West Virginia is Hillary Clinton's kind of state. Most projections have her taking the state by 25-35%. Fortunately for team Obama, it doesn't really matter. I'm most interested in seeing whether or not the irrelevancy of this contest will diminish the vote total. No one likes to go out and vote in an election that's already over, for a candidate who has already lost. Perhaps a bandwagon effect will give Obama a surprisingly good night, but the best he could hope for is to lose by only 20%.
If Hillary wins by more than 40% and there is a heavy turnout, she could net over 100,000 votes, and cable news may try to make the win seem significant, citing the plausibility of her taking the lead in the popular vote.
For those of you who still choose to closely watch this race, I want to direct you to a tremendous resource I've been reading lately, that Chris at the Outside Report got me hooked on. It's a blog with very detailed analysis and polling data, where the polls are weighted based on the polls past performance (and other factors). Check out FiveThirtyEight.com, and if you're interested, here is their WV primary preview.
Update from Buck B.
Further re-enforcing the "everyone-hates Republicans" thing I wrote about below, Democrats have, incredibly, won Mississippi's 1st Congressional District in a special election today....by eight points! This is a district Bush won with 62 percent of the vote in 2004. Republicans have now lost three special elections in a row this year, all in heavily Republican districts.
Oh, and as expected Hillary has officially cornered the market on ignorant white people who will likely vote Republican in November anyway. Congratulations, Sen. Clinton.
If Hillary wins by more than 40% and there is a heavy turnout, she could net over 100,000 votes, and cable news may try to make the win seem significant, citing the plausibility of her taking the lead in the popular vote.
For those of you who still choose to closely watch this race, I want to direct you to a tremendous resource I've been reading lately, that Chris at the Outside Report got me hooked on. It's a blog with very detailed analysis and polling data, where the polls are weighted based on the polls past performance (and other factors). Check out FiveThirtyEight.com, and if you're interested, here is their WV primary preview.
Update from Buck B.
Further re-enforcing the "everyone-hates Republicans" thing I wrote about below, Democrats have, incredibly, won Mississippi's 1st Congressional District in a special election today....by eight points! This is a district Bush won with 62 percent of the vote in 2004. Republicans have now lost three special elections in a row this year, all in heavily Republican districts.
Oh, and as expected Hillary has officially cornered the market on ignorant white people who will likely vote Republican in November anyway. Congratulations, Sen. Clinton.
Labels: 2008, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, politics
I doubt the kind of low-information voters Hillary is relying on in West Virginia have any clue about the contest's "irrelevancy".
Speaking of those voters...
Oh, and did Illinois just let out Friday or something? This place is a ghost town.
Yep. Commencements were 2-3 days ago.
Hey, if you're in Champaign and bored tonight, send me a tell on gmail chat or email me. We can go out for drinks and act like professional writers.
Tom
Oh, while you guys are all celebrating how well Obama's going to help us get along in the Muslim world, you might want to check out this New York Times article.
The West Virginians are actually agreeing with the Muslim world. Isn't that ironic. One of the big problems I see with liberals in general is their total lack of understanding of what motivates religious people of all stripes.
Tom
Tom, that column is, simply put, total horseshit. Did you find it at all curious that its author did not provide any, you know, actual support for his assertions? It's ridiculous. Obviously fundamentalist Islamic law is opposed in very real ways to all sorts of qualities that American presidents possess (and obviously Hillary's gender would be included in that were she elected), not to mention the way that there are large swathes of the Muslim world that oppose in very real ways American foreign policy. It's just totally absurd to single Obama out for this silliness.
What Brian said. Although, if you want to get wade into that water...courtesy of Andrew Sullivan:
"Islam does not consider Barack Obama ever to have been part of the Muslim community. Apostasy has no relevance here," - Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest umbrella Muslim group in the country.