Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Referencing The Campaign

Since I've gotten in the academic habit of footnoting (which I didn't do yesterday, despite the massive amount of sourcing a rant like that should have), I figured I'd link to two of my favorite fivethirtyeight.com stories. If you haven't visited fivethirtyeight.com yet, you should, like, immediately; better yet, fire up the interwebs' flux capacitor and check back in the primaries when Nate Silver was just "Poblano", and was beating every other professional pollster in the world while being just another commenter on the Daily Kos (shades of Peter and Valentine Wiggin becoming world leaders in Ender's Game!)

Anyhoo, aside from being a sabremetric master, Nate's also been travelling around the country visiting the campaign offices of both candidates to get a sense of what the numbers aren't telling; and the visits are clutch in understanding why Obama's going to win:



The first one follows a day in the life of an Obama outpost; the second is the same, but has with it a trip to a McCain outpost that is cut very short, and I'll leave you to read it to find out why. Needless to say, it's not good for McCain. 

And if you're sick of polling numbers, and the "meat-market" aspect of politics above doesn't do it for you, then there's this diatribe against the "permanent polling practices" of today's pundry and populace from The National Review

This new, frenetic age of polling has not necessarily led to more empirical certainty. The very instantaneousness of polls like Leve's threatens to shape perceptions as much as record them. And the deluge of polling data has just given partisans another opportunity to cherry-pick facts and impugn their rivals. In this besieged environment, even pollsters themselves fight bitterly over the best way to measure public opinion and whether the likes of Jay Leve have it exactly right--or very, very wrong.


That Is All For Now.

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