Tuesday, November 06, 2012

Immediate winners

Nate Silver.  Sam Wang.  Polling in general.  Aggregate poll sites.  This is now 3 presidential elections and 5 national elections in which the aggregate pollsters nailed it.  Hopefully next time around anyone unskewing polls will be ignored and there will be an end to poll denialists.

Saturday, November 03, 2012

Believe it would violate the Blogger's rules of conduct not to predict and state preferences in a presidential election

Given the flurry of argument concerning probabilities of victory and skewed polls, how can any self-respecting blogger, even one who posts once a month, not state his preferences, views & pontifications concerning an upcoming election?

Will vote for Johnson but root for Obama.  In good conscience, I cannot vote for anyone who would sentence a 16 year old to death - it smacks too much or the days of the Roman empire or at least Game of Thrones.  Did we kill the son because we were afraid that when he grew up he'd be our enemy?

So will vote for a candidate opposed to our endless war on pissed off muslims, drug war, and abuse of civil liberties.  An ordinary gentleman did make an argument for Jill Stein instead of Johnson as a protest vote, but  part of the argument for Johnson is practical:  the Libertarian party general pulls in the highest number of votes for a 3rd party unless there's a Name running (i.e. Perot, Nader, Buchanan), so if you're going to vote 3rd party, choice the one that has the highest profile to get the attention of the two major parties in the hopes that they understand there is a block of voters no longer willing to vote for the 2 party monopoly.

WSJ mentioned that Obama's campaign depended on convincing voters that he was less worse than Romney.  Romney convinced me of that without any help.  Of the 4 campaign planks that stand out for Romney - cut taxes 20%, increase ship building (defense budget increased to 4% of GDP), more Iran saber rattling, and calling out China as a currency manipulator, none are good ideas.  For personal hot buttons, he's opposed to drug legalization, wishes to continue Guantanamo, wants to defend DOMA.  I have no reason to believe that he would not continue unlimited droning of various Muslim countries - no risk of death or capture of US pilots, so it's cost free for any president deciding on military action.  And his anti-Start invective and foreign policy types he hangs with give me strong reason to believe he'd have an inferior foreign policy to Obama's.

Prognostication:  given the track record of the blogging caesar (missed 2004 by 3 EV's and missed Indiana and NC in McCain's favor - very understandable misses given how long the two states had voted for the GOP) in addition to IEM, inTrade, 538, Princeton Election Consortium, RealClearPolitics (no toss up map), all stating that Obama is the 98.0% or 99.8% or 85.1% favorite and that the election is 3 days away, will have to agree that Obama will gain 290EV's minimum (will win a wager with my brother or beignets at 4141 if Obama wins, so have put my $$ where my mouth is).

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?