Mitt Romney vs Mitt Romney
by Augur • Jan 8th, 2008 at 10:37 am •
Recently I discovered a blog called “The Outside Report” which is run by a friend of a friend of mine. I was impressed with the analysis by Chris, but I haven’t read many posts by the other two contributors. I like how he handled the Red Mitt v Blue Mitt in this post. Take a look.
My predictions:
1. Obama breaks 40% despite Hillary’s strong GOTV machine, Bill Clinton says something foolish, Hillary’s announcement tonight doesn’t have as many people w/ white hair
2. Unaffiliated voters break hard to vote for Obama, which hurts McCain
3. McCain wins by a very small margin over Romney, or Romney very slightly edges him out because of #2
4. Obama gets big bump in Nevada
5. Richardson will not drop out until after Nevada
Comment by kofi the i hear they voted on diebold machines; conspiracy? on 8 January 2008 at 9:16 pm:
How wild is Hillary’s showing in NH? With some 60% reporting she’s up by 3%. What happened to the polls showing Obama up by 5-12%? If Hillary had a showing as predicted that would’ve been the end of it. Now I think this cuts the legs out from under Obama’s bounce. She might actually wind up as the nominee. Crazy.
Comment by JAL on 8 January 2008 at 9:21 pm:
Romney is a blue state Republican. What do you want him to do, advocate marriage of cousins? It is funny to watch his various statements, however.
Comment by tet on 8 January 2008 at 9:54 pm:
As I said in a private email after Iowa, there is something extremely wrong with the procedures being used for polling right now. The results that they’re obtaining are not even close to what the voters are actually choosing.
Someone is going to get very rich if they can figure out how to fix this problem. The polls in Iowa had error bars up to 20% of the value of the final tally. This is a big deal.
It doesn’t look very good for your future as an augur, either, Augur.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by kofi the easy fix; make all elections extremely local on 8 January 2008 at 10:08 pm:
What error bars are you talking about Tom?
Comment by Batman, the Dark Knight on 8 January 2008 at 10:28 pm:
Maybe the voters are taking Royko’s approach and lying to the pollsters.
Honestly, I find the whole exit polling thing both invasive and counter to what the voting system is trying to achieve. It is a secret vote for a reason. Granted, I am a more private person than most, but who I vote for I want to keep to myself. I do not want to be accosted by some guy with a clipboard right after I leave the polls. Everyone will have the actual results in a few hours. Patience is a virtue. Until then, I have every confidence that political pundits will be able to fill the time with something.
As for polling prior to the election, same friggin thing. I would probably lie to them too. If we as a society are concerned that our politicians are too reliant on polls, why do we want them to be accurate? So they can get a better understanding of what the people want? I thought we already had something like that in place…elections.
Comment by tet on 9 January 2008 at 8:24 am:
These, Kofi.
The error in the average of the values polled in Iowa for Huckabee totalled 20% of his final talley.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by tet on 9 January 2008 at 8:27 am:
ABC agrees with me.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by Augur on 9 January 2008 at 8:41 am:
Yeah I struck out pretty bad on this, most of it is attributed to 2 being wrong, and that was attributed to the excitement and massive number of independents i saw at an obama event in NH.
the polling numbers were pretty accurate for the GOP Tom, but dont let that steal your thunder
I think part of this can be attributed to her strong gotv machine, and part of it is what chris matthews has been calling “pale face speak with fork tongue”
I might have botched this call pretty badly, but I had some good company
how good was his speech?
Comment by Augur on 9 January 2008 at 8:44 am:
Tom - you’re pretty quiet about Ron Paul’s performance…are you ready to admit that he isn’t going to take america by storm and be the nominee?
Comment by tet on 9 January 2008 at 9:19 am:
I never figured that he’d be the nominee, Augur. I am disappointed in that it looks like the percentage of Americans who desire freedom at the moment tops out at ten percent.
This means that I’ve got my work cut out for me if I’m going to stop the slide toward the police state that’s the alternative. That’s ok, I’ve been a radical and ahead of my time for 40 years now–I’m used to it.
This too will pass.
As far as the polling numbers go for the GOP, I agree that they were better than Iowa.
Part of the inaccuracy for Obama may be the “white person” factor–Black candidates will always get a minimum of three percent less among white voters than polled.
I haven’t checked with Political Arithmetic this morning–it’ll be interesting to see their take on Iowa. I should be writing fiction for the book right now, and will be as soon as I finish this post.
Tom Trumpinski
Comment by Chris on 9 January 2008 at 7:57 pm:
Thanks for reading my blog! One thing I suspect is that someday this cellphone vs. Landline thing is going to catch up to polling. Its only a matter of time before polling becomes obsolete because of landlines vs. cellphones so maybe this is the first sign of things to come. Plus, people have to remember this is a SMALLER subset of voters. 260,000 voters is just not a lot. I can imagine it being harder (despite) to detect shifts.
Comment by augur on 9 January 2008 at 8:13 pm:
This is a minor point, but using robotic callers instead of human callers somewhat mitigates “pale face have fork tongue” effect
Comment by augur on 9 January 2008 at 8:28 pm:
damn, i even missed my call on richardson
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/09/richardson.out/index.html