Archives for November 2009

It’s election night! So drop off those ballots and then join us for some electoral politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning about 8:00 pm. Or show up early and dine liberally.

Some say tonight is lady’s night at DL…guys will be buying the drinks…especially for attractive gals dressed in red. It’ll be absolutely scandalous!

Not in Seattle? With 340 other chapters of Drinking Liberally, there is sure to be one around your corner.

The Seattle Times’ Bruce Ramsey thinks “lazy people” shouldn’t vote:

For the past 30 years I voted at a neighborhood church. As years went on, more people I knew were voting absentee, though they weren’t absent from the city. They were just absent from the polling station.

Lazy people. I thought it was a bad idea to make it easy for lazy people to vote.

Right. And it’s urban liberals like me who are accused of being elitist.

Like Ramsey, I too prefer the communal experience of going to the polls over the private clerical task of filling out and mailing in an absentee bailout. So much so, that I chose to drive down to King County’s “accessible voting center” in Tukwila today, to check out the touch screen voting machines, and cast my ballot in person. The service was fast and friendly, and I found the printed receipt reassuring, though the machines were considerably less intuitive than a paper ballot.  During my ten minutes there I saw two elderly voters ask for help.

But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, if Ramsey is such a dedicated poll voter, he too could have chosen to back up his words with action, and vote in person. But I guess he was too busy. Or lazy. Or whatever.

Still, it’s not really for me to judge Ramsey’s preferred method of voting, and certainly not for me to suggest that it’s a bad idea to let people like him vote, just because they’re unwilling or unable to put the same amount of effort into the process as I do.

I’m just sayin’….

“The fact that an idea is proven as a disaster doesn’t mean it dies in American politics. One of the perverse things of our federal system is that there’s dozens of states that the advocates of these kinda lunatic measures can continue to funnel money into to try to get them on the ballot.

Basically, to get things on the ballot you just need enough money to get the paid signature gatherers in the state to qualify for these ballot measures, and so as a result, if you’ve got a fringe group of kinda anti-tax radicals, even when you’ve seen it gut a state like Colorado on health care, on education, so much more, they can get this stuff on the ballot and bring it to a vote.”
— Matt Miller

I’m cautiously optimistic about this year’s two statewide ballot measures, expecting R-71 to pass, and I-1033 to fail, but when the numbers start coming in shortly after 8PM, I’ll be paying particular attention to the county-by-county results.

There’s little doubt that King County, with about a third of the state’s electorate, will vote overwhelmingly pro-gay and anti-Eyman, as will several other reliably liberal counties. So if the early numbers are even remotely close, it will be the results from the other side of the mountains that could provide the best predictor of the final outcome.

I simply don’t expect R-71 to lose big enough where it needs to lose big if the measure is to be defeated, thanks in large part to the strong libertarian streak that defines the western states. I’m not saying that Central and Eastern Washington aren’t majority conservative, just that there isn’t an overwhelming majority of conservatives out there who are particularly interested in denying rights to gays and lesbians. They may not like gays, and they certainly wouldn’t want their children to become one. But their lives are their lives, and all that.

One would think this same libertarian streak would bode well for Tim Eyman’s government drowning I-1033, but this is where personal self-interest comes into play. For as much as rural Washingtonians bask in their self-image of rugged independence, their limited tax base leaves them more dependent on state tax dollars than more populous regions of the state, and thus their communities would be disproportionately impacted by the inevitable cuts in state spending I-1033 would necessitate over time.

Already struggling to meet basic needs, I-1033 has received little support from local elected officials, even Republicans. And local voters are swayed by their local leaders.

So while I expect I-1033 to pass in the vast majority of counties, I don’t expect it to pass by nearly a large enough margin to offset its loss in King County.  I’ll be looking to counties like Yakima, Chelan, Spokane and Benton as early bell-weathers for the other side of the state, comparing their results to that of 2007’s I-960. Here on our side of the mountains I’ll be paying close attention to populist Snohomish and Clark counties in anticipation of a possible shift onto the anti-Eyman side of the ledger.

I’d like to believe that there is less of an East/West divide than there’s often made out to be. And I’m cautiously optimistic that tonight’s election results will bear this out.

I was driving along Rainier AVE yesterday, when I saw Joel Connelly. On the side of a bus.

Apart from being a tad distracting to see a larger than life Joel staring back at me from the side of a bus, it was interesting to see that the P-I online is A) actually spending money promoting the product, and B) promoting open and honest “bias” as a selling point.

Looks like Hearst may be wrapping its collective mind around the new medium.

In America’s Vancouver, the big talking points in the mayor’s race often wind up being about stuff the city can only control on the margins. Like jobs.

(In case the link won’t load, it’s a link to a final Columbian article where challenger Tim Leavitt and supporters accuse incumbent Royce Pollard of wishing small business and jobs and anything good would rot and die, and Pollard says “No, no,” and the simple truth that national policies are responsible for the horrendous economic disaster is not really mentioned. If nothing else, Leavitt gives good press conference.)

At any rate, it’s possible a winner will be declared tonight!

It’s also possible that things will be too close to call, and weeks and weeks will go by, as a virtually tied race is slowly, slowly updated, day after painful day, until nobody, not even the candidate’s families and pets, really cares any more. People will still be losing their homes and jobs, and since mayors are not the Federal Reserve, it will still suck.

And then it will be 2010, an even-numbered election year! Yeah! At any rate, today is “Election Day.” You’re smart enough to figure out what to do with your ballot.

A new KING-5/Survey USA poll in the Seattle Mayoral Race was released today. This race has Mike McGinn facing off against Joe Mallahan. Just last week, a Washington Poll poll had Mallahan leading McGinn by 44% to 36% with 20% undecided. The results suggested that Mallahan had an 89.9% probability of winning.

Today’s poll of 586 people (taken over the weekend) shows a tighter race with Mallahan leading McGinn by 45% to 43%. A Monte Carlo analysis (methods) consisting of 1,000,000 simulated elections using the proportions and sample size observed in this poll shows Mallahan winning 635,831 times and McGinn winning 352,638 times. Statistically, the results are a tie. But Mallahan has a small edge with a 64.3% probability of winning; McGinn has a 35.7% probability of winning.

The distribution of election outcomes from the simulation says it better than numbers:

The red bars on the left are Mallahan wins, and the blue bars on the right are McGinn wins.

There are a number of possible confounders here that make this extremely close race even more uncertain. Most obvious is the age discrepancy in support which The Stranger’s Eli Sanders points out may lead to some systematic (statistical) bias:

Remember, too, that SurveyUSA only reaches voters with land-lines, and that some of McGinn’s strongest support is among younger voters—who frequently only have cell phones.

Who knows….

Mark Griswold may be an asshole, but more significantly, he’s a really crappy muckraker. I’d throw in a link, but honestly, he doesn’t even deserve that much respect.

What a maroon.

UPDATE:
In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, Publicola explains.

The non-partisan King County executive race has proud Democrat Dow Constantine squaring off against bashful Republican non-partisan Susan Hutchison. Last week’s Washington Poll gave Constantine a 47% to 34% lead over Hutchison.

A new King-5/Survey USA poll released today essentially confirms last week’s findings. The poll of 614 likely or actual voters gives Constantine a 53% to 43% lead over Hutchison with 5% undecided.

As usual, I’ll use the poll numbers and sample size to assess the probability of each candidate winning (methods are given here). The Monte Carlo analysis of a million simulated elections gives Constantine 962,298 wins and Hutchison 35,378 wins. That is, the poll result provides evidence that Constantine will win Tuesday’s election with a 96.5% probability. Hutchison has a 3.5% probability of winning. Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulated elections:

The red bars are wins for Hutchison, and the blue bars are Constantine wins.

This is the first big test since last November’s initiative made the Executive a non-partisan position. And it sure looks like the electorate won’t be fooled by this non-partisan stuff.

This afternoon I sent the following email to TVW President and CEO Greg Lane:

Subject: Bad Faith DMCA Takedown Notices
From: david@horsesass.org
Date: November 2, 2009 2:08:55 PM PST
To: greg@tvw.org

Dear Mr. Lane,

I am writing in regard to the takedown notices TVW recently issued to YouTube and Vimeo regarding my video “Suzie Huckabee,” in the hope that we both can avoid any unnecessary legal expense.

Under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), copyright holders are required to make a good faith effort to consider Fair Use before issuing a takedown notice. Judging from your public statements and actions regarding a Dow Constantine ad which similarly makes use of TVW video, and for which TVW also issued a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, it is apparent that TVW understands that use of your clips in this limited manner merely violate your policy, not your copyright. I do not doubt that you believe that Constantine and I are “hiding behind fair use,” but that acknowledgment in itself clearly suggests that your DMCA takedown notices were not issued in good faith.

As such I respectfully ask TVW to remedy the situation as follows:

1) Promptly communicate to YouTube and Vimeo that your DMCA takedown notices were issued in error, and formally request that the video in question be restored.

2) Promise, in writing, that TVW will refrain from issuing similar DMCA takedown notices in the future, without first making a good faith effort to consider Fair Use, as required by law.

3) Issue a formal apology for misusing the provisions of the DMCA in your efforts to enforce your own non-binding copyright policy.

If all three of these steps are fulfilled, I will accept the issue as closed. Otherwise, considering how TVW has repeatedly harassed me with bad faith DMCA takedown notices — and considering the dangerous precedent your routine abuse of the DMCA has set — I will regrettably have little choice but to seek redress through the courts, so that this issue may be settled once and for all… and well in advance of the next election season.

Sincerely,

David Goldstein
HorsesAss.org
“Politics as unusual.”

So there.

The details have yet to be released, but the latest KING-5/Survey USA poll shows Democrat Dow Constantine surging to a 10 point lead over Republican Susan Hutchison in the race for King County Executive.

The poll, conducted over the weekend, shows Constantine leading 53-43; that’s a fifteen point swing from KING-5’s 10/13/09 poll, which showed Hutchison leading 47-42, and is consistent with other public and private polls I’ve seen over the past week and a half. Furthermore, with Constantine leading by 12 points amongst voters who had already cast their ballot, Hutchison would need to carry late voters by a better than 14-point margin in order to win.

What accounts for this stunning reversal of fortune?

Women give a 3-to-2 margin to Constantine over Hutchison. The last poll had the candidates split in that category.

Hutchison has an overwhelming edge among Republicans and conservatives in the non-partisan race, while Constantine leads overwhelmingly among Democrats and liberals.

As it should be.  As Democrats in general and women in particular learned more about the candidates, their positions, and their values, traditional Democratic voters came home to Constantine.

That in the end is the fatal flaw in the Rossi-esque tabula rasa strategy Hutchison pursued. Refusing to define yourself can only work if your opponent fails to define you for you.

Update: Here is a link to the current poll results.

I’m not much into the idea of publishing endorsements, because anybody who reads me regularly should already know where I stand on the races I cover, but I thought I’d make an exception to mention a race I haven’t written much about:  the Seattle City Council contest between Robert Rosencrantz and Mike O’Brien.

Vote for O’Brien.

In the end, it really comes down to values. O’Brien is a progressive Democrat and Rosencrantz isn’t. And while I don’t object to having a couple Republicans on the council to mix things up, it’s not like the council is currently a haven for radical lefties… and it won’t get any more so with the imminent election of Sally Bagshaw.

I’m just sayin’…

Ted Van Dyk makes my job as a snarky blogger so much easier.

Susan Hutchison, through her role as a board member of the conservative Stewardship Foundation, has helped steer nearly $600,000 to anti-choice groups over the past few years. But since she refuses to actually answer Yes or No to questions regarding reproductive choice, I guess that’s something voters don’t need to hear about.

(Most dishonest campaign ever.)