool of the Democrats just as much as Fox is for the Republicans. Like Mr Littlewood says there, he spent eight years talking shit about Bush, now he’s talking shit about the people who criticise Obama for doing almost exactly the same things on every single issue.
He's certainly left-leaning, but he's also pretty critical about Obama, and he's not a big fan of many democrats. As are some of his staff - John Oliver slagged off Obama in the most recent Bugle.
I'd say he's more into sensible process than picking a side.
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During the GWB years, he focused on the failings of the administration and the Fox clips were used as comedy gravy, but now there’s a clear sense of outright contempt for how Fox operates. Simply put, I don’t know how “funny” he finds them anymore. And yet somehow, he’s funniest to watch when he’s at his angriest!
I think he's come to the conclusion that they're a part of what is messing America up - they have such massive audience numbers, and they're simply misinforming the voters, which then flows through when they vote and perform other public duties.
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Russell didn't link to the Karl Rove video segment, which is possibly the best:
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And the polling are random (at least in theory).
The polling is random. But determining the outcome of the election based on polling, demographics, exit polls, and partial results isn't. Bad data going in will mess it up, but Nate Silver is using multiple polls - once you mix together a couple of dozen data sets, each of a couple of thousand people, you're starting to get some good polls.
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Not sure about this one. There are electoral systems in the world where people actually physically line up behind the candidates, and they can see where everyone is. This seems crazy to us, but it does seem to work out OK.
That's pretty much how the Iowa Democratic caucuses work, and they have a significant influence on who gets to be the Democratic nominee as they're the first held. From wikipedia:
The process used by the Democrats is more complex than the Republican Party caucus process. Each precinct divides its delegate seats among the candidates in proportion to caucus goers' votes. Participants indicate their support for a particular candidate by standing in a designated area of the caucus site (forming a preference group). An area may also be designated for undecided participants. Then, for roughly 30 minutes, participants try to convince their neighbors to support their candidates. Each preference group might informally deputize a few members to recruit supporters from the other groups and, in particular, from among those undecided. Undecided participants might visit each preference group to ask its members about their candidate.
After 30 minutes, the electioneering is temporarily halted and the supporters for each candidate are counted. At this point, the caucus officials determine which candidates are viable. Depending on the number of county delegates to be elected, the viability threshold is 15% of attendees. For a candidate to receive any delegates from a particular precinct, he or she must have the support of at least the percentage of participants required by the viability threshold. Once viability is determined, participants have roughly another 30 minutes to realign: the supporters of inviable candidates may find a viable candidate to support, join together with supporters of another inviable candidate to secure a delegate for one of the two, or choose to abstain. This realignment is a crucial distinction of caucuses in that (unlike a primary) being a voter's second candidate of choice can help a candidate.
When the voting is closed, a final head count is conducted, and each precinct apportions delegates to the county convention. These numbers are reported to the state party, which counts the total number of delegates for each candidate and reports the results to the media. Most of the participants go home, leaving a few to finish the business of the caucus: each preference group elects its delegates, and then the groups reconvene to elect local party officers and discuss the platform.
The delegates chosen by the precinct then go to a later caucus, the county convention, to choose delegates to the district convention and state convention. Most of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention are selected at the district convention, with the remaining ones selected at the state convention. Delegates to each level of convention are initially bound to support their chosen candidate but can later switch in a process very similar to what goes on at the precinct level; however, as major shifts in delegate support are rare, the media declares the candidate with the most delegates on the precinct caucus night the winner, and relatively little attention is paid to the later caucuses.Somewhat crazy, but it sounds like fun for a political junkie. STV, musical chairs, and arguing with the other lefties for the win!
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If I roll two dice, I expect I will roll something less than 11. But rolling a 10 or a 9 or an 8 or something lower is not a foregone conclusion. There is a smallish, but very real chance I will roll an 11 or a 12. And on Nate Silver’s numbers, he was telling everyone he thought the same about the presidential race: confident Obama would win, but not certain. Just like me and those dice.
But rolling dice is random (at least, in theory, I guess it's actually a result of physics, the nature of the dice, the nature of the surface it lands on, and the way it gets thrown) at the time the dice gets thrown.
Elections aren't random. If 90% of people have chosen how they vote a week out from the election, then polling can send very strong signals.
Exit polls, taken after people have actually voted, can give much clearer answers.
Extrapolating who is going to win a state or an election once you have 50% of the results in and exit polls on some of the remainder and extensive polling data on the whole state, isn't like rolling a dice.
It's like rolling a dice and when it's already bounced three times, and have a fair understanding of the physics involved, and then you hit pause and ask a computer to tell you what it will be. Not exact, but no longer random, we're crossing over into the territory of science.
I agree with Bart that inaccurate polling is the worst case scenario, but I repeat my earlier point that foregrounding how people are likely to vote in political coverage, ahead of analysis of policies can’t be a good thing, regardless of whether those polls are accurate or not. Can it?
I would agree. I like how we don't have exit polls, and how all our polls close at the same time. Results out East affecting how people vote out West would drive me nuts.
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I was almost hoping Romney might win, the reason being that when (as is likely) a major setback occurs to the US, such as a banking crash, the doctrinaire craziness of the right would be exposed.
Previous experience indicates that exposing this doctrinaire craziness doesn't make it go away or even much less popular.
I didn’t see that but I thought some of the early calls were way too early in such a tight race and when voting hadn’t closed in many states.
I've seen a lot of people comment on this. We have to remember that in the states they have vastly more knowledge at their fingertips about which precincts have returned their votes, and which have left to do so. Within each precinct they have a lot of information about how many democrats, republicans, independents, democraphics, income etc - it's all matched up with the census and so forth.
So if they've got half the precincts in, and they show a 5% swing in a direction, they can extrapolate that using fairly simple maths as to what the final result is likely to be. Hence when Rove sends the reporter down the corridor to talk to the analysts, they can say "yes, the places yet to return are largely democrat leaning, Romney isn't going to make up ground there".
It's not an exact science, but it's fairly impressive in most cases the data they have and what they can do it with it, and very well resourced (what the political parties do with it is astounding).
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Neither party offered an alternative to pursuing the Vietnam war, yet the protests accelerated and arguably hastened its end.
Actually Nixon promised to end the Vietnam war and it got him so tangled up that trying to find ‘peace with honour’ possibly extended it.
It didn’t help that by 1968 the Democratic Party had screwed itself into knots on the issue and didn’t present a particularly viable alternative. If Bobby hadn't gone and gotten himself shot....
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I know it’s not needed for a result, but when can we expect a final tally from Florida?
I don't think they're allowed to start counting special votes until 10 days after the election (ie, people have 10 days for the special votes to get to Florida, after that they don't count).
So maybe Monday week they'll have a final result? Assuming no recounts etc.