Mindless Philosopher

For all you NH Deaniacs who read my blog, don't miss today's WaPo article about the Obama campaign using the organizing model of voter contact. The article will make you all warm and fuzzy when you run across terms such as "one on one" and "house meeting".

One of my biggest regrets over Dean's loss in New Hampshire was that I didn't think our style (i.e., Marshall Ganz's style) of campaigning would be validated. Even though NH voters were subjected to a week long media story on "The Scream", we still managed to come in second in the Granite State. Unfortunately, it was a distant second, and the media gave us little credit for garnering over a quarter of the vote in a crowded field with a candidate who had already imploded. The media narrative of the "Dean Machine" stopped on that Election Night.

It shouldn't have. Anyone on the ground will tell you that energized Dean Democrats helped flip NH's governor and congressional representatives to Blue over the next two cycles. Most campaigns tap into existing party resources, cajole partisans to volunteer and myopically focus on getting votes on Election Day. In contrast, the organizing model empowers the partisans to take control of their own neighborhoods and create ties to other Democrats that last much longer than a fall campaign season. As Lavalee said, "We left more than just yard signs".

Thankfully, in 2007, ex-Deaniac Jeremy Bird hopped on the Obama wagon and ran the organizing model in South Carolina. Check out the part of Obama's Philly Speech on Race about Ashley to see the fruits of always asking "What's Your Story?" And now the WaPo article indicates that this organizing model is now nationwide: huzzah!

I am a bit disappointed that the article didn't make the Labor organizing->Ganz->Dean->Obama connection, but it's probably too much these days to ask reporters to use Lexis or Google.

I griped to Janeite about this WaPo story when it came out last week, but now that we have more fundraising numbers, I feel confident enough to gripe to the world about it.

The article says that because Obama is asking donors to give to Clinton (to help retire her debt), his fundraising machine is showing "signs of wear." The only empirical evidence in the article is displayed on the graph on the right, which shows Obama's per-month fundraising numbers falling from February to May. Yes, that's right, Clinton's debt is to blame for Obama's "poor" fundraising ($22 million in May still seems high to me) during a period when Clinton was still in the race. When the Post decided to run this article on July 11th, five days before June fundraising numbers are reported, they really didn't know what the true impact of Clinton's debt on Obama's fundrasing would be. The data don't say one way or the other. Maybe they would get lucky and Obama would have a terrible June in terms of fundraising.

Not so much. Obama raised $52 million, more than doubling his May take. Oh, and that measly $22 million that Obama raised in May? It's the exact same amount that McCain raised in June. Still waiting for the Post article about how the McCain machine is lackluster.

Late Update: After years of being behind, Dems finally have fundrasing parity with the GOP: Obama+DNC=$92m CoH, McCain+RNC=$95m.

Congrats to Samidh, whose company Pluribo launched their first product a couple days ago! In a nutshell, it's a Firefox plug-in that takes Amazon product opinions (just for electronics at the moment) and summarizes them into one sentence via an automated algorithm. To see it in action, take a look at this screencast, with narration by Samidh.

I've tried it out, and it's very cool. Actually, now that Pluribo is released, maybe the team can turn Pluribo on itself and summarize what people are saying about it!

While I enjoy Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews on the Colbert Report, let me echo the sentiments made by Prof Gelman and Mark "Myster Pollster" Blumenthal: Dr. Tyson should stick to astrophysics instead of attempting poltical science. Last week Dr. Tyson proposed a simplistic model for predicting the state outcomes in presidential elections: taking the median of polling 40 days before an election. Gelman took Tyson to task not accounting for electoral variability between May and November as well as his condescending tone to political scientists. Blumenthal points out that Tyson has very few May polls with which to make his inferences.

I'd like to add that Tyson validates his model in an extremely poor way. He proposes an inference method (the "median poll method") for using early polls to predict the Novemeber winner. Thus, he should test this model on early polls in modern presidential elections. Instead, he applies his model with only October polls and only for the 2004 election. Not surprisingly, he finds a "good" model; the median method only mispredicts the winner in one state (Hawaii). Heck, here's a model that misses only two states in 2004 (NM and NH): just predict the winner by who won last time. Clearly that model sucks historically (cf., predicting 1992 from 1988), and I'm guessing so does the "median poll" method (if you examine the historical May state polling).

As Gelman says, Tyson should consult political scientists (such as James Campell, who has done a lot of work on this topic) before penning an op-ed for the Times. If he does that the next time around, I promise not to write my next blog post on Bell's Inequality.

Congrats to Sen. Obama on his victory. I look forward to a President Obama come 2009.

But I want to take a moment to pause and reflect on just how close this nomination election was. For first time since the introduction of superdelegates, the distance between the top two candidates, in terms of pledge delegates, is less than the number of superdelegates. Only 31 pledged delegates are up for grabs tonight and Obama needs some of these delegates to secure the nomination. (In contrast, the last primary day in 1984, which Mondale needed to garner a majority of delegates, included California and New Jersey.)

Obama's popular vote margin (with MI allocated by the exit poll) will end up being about 70-80K, or 0.2% of the popular vote (48.1% - 47.9%). Wow.

I'd also guess that this nomination race is the last time the eventual winner needs the last day of elections to secure a majority of delegates before the parties decide to reform the system and move to a semi-national or regional primary process. Something to tell the grandkids about :)

Next Morning Update: Including Michigan's 30,000 write-ins and allocating Michigan by the exit poll, my final popular vote numbers are 18,087,958 (48.0%) for Obama to 18,004,743 for Clinton (47.8%), a difference of 83,215.

Oh, those silly undergrads. I parked my car next to the eating clubs last night (since my office is on the same street). When I returned after working late, I noticed something on my windshield...a piece of meat. It was a circular cut of Salami (I think? As a vegetarian, this is hardly my area of expertise). The best part, though, was that the prankster had cut out a smiley face in the meat. The meat was positioned on the driver's side of the windshield at about eye-level. I guess I was supposed to hop in the car, turn on the lights and be scared by the face? Well, not so much. Nice try, rookies.

Grad student 1, undergrads 0.

I've been in denial for a few weeks now. The signs looked ominous and the data was discomforting, but still I clung to the hope that things would start to go in a positive direction again. But, now, after the events of the past few days, I think it's finally time to admit that it's over.

My home-brew TiVo is dead.

(What? You thought I was talking about something else?)

I "called it" at 12:46pm on May 24. Cause of death: hard drive failure. *Sniff*. The MythTV-based DVR lasted exactly three years, as one of the first things it recorded was the Champions League Final of 2005. It blew out just before it could record this year's final, and two weeks of recovery efforts ended in failure.

Ah, well, I'll have to buy a new hard drive. I think I'll go with Ubuntu instead of Fedora for the Linux distro this time around, as Ubuntu seems to be the new standard. Hopefully this installation will be easier than the first go-round.

At the politics department picnic, they set up a moon bounce for the kids....and, of couse, the grad students. Three of us "kids" wanted to go on, but the rule was only two adults at a time, so I boon-bounced with TJ*, a 6-yr-old child of a faculty member. Once inside, I remember that I had my rubber RSI ball on me, so we started throwing that around and wrestling for it. After our time in the moon bounce was up, TJ wanted to go again, but we had to wait for the next group to have their turn. The following conversation ensued.

TJ: You should get a tatoo!
Me: Um...ok.
[We walk over the fake tatoo station.]
TJ: Get the pirate one!
Me: Ok.
TJ: Put it on your forehead.
Me: ...okay.

(I'm not a sucker for kids at all! /sarcasm) Thus I walked around with a pirate on my forehead for the rest of the day. I received some distressingly weird looks at the D-Bar later last night; I miss MIT, where no one would have batted an eye.

*name changed so I don't violate any Internet laws.

Our ISP's being a clown
So now I'm wearing a frown
A series of tubes?
One must need some lube:
For three hours my Net's been down

Maybe the fault lies elsewhere
And obama's behind this scare
There's no act too low
Where they wouldn't go
Since his wins are increasingly rare

No matter for this Hoosier state--
It's really a matter of fate
There's no better pal
HRC's our gal
Tomorrow night we'll win by eight!

I missed the PA margin by 1. Here's the chat log before the polls closed. (Remember the leaked exits said HRC would win by only 5 points.)

6:46 PM L: were you really canvassing all day?
7:20 PM me:[just] this morning
7:26 PM L: you are a good man [What's your prediction]
7:27 PM me: I think HRC by 11