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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Come next Tuesday night, we’ll get a resolution (let’s hope) to a great ongoing battle of 2012: not just the Presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, but the one between the pundits trying to analyze that race with their guts and a new breed of statistics gurus trying to forecast it with data.
In Election 2012 as seen by the pundits–political journalists on the trail, commentators in cable-news studios–the campaign is a jump ball. There’s a slight lead for Mitt Romney in national polls and slight leads for Barack Obama in swing-state polls, and no good way of predicting next Tuesday’s outcome beyond flipping a coin. ...
Bonus link: Esquire - The Enemies of Nate Silver
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I did a little reading after the q was first posted here, and it seems Lear though O'Connor a complete pain in the ass, often because of how difficult it was for O'Connor to get into character. They both thought it was worth it, though, for the way O'Connor nailed the role.
Well, if we imagine the North actively choosing not to fight in the early 60s, it probably would have involved a treaty of some kind. A North reluctant to fight in 1860-61 is different enough from the North that was that I can imagine a costly war being avoided indefinitely. I've even wondered if the conflict was so personality driven that if Abe Lincoln gets run over by a horse in 1847, does the Civil War look remotely like the one we saw? Does it even get started?
No doubt they "let that water flow right over them," as they mulishly resisted the current of social progress and anchored themselves in eddies of stagnant obstinacy, to await Rush's approval. What a prize for Republicans.
So much for the value of that Bloomberg endorsement. The value of his brand may take quite a hit over his being so slow to realize how bad the optics were on this.
'There's Never Been A Day In The Last Four Years I've Been Proud To Be His Vice President'
Meanwhile:
- Romney is +1 (49-48) in today's ABC/WaPo national poll;
- 75 times more people (!!) have gone on food stamps under Obama than have found a job.
Quinnipiac is also a poll. Just like the census, their count of "registered voters" is determined by what people tell them when asked whether they're registered or not. They found that 96% of the people who say they are registered to vote are likely to vote. How do we check to see if that's reasonable? We have to guess what percent of people who say they are registered to vote actually vote. That's what the census data tells us--90% of people who said they were registered to vote actually voted.
Preferential treatment along class lines in one way is no different in principle than preferential treatment along class lines in another way. Please don't miss the point. Because it forms the intellectual bulwark for that obstinancy.
The point is those alienated white people (and there are a ton of them) feel that they, and their ascendants, were criticized and condemned for doing what you then insisted as your right to do. You preached to them, and then you did what you condemned them for doing. (What do you call that again?) You can talk about different levels of effect, but that's only a difference in degree, not in kind. And, moreover, they feel you will, if given the chance do worse--only their numbers and power prevent this. Thus, there willingness to adhere to whoever will see they retain that power and those numbers.
It was not necessary that they be given this freebie with watercress all around it. And the Old Left hardly raised an objection. This ended up with those disaffected and angry whites in their minds having cause to justify their bigotry (in a more pallid sense) and to hold an eternal grudge exercise extreme wariness. You really were no better than they were. You can't be trusted. You reneged on your enunciated principle.
But only 72 percent of actual registered voters actually voted, which means either 20 percentage points of the respondents lied or they were disproportionately from one party (or some combination of the two).
Bloomberg's endorsement was never really gonna help obama - he's a "Republican" only because that was his only way to get elected. Powell is a bit more meaningful, but not by all that much
I don't see how the two of them don't go to war several times as they both expand their nations.
Like I said at the beginning, that's a lot of people to discount. Last I heard even racists, sexists, and no-accounts in general get to vote. And the Democratic Party made a mighty powerful enemy, and made it along a wholesale class category--one which it seems to be at a loss to come terms with. I don't have any answers. But a lot of white people are pissed. It's that simple. And things like Jena and Gates, to name just two very recent examples, don't soothe that savage breast. To them, it's just an indication of the way it really is.
The problem stems from years of treating them as just ignorant Redneck types who need to somehow be circumvented. If that's the way game is going to be played, then they'll play it that way. They'll fight it on terms of winning--not on terms of what's right. They'll end-run you. They'll put their kind on courts. They'll elect those who bend the knee to them no matter what. That's the game, isn't it? You forfeited fighting on the grounds of principle; that leaves only power left. And whites, Euros, are still by far the largest class in this country.
It looks like I am going to read "Nixonland" again as that sounds like the main point of the book.
No, no — Bloomberg was leading from behind.
And Richard E. Nixon was Archie Bunker's president.
It's one of several main points, and a completely brilliant book.
I didn't mean in NYC - Obama should win there with no trouble. But we're now likely to have several news cycles of Bloomberg scrambling to avert further disaster on Staten Island (and elsewhere), while people picture him as the clueless Mayor who thought it was OK for hotels to kick out the sheltering locals to honor marathoners' reservations and divert resources such as generators and bottled water to the marathon. That might be all that a lot of folks in Iowa and Colorado (and elsewhere) know about Bloomberg, plus that he just endorsed Obama. If they follow Bloomberg closely, they might also know he wants to take away their guns. Not a huge deal, but those touting the value of Bloomberg's endorsement (was that just yesterday?) may have inflated the benefit of that nod.
Yeah, I'm sure that there is endless squabbling over Alsace-Kentucky and so on, but the problem is that this ultimately leads to an all-out fight that the North wins. End of CSA. The whole proposition requires that the CSA *not* get involved in these sorts of fights, at least not until it's been independent long enough to become an actual nation of long enough standing that the North is willing to beat up on it without trying to annex all of it. How long is that? 50 years? I don't know. Maybe Kaiser Wilhelm's telegram to the USA's southern neighbor starts a North American war after all. It ends with the USA giving the CSA a beat down, while Germany wins WWI and establishes something like a more oppressive European Union by 1920. Then WW2 never happens, and (strangely) the effects of an independent Confederacy are more lasting in Eurasia than in America.
The problem stems from years of treating them as just ignorant Redneck types who need to somehow be circumvented. If that's the way game is going to be played, then they'll play it that way. They'll fight it on terms of winning--not on terms of what's right. They'll end-run you. They'll put their kind on courts. They'll elect those who bend the knee to them no matter what. That's the game, isn't it? You forfeited fighting on the grounds of principle; that leaves only power left. And whites, Euros, are still by far the largest class in this country.
Are you explaining their position or endorsing it?
I think the answer - including the Cold War - is "all of them."
Well, obviously they've played it that way, and leveraged quite a bit of electoral and legislative success out of it since the 1970s.
But just as obviously, it's a "game" without a good exit strategy. "Whites, Euros" are a vastly larger, broader, and more diverse ethnic and cultural category than the Archie Bunker fans upon whom you're focusing. The Archie Bunker fans are concentrated in a demographic that is steadily and relentlessly losing proportional representation. The GOP's co-optation of them was one of the great political maneuvers in US history, but it is driving the party full-speed into a blind alley, ever-increasing the zealous devotion of this base while simultaneously repelling nearly all others even as the others grow in proportional representation.
I guess the way the CSA survives is if it gains its independence by a McClellan victory in the 1864 election, or in some other way survives but does not win the Civil War. The Southern powers-that-be look back on the war and understand that war is now an industrialized business and only going to get more so, and the North is a vastly stronger industrial power. They then make the avoidance of war with the USA the fundamental goal of their foreign policy. They try to expand, but are cautious about it.
Yeah, this doesn't really happen, and the CSA is winkled out by 1900. But this is the best I can do.
Not one of George Will's favorite books apparently: Nixonland review
I'm explaining it and I understand and sympathize. It's easy to view contemptuously those whose anguish and angst (bred by fear) you don't hear on a regular basis.
I voted for Obama in '08 and will vote for him again. In fact, I like him, too. I haven't voted for a Republican since I voted (to my eternal shame and chagrin) for Nixon in '72. I loathe and despise the Republican Party. The Republican Party makes me feel like I walking barefoot over writhing snakes. How anyone with an educational level of over the sixth-grade could be a Republican is beyond me.
But I can't respect the Democratic Party, and I think it is in a wuss degraded mode. It's jaded New Deal/Great Society in domestic affairs and closet appeasers/attritionists in foreign affairs. Perhaps most of all, I admire Obama for trying to get beyond all that. He's done that mostly in a principled manner, exhibiting some real character. That he's view as he is by so many is depressing, and it says something about how horrible our system has become when decency and intelligence and (yes) good-heartedness doesn't matter, can, in fact, be twisted to mean something else. It's all about the game. The model for our politics is tribal. It's no more than the LSU-Alabama football rivalry, the Superbowl, the reality show du jour. It's pathetic. That your side might win doesn't change that awful, self-destructive paradigm.
Certainly true. But I wonder how particularly unique this is to the current-day USA. We are, everyone, the descendants of warring tribes (and in many places in the world, we're still active members of warring tribes), and while this civilization thingie has been a profound success in countless ways, we're still the same animals underneath.
Agonizing over the human condition doesn't seem an especially fruitful exercise. I prefer to acknowledge it for what it is, and try to nudge the stubborn boulder of progress forward by a fraction. YMMV.
Oh, I agree. I think it was doomed from the start. The North didn't have an especially good war and won anyway, and it takes a lot of couterfactuals to change that. There's no one thing you could easily change and have a surviving CSA. But if you want to create the alternate history you have to just arbitrarily choose something.
There's that problem, but allegiances creating coalitions are always in a state of flux. And as was pointend out up thread, the country is getting more conservative, and more, not less, are feeling dispossessed disenfranchised, and what hasn't been mentioned is that they feel less cowed with every passing election in experssing it in those terms. You can't shamed them on the basis of race anymore--that right was forfeited. It doesn't bother them that you think or call them racists/sexists. More and more are joining them. They see the gain to be had. The trajectory right now is in their favor.
Obama got some of those blue collar types, but he treated them much too lightly (maybe he didn't know what to do with them, sort of like the dog and the VW Beetle), and has squandered what he gained provisionally with a stimulus policy in favor of big business and the rich. That was a missed opportunity big-time. Still, the Democratic Party does too little to draw them in. The attitude is lump it or leave it, and they've been leaving. And they will continue doing so, in greater and greater numbers.
I don't know about that. The administrations handling of foreign powers was very good. The blockade was hugely successful. The war in the west was extremely one sided towards the North. The wars in the middle area, such as Kentucky/Tennessee went the North's way. About the only place they initially struggled was in Virginia but they never really had an out and out disaster in VA and eventually VA became a huge win for the North as well.
Basically the CSA spent all of their resources holding the line in front of Richmond that they gave up the rest of their territory to the North. Meanwhile the North was so vast and so powerful that they could hammer away at VA with a large and powerful army while still devoting vast amount of resources to taking the rest of the rebel states as well.
David Brin was once asked to contribute a story to a volume called Hitler Victorious. He looked at it and decided there was no reasonable way for Hitler to win, so he wrote a story in which the Norse gods showed up right when the Allies were on the verge of winning. The story is about some Canadians (IIRC) on a secret mission in a submarine with Loki, who is helping them. It ends with one of them creating Captain America to defeat Thor and company.
So yeah, Kal-El works.
On what basis do you conclude this? Voter registration stats? General electoral trends (including more election cycles of recent years than just Nov. 2010)?
I don't believe the demographic landscape supports your breathlessly dramatic narrative. (Though it is fun to imagine it being read by Walter Winchell.)
There were plenty of people and pols that were reluctant to fight. They'd spent almost 20 years trying to avoid that fight. Great Compromiser and all that.
If there was no war the pressure would have been international, embargoes and all that. Great Britain and others would have not continued to trade with a slave state.
A Lee victory at Gettysburg brings in England and France to force the North into a negotiated peace.
The time for that had past. There was a real danger of that in 1862, but not after the EP. That made intervention on behalf of the South politically impossible.
OK, Antietem then.
edit: But was also politically impossible was an indefinite cotton embargo to the old world textile mills. A Lee victory at Gettysburg signals a possible war without end, and the accompanying cotton starvation without end, and that would have been just as disastrous to their governments.
I don't think so. France wasn't going anywhere by itself - Napoleon III was quite blunt about that. The British weren't going to get involved once the Emancipation Proclamation was issued - indeed a large part of the reason for the Proclamation was to assure the British that the Union was truly committed to the elimination of slavery. It would have taken much more than Gettsyburg - especially in light of the Union victories in the West - to convince France and Great Britain that the Confederacy was viable.
-- MWE
EDIT: Or what Mefisto said.
Than what was he doing in Mexico?
Except that by 1863 the British had been developing alternate cotton sources in India and Egypt, which more or less cut the heart out of the Confederacy's economy.
-- MWE
The Greeks had it mythically covered.
Brother Sisyphus.
France wasn't there by themselves originally (Great Britain and Spain supported the invasion initially but withdrew when they realized what the French were doing). The British and Spanish were upset because Mexico had stopped making interest payments on foreign investments. Both countries sent fleets in support of the French invasion but pulled out once it became apparent that France was going for the kill.
In part because of their involvement in Mexico, the French could not afford to get the Union ticked off at them - which most assuredly would have happened if they had recognized the Confederacy at the same time.
-- MWE
A Lee victory at Gettysburg would have changed the course of the war in the North, certainly, especially given how badly things were going in West Virginia at the time. The Union might (probably would) have had to divert part of its strength from Tennessee east, which probably would have made the Tullahoma campaign and Chattanooga impossible in 1863.
-- MWE
I'm in Virginia - perceived as a swing state - and it's been non-stop election-related calls for quite some time. Robocalls with messages, invitations to political events, polls, and surveys by campaigns and those that probably want to sell my data to campaigns or political fundraisers. Now that I'm enjoying my well-deserved retirement, I'm home during the day a lot, and those calls are a major annoyance. I don't need anyone's help to make up my mind, and I think most people feel like that regardless of whether others would classify them as high information voters. For this and other reasons, the conventional wisdom extolling the value of the ground game may overstate its importance. Perhaps some candidate should try running on a "Vote For Me And I Won't Bother You Again" slogan.
All speculation, of course.
My mileage does vary. Recognizing the tribal is only step one. Step two is understanding consenting to a process that gets you beyond that. If you’re not willing to do that, endless contention is the order of the day.
Every facet and aspect of American politics is an Us v. Them construct. We no longer can find our way through our system to find a way to reconciliation. Reconciliation, in fact, by a larger and larger segment of the participants, is no longer valued, much less prized.
The problem is the system is ######. People hate to hear this because they have made of the Constitution a text of holy writ, we have imbued our system and our process with this sense of ineffable awe and majesty. Everything about us is all so exceptional. Yet, this system and process was conceived in a matrix that didn't prize coming to terms. Things move like they do now and now we need a system that is efficient and effective. The one we have isn't it.
For a long time, we had custom and tradition when it came to getting things done. This has broken down. What takes its place?
My gf was planning on running the marathon. She is beyond pissed about this coming out tonight, of all nights. Her parents are flying in from Chicago tomorrow morning. She'd secured charitable donations for her run (raising far more money than she could ever donate herself.)
...very seriously, in good faith: what damage does running the marathon pose to Staten Island?
I agree with you that treating the Constitution is writ is silly and self-destructive. Not sure the system has broken down relative to the past. It's a frustrating moment, but most political moments are frustrating. Politics doesn't build consensus; it isolates differences. Most periods of US history have been fraught and conflictual and have frustrated people on all sides. After the Civil War ended slavery, people spent 30 years screaming about tariffs and coinage ratios, things no one understood at all. In the 20s everybody screamed about prohibition. There's always something.
The other thing I believe is that politics rarely keeps us from simple solutions since they are rarely such simple solutions available. There are often two different contradictory solutions, each simple on its own terms, and politics is where people fight out over which to try.
Close and ill-tempered elections are part of the norm.
Now if we get close to default...
While I'd like this to be true, I'm pretty sure it isn't. This, THIS Republican party, that ran out a dozen dwarfs in the 2011-12 primary process, that disavows science, that nominated a man who, even by the incredibly low standards of politicians, seems incapable of even rudimentary honesty, is within a few thousand votes of winning the Presidency, has a useful majority in the House, and isn't all that far from taking the Senate.
This is a party that clearly, demonstrably, relentlessly put its interests above that of the country, and is nonetheless inches from power. As perverted and corrupt as the Supreme Court has been, a Romney Presidency that puts a couple more Scalia's on the court could, in a few years, make Citizens United look like a centrist way station re campaign cash on the way to the wholesale delivering of the political process to a few hundred of the wealthiest citizens.
I just can't agree that the GOP has reached a blind alley. They were a handful of state court decisions from effectively stealing the presidency by way of vote suppression. There's a vicious, soulless streak in the American character that delights in brutality. This GOP has effectively tapped into that streak. Expect an incredibly protracted resistance to the slow, slow loss of power. If this GOP had adopted a more Bushian approach to immigration I suspect we'd be looking right now at an easy Romney win.
The idea that the Jim Crow south was happy to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules until those vile Northerners sucker punched them is, well, remarkable.
We'll have to stop there, then. I have literally no idea what you're talking about.
edit: and yet, 729 is remarkably astute.
The generators involved could instead be used to restore power to 400 homes. The police have other things to be doing right now than monitoring a race.
Also, the marathon shuts down the Verrazano and Queensboro Bridges, in addition to 4th Avenue (although I guess that's technically "damage to Brooklyn", which isn't exactly what you asked). At a time when other arteries are still unusable due to the hurricane, main thoroughfares should be kept open.
Huge crowd in Ohio tonight in support of oligarchy (or something).
The idea that the Jim Crow south was happy to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules until those vile Northerners sucker punched them is, well, remarkable.
What's not remarkable is that when someone speaks about people (persons, individuals) in the South, you speak of the "Jim Crow south". Muppet morality.
You really were no better than they were. You can't be trusted. You reneged on your enunciated principle.
We'll have to stop there, then. I have literally no idea what you're talking about.
I don't think you ever did, and I don't think you ever tried--but that is a smart career move. Stick with it.
Since I don't know, I'm just asking, doesn't the marathon require a lot of streets to be closed? I can see how that would limit already limited routes of supplies to, among other places, Staten Island. Wouldn't the thousand(s) of police required to keep the event safe be better placed in, say, Staten Island?
And what Monty wrote in 757.
Yet, it gets away with it. In the view of many, it's as if we're obligated to always go back to the Constitution as it was first proposed (to the extent we can know that) and the government as it first functioned--as if nothing has happened (including a Civil War) to change any of that through the course of over 200 years. That is so stupid and so dishonest it boggles the imagination. Yet, they are taken seriously. No one questions the legitimacy of rehashing current problems and crisises in terms of 1787 or pre-Civil War state right statuses.
Affirmative action is still not enough to level the playing field in our society. It doesn't even get to equal opportunity for equally qualified workers.
Replace cotton with oil. Replace the American Civil War with the Middle East. Replace England/France with USA/England.
It's still inches from power because it relentlessly puts its interests - i.e. the interests of its base - above country. Because it's base - white men - are still the plurality of voters in the United States. And if you ask them, they're not putting party before country, they're defending the only party that still represents the "real America." They believe their party and the country are identical, and people who oppose their party are traitors.
Obama's president. We MUST be post-racial!
Most definitely with each other.
After 1860 you've got the railroads heading out to California for the gold, you've got transportation across Panama, you've got the Silver Rush in California, the Comstock Lode just before 1860, and in Colorado. You've got oil in Penn and Ohio and then Texas.
The South was resource poor for the Industrial Age and expansion by the North would effectively kill them so they couldn't allow while expansion by the South would inflame the North.
As for Britain getting in the way, they didn't want a war and had no real intention of going to war to put an end to the Civil War. Economically it was bad business as well as militarily. England was heavily invested in America and a war against the North would be ruinous to their economy and their government. Their people didn't want a war nor did their businessmen or bankers. If they ever did ask for an end it would be a giant bluff in which they would think the North couldn't say no because they couldn't risk going to war with England. Neither Gettysburg nor Antietam was going to cause that. The North would have to have worse defeats that that. DC would have to fall and that wasn't really going to happen.
Sounds about right. What's the next step?
I would have favored reparations rather than affirmative action, but I don't think they should have been mixed.
But after that introductory self-serving BS, here's an interesting piece by Nick Gourevitch that should keep Joe out of trouble for a while.....
Is Romney's Lead With Independents a Mirage?
32-29 Democrat. Sadly they don't ask the independents to say which way they lean.
- are needed in lesser quantities if they just take the weekend off
- are just the sort of thing that tens of thousands (understatement of the week) of local people do not have and need badly.
also true of generators, police manpower, volunteers, etc.
running the race almost would feel like if a celebrity dressed up on Wednesday night in Manhattan for Halloween as Marie Antoinette:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/let_them_eat_cake_SmDVCnm12OorMhfN2ag5kO
that said, it stinks that it was canceled so late that the visitors have already arrived yet don't get to race. That's on Bloomberg.
Interesting article, but the headline is out of whack with the info. presented. Romney's advantage with independents might be the highest in the most pro-Dem polls, but Romney still leads independents handily even in the polls with the lowest Dem/GOP splits.
In other news, Karl Rove says that Dems are down ~220,000 in early and absentee voting in Ohio compared to 2008, while the GOP is up over 30,000. This 250,000-vote swing almost entirely covers Obama's margin of victory in Ohio in 2008 (and McCain won Election Day voting in Ohio).
I tend to think marathon runners are nuts, but they train for these things for months or years. Getting to NYC on Friday, for a Sunday race, doesn't seem stupid at all.
@777--yup. Weird. Bloomberg's politically savvy, much of the time. This whole business with the marathon seems extremely tone deaf, as though he got it in his head that a stiff upper lip was the way to go, and only relented in the face of a dozen advisors hollering otherwise.
Why should the words of Karl Rove be given any credence this late in an election season? If you listen to campaign officials this close to an election you'd expect Tuesday's result to be a 55-55 tie.
Seriously. I have called my clients in central Jersey three times this week simply to ask "are you sure you want me flying in next week?" And I immediately cancelled the planned weekend in NYC when it was clear Sandy was going ashore in the area.
Seems the Mayor decided that the marathon was the way to show the world that NYC was too tough to be anything remotely like the victim of natural disaster a lesser city (*ahem*NOLA*ahem*) might have been, and was not welcoming to contrary points of view. Just a guess from a thousand miles away.
Well, the numbers Rove claimed are easily verifiable with the Ohio elections people. Early voting numbers are released on a daily basis.
Iowa has 584,000 early voters with it being 42-32 Democrat.
North Carolina has 2.3 million early votes with it being 48-32 Democrat
Compared to the data in 2008 the Dems have come up about 50,000 short of what they did while the Reps have improved by about 70,00 or so. But it is important to note that Ohio has open primaries so in the end it really is anybody's guess as to what the early voting numbers are saying absent polling data on those people.
The polling data that we do have on Ohio early voting is that it is going Obama's by a huge margin which suggests that a lot of the so called republican voters in the primary weren't really Republicans.
In 2008, early and absentee in Florida = 4,377,774, with Dems enjoying a 45.6 to 37.3 percent advantage. (GOP +5.3 in 2012.)
In 2008, early voting = 481,179, with Dems enjoying a 47-29 advantage. (GOP +8 in 2012.)
In 2008, early voting = 2,623,838, with Dems enjoying a 51-30 advantage. (GOP +5 in 2012.)
— source
I think Paul is in Minnesota instead of Florida because Paul Ryan has no juice in Florida while in Minnesota he has some juice there while also bringing attnetion to the Republinca over in Wisconsin. I think quite simply it is about bang for your buck at this point.
Yeah, he seemed to think there was a parallel to this and post-9/11 baseball. But baseball came back ten days later. Oh, and it was mostly confined to the baseball stadiums.
You might want to stop by RCP.
RCP has Obama up by 0.1. Every other tracking poll taken during the last 5 days has Obama up or a tie.
How are the Dem/Rep splits being calculated? If it's based on whether somebody voted in the Democratic or Republican primary, then I don't think 2012 - where the Dem candidate for President ran unopposed, while the Republicans had a hard-fought 2-4 person race through most of the primary season - can be meaningfully compared to 2008 - when the Dems had a classic 50/50 two-person battle while the Republicans had a 2-4 person race through most of the primary season. How many of those "Republicans" are liberals who took a Republican ballot this past spring because there were no interesting races on the Democratic side (obviously the latter caveat would be state-specific; I'm sure some states had interesting Democratic primary battles for other races - Senate, Governor, et al.)?
In the 10 polls in the RCP average, Obama leads in four, Romney leads in three, and three are tied. "Weekly Journalist" made it sound like Obama was +3.0 and I went nuts over a single Romney +1 poll.
***
None of those three states have an open primary, so these questions seem moot.
Florida is a closed primary
North Carolina is a semi-closed primary where unaffiliated voters can take part in the primaries.
Actually, that makes the question even more relevant. How hard is it to change the party identification attached to your voter registration? According to CNN exit polls, for example, 25% of voters in the Iowa caucus self-identified as either Democrats or Independents and 17% self-identified as "Moderate or Liberal" (as opposed to "Somewhat Conservative" or "Very Conservative").
So now we have to wait and see what that does to the day of numbers and obviously to the overall numbers. Every vote you cast now is one less vote that gets cast on Tuesday. The real questions are how many of your people can you get to vote and how many new people can you get to vote.
It shows three "Obama +1," two "Romney +1," a "Romney +5," an "Obama +5," and three ties. Based on absolutely no analysis, I'm going to declare Gallup (Romney +5) and National Journal (Obama +5) obvious outliers that should be ignored.
Also, since all the other polls essentially balance out, I rule that they're all a waste of time. Clearly the person who will win is the person who I want to win.
The article linked in #773 seems to indicate that party registration data is available on absentee ballot voters in the states mentioned therein.
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