Reply #17: election model [View All]

[tunesmith]

There are lots of election models. They all say different things. Most of the wrong ones depend on the "undecideds break towards challenger" thing. They didn't this time, because of the cultural hot button issues and the fear/war stuff.

I ran a model myself. It uses ALL the polls from electoral-vote.com, for the last two months of the campaign. They used registered-voter numbers only (not "likely voters"). It split them out by state. It calculated how much support each candidate had in each state, in terms of the electoral votes for that state. It approximated each candidate's raw electoral power. I supported Dean, then Clark, then Edwards, then Kerry. I worked hard for Democrats. So I'm not some GOP plant coming in running interference. But when I ran the numbers (unfortunately only in hindsight) I saw that Bush had the advantage. He just had more support. Kerry came close during the debates, but it all fell away when the debates were over.

It's hard to explain, but here it is in short: Kerry's strategy was to get most of the swing states. Swing states are, by definition, close states. When they're close enough, they're basically 50/50. When something's 50/50, its outcome is determined by pretty crazy factors. Anything can make it go one way or the other. The weather, a small flu outbreak, some small potatoes operative trying to game the system (like in Ohio). It's basically random. So when you've got something that is random, pinning your strategy on getting more than half of them is pretty stupid. As it turned out, Kerry actually beat the odds. He got six out of the top ten swing states. If he had gotten Ohio, he would have had seven out of ten. He almost got lightning to strike, but it wasn't quite enough.

I respect people trying to dig into the whole fraud and suppression angles. We need major improvement. But we can't get so wrapped up in this that we neglect doing work to build liberal/progressive values and creating more Democrats. The truth is that in 2004, we honestly did not have enough people intending to vote for us. Not even close. Kerry winning from a flip of 60,000 voters in Ohio would have been a statistical fluke. The national support levels were very weighted towards Bush, by millions. If you want to believe fraud explains *that* large of a gap, I can't stop you, but there's no way we'd be able to fix *that* much by 2004. We simply need more Democrats.