Mindless Philosopher

Another set of fairly good predictions (and a great night for Dems/progressives):

PA-12: I had Critz by +2, he won by 8. Major props to the Critz campaign and the DCCC -- that was an impressive margin.
KY-SEN GOP: I had Paul at 55%; he ended up with 59% of the vote. I hope this puts KY in play for the Dems; we'll find out soon enough.
KY-SEN Dem: I had Conway by 3, he won by only 1 percentage point. I hope that's his margin in the general :)
AR-SEN Dem: Lincoln by +2; nailed it, though I underestimated the third candidate's support. Should be an interesting runoff.
PA-SEN Dem: I had inside knowledge of this one; my private prediction was only off by one point on Sestak's percentage.

Here are my predictions for the races I can comment on:

PA-12: Critz 50 - Burns 48 - Agoris 2
KY-SEN GOP: Paul 55 - Grayson 39 - Others 6
KY-SEN DEM: Conway 49 - Mongiardo 46 - Others 5
AR-SEN DEM: Lincoln 48 - Halter 46 - Others 6

As the Americans and the Canadians face off today in Vancouver, I thought it would be fun looking back on their first meeting in 1920. The Olympics were held in Sweden, where they had never seen North Americans play hockey. (Europeans had more experience with the amateurish game bandy.) Here's what the Swedes wrote of the spectacle.

I have never seen the like of this sports competition. Every single player on the rink was a perfect acrobate on the skates, skated at tremendous speed without regard to himself or anyone else, jumped over sticks and players with ease and grace, turned sharply with perfect ease and without losing speed, and skated backwards just as easily as forwards. And during all this, the puck was held down on the ice and was dribbled forwards by means of short shoves of the stick. In bandy you often have to play the ball in the air to pass it, but here the puck was kept gliding on the ice without interruption, even though the space for each player was less than a third of that in bandy. How the players were able to rush forward at such high speed and thread their way through the attacking opponents together with the long stick and puck on this insignificant space, where the distance between team mates and opponents hardly ever reached one metre, is quite beyond comprehension and had to be seen to be believed.

In soccer and bandy you say that there can be much pressure on a player, but the worst situation in these games is as sitting in a comfortable armchair compared to what these players did to one another. The players attacked each other with a roughness that would have sent an ordinary bandy player far into the next week, and you might possibly have a notion of what it was all about when the small Canadian defender Johanneson at one time was pushed headlong into the barrier board, so that it was cracked. However, he happily continued to play on, as if nothing had happened.

The small puck was moved at an extraordinary speed around the rink at all directions, so that the spectators almost became giddy, and the players fought for it like seagulls, that flutter about after bread crusts from a boat. In the same daring manner the players dived for the puck and turned away in a circle if anyone else had retrieved it, so as to glide round and try to get into a better position for capturing the coveted thing.

And there were shots at goal! At the worst speed the players had such extraordinary control that they confidently could send the puck towards the goal so hard that you could not follow it with your eyes. When you previously had seen the goalkeepers in their thick leg-pads which almost covered half of the goal, you had imagined that they only had to stand still to deal with the shots. But in this game you could see that there really is such a thing as goalkeeping. Because not one of the shots were directed towards the goalkeeper, but instead aimed at the bottom comers of the goal, preferably a few decimetres above the ice. The goalkeepers had to dart about like mad, and be active all the time, sometimes using their feet and sometimes their stick, and they had an inconceivable ability to be in the right position to fend off the ball, even before the spectators had had time to realize there had been a shot. A few times the Canadian goalkeeper had to stop the puck with his hand, and despite his thick gloves his fingers were smashed until they bled. Those shots had great speed, and the puck is not soft.

We lost that game 2-0; here's to hoping for a different outcome today!

I'm fairly knowledgeable about sports. And while football is not at the top of my sports-following pecking order (which starts with soccer, baseball, and college basketball), I have always watched the Super Bowl.

But not this year. CBS has decided to politicize the Super Bowl by allowing a pro-life (or, at a minimum, anti-abortion) to air. While CBS has had a "non-advocacy" policy in recent years (even barring this hardly controversial UCC ad in 2004), they announced a policy change in allowing the anti-abortion ad:

CBS said Tuesday that the decision to air the Tebow ad reflected a change in its policies toward advocacy ads that has evolved over the past several years.

Of course, progressives immediately tested this new policy with a ad for a gay dating web site. CBS's response? Rejection.

No problem, CBS. I get the message. If you want only conservatives to watch this year's Super Bowl, I'm happy to oblige. My friends and I will be baking some desserts, playing Settlers of Catan, and popping in a DVD tonight at our anti-Super Bowl party.

The United States' soccer team isn't the best in the world, and--despite it being 2010 next year--not a championship threat. Given our position, a World Cup campaign is judged to be successful is we make it from the group state (of 32 teams in 8 groups) to the knockout state (of 16 teams). To enter the knockout stage, you have to be one of the top two teams in your group. Tomorrow, the groups will be determined by a lottery and partial-seeding system. Succinctly put, this system screws the United States.

According to Nate Silver's new soccer rankings (called SPI), the United State is the 16th best team in the world, and the 15th best team to make it to the World Cup finals (Russia--ranked 14th--failed to qualify). So, if the groups were drawn randomly, about half the time would we be paired with two teams ranked below us and one team ranked above us. In these cases, we would expect to qualify. The other half of the time, we would be paired with two teams ranked about us and would expect not to qualify. For those doing the math at home, the actual probability of being in an easier group is 57.5%. (Also, if the official, but less-rigorous FIFA rankings were used, the US would be in an even better spot, as the 13th most-highly ranked team in the tournament.)

Often, to prevent the uncertainty of match-ups described above, tournaments will seed teams so that the best teams play the weaker teams in early matches. In soccer tournaments (e.g., Euro 2008) often the top quartile of teams will be seeded in "Pot A", the next fourth of teams in "Pot B", and so on for pots "C" and "D". Each group comprises one team from each Pot. Under this scheme, the US would be in Pot B and be guaranteed to have two weaker teams (from Pots C and D) in its group.

A potentially even smarter systems would used the specific ranking of each team to assign groups. The highest ranked team would be paired with the lowest ranked team as well as the two middle rankings (16 and 17). Sports fans would recognize this type of ranking from the NCAA basketball tournaments' regional groups. In that case 16 teams are split into four groups of: (1,8,9,16),(4,5,12,13),(3,6,11,14), and (2,7,10,15). Again, under this formula, the US would be guaranteed to have two weaker team in its group.

But does the World Cup use either of these systems? No. Alas, the Euro-centric FIFA powers that be have conspired to stack the deck against the U.S. and other teams in our position. The World Cup Seeding system uses Pots (as described in the Euro 2008-scheme) but only sorts Pot A by ranking (these eight teams are called "seeded"). The other Pots are determined by geography (i.e., continent). Here's the breakdown:

• 8 seeded teams (5 from Europe, 2 from South America, and the African host nation)
• 8 from Europe
• 3 from North America
• 3 from South America
• 5 from Africa
• 4 from Asia
• 1 from Oceania

FIFA must takes the non-seeded teams and puts them into three pots of 8. This year, the math worked out well: there are two scenarios that do not split continents across pots. Scenario 1: Seeded / Europe / N.A+Africa / S.A+Asia+Oceania. Scenario 2: Seeded / Europe / N.A.+Asia+Oceania / S.A.+Africa. Unfortunately, the U.S. is screwed in either scenario. Why? The Oceania, Asian, African, and non-U.S. North American teams are on average worse than the U.S. And those are the teams that the U.S. is guaranteed not to play in the group stage under one of the two scenarios (or both). Let's take a closer look by examining the actually SPI values (larger is better, U.S.=78.6) of teams who would be in the U.S.'s pot in either scenario:

Scen. 1: N.A.+Afirca Team Cont. SPI < U.S.? United States N.A. 78.6 -- Mexico N.A. 77 Y Honduras N.A. 75.1 Y Ivory Coast Afr. 80.6 N Cameroon Afr. 78.9 N Nigeria Afr. 73.3 Y Ghana Afr. 72.9 Y Algeria Afr. 69.4 Y Median In-Pot SPI: 75.1 Y Median Out-Pot SPI: 78.1 Y		Scen. 2: N.A.+Asia+Oceania Team Cont. SPI < U.S.? United States N.A. 78.6 -- Mexico N.A. 77 Y Honduras N.A. 75.1 Y Australia Afr. 75.4 Y Japan Afr. 73 Y South Korea Afr. 70.2 Y North Korea Afr. 56.9 Y New Zealand Afr. 56.9 Y Median In-Pot SPI: 73 Y Median Out-Pot SPI: 79.5 N

Check out how many worse-than-U.S. teams these scenarios take out of contention for being in the same group as the U.S. In scenario 2, every team in our Pot is worse than us, and the median SPI of the other teams actually leapfrogs the U.S.! What ridiculousness. And yet, because of the way soccer/football is spread across the continents, this will happen every World Cup until: (1) the U.S. becomes a seeded team or (2) the balance of soccer power is significantly altered across the globe. For the short- and medium-terms, we just have to get used to tough draws.

So who wins with this seeding system? European teams (e.g., Slovenia and Slovakia) who barely qualify. They get to rest easy know that they won't have both a seeded team and a very good unseeded European team (e.g., France) in their group.

As for this World Cup specifically, FIFA determined (randomly? by fiat? who knows...) to go with Scenario #2, which really dampens our hopes of a decent draw. (It also means there won't be a U.S. v North Korea match -- too bad.) So that 57.5% chance of being favored to advance that would result from a completely random system? It drops to a 31.5% chance under this absurd, geographically-based system.

So no matter which balls Clarlize Theron pulls out of the hat tomorrow, I have just one thing to say: Go to hell, FIFA, and take your WC seeding system with you!

(I just noticed that the NY Times has a similar article up, but of course it goes into much less depth.)

From Today's Hotline (sub. req.):
I originally wanted the winner to have to name six but apparently the Hotline staff does not have much faith in DC's intelligentsia.

Well, that was a mostly depressing evening. I guess I can't say it was unexpected as I went 4/4 in my predictions. Let's go through the races:

• VA-Gov: No shocker here. In fact, I nailed the election results dead on. I will add two nuggets of opinion on some CW: (1) T-Mac would have done just as poorly (I mean, he got crushed by Deeds in the primary, after leading for months), and (2) I do think Deeds campaigned hard, it's just that his campaign didn't resonate with voters so it seemed as if he wasn't trying.


• NJ-Gov: The biggest shock here (and maybe of the evening) was how poorly Dagget ran. 5.7%?!! He was in the high teens just three weeks ago! Tip of the hat to voters for acting strategically and not wasting their votes. But, Dagget: you garnered the same percentage of votes as Scozzafava and she dropped out and endorsed another candidate! Pathetic. (Maybe you can blame the ballot?) For the record, I had predicted Dagget at 9, and underestimated Christie's win by a bit.
  


• ME-Prop 1: The biggest disappointment of the night by far. Polls continue to underestimate support against gay marriage. One reason I thought we were going to lose was that the robo-survey PPP had Yes winning by four points (which might be the final margin after some big cities come in). In the privacy of the voting booth, voters just say "Ick" (as Bill in Portland puts it). I also think they have a hard time redefining an institution that has been so ingrained in their psyches since childhood.
  
  Also, clearly people can't kick around the No on 8 campaign anymore. According to Nate's regression analysis, Maine/2009 was in a much better position than California/2008 to uphold gay marriage, and it'll lose by about the same margin.


• NY-23: Yay, the Dems finally won! I love this picture. Maybe Coburn should have actually read those political science books and articles he was lambasting, because he would have found many discussions about the Median Voter Theorem. I rarely go against polling, but with only two candidates left in the NY-23 race, I was more confident in my prediction: despite his momentum, Hoffman was just too conservative for the district. Full stop.


• NYC-Mayor: A word on this race: people should not have been so surprised by the closeness of the result. When elections include an incumbent, one-sided spending, and one-sided earned media (all at play here), the undecideds will break heavily toward the challenger. (As those elements become less one-sided, the undecided start evening out as well. So don't count on an undecided effect in most presidential races, for instance.) Bloomberg never left the low 50s and that's where he ended up. Though I would have probably expected him to garner 53 percent of the vote rather than the 51 percent he actually received.

Overall, Election Night 2009 was uninformative (are off-year elections ever?). Shocking that people don't like incumbents in a bad economy. If the employment rate begins improving by the summer, the Dems should be fine in 2010.

Happy Election Day everyone :) I'm sure if you're reading this blog you've already voted. My predictions for NY-20 and the VA three-way primary were only a couple percentage points off, so let's see how I can do this time:

• VA: McDonnell 59 - Deeds 41


• NJ: Given privately to Janeite but I can't reveal since Corzine is a client


• ME-1: I feel sad writing this but: Yes 51.5 - No 48.5


• NY-23: I'm going with an upset here. Owens 47 - Hoffman 45 - Scozzafava 7. I guess I just think that Hoffman is too conservative for the district. We'll see!

Following on our success last year, the Voting Information Project has again teamed up with Google to create a gadget for Virginia Voters:

Right now it only has polling location, but by early next week it'll have ballot info as well. You too can put the gadget on your own website. This way, candidates and newspapers have access to a good-looking, informative election gadget.

Their first foray was great, but this one had me practically on the floor, especially the very end.


Coincidentally, I was just talking about WaPo and this contest to folks at a dinner party last weekend at Dupont Darling's flat.