News from the Votemaster

Announcement

From May 24, 2004 when this site went live, until now, we have never taken any paid ads, despite requests for them. The banner ad for VoteFromAbroad.org is a freebie, to register (overseas) voters, the real purpose of the site. The headlines from Political Wire are courtesy of that site (and judging from the number of clicks, are a popular feature). Starting today, advertising on electoral-vote.com is possible. All the revenue from the ads will go into buying ads on other blogs to get more traffic. An ad for 1 week on a moderately popular blog can easily run $500-$1000 or more. If your company, organization, or candidate wants to advertise to a politically astute audience now numbering 80,000 daily visitors and growing rapidly, click on "Buy a premium ad" or "Advertise here" at the right.

Despite the ads, donations are still more than welcome. The donations will primarily be used to advertise the site on the Websites of college newspapers in swing states to get young voters more engaged in the political process. See the Donations page for where they ran in 2004. I will continue to pay for the actual operation of the site myself (hosting, data subscriptions, Google ads, etc.) Thanks for visiting and tell your friends.

As you can see, headings have been introduced today to separate the various news items. Hopefully this change increases readability.

Comparison: 2008 vs. 2004

Here is a .csv file that compares the Kerry-Bush race with the Obama-McCain race as of Aug 11 of both years. The data is from this site but the algorithm has changed. In 2004, each state's score was simply the most recent poll. Now it is the most recent poll averaged equally with any other polls taken with a week of it. And in both cases it is simply a snapshot, of course. Here is how the data compare.

The key columns are BO-JM (how much Obama is ahead of McCain) and JK-GB (how much Kerry was ahead of Bush). For example, yesterday Obama was ahead of McCain by 12 points in Massachusetts whereas on Aug 11, 2004 Kerry was ahead of Bush in Massachusetts by 26 points. Thus the 2008-2004 coumn shows 12 - 26 = -14 (i.e., Kerry was doing relatively better than Obama in Massachusetts on Aug. 11). The table is sorted on this column. Thus Massachusetts is Obama's worst state compared to Kerry and Wyoming is his best state (i.e., he is behind by only 13 points compared to Kerry being behind by 40 points on Aug. 11, 2004.

Unfortunately, the devil is in the details. Another study, using a different algorithm (which counts old polls much more heavily than our algorithm), comes to a different conclusion, namely, that Obama is doing relative better than Kerry. As of yesterday, we had Obama ahead of McCain 289 to 236 in the electoral college. In 2004 Kerry was ahead 307 to 231, so it is a bit hard to see how Obama could be doing so much better than Kerry. The other study didn't publish the input data.

Turnout of Different Age Groups

Charles Franklin at pollster.com has an excellent graph showing voter turnout as a function of age. Turnout is highest among 70-75 year olds and lowest among under 30s. Since McCain is leading strongly among voters over 50, this effect will help him. However, primary turnout among under 30s was exceptionally large this year, so they might vote in larger than usual numbers in this year's general election, which will help Obama. The Obama campaign is putting a huge effort into registering young voters, but it has a long way to go to match the 70-75 year olds' participation rate.

Memos from Hillary Clinton's Primary Campaign Leaked

Strategy memos that Mark Penn wrote to Hillary Clinton during the primary have now leaked out. He advised her to go brutally negative and emphasize that Obama was not a real American. To her everlasting credit, she didn't follow his advice and ran a fairly clean campaign mostly emphasizing her positives ("Ready on day 1") rather than his negatives.

McCain Plagiarizes Speech from Wikipedia

Taegan Goddard at Politicalwire.com had a scoop yesterday about John McCain's speech on the war between Georgia (the country, not the state) and Russia. Part of it was lifted directly from Wikipedia. If Obama had given a speech based on the Wikipedia article about Georgia, undoubtedly McCain would have been all over him for having so little experience in foreign affairs that he had to resort to Wikipedia for his foreign policy. But it was McCain, not Obama who did this. No doubt the speech was written by some junior staffer who had never previously even heard of Georgia (the country, not the state), but can you imagine the reaction if Obama had given the plagiarized speech and then blamed it on some junior staffer? For a candidate whose main strength is foreign policy, this has to be embarrassing.

Today's Polls

We have three presidential polls today. The most important one is in Virginia, which is still a tossup. John McCain is now 1 point ahead, 48% to 47%. The battle continues here. In Iowa and Oregon, Barack Obama continues to have a substantial lead. Oregon is generally a blue state, but Iowa went for Bush in 2004 and is likely to flip this time.

Although the presidential race in Oregon is not exciting, the Senate race there is. Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR), a moderate fighting for his political life, is now leading 47% to 39%, but this one has had wild swings this year. State house speaker Jeff Merkley is going to be the beneficiary of a large amount of DSCC money as the season progresses. With Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, New Mexico, and now Alaska looking like blowouts for the Democrats, Oregon, Minnesota, Maine, Mississippi-B, North Carolina, and Louisiana are going to be the main battlegrounds for the Senate.