(h/t Crooks and Liars)

Consider this an open thread.

In this episode, Goldy and friends offer condolences to congressional candidate Darcy Burner over the loss of her house (and cat) earlier in the day. Next they dive into a multi-threaded discussion of the Washington state gubernatorial rematch, surrogate attack dogs, fake scandals and all. The podcast ends with a brief (roughly…seven word) tribute to the late George Carlin.

Goldy was joined by Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly, Seattle’s blogging pioneer N in Seattle, HorsesAss and EFFin’ Unsound’s Carl Ballard and HorsesAss’ former blogger emeritus Will.

The show is 51:19, and is available here as an MP3.

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_july_1_2008.mp3]

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to creators Gavin and Richard for hosting the site.]

In 2004, Washington state witnessed the closest gubernatorial election in history, as then Attorney General Christine Gregoire defeated then real estate broker salesman Dino Rossi by 129 votes (later changed to 133 by a court).

A year and some later (April, 2006), the now defunct East Side King County Journal asked about Rossi What’s his shelf life?:

The charismatic and smooth conservative came within a whisker of winning the governor’s mansion in 2004 and is widely expected to seek a rematch with Democrat Chris Gregoire in 2008. Will it be “Dino Who?” by then?

In politics, it is said that a year is an eternity. So what does that make Rossi’s four-year hiatus with no political office or bully pulpit while Gregoire relentlessly dominates news cycles week after week?

It was an interesting time to ask the question. At the time, Rossi was leading Gregoire by 51% to 38% in a Strategic Vision poll asking about the 2008 election. In fact, Rossi had led Gregoire by more than 50% to Gregoire’s less than 40% in the five other polls taken after the election contest and before April 2006.

The Republicans resoundingly lost the legal battle in the election contest of 2005, but they won the PR battle. Governor Gregoire began her first term polling as less popular than the loser of the election. After a highly contentious, close election, followed by a multi-million dollar Republican dis-information campaign (a.k.a. the election contest), Gregoire’s approval–disapproval spread started out strongly negative, and remained in negative territory for her first year in office. Then, after a 6 months period of nearly even approval (Jan 2006 until June 2006), Gregoire emerged from negative approval-disapproval territory.

Starting from a very bad position, Gov. Gregoire genuinely won over the electorate.

But what about Rossi? When he launched his 2008 gubernatorial campaign (umm…for the second time), Rossi routinely quipped:

“Last time I started with a 12 percent name identity statewide. Most everybody thought Dino Rossi was some kind of wine at that point. A cheap wine at that,” Rossi said….

But name recognition isn’t enough. On the public’s perceptional palette, had Rossi matured into a vintage wine? Or had Rossi’s cheap wine turned to vinegar?

In 2005, Pollster Stuart Elway pointed out:

“’We wuz robbed’ won’t be a strong campaign theme, and Dino will have to present a credible challenge to an incumbent this time. It won’t be like he’s a challenger coming from out of nowhere, but my question is how he stays on the radar screen when he doesn’t hold any office.”

Elway’s concerns were prophetic. Rossi was never able to remain an important player in Washington politics. (Hell…he wasn’t much of a player in Washington state Republican politics, either.) For example, Rossi refused to take a stance in Initiative 912 that would have repealed a state gas tax increase. Neither has Rossi grown in the interim. His campaign stump speech has evolved minimally since 2004. And, at least early in the campaign, Rossi was still running on the “We Wuz Robbed” platform.

The inevitable result is that Rossi has squandered his position of great strength from 2005 and 2006. Just look at the polling. Here is a compilation of every publicly-released head-to-head Gregoire–Rossi poll for the 2008 election:

(Note: different pollsters probe undecided voters to very different degrees. To make the numbers comparable, I have normalized the results so that the Gregoire% + Rossi% sum to 100%.)

After leading in the first 15 polls in a row (through November 2006), Rossi has lost all but one of the most recent 15 polls. A running average puts Rossi about 7% below Gregoire. At this time during the 2006 election cycle, senatorial candidate Mike McGavick, running against an incumbent Sen. Maria Cantwell, had just peaked at 9% below Cantwell. In other words, beginning with a huge advantage in 2005, it looks like Rossi’s residual advantage of the 2004 election (and contest) has shrunk to, roughly, a 2% advantage over McGavick’s unimpressive performance.

The electorate just isn’t taking a liking to the Rossi-brand whine. (Perhaps Rossi shouldn’t be building a campaign on sour grapes.)

(Cross-posted at Hominid Views.)

Join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. Officially, we start at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some folks show up early for Dinner.

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area this evening, check out McCranium for the local Drinking Liberally. Otherwise, check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

Elway has just released their June poll for the Washington state gubernatorial race. The poll of 405 people shows Governor Christine Gregoire leading Dino Rossi 47% to 39%.

The 8% spread found by Elway is the largest of the three June polls in this race. An early June SurveyUSA poll found Gregoire leading by +3.5%, and an early June Rasmussen poll found Gregoire up by +7%.

As usual, I use a Monte Carlo analysis to estimate the probability that Gregoire would win if the election were held now. I simulated a million gubernatorial elections of 405 voters each, where each person had a 47% chance of voting for Gregoire, a 39% chance of voting for Rossi and a 14% chance of voting for neither.

Gregoire won 965,619 of the simulated elections and Rossi won 3,852 times. This suggests that Gregoire has something approaching a 96.9% chance of beating Rossi (if the election were held now). A statistician would simply point out that Gregoire’s lead in this poll is outside the margin of error.

Here is a plot showing the distribution of votes in the million elections:

The area to the right of the red line are wins for Gregoire; those to the left are wins for Rossi.

This current poll makes the eighth consecutive poll in a row in which Gregoire has led Rossi. At this point in the election season, Gregoire holds a commanding lead over Rossi.

Some month ago, when asked what kind of computer he used John McCain responded:

“Neither. I am an illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.”

Now the McCain campaign has suggested that Grandpa McCain doesn’t use the computer at all:

…this morning at the Personal Democracy Forum conference, Mark Soohoo, speaking on behalf of the the Arizona senator’s Internet team, was asked whether McCain even uses a computer.

His response: “You don’t need to use a computer to know how it shapes the country.”

Really? The Republicans expect Americans to seriously consider a candidate that doesn’t use a computer?

Soohoo may be right that you don’t need to use a computer to understand its cultural and economic impact.

What bothers me is what this says about McCain’s intellectual curiosity—specifically, his lack thereof. Are we really going to elect into the most powerful office in the world, a man who shows no interest whatsoever in the most powerful product of human collective culture?

And haven’t we just experienced a painful lesson from electing a President who lacks any vestige of intellectual curiosity?

SurveyUSA released the first poll of the season in the 8th CD race between Darcy Burner and Rep. Dave Reichert.

The poll surveyed 679 likely voters on June 16th and 17th, and showed Reichert leading Burner 51% to 45%.

As usual, I try to assess these poll results by a simple Monte Carlo analysis. I simulated a million fictitious elections between Burner and Reichert, using the observed percentages and the number of people polled.

Reichert won 948,339 of the elections and Burner won 48,199 times. In other words, the poll results suggest that, for an election held right now, Burner would have a 4.8% probability of winning the election and Reichert would win with a 95.2% probability.

Here is the distribution of outcomes (percentage of votes) from the million simulated elections (Reichert victories are those to the left of the red “tie” line, Burner victories are those to the right):

At risk of coming off as just another amen blogger, the poll results don’t strike me as particularly bad for Burner. Yeah…she is -6% down, but Reichert, as the incumbent, starts out with the advantage. The poll’s cross-tabs look reasonably positive for Burner. Among other things, of those who said they could change their mind, 50% were Reichert supporters and 39% were Burner supporters. Also, Reichert holds 35% of the pro-choice vote. It’s hard to imagine that the Burner campaign won’t make in-roads into that group.

This poll comes on the heels of massive mailings of campaign flyers franked informational pieces from the Reichert campaign congressional office. The Burner campaign, to my knowledge, has not made any media purchases.

Furthermore, Reichert has recently gotten a lot of well-deserved publicity for eco-friendly votes. I say “well deserved” because, clearly, Reichert’s handlers have developed a brilliant strategy that has rendered the local media stupifyingly blind to Reichert’s strategy of full participation in Republican obstructionism in Congress during procedural votes, only to switch his vote when the results are certain passage. Daniel Kirkdorffer has meticulously documented this rather cynical strategy. It is hard to say whether Reichert’s people will be able to maintain their spell over the media through November.

(Cross-posted at Hominid Views.)

The Governor’s big night out:

This reveals a fundamental difference between Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain:

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama released their Senate financial disclosure statements on Friday, revealing that Mr. McCain and his wife had at least $225,000 in credit card debt and that Mr. Obama and his wife had put more than $200,000 into college funds for their daughters.

Yeah…the circumstances differ. When you leave your wife to marry a fabulously rich heiress, a quarter million of debt comes off as chump change—even “at a stiff 25.99 percent interest rate.” And squirreling away a couple hundred thousand for your kids future isn’t really necessary. But the fiscal report betrays a rather caviler fiscal attitude in the McCain residence.

This strikes me as a metaphor showing a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. Republicans—the self-anointed party of “fiscally responsibility”—have intentionally outspent their means. They’ve piled unprecidented debt onto the backs of Americans for generations to come.

George W. Bush came into office with a $5.7 trillion federal debt. Today that figure has ballooned to $9.5 trillion, which means that every American has their own $31,100 credit card charge.

Contrast this to Bill Clinton, who took office with $4.4 trillion in federal debt and left office with $5.7 trillion. And with a budget surplus in his second term, Clinton pushed hard to invest in the future, a vision captured in his farewell address:

First, America must maintain our record of fiscal responsibility. Through our last four budgets we’ve turned record deficits to record surpluses, and we’ve been able to pay down $600 billion of our national debt–on track to be debt-free by the end of the decade for the first time since 1835. Staying on that course will bring lower interest rates, greater prosperity, and the opportunity to meet our big challenges. If we choose wisely, we can pay down the debt, deal with the retirement of the baby boomers, invest more in our future, and provide tax relief.

Instead…we got George W. Bush and the Big Credit Card.

This fall we will have a choice between Candidate A, whose household finances show a credit card debt of $225,000 and Candidate B whose household has saved $200,000 to invest in their children’s future.

Pretty easy choice, huh?

In this episode, Goldy and his panel take on the BIAW, say “amen” to overly-sensitive journalists, explore issues of secret ballots and voter integrity, note how the top-two primary leads to absurdities like a “Grand Old Party Party,” and tackle our region’s tough mass transit problems.

Goldy was joined by Democratic candidate for Secretary of State Jason Osgood, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly, HorsesAss and EFFin’ Unsound’s Carl Ballard and HorsesAss’ blogger emeritus Will.

The show is 49:31, and is available here as an MP3.

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_june_10_2008.mp3]

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to creators Gavin and Richard for hosting the site.]

Fresh on the heels of the Survey USA poll I wrote about this morning, Rasmussen Reports has just released their head-to-head poll pitting Washington state Gov. Christine Gregoire against her Republican challenger, Dino Rossi.

The Rasmussen poll surveyed 500 likely voters on June 9th. Gregoire led Rossi 50% to 43%, with another 2% selecting “other” and 5% who are not sure. The +7% advantage that Gregoire has in this poll is about double that of the SurveyUSA poll (which was taken from the 7th to the 9th of June).

What are the chances that Gregoire would win an election today, based just on this poll? Let’s figure it out using the computational equivalent of a sledge hammer. I simulated a million gubernatorial elections of 500 voters each election. Each voter in each election had a 50.0% chance of voting for Gregoire, a 43.0% chance of voting for Rossi, and a 7.0% chance of voting for neither.

Gregoire won 949,070 times and Rossi won 2,829 times. In other words, the poll results suggest that, for an election held now, Gregoire would have a 95.2% probability of winning the election and Rossi would win with a 4.8% probability.

Here is the distribution of outcomes (percentage of votes) from the million simulated elections (Rossi victories are those to the left of the red “tie” line, Gregoire victories are those to the right):

Since the Rasmussen and SurveyUSA polls were taken almost simultaneously using similar methods, it seems quite reasonable to combine the polls. Of the 1,137 pooled poll participants, 571 (or 50.2%) of them “voted” for Gregoire, 514 (or 215%) “voted” for Rossi and 52 (or 4.6%) choose neither. A million simulated gubernatorial elections later, Gregoire wins 952,104 times and Rossi wins 44,749 times. The pooled set of polls suggest that, if an election were held now, Gregoire would have a 95.5% probability of winning and Rossi would have a 4.5% probability of winning.

You may be wondering why Gregoire’s probability of winning actually increase when the Rasmussen poll is pooled with the SurveyUSA poll. The answer is that Gregoire percent of the vote actually decreases slightly in the pooled analysis. In the Rasmussen poll she led by 50%/(50% + 43%) = 53.8%. In the combined poll, she leads by 50.2%/(50.2% + 45.2%) = 52.6%. But even with a smaller estimated fraction of the vote, there is more certainty that her lead is real (95.2% for the Rasmussen versus 95.5% for the pooled polls). This is because the certainty is more strongly affected by the larger sample size in the pooled polls.

Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulated elections (combined polls):

As I suggested previously, it is unlikely that Gregoire’s lead is an artifact of sampling error. Now, with seven consecutive polls in a row in which Gregoire leads Rossi, it is even more certain that she is truly in the lead.

(Cross-posted at Hominid Views.)

A new poll in the Washington state gubernatorial race was released yesterday. The SurveyUSA poll conducted from June 7th through the 9th asked 637 likely voters who they would vote for in an election held now. Governor Christine Gregoire received 50.4% of the “votes”, Dino Rossi received 46.9%, “other” received 1.4%, and only 1.3% were undecided.

The +3.5% lead for Gregoire is substantially narrower than her +11% lead in a May 12 Rasmussen poll. But the current result falls squarely in line with all other recent polls: a late-April Elway poll that gave Gregoire a +5% lead, a mid-April SurveyUSA poll that gave Gregoire a +4% lead, and a Rassmussen poll in late March that gave Gregoire a +1% lead.

The current SurveyUSA poll results are within the 4.0% margin of error, which means that, given a sample of only 637 likely voters, the probability that Gregoire’s lead is “real” (in an election held now) is something under 95%. This is commonly called a “statistical tie,” but we can do better than that. We can estimate the probability that Gregoire would beat Rossi (and vice versa) in an election held now.

I simulated a million gubernatorial elections of 637 voters each election. Each voter in each election had a 50.4% chance of voting for Gregoire, a 46.9% chance of voting for Rossi, and a 3.5% chance of voting for neither.

Gregoire won 824,097 of the elections, and Rossi took 9,687. In other words, the poll results suggest that, for an election held now, Gregoire would have an 83.2% probability of winning the election and Rossi would have a 16.8% chance of winning the election.

Here is the distribution of number of votes (converted into percentages) from the million elections (Rossi victories are those to the left of the red “tie” line, Gregoire victories are those to the right):

The good news for Rossi is that this poll places him back in the running, unlike the previous Rasmussen result. Rossi may have been “unlucky” during that poll—that is, just by chance, perhaps too many Gregoire supporters were polled. Alternatively, Gregoire may have experienced a large surge in support last month.

The bad news for Rossi is that Gregoire has held the lead for six polls in a row now, and has led in seven out of the eight polls taken this year. (The last time Rossi led was in a March 5th Rasmussen poll, in which he held a slim +1% advantage.)

With poll after poll showing Gregoire up, it becomes very difficult to attribute her leads to chance. In other words, the consistency across polls suggest that Gregoire really does hold a solid lead over Rossi—at least at this point in the election season.

Join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. Officially, we start at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some folks show up early for Dinner.

Tonight’s activity…we will “veto every single beer”…

…with ill-marks, because it’s a Google.

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area this evening, check out McCranium for the local Drinking Liberally. Otherwise, check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

You may remember Part I of the McCain: “I am an illiterate” series, where John McCain was asked what kind of computer he uses:

“Neither. I am an illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.”

Just in case there are any lingering doubts that he is wildly out of touch with the 21st century, McCain demonstrated that he is (rather unsuccessfully) taking vocabulary lessons (my emphasis):

We’re going through a process where you get a whole bunch of names, and ya … Well, basically, it’s a Google,” McCain said. “You just, you know, what you can find out now on the Internet. It’s remarkable, you know.

Pathetic. Is this an example of McCain’s famous “straight talk”? What can we expect next from “the straight talk express”…McCain asking African Americans, “Who Let the Dogs Out,” and complementing them on their bling bling?

(H/T Political Wire.)