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SurveyUSA has just released a new poll for the Washington state gubernatorial race. The poll of 634 people shows Governor Christine Gregoire leading Dino Rossi 50% to 46%. The 4% spread is an improvement for Gregoire from the 1% spread in the early April SurveyUSA poll and the 1% spread in a late March Rassmussen poll.

Clearly, the current SurveyUSA poll results are within the 4% margin of error for the poll. What this really means is that the probability of Gregoire beating Rossi is less than 95%, based on what we can tell from a relatively small sample. But we can do better than to just dismiss the poll as “a statistical tie.” Instead, we can estimate the probability that Gregoire should win, given the information available from a sample of this size. This can easily be calculated mathematically. But it is more intuitive to simulate elections and simply count the number of Gregoire wins and Rossi wins.

I simulated a million gubernatorial elections of 634 voters each, where each person had a 50% chance of voting for Gregoire, a 46% chance of voting for Rossi and a 4% chance of voting for neither.

The results give Gregoire 859,651 wins and Rossi 132,432 wins. This suggests that Gregoire has something like an 86.7% probability of beating Rossi if the election were held right now, and Rossi has a 13.3% chance of beating Gregoire.

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 and those to the left are wins for Rossi.

Things may change between now and November, but if I had to bet the (server) farm on a candidate right now, my money would be on Gregoire.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted.

Barney Frank has introduced his “Make Room for the Real Criminals” bill

It hasn’t been talked about much, but this is really bad news for McCain.

Two days into our 2nd Annual Pledge Drive we’re more than a third of the way toward our $6,000 target with slightly less than five days remaining. That’s great, and I thank all 33 donors for your generosity. But so far, only 33 of you have contributed, and that’s well below where I’d hoped to be at this point in the fund drive.

Reaching our goal is particularly crucial because it will give me the breathing space I need to continue developing the new HA, bringing you expanded content, new interface features, reader blogs and more. I have rededicated myself toward taking HA to the next level, but I also need to pay my bills; only with your help can I afford to do both.

Only $40 each from 150 donors — less than 5-percent of my typical daily readership — is enough to reach our goal, but I certainly understand that not everybody can afford to be so generous, so please give whatever you can afford. A ten dollar donation brings us ten dollars closer, and lets me know that you appreciate all the hard work I put in to making HA the most widely read and influential progressive political blog in WA state. Thank you for your support.

I’ve been reading through Dino Rossi’s transportation “plan,” trying to figure it out, and for the life of me I just can’t make his numbers add up. Wider bridges cost less than narrower bridges? Tunnels are now suddenly cheaper than elevated viaducts? We can divert $10 billion out of the state general fund to transportation, without raising taxes or cutting services, and still balance the budget?

You gotta give Dino credit though for listening to voters. Polling conducted in the wake of Prop 1’s defeat showed that voters want a transportation plan that does more but cost taxpayers less — and that’s exactly what Dino is promising. Too bad the only way for him to deliver on these promises is to print the money to pay for them.

UPDATE:
It looks like I’m not the only one who can’t figure out Dino’s new math…

“Mark Hallenbeck, director of the Washington state Transportation Center at the University of Washington, said Rossi’s numbers are ’completely divorced from reality.’ […] ‘He lowballs almost all the estimates and never says where all the funds are going to come from. It’s a political statement. It’s complete silliness,’ Hallenbeck said.
— Seattle Times, 4/16/08

“The Republican candidate for Washington’s governor outlined a number of spending initiatives, from an expensive tunnel replacing Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct to a north-south freeway in Spokane. But when it came to paying for them, he punted. Actually, faked is more like it. […] it’s another something-for-nothing scheme…”
— Lewiston Tribune, 4/17/08

“Can Dino Rossi’s freshly unveiled transportation plan solve our traffic mess? Doubtful. Many of the cost figures cited in it appear to be based more on wishful thinking than thoughtful analysis.”
— Everett Herald, 4/17/08

“…the particulars of his proposal seem a little delusional.”
— The Stranger, 4/16/08

“Of course, his plan to use all that state money has only a snowball’s chance in hell…”
— Tacoma News Tribune, 4/15/08

“Rossi’s ideas run counter to local public opinion…”
— Seattle P-I, 4/16/08

“Further criticism came from the Director of the Washington State Transportation Center, who said in the Seattle Times that Rossi lowballed all of his estimates.”
— KXLY, 4/16/08

Credit: Clifford DesPeaux/Seattle P-I

Honestly, this never would happen on light rail.

I’ve written about it before, but never in such detail as Paper Noose at Blogging Georgetown… the bizarre, semi-secret way we elect the King County Conservation District board. This is the only kind of election the righties win around here anymore — you know, the kind almost nobody votes in.

Join the fun at 3Trillion.org.

April 17, 2008 – LOS ANGELES – Fox News channel is debuting a new show next week called “Fox’s PC Police.” The half-hour show will be a daily recap of all the groups who have recently been offended by Barack Obama. Hosted by Michelle Malkin, the first week of shows covers how Obama has offended Amway salesmen, CPAs, the University of Utah field hockey team, John Wayne’s ghost, KLM stewardesses, and Brit Hume’s cat “Whiskers.”

The show will also feature several other daily and regular segments.

John Gibson will frequently join Malkin in the studio in order to show clips of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and to explain how Bill Cosby would lecture Wright on how to be a civilized black person.

Brent Bozell III will host a segment called “Panties in a Bunch” where he will point out how Satan’s influence is destroying your children through your television set.

And finally, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Donohue will have a daily debate called “The Victim-Off,” where the two men argue over whether American Jews or American Catholics are the most persecuted people on the planet. The only thing they will agree on is that African-Americans, Palestinians, and gays have absolutely no reason to be angry and should stop playing the victim card all the time.

Now that the show has been previewed by select members of the press, the show already has a higher viewership than The Glenn Beck Program.

No joke… Democrat George Fearing outraised incumbent Republican Doc Hastings in the first quarter, $38,000 to $33,000. Hastings still has big cash on hand lead, but it’s not so big that Fearing can’t get on a level playing field. And this is WA-04 for chissakes.

Jimmy’s got the details.

Yesterday I announced my second annual HA Pledge Week with an ambitious goal of $6000 from 150 readers… and in the first 24 hours we raised $945 from 16 contributors. That’s a great start. A big thanks to everybody who has contributed thus far.

This pledge drive is crucial for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that maintaining HA has become a full time job, and for the moment, my only source of regular income. The ads you see and the contributions you make are what permit me to pay my bills and keep on blogging. But I also have ambitious plans to expand HA over the coming months, and your demonstrated commitment will make it all the more possible for me to raise the kind of money necessary to make my vision a reality.

If HA has become a regular part of your daily routine, please show your appreciation by contributing today. And if you believe we need more progressive media, not less, then your contribution is all the more important.

New meaning was given to the expression “happy birthday, and many happy returns” in this birthday/tax day edition of Podcasting Liberally.

Joining The Birthday Boy (who has no business pushing their buttons, some Righties claim) was a taxing panel of political bloggers and boisterous blowhards: Will, Lee, Carl, and Nick.

They begin with a bitter discussion of “bittergate,” and a better discussion of a bitter Rossi’s budget busting “Progressive” Transportation “Plan” fantasy. Next the bloggers barked at Reichert’s sub-prime fundraising bust and boasted about Burner’s better fundraising bonanza. There was some banter about the Colombia trade deal and bellyaching about the Sonics, too.

The show is 54:46, and is available here as a 51.3 MB MP3.

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_april_15_2008.mp3]

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

Remember all those funny acronyms from last fall’s mainstream media coverage of the Roads and Transit campaign? YOE, for year of expenditure was a favorite of many of Seattle’s newspaper writers and columnists. They were fixated (examples here, here, and here) on slapping the Roads and Transit plan with as high a price tag as they could by including inflation into the total price tag of the plan, not just the price tag in current year dollars. By doing so, they held the Roads and Transit plan to a standard never before seen for a tax measure or capital construction program in our region.

Yesterday Dino Rossi released his transportation fantasy and said it would cost $15.5 billion in 2007 dollars. Keep in mind, that’s in last year’s dollars.

I have done a little bit of “back of the envelope” math (you know the kind that Rossi’s Republican, anti-light rail pals did when they fed the media their scary cost numbers on Prop 1) and the results I get are staggering. Rossi’s $15.5 billion plan, when you account for 4 percent annual inflation over a 30 year construction schedule, suddenly balloons to $50 billion dollars. And this doesn’t even include the interest on the bonds that would be needed to finance all of Rossi’s made up project cost estimates. So we would have to add all of the interest payments to the $50 billion number to get the true cost, well at least according to our friends in the “traditional media.”

You can do the math yourself with this handy little inflation calculator.

UPDATE [Lee]: This part from a post by Martin at the Seattle Transit Blog made me laugh:

So I looked to Dino Rossi’s Transportation Plan with hope and anticipation. I shouldn’t have. This document was first sent to me by a Gregoire operative; when your own campaign literature is being gleefully distributed by the other side, that’s a bad sign.

I haven’t yet had the time to study Dino Rossi’s newly unveiled transportation “plan,” but one element immediately leaped out at me:

Rossi proposed funding high-occupancy-vehicle projects on the Eastside by tapping Sound Transit money that would otherwise be used mainly to build a light-rail line from downtown Bellevue to Seattle.

Of course, such a proposal may have a certain appeal to Rossi’s anti-rail constituency, but if he really wants to be governor I suggest he put down those Discovery Institute and Washington Policy Center briefing papers, and take a little time reading the state Constitution:

ARTICLE XI, SECTION 12: ASSESSMENT AND COLLECTION OF TAXES IN MUNICIPALITIES.
The legislature shall have no power to impose taxes upon counties, cities, towns or other municipal corporations, or upon the inhabitants or property thereof, for county, city, town, or other municipal purposes, but may, by general laws, vest in the corporate authorities thereof, the power to assess and collect taxes for such purposes.

Um, see Dino, Sound Transit is a local government with local taxing authority, and the state simply cannot direct it how to use its revenue or its surplus. Local voters authorized ST to raise this money for a specific purpose, and only local voters can redirect these funds. Who is your legal adviser… Tim Eyman?

Promising to do something and having the legal authority to do something are two different things.