Tue, Oct 07, 2008

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Jewcy Book Club

Welcome Authors
Brian Frazer
&
Mike Edison
who are posting all week.
Coming up:
  • 10/13:
    Rabbi Levi Brackman and Sam Jaffe
  • 10/20:
    Jonathan Garfinkel
  • 10/20:
    Rabbi Robert Levine
  • 10/27:
    Danit Brown
  • 10/27:
    Joshua Henkin
  • 11/03:
    Craig Glazer
  • 11/10:
    Max Gross
  • 11/17:
    Seth Greenland

THE CABAL
Why Did Obama Lose?
And what happens now?

Like John Kerry on election day in 2004 -- when the exit polls first came in until around 7:30-8:30pm EST -- Barack Obama had fun being president for a few days; and I hope he'll get to be president for a few more.

What happened? The last Zogby poll had Obama ahead by 13; Rasmussen 7; Keith Olbermann says the internal Obama polls showed him winning by 13, and the internal Clinton polls showed him winning by 11. He lost by three. Could it really be that Hillary Clinton sort-of crying (see Mike's post below) vaulted her to victory?

I'm listening to Eugene Robinson on MSNBC going over the exit polls, and as it turns out, among voters who decided in the last three days, Obama actually came out ahead 37-36. So Hillary's anti-Muskie moment didn't decide things. Was Obama (shudder) a victim of the Bradley effect? But then why would only white women lie to pollsters? If anybody's got an idea how the polls were so far off, I'm listening.

There seem to be some increasingly cemented fissures in the Democratic electorate: men, young voters, wealthy voters, and educated voters for Obama; women, old(er) voters, poor voters, and uneducated voters for Clinton. It's beer track vs. wine track, plus a gender split, and neither bodes well for Obama. On the other hand --- and do re-read the last sentence before you accuse me of Hewitt-like denialism --- I can't see how the Edwards campaign continues. (His support would presumably go to Obama.)

Next up are Nevada and South Carolina. Nevada was going to be a cakewalk for Obama after the Culinary Workers Union decided to endorse him. Until, who would have guessed it, the CWU got cold feet. Oh well, si se puede.



Daniel Koffler is a Clarendon Scholar and graduate student in philosophy at the University of Oxford.


More...

kid blast


Rumor is the Clinton

Rumor is the Clinton campaign strategically doled out thousands of dollars to the cool kids at Dartmouth, UNH, etc. "Have  blow out", they said. "Start early. It's on us."

 Either that or--shock--people lie to pollsters. 





Anonymous


It's the Wilder effect for sure

White women felt gulty and lied to the pollsters.





Anonymous


CWU endorsed Obama today

I guess their feet warmed up...or is Commentary just misinformed?





Baltimom


So it isn't genderblind afterall

They hate her because she's a politcal droid, they hate her because she's a crying girl.  Blahblahblah.  Women thought that they didn't have to rally around the female candidate, and they they woke up to the hateful misogyny spewed by Chris Matthews and the rest of the pundits.  We didn't feel sorry for her because she cried.  We're pissed that she gets condescended to because of her gender.  If the pundits are going to judge her through the prism of gender, well, then so are we.





Anonymous


The Wilder effect or the scary black male

Professor Sabato from UVA noted yesterday:

Why were all the polls so wrong in New Hampshire? Why did even the private tracking polls conducted by the paid consultants to Clinton and Obama show Obama on the verge of a huge 11-14 percent victory that turned into a 3 percent defeat? I have studied the phenomenon of "racial leakage"--the tendency of a few percent of white voters to fib to pollsters about their voting choice--and many of the telltale signs were here. Other than the universality of the inaccurate public and private polls--all done by reputable outfits--another tip-off was the networks' exit poll, which was right on the money in the GOP contest (+5 percent for McCain) while simultaneously projecting a dead wrong +5 percent victory margin for Obama. How could that happen? I recall Douglas Wilder's candidacy for Governor of Virginia in 1989, when the state was about 83 percent white. All the pre-election polls had Wilder up about 10 points, and sure enough, the exit poll on Election Day showed him winning by 10 percent. In fact, Wilder eked out a 6,000-vote victory out of 1.9 million votes cast. How do we know the exit poll wasn't simply wrong? Because the same poll, taken by the same interviewers, outside the same polling places, with the same voters leaving their precincts, got the percentages for the winners of the other statewide contests exactly right. Just in Wilder's case was the exit poll wrong, and Wilder was the only minority on the ballot. There are many other modern examples of this phenomenon in other states and cities.





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