++Republican win in Massachusetts++

Best places to follow the Massachusetts count? UPDATED

Due to five hour time difference, I'm not liveblogging the Massachusetts special election count for the next few hours.

So here are some good places for readers who live in more favourable timezones or who are prepared for an all-nighter:

Fivethirtyeight Especially because it has a live Twitter feed.

If you're a sadist and the Democrats are losing, much wailing and gnashing of the teeth here. ;-)

N.B. Expect Nate Silver, who runs 538 to get inside news from the Democratic camp.


Drudge Report is updating the count on its main page. Seems pretty quick.

RealClearPolitics (conservative) looks to have a neat live blog going. If you're a Democrat and want to see GOP fans cry, this could be a good place to start if your woman wins.

There doesn't seem to be an official results page on the Commonwealth of Massachsetts website yet, but I think it will be on this page or linked to it.

Intrade appears to have crashed, leaving people who wished to make last minute bets potentially in the lurch. If it comes back on tonight, check to see if the contract moves below 70% for Scott Brown or above 30% for Martha Coakley. That would suggest that the Democrats might pull off an incredible escape. We'll see.

UPDATE: Barring something very odd, I'm calling this a Republican gain.

How to do it

David Axelrod, the Senior Advisor to US President Barack Obama, and who knows a thing or two about elections, told a gathering of reporters before voting ended in Massachusetts yesterday, that "he thought Brown ran a very good campaign, saying that 'as a practitioner, my hat's off to him'." (AP via Breitbart)

Leaving aside the wisdom of making such a statement when your own party's candidate is presumably still fighting for her political life, this endorsement of Scott Brown, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Massachusetts' campaigning skills, is praise indeed.

I've touched on this over at Fivethirtyeight.com in the comments to this article, as well as in two postings yesterday [here and here].

Over at Intrade, if you think there's a chance that Democratic candidate Martha Coakley has in fact won the election, a $50 bet right now will net you $250 (you can buy a contract at 19.9). I admit, if I'd backed the Republican a week ago, I'd be sorely tempted to hedge by taking this up.

More on Twitter

"I've seen it translate into dollars. I've seen it translate into traffic. I've seen it translate into media news stories," he said. "How that translates into votes, I don't think people have figured that out yet."
Justin Hart, director of new media for the Senate campaign of Chuck DeVore (Republican) in California.

Over at RealClearPolitics (which doesn't have a share button for its Politics Nation section yet) a good article with some interesting quotes about how 2010 is shaping up to be the year when election campaigns are fought and lost on Twitter.

Here's a summary:

On December 28, Brown announced what became the signature force behind his campaign, his pledge to be a 41st vote against President Obama's national health care reform legislation. Accompanying that news on his Twitter feed was this notation: #41stvote. Referred to as a hashtag, those nine characters became a mechanism to attract like-minded activists and identify new ones. Reflecting an enthusiasm gap not just in the state but among national politicos, Brown now boasts more than 11,000 Twitter followers, compared to barely 4,000 for Democrat Martha Coakley.

That following paid dividends last Monday when, aided by a strong Twitter campaign from Brown and dozens of his newest online advocates, the Republican smashed a fundraising goal of $500,000 for a one-day "money bomb," generating instead well beyond $1 million. That total from just 24 hours was well beyond what he had raised in the entire previous fundraising period. Where there had been skepticism before about what kind of impact Twitter could have, the Brown campaign is making a convincing case.

There's more:

"When I started, everyone joked that I was the director of shiny objects," said John Randall, director of new media for the National Republican Congressional Committee. "This is not a shiny object. This is industry standard now. It's definitely something that I point out to all the campaigns."

And:

In Virginia's gubernatorial campaign, Republicans credit an effective use of social media by the campaign of Bob McDonnell to respond to potentially damaging claims coming from traditional media sources, most obviously the Washington Post's coverage of "Thesis-gate." The Republican Governors Association found based on its polling that many more voters said they were getting their news about the race online, and among that subset, their won handily - 50-38 in New Jersey, and 62-38 in Virginia.

"We realized there is a changing phenomenon. More folks, particularly young people in that demographic that frankly our party has not done that well in the past, are getting their information there," McDonnell said at an RGA conference after the campaign.

Finally, Jordan Raynor, a Florida-based Republican online strategist [blog, Twitter], said: "It has never been easier to be as influential as you can be today. Information is cheap. Information is easier to produce. And if you have a quality message, it's never been cheaper to get out."

Massachusetts Special Election

Sometimes, one should back a hunch. Always, one should write it down.

A week ago, I took my first look at the election campaigns of the two main party candidates for the Special Election in Massachusetts, USA, to replace the late Senator Edward Kennedy.

My first impression, especially given how the Democrats had steamrollered the Republicans at the 2008 presidential and other federal elections that year, was that Scott Brown was running an effective online campaign. His Democratic party opponent, was not.

Had I backed up my gut feeling that I could see Lt Col Brown (of the Massachusetts National Guard) causing an upset on Intrade, I could have made a 630% profit, even if today's vote went against him (as of writing, the Intrade index puts Brown at 73.5 as a SELL, which given a 10 BUY last week gives a very nice return).

I even had the excuse: I gave a talk here on Monday 11th about the Wisdom of Crowds [audio recording here] and it is astonishing how good prediction markets can be.

The election itself is happening in interesting circumstances. First, the Democrats need to hold all their Senate seats if they wish to prevent the minority Republicans from filibustering proposed legislation. Assuming the voting blocks hold in the US Congress' upper chamber, 60 out of the 100 senators are required to pass a "cloture" vote (what we in the UK call a "guillotine" [heh]).

Second, over a third of the Senate is up for re-election this year. Under normal conditions, every two years 33 or 34 senators are elected in November, but this year the number will be 36, because New York state will have a second vacancy, caused (to cut a long story short) by Hillary Clinton's nomination as the US Secretary of State last year, and Delaware will have one vacancy caused by Joe Biden's elevation to the position of Vice-President.

This would normally be a difficult year for the Republicans in the Senate. Because the class up for election was voted in 2004, the GOP would be defending 19 seats (one defected to the Democrats last year so its 18). The Democrats would be defending 15, and these held off the 2004 tide so they wouldn't be easy to pick off. The GOP, demoralised and short of funds after 2006 and 2008, might have struggled to hold onto gains made six years ago.

The extra Senate contests, all being Democrat seats, offer opportunities for something to go wrong for the governing party, at the very least diluting some of the campaign efforts.

Third, health care legislation. The Massachusetts election has become at least in part, a referendum on President Barack Obama's plans for introducing mandatory health insurance. This is not the place to debate the issue, but it has drawn considerable criticism, from left and right, although often for contrary reasons. Massachusetts has its own statewide health insurance scheme, which to some extent may make some local people ask "why do we need a federal one as well?" Without the 60th Democrat (or Democrat-leaning) senator in place, the health care legislation will probably not be carried without some dubious and unpopular machination (e.g. pretending the legislation is a finance bill, or refusing to let the Republican winner be "certified" until AFTER the vote in the next few weeks).

Coming a year after President Obama's inauguration, in a state he carried by over 25 percentage points, where no Republican Senator has been elected since 1972, it will be hard not to see a defeat for Martha Coakley as a vote against the President. The damage limitation is already underway, with one leftist blogger claiming: "Coakley is arguably a worse candidate than either Jon Corzine or Creigh Deeds [respectively, the losers in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections last November], which is quite a feat to pull off."

For an election watcher, who is less interested in the politics, the lesson that looks like being learned is that clever use of online tools can compensate for lack of funds at the start of an election campaign. More than that, the buzz created by online engagement can generate supporters [here and here] and donations, not just for a national figure like Barack Obama.

I think we can look forward soon to the day when both sides in a contest will use Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube or other as yet untried cheap or free tools as their primary means of engagement. It might not be in the USA, but I'm looking forward to covering it.

A few words about the Libertarian candidate for those of my readers who like to know how the pro-freedom candidate is doing. Joe Kennedy is not to be confused with the former Democrat senator. The main coverage he's got is Democrats desperately trying to make sure no one thinks he's a relative of the departed Ted Kennedy. I've been there twice as a minor party candidate in a contest one has no hope of winning, so I respect the effort.

But there is no excuse for the ropey (that would be "amateur" for non-English readers) website, or basic errors like offering "dave[at]joekennedyforsenate.com" as one's Facebook contact details. I think we can appreciate that the candidate is not going to respond to random emails sent to the campaign, but this is one instance where either "info@campaignname.org" or the full name of the campaign manager "karl.rove@camapaignname.org" would be better. In the case of a third party candidate, I'd also consider whether one couldn't try to answer a decent proportion of the emails coming in, so perhaps it should be "joe[at]joekennedyforsenate.org", with someone filtering out the spam and timewasters.

One tool that's been pretty well used by the Libertarian Party on this occasion is Twitter: http://twitter.com/joek4Senate . From September last year, this online tool was used to gather together supporters, collect nomination paper signatories and raise campaign funding. I think a little effort could have put into personalising the page but it passes.

Less democratic than Bonaparte

The new office of European President has been filled by a cabal of national politicians with the result that Herman van Rompuy, Belgium's Prime Minister, has been "elected."

It's worth noting just how undemocratic this choice is.

When Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to declare himself the First Consul of France (and dictator of most of what is now the European Union), he held a plebiscite. If he had lost, he would have been finished. Unlike the Lisbon Treaty.

True there were no alternative candidates allowed. Also true, I doubt if anyone would seriously argue the voting was "free and fair." But there was at least the possibilty that a protest could be made.

Not with Mr van Rompuy.

If Belgium's Prime Minister were remotely concerned with the problem that he was chosen by fewer than 27 people out the E.U.'s 500 million citizens, he would refuse the post or insist on an election.

I've started a group on Facebook called "He's not my (European) President" to call for the post to be filled by one of two methods: either a proper electoral college, such as that used in U.S. presidential elections, or one person one vote across the whole of the E.U.. The French presidential election system would seem eminently reasonable, although if I were Belgian or Maltese, I might prefer a U.S.-style solution.

We've got a European head of state now. I don't see why it needs to be selected by a less democratic process than that for China or Iran.

Post mortem on U.S. election night

The gubernatorial elections [here {very good map of New Jersey voting} and here] in the U.S. states of New Jersey and Virginia have produced two gains for the Republican Party from the Democrats, supporting opinion polls that suggested the opposition is able to mobilise a majority of voters on the issues of the economy, excessive public spending and health care reform.

One problem for the Republican Party is that the wrong lessons could easily be "learned" from the events yesterday. As Scott Rasmussen wrote recently, there is a bigger untapped conservative vote in America that isn't going to back the Democrats and doesn't vote Republican, than there is a Republican-inclined "centre."

So the conventional wisdom of widening appeal by going for independents doesn't work, as the New York State's 23rd congressional election result indicates: the Conservative Party candidate scored over 45% of the vote.

If the Democrats can hold this district in November next year when the 435 seats in the House of Representatives come up for election, they will have reasonable cause for cheer. Also if the Republican Party thinks that its mistake was not giving enough backing Dede Scozzafava, an ACORN supporting "moderate," and that picking candidates from the top is the way forward in the 21st century (watch out in Florida next year!), then the Democrats could even emerge stronger from last night's voting.

The immediate practical consequence of the two gains for the G.O.P. are that the number of Republican Governors has risen to 23 with 27 Democrats remaining. Both New Jersey and Virginia were states that voted for Barack Obama and the Republicans had been fading in these East Coast states. The meme that the Republicans are being driven into the Deep South and the less populated Mountain States has been dented by this election.

For those interested in the New York mayoral election: as expected Bloomberg was re-elected as a nominal Republican. The voting breakdown can be found here, with an interesting graphic showing the various districts of NYC and how polarised they are. To give one example, there are two districts on the Rockaway Peninsula in Long Island which are split as one safe Republican (district 23) and one safe Democrat (district 31).

Late forecast for US election night (Updated)

UPDATE: NY 23:

Candidate Party Votes (%)
Bill Owens Democrat 47,826 49.1%
Doug Hoffman Conservative 44,349 45.5
Dede Scozzafava Republican 5,294 5.4
67% reporting

As of time of writing (03:54 GMT), the gap has been narrowing. Scozzafava's votes are thought to mostly be absentee ballots which would have been posted before she withdrew.


UPDATE: Local media calling NJ for Republican candidate Christie.

UPDATE: Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate has conceded in Virginia. President Obama is said by the White House Press Office to not be watching returns tonight.

Governor New Jersey: the courts will decide, absentee ballots could give this to Joe Corzine (ex-Goldman Sachs director), returning the Democrat to a second term.

Governor Virginia: one of the states that does not allow a Governor to stand for re-election. Expect Bob McDonnell to win easily for the Republicans, a gain from Democrats.

California 10th congressional district: expect Democrat hold for John Garamendi (currently the Lieutenant Governor of California).

New York 23rd CD: expect CONSERVATIVE PARTY win for Doug Hoffman (the "Republican" candidate quit over the weekend and endorsed the Democrat, justifying charges she was too close to the Dems). However, this is getting so dirty, I don't expect Democrats to play fair here.

Election nerds will be looking at the changes since last year, when Barack Obama won all four constituencies.

2008 results:
NJ: 57%
VA: 53%
CA 10th CD: 65%
NY 23rd CD: 52%

My forecast is a big swing against the Obama landslide, but to be fair, this is not entirely surprising.

For what it's worth, four years ago I covered the same two gubernatorial elections [and here] in New Jersey and Virginia, when both were won by the Democrats, in what I considered to be an impressive result.

What I got wrong in 2005-2006, was the degree to which the Democrats got themselves organised from a grassroots campaign using blogs such as Daily Kos as well as the idiotic consequences of the McCain-Feingold Act (the main loser being Senator John McCain's presidential ambitions).

Conservatives are likely to be reasonably cheered by these results, but the Republican fiasco in New York and the possible theft of two elections by the Democrats (not the first in recent years at state level) suggest that the Republican party machine and its ruling élite are a shambles.

Rasmussen on US parties' best tactics for outreach

Scott Rasmussen, one of the more reliable pollsters in the U.S.A., has written a thoughtful round up of the issues surrounding the New York State's 23rd congressional district election, which took place on November 3, and which has not yet been called.

He writes:

while Republican voters overwhelmingly consider themselves conservative, only 56% of conservative voters consider themselves to be Republicans. In other words, nearly half of all conservatives nationwide reject the Republican Party label.

This means that Republicans looking to broaden their party’s outreach cannot ignore the need to attract a large number of conservative voters along with some political moderates. Of all the non-Republicans in the nation, 31% consider themselves at least somewhat conservative while 37% say they’re political moderates.

The sweet spot for Republicans are core issues that unify conservatives while dividing more moderate voters. One such issue is health care where conservatives are united in their opposition to the plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats, and 37% of moderates are opposed, too.

Looked at from that perspective, nominating a GOP candidate who supports the president’s health care plan is likely to drive away more voters than it attracts. The same logic applies to the stimulus package, card check and other such proposals. That’s just what happened in NY-23. Nationwide, 42% currently support the health care plan working its way through Congress.

It should be noted that Democratic Party dynamics are entirely different.

While a plurality (44%) of Democrats are politically liberal, nearly as many (35%) are moderate. So Democrats must make compromises within their party before reaching out. Also, the pool of available non-Democrats is very heavily on the moderate side.

Just nine percent (9%) of non-Democrats are even somewhat liberal while 29% are politically moderate. These non-Democratic political moderates are absolutely essential to Democratic candidates. That’s why Democrats are eager to suggest that situations such as NY-23 indicate a GOP rejection of moderates in favor of extremists.

Interestingly, while Republican voters say their congressional representatives are out of touch, a plurality (47%) of Democratic voters view their members of Congress as roughly in the same place they are ideologically. Just 27% say the average Democratic member of Congress is more liberal than the average Democrat, while 19% think the average Democrat in Congress is more conservative.

A thought about European elections: why they're boring

The drama of an election comes from the combination of a plot where the end is not known: we don't know who will win (in some cases, who has won), whether the result will be accepted by the loser, and how well or badly the defeated will behave.

But in an election with the D'Hondt method of proportional representation (that rolls of the tongue!), it seems like almost everyone wins something, and really isn't clear who has lost, or by how much: was it close or a landslide?

The U.K. elections for the European Parliament this month are a case in point.
How many people realise that the British Nationalist Party scored nearly one million votes across the U.K.? Or how close the B.N.P. came to winning elsewhere and which party narrowly defeated it?

Supporters of proportional representation might pause and think about how much of a turn-off it is to voters to remove the drama from an election. When there are no losers and no clear winners, there is no interest in taking part.

Twitter ALLOWS Iranian protests

If this isn't power, what is?

Twitter has re-scheduled a maintenance downtime to about 1.30am local time in Tehran, to allow the protesters to organise and agitate against the recent election result (which "concerns" U.S. President Barack Obama - whatever that means).

MG Siegler at TechCrunch has the story:

Twitter had been planning to have a 90 minute downtime tonight for maintenance. Given what’s going on over in Iran right now, that was a problem. And so Twitter has decided to reschedule the maintenance so the protests can go on.

This is a good move by Twitter. It clearly didn’t want to have to move the maintenance window that it calls a “critical network upgrade,” but the #nomaintenance hashtag that has spent the entire day on the trending topic list, made it pretty clear that Twitter’s users don’t want the service going down at all during this important time. So Twitter worked with its network partner NTT America to reschedule the maintenance for 2-3 PM Pacific, which will be 1:30 in the morning in Iran, rather than during the day.

Twitter uses the rest of the post to praise NTT America for its flexibility, but really this is all about Iran. The people over there are using Twitter as a tool of choice to spread information about what is going on, even as other outlets for communication are being blocked.

N.B. a hashtag on Twitter is explained here.

[Hat tip: Laurent Maumet's Twitter feed]

"I think hiatus is the word"

If it's good enough for Salam Pax...

I've been too long away from this blog. For reasons that are not really nice (the company I worked for has gone into liquidation) I now have time in the day with a computer that actually works. Hiatus over, at least for now.

I have completed my statistical compilation of the UK's European Parliamentary election data and will be issuing my analysis over coming days.

Clearly a big issue right now is the contested Iranian election result.

For those unfamiliar with Twitter, this is something I predicted recently: the first use of social media to try and overthrow a government. This is something quite different from using social media to run election campaigns, which I think is now the norm.

When it looks like a pig...

Here's what the Democratic Party's website shows on the "Lipstick on a Pig" issue.

Now I wonder who they could possibly be trying to portray?



What tasteful mock-ups of Barack Obama do you suppose would be considered reasonable?

[hat tip Michelle Malkin]

Palin Derangement Syndrome, or "Lipstick on a pig" Take 2

If Senator Obama did not intend the insult, why did he repeat it on the Letterman show? Bush Derangement Syndrome has been replaced by Palin Derangement Syndrome. The Democratic Party candidate for the presidency of the U.S.A. has got it bad.
His excuse for the now notorious "Lipstick on a Pig" jibe at his vice-presidential opponent Governor Sarah Palin is:

"Keep in mind, technically, had I meant it this way, [Palin] would be the lipstick. The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig, just following the logic of this illogical situation," Obama said.

So to all the people (mostly women) who have been in denial that this was an attack on Governor Palin: "SHE WOULD BE THE LIPSTICK" on a pig [McCain].

Obama's "had I meant it this way" sounds like O.J. Simpson trying to cash in on "if I did kill my ex-wife and her boyfriend, this is how I would have done it." I don't know on what planet Obama thinks his "following the logic of this illogical situation" will work, but it isn't in this solar system.

It was a cheap shot. The body language tells me he knew it, was embarrassed by it from the moment it left his mouth. The rest is a bully's denial. Pathetic.

Here's a transcript of what I saw:
“[hand in starts in pocket then moves towards face] but you know you can’t…you-you know you can put..er…[covers his face]…lipstick on a pig…[long pause waiting for audience to cheer]…[takes his hand off his face]…it’s still a pig! [looks around].”

UPDATE: Just checking out Intrade. Here's what people putting their money think.

2008 Pres Obama: 49.0 -3.4
2008 Pres McCain: 50.0 +2.6

Doesn't Senator Obama know how many U.S. Senators there are?

I really hope this isn't the reason Senator Barack Obama loses the 2008 U.S. presidential election:



If Senator Obama thinks he's going to win the NINE states he claims to have visited that don't exist he might have a problem: overestimating his Electoral College votes. He said he hadn't visited Alaska or Hawaii so he can only have visited 48 real states at the most. That's a minimum overestimate of 27 electoral college votes, assuming they're all small. To give Senator Obama some credit, he did run a superb primary election campaign by not, at least until he was clearly going to win, refusing to campaign in states however small or normally Republican (Michigan and Florida re a special case).

Or is it that Senator Obama hasn't a clue? You'd think he knew how many Senators there are at least: 2 per state or 100 in total.

Perhaps it's something about the drinking water in the U.S. Senate washrooms, in which case I assume Senators John McCain (Arizona) and Joseph Biden (plagiarist, Delaware) should be viewed with suspicion:

Last election, Senator John Kerry (Massachusetts) also thought he had a better chance of winning than he really had: he thought that he only had to gain FOUR E.C. votes from New Hampshire and hold the states certified to have been won by Al Gore in 2000. Turns out, Senator Kerry didn't know about the U.S. Census and how that changes things.

"Lipstick on a pig"

From Breitbart.com:

"We will leave here more united than we came," she said.

Some audience members heckled her in response. "Lipstick on a pig!" one shouted.

"We just blew the election!" a woman in the audience shouted. The crowd was divided between cheering Obama supporters and booing Clinton supporters.

"This isn't unity! Count all the votes!" another audience member yelled.

At stake was what the Democratic National Committee was going to do about the Michigan and Florida primaries, where the Party initially proposed to ban delegates from those two states from the August National Convention.

The "compromise" effectively gives the nomination to Senator Barak Obama.

Of course the procedure is so convoluted and arbitrary that the deal may not stand up to the scrutiny of a court of law.

Whatever happened to "every vote must be counted"? Silly me, it only applies to when the Democrat is behind a Republican...

How things stand in the 2008 Democratic primaries

All right, this site doesn't normally do satire. But this is priceless.





Hat-tip: Russell Whitaker.

Welcome fivethirtyeight.com!

Fivethirtyeight.com is a project by a Daily Kos contributor I've mentioned previously, here and here and which has some flaws, despite what I reckon are genuine attempts to avoid overstating Democratic party hopes for November.

I think it's a very good addition to the debate about what will happen, as opposed to what we might like to happen or wish would happen. As such, I have no hesitation in adding fivethirtyeight.com to my blogroll.

Here's what Poblano says about it all, taken from the site FAQ:

What is the significance of the number 538?
538 is the number of electors in the electoral college.

How is this site different from other compilations of polls like Real Clear Politics?
There are a few things we're able to do over here that these other sites haven't done. Firstly, we assign each poll a weighting based on that pollster's historical track record, the poll's sample size, and the recentness of the poll. More reliable polls are weighted more heavily in our averages. Secondly, we include a regression estimate for each state among our 'polls', which helps to account for outlier polls and to stabilize the results. Thirdly, we simulate the election 10,000 times for each site update, in order to provide a probabilistic assessment of electoral outcomes.

I'm not sure that RealClearPolitics doesn't already do the weighting that Poblano is doing, but either way there are likely to be some differences. See here for my praise for the RCP.

And we agree on Zogby:

OK, so just who are the most reliable pollsters? As of 3/13/2008, the weights assigned to the various polling agencies are as follows:

Survey USA 1.91
Selzer & Co (IA) 1.47
Field Poll (CA) 1.33
Rasmussen 1.30
Ohio Poll / U. of Cincinnati 1.24
Chicago Trib. / Market Shares 1.16
Mason-Dixon 1.10
Univ. New Hampshire 1.08
Public Policy Polling (PPP) 1.05
Research 2000 1.01
Mitchell (MI) 0.96
ABC / Washington Post 0.95
Insider Advantage 0.95
Quinnipiac 0.95
Strategic Vision 0.95
LA Times / Bloomberg 0.83
Star Tribune (MN) 0.81
FOX / Opinion Dynamics 0.79
CNN / Opinion Research 0.77
Suffolk (MA) 0.77
EPIC-MRA (MI) 0.75
Franklin Pierce (NH) 0.74
Farleigh-Dickinson (NJ) 0.71
Marist (NY) 0.69
CBS / New York Times 0.66
American Research Group 0.65
Zogby 0.64
Keystone (PA) 0.64
USA Today / Gallup 0.63
Public Opinion Strategies 0.63
Columbus Dispatch (OH) 0.50
Zogby Interactive 0.43

Let the voters decide? No!

Daily Kos contributor DHinMI seems almost frantic to persuade Senator Hillary Clinton to stop her campaign, before the Pennsylvania and other primaries that remain.

See here, here, and here.

For what it's worth, I agree with the analysis and that the only serious chance Mrs Clinton has is to see her rival, Senator Barack Obama, destroyed by a smear or a drip-drip of innuendo, like this.

Anyone who believes there aren't people working full-time on identifying, testing and disseminating dirt on Mr Obama, for the benefit of the Clintons is naive.

So for the sake of Party unity, this slugging match must stop. Barack Obama is the (almost) clear winner.

But what I want to know is, what happened to "count every vote"?

What happened to the disenfranchised voters of Florida and Michigan? If I lived in Florida, it wouldn't MY fault the local state government and political parties move the date of their primary to January. So by what right would I be disenfranchised?

In 2000, the Democrats made a lot of noise about electoral cheating and sharp practice. In 2004, very conveniently (because Ohio was the ONLY state that could change the result), various allegations were made, which should more likely have been directed in the Washington State Governor's election.

So blacks can only vote, when they vote Democrat. And Florida can only vote, when it suits one of the Democratic nominees. And just in case the voters get it wrong, the super-delegates can fix it.

Any guesses as to why Senator John McCain, if he were 10 years younger, would now be my prediction for winner of the November presidential election? I won't make a firm prediction until the vice-presidents have been picked.
McCain's problems are:

1) the stupid, if not outright evil, Feingold-McCain Campaign Finance Act, which allows labor unions to act as Democratic party surrogates but restricts individual donors and businesses; he sponsored it, so I have no sympathy. The legislation was also used to try and shut down political blogs, so shame on you Senator! McCain has less money than his opponents, although they seem to be doing their best to redress that imbalance.

2) age and health. The simple fact is, he has never had a campaign of this kind before. How fit is Senator McCain. He is two years older than Ronald Reagan was in 1980. It didn't harm the Great Communicator in 1984: "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

3) He is a Senator. That means he has a long record of votes than can be mined for evidence of anything an opponent might wish to accuse him of. True, so are his opponents, but unlike a McCain or a John Kerry, there is a lot shorter trail of evidence to follow.

The big advantages McCain has are "the surge" in Iraq, no nonsense about earmarks, the fact he was demolished in 2000 by George W. Bush (hard to make him out to be a crony) and his appeal to moderates.

Here's the sort of opinion poll Democrat strategists wake up in the night screaming about: one in five Democrats will back McCain instead of the primary candidate they didn't want.

If [FILL preferred candidate] does not win the Democratic nomination, who do
you think you will vote for in the November election? Will you vote for [fill other
candidate], John McCain, some other candidate, or will you probably not vote in the
November election?

Hillary Clinton supporters (n = 228)
53% Barack Obama
19% John McCain
5% Other
13% Won’t vote
10% Don’t know

Barack Obama supporters (n = 126)
60% Hillary Clinton
20% John McCain
3% Other
3% Won’t vote
14% Don’t know

When narcissists clash

From that bastion of the great "right-wing conspiracy," the New York Times, comes this:

Delegate Battles Embroil 2 States

Remember Florida 2000? You ain't seen nothin' yet!

There's one lot wants their money back.

Reflecting how tense the situation has become, influential fund-raisers for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton have stepped up their behind-the-scenes pressure on national party leaders to resolve the matter, with some even threatening to withhold their donations to the Democratic National Committee unless it seats the delegates from the two states or holds new primaries there.

In the middle of it all the Clinton spin machine is flying into orbit:

Mrs. Clinton won the primaries in both states, but the contests were not sanctioned by the party, neither candidate campaigned in the states and Mr. Obama did not even put his name on the ballot in Michigan.

Actually, Senator Clinton accidentally forgot to have her name taken off the ballot in Michigan, you know, a bit like forgetting to cancel the gym monthly payments...
And the "non-campaign" in Florida included a televised event in the state a couple of days before the vote (obviously a long-standing engagement that couldn't be re-arranged for the following week, you understand). In fact, the bit I really liked was the victory party for the non-campaign.

Pushing to seat the Florida delegates, at least one top Clinton fund-raiser, Paul Cejas, a Miami businessman who has given the Democratic National Committee $63,500 since 2003, has demanded Democratic officials return his 2007 contribution of $28,500, which they have agreed to do.

“If you’re not going to count my vote, I’m not going to give you my money,” said Mr. Cejas, who was the United States ambassador to Belgium from 1998 to 2001.

Hmm. Is it really legal to appoint as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium someone who's main qualification was to give under $30,000 a year? If buying ambassadorships is that cheap, can I have one?

The post is presumably important, given that the E.U., N.A.T.O., and a couple of other international bureaucracies are based there. Its not like Ambassador to St Lucia or Monte Carlo. Also, we can assume that the threat means Mr Cejas doesn't expect to get a big-time job this time. Is he worried the Democrats might lose?

Just in case you think Florida's bad...try Michigan:

The new vote, which would be run by state elections officials but financed with money raised from private sources, is far from a sure thing. It requires approval by the divided state legislature and from the Clinton and Obama campaigns. There is also no assurance that the party can quickly raise the estimated $10 million it would cost to redo the January contest.

Now you might be forgiven for thinking it was the Republicans stirring the pot and making it hard to arrange a re-vote. But no:

The person said that Michigan Republicans, who control the State Senate, said they would not stand in the way. But Democrats, who control the state House of Representatives, are divided between Clinton supporters and Obama supporters. “The Clinton people say they’re not going to block it,” the source said. “The question is what the Obama people are going to do.”

I always thought the Florida 2000 fraud claims were dubious: the Democrats in Florida have a rotten record of organizing elections, and in many of the areas where disputes occurred, the local election boards were, shall we say, not exactly in the hands of Karl Rove.

At stake is a net THIRTY-EIGHT DELEGATE gain for Senator Clinton. According to some counts, this reduces Senator Barack Obama's lead by a third.