Jenkinsear.com Podcast (07/10/09)

[NOTE: We are not blogging at Jenkinsear.com, so come check us out and be sure to update your podcast subscription.]  In this podcast, we offer a preview of the upcoming Sotomayor Supreme Court confirmation hearing…

[audio http://2008central.net/jenkinsear/podcast/JusAdBellum_Jul_10_2009.mp3]

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We’ve Got a New Blog!

Follow us over at Another War of Jenkins’ Ear! It’s a blog about everything and everything, from politics to puppies.

Look forward to seeing you there.

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That’s a Wrap

We had considered staying around for the transition, but between finals and other law school stuff, that’s just not possible in any real way. So thanks for reading, and check this space for the eventual news of our next venture.

Hopefully, you’ll all give us the same rousing farewell that Ted Stevens received today.

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Guy From The Dark Knight Says Take Chairmanship Away From Lieberman

He’s also the senior Senator from Vermont. TPM has audio.

Excuse to post this:

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HRC-Seward Watch, Part I

Andrea Mitchell:

Two Obama advisers have told NBC News that Hillary Clinton is under consideration to be secretary of state. Would she be interested? Those who know Clinton say possibly.  But her office says that any decisions about the transition are up to the president-elect and his team. Clinton was seen taking a flight to Chicago today, but an adviser says it was on personal business. 

William Seward, of course, was a Senator from New York and the favorite for the 1860 Republican nomination and shockingly lost to s skinny guy from Illinois, only to become the Secretary of State.

He’s better known for Seward’s Folly: buying Alaska. But that didn’t happen until Andrew Johnson was President.

Clinton, though, does not hold Seward’s seat. She does hold Gouvenour Morris’s seat, though. So she’s got that going for her, which is nice. On the other hand, there’s a clear reason why she was not made VP: she also holds the seat once held by one Aaron Burr.

Of course, plenty of others have made this comparison before, including me.

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Fred Thompson Wants To Lead GOP?

James Wolcott uses a lot of big words to mock the prospect of Fred Thompson leading the GOP, but I’ll just say that Thompson reminds me of a poor man’s (read: lazy) William Hague.

Reminder:

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John Hinderaker Shows How To Be a Flack: Be Less Honest Than Bush

Hinderaker:

bama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn’t raise his standards, he will exceed Bush’s total before he is inaugurated.

Bush:

As his presidency nears its end, a reflective President Bush suggested Tuesday that he regrets some of his more blunt statements on the war on terrorism over the last eight years and said he wishes he had not spoken in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner only a month after U.S. troops in Iraq were deployed.

“I regret saying some things I shouldn’t have said,” Bush told CNN’s Heidi Collins when asked to reflect on his regrets over his two terms as president. “Like ‘dead or alive’ and ‘bring ‘em on.’ My wife reminded me that, hey, as president of the United States, be careful what you say.”

Plenty of others have commented on the substantce of both statements, but it’s especially jarring to see them back to back.

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Palin’s Purge

Interesting anecdote within the great Newsweek inside the campaign series:
McCain’s advisers had been frustrated when Palin refused to talk to donors because she found it corrupting, and they were furious when they heard rumors that Todd Palin was calling around to Alaska bigwigs telling them to hold their powder until 2012. The day of the third debate, Palin refused to go onstage with New Hampshire GOP Sen. John Sununu and Jeb Bradley, a New Hampshire congressman running for the Senate, because they were pro-choice and because Bradley opposed drilling in Alaska. The McCain campaign ordered her onstage at the next campaign stop, but she refused to acknowledge the two Republican candidates standing behind her. McCain himself rarely spoke to Palin (perhaps once a week when they were not traveling together, estimated one adviser). Aides kept him in the dark about Palin’s spending on clothes because they were sure he’d be offended. In his concession speech, McCain praised Palin, but the body language between them onstage was not particularly friendly. (Palin had asked to speak; Schmidt vetoed the request.)

Both Sununu and Bradley lost their races in New Hampshire. Moreover, Palin seems to misunderstand one of the core priorities of presidential elections: building broad coalitions. As explained eslewhere in the article, many New Hampshire Republicans are in fact pro-choice. 

Democrats are not going to interrupt purging efforts like this or the one going on at Redstate. 

I’m a bit surprised that the reaction to losing an election is to shrink your coalition by kicking people out.

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Let The River of Dirt Flow: The Palin Edition

Words do not do this hit job justice:

Yeesh.

Clearly the campaign really soured on her.

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Official Election Day “Until There’s a Winner” Liveblog

And here is the liveblog, if you are having trouble viewing email us (mail)…

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2008 Election Results (President, Senate, House)

Here are live, up-to-the-minute, results for the presidential, Senate and House elections…

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VIDEO: Sarah Palin Holds Election Day Press Conference

Sarah Palin held a (finally) held a press conference after casting her vote in Alaska. Per usual, she makes as little sense as possible, and the press never fails to as bad a job as possible. So, kudos all around

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Election Day AM Liveblog

8:07: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and even Bill Ayers have all already voted. Why haven’t you? 

8:09: Morning Joe is pretty dull today.

8:11: Voting turnout is uniformly high, it seems, from early indications. A line in Madison was over a block long.

8:14: Bill and Hillary Clinton, celebrity voters.

8:26: Interesting point on MSNBC: If Obama wins, there’ll be no African-Americans in the Senate.

8:35: Joe Scarborough just said that no Republicans in Congress really supported the Iraq war: that if Bush ever vetoed a budget, they would all turn against it. That’s certainly not what Republicans ran on in 2002 and 2004, and even 2006. It was only after that election that Rumsfeld was replaced, despite wide signs that he needed to be removed before hand. I don’t think Scarborough’s analysis holds up. Also, if someone said that about Democrats, that they didn’t support the war but just did it to get their pork passed, the uproar would be huge, justifiably. Do Republicans care more about pork than war? That’s the implication of what Scarborough is saying. Just a really disingenuous argument, in my opinion.

8:49: Problems in Virginia and elsewhere:

According to reports from OurVoteLive, some precincts in Virginia are equipped with fewer voting machines than expected, while many voters are simply reporting that voting machines are “not working.” In Reston, there have been reports of paper ballot scanners malfunctioning. A few voters in Richmond report that the electronic machines in use told the voters their votes for president had been recored when, in fact, the voters had not voted for president yet.

Get that fixed.

9:07: Morning Joe is shocked that Obama is campaigning in Indiana today. But McCain is also campaigning in a couple of states today.

9:11: Harold Ford talks about unkowns being competitive in state races. Does he regret not running against Lamar Alexander?

9:16: Early non-scientific indications are that turnout is officially insane.

9:17: Joe Scarborough thinks all election lawyers are just out to turn a buck. That’s borderline offensive, and I’m pretty shocked no one on set has nothing to say, especially with voting fraud and problems really high on the minds of both parties.

9:26: More on exit polls: Nate Silver here, Mark Blumenthal here. Ignore them. They are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

9:44: In case you were wondering, Obama’s grandmother’s vote will count. Philosophically, I think it’s a good idea to count votes by people who subsequently die. I don’t really want the government to be in the business of deciding who lives long enough to be qualified to vote. Anyone voting today could die later in the day. Hopefully not, though.

9:48: How sad is it that Dan Rather has to be a guest on MSNBC to ask Chuck Schumer a question. Also, the question is stupid, asking if the party will move to the left. The new House and Senate members are uniformly more conservative than the general Democratic caucus that exists. The locus of power will move to the left, but the Democrats will move to the right. This is not particularly controversial or hard to understand, unless you’re a discredited former news anchor, apparently.

10:03: Speechless:

But when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer talks with Candy Crowley from the Obama headquarters in Chicago on Tuesday evening, the correspondent could simultaneously appear in the New York studio—at least as a 3-D hologram. Really.

This is too much. Way, way, way too much.

10:07: Sarah palin is voting from a helicopter.

10:14: John McCain is voting, and the camera crews are going nuts. Will he vote for Obama? THat’d certainly be the maverick move.

10:45 No recent updates because there’s nothing more to update. It seems we’ve reached some sort of equilibrium where any new information will be of less and less use. So I;m going to break for a while, pick up some things, and return here later, in a new post.

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On Leaked Exit Polls, Part II

Ignore them. They’re not representative. They usually have a Democratic lean, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they had a Republican lean this time around, either.

The only exit polls worth using are the weighted ones released after the voting numbers.

See more here.

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List Of State Websites For Election Returns…

If you want to bypass the filter news websites and go straight to the source for election returns, here’s a links to the official government election reporting authority for the following states:

Ohio (Secretary of State)

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How Off Were The Final RCP Averages in 2004?

Answer: a few points, generally.

Sources: RCP Final by state, Actual Voting, double-checked here. I’m only using states close enough that polls would be considered reliable. 

State	Bush/Kerry RCP Margin	Bush/Kerry Actual Margin	Difference
Florida	Bush +0.6%	Bush +5.01%	4.41%
Ohio	Bush +2.1%	Bush +2.11%	0.01%
Pennsylvania	Kerry +0.9%	Kerry +2.5%	1.6%
Wisconsin	Bush +0.9%	Kerry +0.38%	1.28%
Iowa	Bush +0.3%	Bush +0.67%	0.37%
Minnesota	Kerry +3.2%	Kerry +3.48%	0.28%
Michigan	Kerry +3.5%	Kerry +3.42%	0.08%
Missouri	Bush +4.2%	Bush +7.2%	3%
New Mexico	Bush +1.4%	Bush +0.79%	0.61%
Nevada	Bush +6.3%	Bush +2.59%	3.71%
Colorado	Bush +5.2%	Bush +4.67%	0.53%
New Hampshire	Kerry +1.0%	Kerry +1.37%	0.37%
Maine	Kerry +9.5%	Kerry +8.99%	0.51%
West Virginia	Bush +8.5%	Bush +13%	4.5%
Oregon	Kerry 4.8%	Kerry +4.16%	0.64%
New Jersey	Kerry 7.0%	Kerry +6.68%	0.32%
Arkansas	Bush 6.5%	Bush +9.76%	3.26%
Hawaii	Bush 0.9%	Kerry +8.75%	9.65%
Average			1.95%
Average w/out Hawaii			1.50%

The Hawaii polls were not really believed at the time either, so I included a separate average without them. As you can see, the numbers were generally quite close, with only a handful of states exceeding the excessive margin.

The point for this year is that most states will likely be very close to what is predicted, but a few may differ. And the few that differ are likely to be the states polled the least, like North Dakota.

The best that McCain partisans can hope for is that there are very, very large breaks against Obama. I think that is really unlikely to occur.

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Drop Everything!

A very small, wholly insignificant group of people announce their votes to the press. 

Tens of millions of other people have already voted. This is not news, this is not even a curiousity. Stop feeding the beast and ignore this post.

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Final Election Projection: The Turnout Election

[LOOKING FOR ELECTION RESULTS? Then Check Out Our ELECTION NIGHT LIVE BLOG]

As I was pondering a final election preview, I noticed how many states will be decided by turnout; specifically, Barack Obama’s turnout operation. 

Obama can win states like Florida, North Carolina, Indiana, and Missouri if turnout is high. If it’s just moderate or poor, those states probably fall off the map. In the more traditional and high-leverage tossup states, turnout is less of a factor, but still highly important. If Georgia turnout is massive for Obama, that also could be on the map, but it’ll take more to win there. North Dakota and Montana are somewhere in between these two categories - the data is not stong enough to really tell. 

I’d put states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada all lean Obama for now. So officially, I’ll go the safe route and pick Obama to win with 307 electoral votes, but his ceiling is 392 electoral votes. I expect something in that range. There’s so many different routes for Obama to win, it just depends on how high turnout is to determine the margin. McCain’s best hope is a game theory type laziness in swing states. He basically needs to run the table of the contestable states to win. I really don’t see that happening, especially with the sizeable early vote for Obama.

Personally, I think that voter turnout is going to reach record levels, but I don’t fetishize predictions enough to make some sort of random prediction in how that will manifest itself exactly in terms of the electoral college.

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