ciphergoth | Reasons to be cheerful

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Reasons to be cheerful

Two recent polls have Obama ahead in Florida by four to five points. The polls currently show Obama having a 74 vote lead in the Electoral College. My lovely graphs are starting to keel over, because all the lines are bunching up at the top: they currently show that Obama would have a 55-75% chance of victory even if he were to lose three percentage points against McCain nationally; on current form they show an 88-99% chance of victory.

This November we could be looking at total meltdown of the Republican party, with wipeouts not only in the Presidential elections but in the House and the Senate too. The Dems could have a sufficient majority to kill off the ridiculous procedural crap the GOP keep pulling. Let's just hope they find enough spine to use it.

Updated: Of course, this is before the coming advertising blitz has its effect. John McCain has announced that he's going to join the Federal "matched funds" programme, which means that he accepts a donation cap of $84.1M in return for a matching $84.1M from the Federal purse, giving him about $170M to spend on advertising in the coming months. This programme has been in place since 1972 and all Presidential candidates have accepted the matching funds in that time.

Except for Barack Obama, who announced yesterday that he will not be taking part in the scheme. This is because the Obama camp anticipate raising up to $500M from donations, largely small donations made online. In other words, starting from a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls, Obama will outspend his rival 3:1.

Oh, and just in case that's not enough, the Democrats are also going to sue John McCain for violation of campaign finance rules he signed into law.

Yee-har!

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*cheers*

"This November we could be looking at total meltdown of the Republican party"

Shhh

Don'tsaythingslikethatthegremlinswillhearyou

*holds thumbs*

Yay! Thanks for reporting this. Alexa : )

Ok, this post made my day for too many reasons to count. Not the least of which is that you sound like so much of my US tribe.

::cheers you on::

You seem to think that candidates spending enormous amounts of money to win an election is a good thing.

my thought... one shouldn't even start thinking about what good that money could do.

Yes, especially when there's reasonable evidence that the amount of money spent makes very little difference to the results.

Well that certainly contradicts the received wisdom of US elections. Most of the studies I can find with a quick Google are behind paywalls and the abstract doesn't say what they found, but I was able to find the full text of this one:

Green, D. , Hillygus, S. , Sides, J. and Shaw, D. (2007, Apr) "The Influence of Television and Radio Advertising on Candidate Evaluations: Results from a Large Scale Randomized Experiment" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hotel, Chicago, IL (PDF)

Advertising thus appears to have the capacity to induce a substantial shift in the relative evaluations of the candidates. This conclusion remains unchanged when one introduces controls for the airing of opposing ads or the partisan composition of the sample.

Do point me at more research on this though, I'm sure it's a disputed area.

I was thinking of this Levitt paper, which takes pairs of candidates who've stood against each other more than once, and examines the effect of different funding levels.

Edited 2008-06-20 13:03 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks. Looks like both positions have credible evidence; I think I'd prefer to hear that it has little effect (even despite the fact that for once such an effect would tip the balance in favour of the better candidate) but reality may have another opinion :-)

Sorry, I'll phone the Obama campaign now and let them know I'd sooner see another Republican in the White House than see them have anything to do with the filthy stuff.

*raised eyebrows* That sounds disturbingly as though you think it's okay for your candidate to use tactics you'd disapprove of if it were the other side. I find it very hard to believe you actually think that, but if you don't disapprove of high levels of campaign spending in general then this comment is rather disingenous, and if you do disapprove in general then surely you should disapprove when the good guys do it.

I, for one, would be willing to compromise on something like high campaign spending to see the republicans out of the Whitehouse.

And (for me at least) it is not a case of the good guys vs the bad guys. Obama is the lesser of two evils.

That depends on the consequences of the tactics. If it's something like lying about the other candidate, for example, then using those tactics directly does harm no matter who uses them, and so I'm against my side using them. If it's something like the potential undue influence of money when deciding elections, then the bad consequence is victory for the worse candidate, so there's some point in pushing for changes in the rules that reduce that influence but no point in the better candidate unilaterally not spending their money (or whatever course of action is being advocated here, which I really can't work out).

Edited 2008-06-20 13:49 (UTC)

If it's something like the potential undue influence of money when deciding elections, then the bad consequence is victory for the worse candidate

I think that the candidate I support winning because of the undue influence of money, rather than because the majority of people would choose to vote for them without that influence is a bad consequence if you believe in democracy.

I'm not sure that any course of action is being advocated per se, but I don't think that Obama outspending McCain is a reason to be cheerful.

There are plenty of unfair influences; I'm glad that at least some of them are unfair in our favour.

I suspect those aren't the only two options.

Surely they might be the two options - if the election is very close the money might make the difference.

Well I certainly can't work out what course of action is being advocated if not that. If it's that we should be pushing for a change in the rules that reduces the influence of money, that could be a good thing; but the rules are not going to change before November, and I'm glad that, playing within the current rules[1], the better candidate is ahead.

[1] which Obama is but McCain isn't, of course

There is a lot that could potential happen in the coming months to put a different slant on things.

I would question Obamas funbding from small donations, Americans like everyone else are feeling the ecnomic pinch, more so cause there are further into the cycle. Call me cynical but i am sure many larger interested parties have made donations too.

Sorry Obama doesn't fill me with any hope, if he has got this far......
Another charasmatic poltician promising change just like one Mr T Blair. If there was any change for the better well i did not see it. Even in 1997 when Labout first got in the first thing they did was cut benefits for single parents.

A two party political system eveitably mean that both sides take on the mantle of their opposities. They are both chasing the few swing voter and can ignore there established supporters After all who the gonna vote for the othere guys ?

Mind you expect proably the most vicious campaign we have ever seen in the states...some entertianment at least.

Funding is one thing but i think we might be looking at the wrong thing.
Not too informmed about media in the states but look at it this way. No politcal pary in britian pays for the Sun's support. Well no cash changes hands anyway......

The economy is going to change more slowly than that; funding may slow a little but it won't suddenly dry up.

For all that I loathe the man Mr Blair is way to the left of Obama or anyone else we might get as President; the first thing I remember him doing was introducing a minimum wage and permitting unions at GCHQ. I don't expect miracles; I just think that he's going to be far better than any Republican.

Plurality voting inevitably brings about the ills you describe; see Duverger's Law.

As you say, no cash changes hands, but an enormous price is paid for Murdoch's support. Of course in the USA Murdoch backs the Republicans to the hilt - cf "terrorist fist jab"!

From my window I can see one change for the better: a spanking new primary school at the end of the road, replacing a decrepit Victorian building and bunch of sheds used as classrooms. It was built using PPP funding. Critics of New Labour focus on (justified) criticism of the "using PPP funding" part of that sentence, but tend to overlook the "It was built" part, which is actually more important.

If I look out of our flat's front door, I see the flat belonging to the two gentlemen upstairs, who got married last year. Technically, the arrangement is called a "civil partnership", but they call it a marriage and so do the rest of us.

If I actually bothered to leave the flat, I might see more examples. My job, for example, comes from a large and sustained increase in science funding in the UK. But I can see the two above without making any effort at all.

It's much easier to see the bad things they've done (Iraq, racking up a massive national debt hidden as PPP, election fraud, immigration hysteria, a terrifying illiberal agenda) but it won't take much of Tory rule for us to realize how much better they were, and wish again for the sort of administration that brings in SureStart, minimum wage, the hunting ban, the congestion charge, anti-discrimination legislation and so on.

Don't you love the two-party system?

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