10.21.08

FRONTLINE’s The Choice, 2008

Posted in politics, tv at 9:18 am by danvk

I wrote a few months back about my mixed reactions to this season’s episodes of FRONTLINE. The latest is their quadrennial biography of the two presidential candidates, The Choice 2008 (also free on iTunes). It’s well worth watching.

The first half of the show, which covers McCain and Obama’s early lives, is the more interesting, or at least less familiar. Frontline did a great job of digging up old videos. There’s a recording of McCain in the POW camp. There’s a recording of Obama giving a speech at Harvard Law in 1990. He looks different, but the cadence of his speech is eerily familiar. It’s also interesting to see speeches that McCain gave in the past. He’s noticeably more relaxed than he has been in the debates. A particular standout is his exchange with John Stewart in 2006.

My main problem with the episode was its lack of depth. This was more of a problem with the latter half, where I could see the gaps in their coverage of stories with which I was already familiar. The biggest questions they asked but left unresolved related to Reverend Wright. They said it was shocking that the Clinton campaign didn’t use him against Obama until after Super Tuesday, but never offered an explanation of why. I’ve often wondered this as well. If the Reverend Wright controversy had struck before Obama was ahead in delegates, Hillary might well be the nominee.

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09.25.08

How to Read Polls

Posted in math, politics at 3:45 pm by danvk

On September 15, SurveyUSA released this poll of likely voters in Virginia:

McCain (R) 46%
Obama (D)  50%
Margin of Error: +/-3.7%

Tables like this appear on TV and in newspapers all the time. But they’re never accompanied by any explanation of how to interpret the margin of error. Commentators usually interpret it in one of two ways:

1. Obama is ahead by more than the margin of error, hence his lead is statistically significant.
2. That “+/-” means either number could be off by that amount. If you added 3.7% to McCain’s 46% and subtracted 3.7% from Obama’s 50%, McCain would actually be ahead. So Obama’s lead is not statistically significant; it is less than twice the margin of error.

In either case, they are wrong.

So what’s the right way to interpret the margin of error? A lead is significant if it is 1.6 times the margin of error or greater. That’s 5.9% for our poll, so Obama’s lead is not significant.

This is a strange, non-intuitive rule, which explains why commentators don’t use it. The derivation is more revealing than the rule itself.
Read the rest of this entry »

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05.20.08

Some Delegate Math

Posted in news, politics at 11:49 pm by danvk

I came to a realization last weekend while watching Mike Huckabee, Harold Ford, Jr. and various pundits discuss VP candidates on Meet the Press. We’re going to be hearing this exact argument for the next three months. I’ll care then. After the Oregon and Kentucky primaries tonight, I’m going to stop paying attention to the presidential race. There’s just not going to be any news of note until this fall. Why worry?

But before checking out for a few months, I’ve got one last Presidential Primary post left in me.

The question for the last few weeks has been “why is Hillary still in this race?” She can’t win a majority of pledged delegates, overall delegates, states, or votes (unless you use very strange definitions of who “counts”). Could she have something up her sleeve with Michigan and Florida?

According to Daily Kos, here was the delegate count at the end of the night:

Obama passed 1,622 pledged delegates tonight and claimed a majority. But that excludes Florida and Michigan. Florida had 185 delegates and Michigan had 156. To get an absolute majority of pledged delegates including Florida and Michigan, he’d need 1,622 + (185 + 156)/2 = 1792.5 delegates. With only 86 pledged delegates left, there’s no way he can make Florida and Michigan irrelevant.

Or so goes the argument. But what did those excluded Florida and Michigan actually look like?

I don’t know precisely how the “Uncommitted” delegates work, but I imagine they’d be under enormous pressure to vote for Obama at the convention. Add those in and you get:

So if you include the Florida and Michigan delegations, he hasn’t passed that magic mark, but he’s extremely close. And more interestingly, he’s the only one that can pass that mark. Hillary needs 113 pledged delegates for a majority, but there are only 86 left. This is because of the Edwards delegates.

If you don’t give Obama the 55 uncommitted delegates from Michigan though, he’s unlikely to pass the 50% mark, even by June 3. Could that be the trick? It seems a bit far-fetched. We’ll find out in three months when I start paying attention again!

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01.30.08

John Edwards is out

Posted in news, politics at 11:20 am by danvk

The big news of the day is that John Edwards is dropping out of the Democratic presidential race. It’s not clear to me whether this helps Clinton or Obama. From what I can tell, Edwards’ main constituency was older, white men. In the past, men have tended to favor Obama, whereas older people have tended to favor Clinton. It will be interesting to follow the polls over the next few days.

One thing that’s certain about Edwards’ decision is that it’s a good one for the Democratic party. Because each state awards delegates proportional to its popular vote, he could have grabbed maybe 5-10% of the delegates. This would have almost certainly prevented either Clinton or Obama from getting a majority, and led to a brokered convention. Now, that could only happen if there were an exceptionally close delegate race.

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08.20.07

Hillary Clinton’s Other Mate

Posted in news, politics at 9:42 am by danvk

The Stanley Fish blog on the NY Times has a post looking at Hillary’s potential running mates this morning. This kind of piece does a lot to reinforce the “Hillary is inevitable” meme. I’m tempted to buy into it myself. Hillary’s been running the best campaign so far, and she’s been effective in all the debates. (Except for that quip about lobbyists representing the real America.)

At the same time, I know that the Hillary machine is trying to project a sense of inevitability. It’s all part of their plan, and I don’t want to buy into it.

A couple reactions to the article I linked to: Read the rest of this entry »

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