In world of weird indicators for 2008 we’ve seen Internet traffic, facebook & myspace friends, crowd sizes and now bumper sticker sales. Political Wire is looking at candidate CafePress sales as a potential sign for “momentum” and the site sees progress for Obama and Clinton on the decline.
I personally think this is yet another non-indication-indication dreamt up to fill the polling void. No offense to Political Wire and all the others but I think we can do better. My only question is this, will Obama be claiming these sales as “individual contributors?”
I keep seeing a lot of odd information coming out of the polling. Obama seems to be catching up nationally but a CBS poll finds that amongst Super Tuesday states Clinton holds a massive advantage. Everyone is reading into conflicting information about early voting. Most of the early voting and absentee ballots were cast when Clinton was riding high but there are conflicting reports on whether pollsters are taking these early voters into consideration.
Basically the idea right now is that people were so turned off by Bill Clinton and so turned on by the whopping win in South Carolina for Barack Obama (Also the Kennedy endorsements) that many are jumping the Clinton ship. I don’t know that we can really believe that and in California where a very large percentage of the state votes absentee, I just don’t know what we can expect.
Then there is this nugget, one poll shows 53% of Democrats believe we are making progress in Iraq. That could be very true our it could be one more indication that these polls are not entirely accurate.
So in short as I keep saying the following, polls taken with such small sample sizes in such a short period of time between contests and across such a wide array of states and spun in so many different ways and showing conflicting information probably should not be trusted.
My conclusion? I am not going to be citing polls in the next twenty-four hours as any indication of voting on the Democratic side. Republican polling seems to be a little more stable though there are probably problems with those numbers too so I am just going to avoid polls altogether and not get on the “lets make predictions” bandwagon. With everything running so close for Democrats we probably won’t know until Tuesday night or Wednesday or even later what is happening.
Early on much was made of Senator Hillary Clinton’s relationship with conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Last week much was also assumed by Murdoch’s paper The New York Post endorsing Barack Obama. Was it a sign of a breach in their relationship? Was it Murdoch’s personal belief that Republicans would have a better chance running against a perceived lightweight in Obama? Nobody really knows but there is plenty of speculation to go around.
David Carr at The New York Times looks over the complex and perhaps unknown relationship and Clinton’s sometimes half-hearted wooing of the paper and its owner.
As a senator, Mrs. Clinton did put time and effort into the care and feeding of the tabloid, making sure that Post reporters had access to news and expertise out of her office, along with the occasional scoop when it suited both parties. But she never once appeared before its editorial board — a customary act of tribute by local politicians — and her lack of deference was duly noted by the paper’s leadership.
Part of the cooling in the relationship, according to people involved on both sides, has to do with the realities of being a hometown paper. When Mrs. Clinton was serving and running as a senator, she had a relationship with the paper. But as her candidacy for president gathered momentum, The Post became just one more part of the media scrum, and the paper did not react well to the disregard.
When John Edwards announced that he would boycott the Fox News Channel debate last spring, Mrs. Clinton went along. Fox News and The Post are corporate siblings, although they’re not particularly close. Still, Mr. Murdoch certainly took note of the fact that the courtesies extended to Mrs. Clinton — a muted presence in the gossip columns of Page Six, more balance in the news pages — did not seem to be returned in kind.
Ralph Vartabedian and Nicholas Riccardi at the LA Times look at the potential need for John McCain to “mend fences” with conservatives in Arizona and across the nation. Though the Senator is expected to win his home state handily on Super Tuesday, the authors report on the sentiment of many conservatives who feel McCain has been on the wrong side of too many issues.
“We feel betrayed and let down by our senior senator,” said Russell Pearce, a Republican representative in the statehouse who has written a number of tough laws against illegal immigrants. “I will not support a candidate, I don’t care how many medals he has on his chest, when he won’t do the right thing for America.”
The anger grows out of McCain’s role since at least 2006 as the prime Republican leader of a comprehensive immigration legislation that would have given the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. a path toward citizenship.
McCain’s greatest strength has always been his ability to reach out to independents and Democrats. That strength is solidified when he reaches across the isle on issues like immigration. The problem of course is that his greatest weakness is with the party base who recoil at the Senator’s positions on the same issues which make him electable.
The Senator has a tuff road and a fine line to walk ahead of him.
It is probably too early to tell and honestly beyond the economy as an issue I am not so sure I see much to compare. I consider that 1992 was post war, 2008 is in War. In 1992 race and culture were radically divisive issues and in 2008 race and culture are more uniting issues than they have been in decades. Still the New York Times looks at the economy but only lightly considers the comparison despite the headline ‘It’s the Economy Again, and Some See Similarities to 1992′.
Still it is interesting to think about.
In what could be a haunting replay of what happened to President George H. W. Bush in 1992, economists caution that voters are not likely to feel much better at election time even if the economy is rebounding.
From Vauhini Vara in the The Wall Street Journal it appears that the Internets favorite Republican candidate Ron Paul is finding interest and support with voters in Alaska.
Within weeks of his announcement in March that he would run for the presidential nomination, Mr. Paul’s supporters in Alaska began informally campaigning. They clustered on cold, dark afternoons to wave Ron Paul signs at intersections. When Fox News left Mr. Paul out of a televised forum in New Hampshire with the other Republican candidates last month, they stood in front of a Fox News affiliate in Anchorage to protest.
Mr. Paul’s national campaign is now trying to harness the local support. A few weeks ago, Craig Bergman, a consultant for Mr. Paul’s campaign, phoned volunteers across the country to find pockets of local enthusiasm that he could tap. He was impressed with the “natural support” for Mr. Paul here — so just more than a week ago, he opened offices in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Mr. Paul now has eight full-time staffers in the state, more than he had in Michigan, Florida or South Carolina. Friday, Mr. Paul hosted a live phone call with Alaskan voters.
Will it turn into more than interest? We will see.
Last nights Super Bowl featured an ad with Democratic & Clinton strategist James Carville & Former Republican Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist reaching across their differences and coming together over some sugar water. Other than being a nice contrast to the back and forth of the campaign season I don’t know how it fits into presidential politics but what the heck, I thought I would toss it up.
A great read by Andrew Gumbel at Huffington Post who has a very interesting look into how the Obama campaign has been working against convention wisdom to employ canvassing and Internet campaigning in the nations most populous state.
Obama’s grassroots campaigning model, depending heavily on a pumped-up army of passionate volunteer field workers using the Internet both to connect and to organize, has been adopted before - notably, in the recent past, by Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign - but has never paid real dividends, certainly not in a presidential nominating race.
Conventional wisdom has it that even the most energetic field operation can’t net a candidate more than one or two percentage points. Conventional wisdom suggests, too, that the only really meaningful way to campaign in a state as vast and varied as California is to rally the party establishment, as Senator Clinton has done, gun for as many endorsements as possible from public figures and unions, raise money like there’s no tomorrow and bombard the airwaves with paid advertising.
Essentially, the Obama people are waging the battle as though the Golden State were holding 53 separate caucuses, one for each congressional district. “What they are doing is concentrating on the delegate hunt,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe of the University of Southern California’s School of Planning, Policy and Development. “Sure, it has a chance of succeeding, particularly in rural areas. It worked in Nevada and Iowa. It’s not so much a new model as grabbing the caucus model and grafting it on to not only a primary state, but the biggest primary state there is.”
I have always heard nothing but wonder things about Minnesota and luckily this July I will have the chance to visit for a wedding. Despite the love of those who visit the state are the candidates paying attention? Check out this report from Lawrence Jacobs, director of the Center of the Study of Politics and Governance at the Humphrey Institute of the University of Minnesota, who talks with Michele Norris about how much attention the candidates are giving the state.
- Up to 20% of the votes could remain uncounted on election day, according to Secretary of State Debra Bowen.
- 700,000 more Californians are registered to vote now than before the 2004 presidential primary. Included in that total were more than 244,000 voters who signed up in the 45 days before the Jan. 22 registration deadline. (The recent registrants included more than 150,000 Democrats, compared with almost 40,000 Republicans.)
- About half of the ballots are expected to be cast either by mail or by voters who drop off mail-in ballots at precincts. Those ballots can take longer to tally because elections officials are required to check signatures against the registration file. State law allows officials to tabulate those ballots beginning one week before the election, and the totals are the first results released on election night.
But when the polls close, officials turn to counting the precinct votes, leaving the rest of the mail-in ballots and the laborious checking process until after the traditional votes are counted.
This is bad news for junkies like me who want our fix on election night!