Electoral College Wrapup

Sometimes cleverness is not enough. Or, as critic Rex Reed Gore Vidal once said about the Cockettes, "Lack of talent is not enough." Case in point: my photo here of Alberto Giacometti's sculpture "The Nose," from the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, was meant (all too cleverly) to evoke Pinocchio, which would immediately call to mind George Bush, who has been lying about so much the last few years that he would certainly be found out and punished severely, perhaps by losing the election. Yes, sometimes cleverness is not enough.

The averaging methodology I used for these electoral college updates, however, worked all too well, predicting on Monday a big win for Bush. As you can see, the final projection was wrong in only one state, Wisconsin, which went for Kerry. (I am, perhaps prematurely, calling Iowa for Bush on his 13,000-vote lead.)

My last futile attempt on Monday to allocate undecided voters, however, failed to take account of the fact that they refused to allocate themselves as I preferred. As a result, that map unfortunately did not turn out to be part of the reality-based community, much like the final Zogby projections.

There is much to be learned from the ups and downs of this campaign—though after the fact I must say the EC updates were finally little more than Fun with Numbers, and the Common Wisdom could have come just as close, with a lot less trouble. We are all fascinated with the horserace, it's true, and candidates need to know which strategies are clicking with the voters and which aren't, so conducting and analyzing polls is certainly a valuable skill. If you want to know more about it, Mark Blumenthal's your man, over at The Mystery Pollster. He posted an excellent preliminary wrapup this morning, and his tutorials on the fine points of the artful science are better than anything I ever saw in my years with the Census Bureau.

Thanks to all of you who have been following these updates and sending me your suggestions and ideas over the months. Today it's back to the hard work of dealing with the issues, which are even more important now that we are faced with another four years of Bush's catastrophic successes. Since you've been reading the updates, you may be interested in some of my earlier posts on other subjects (with guest posts now and again by John Shelton Lawrence):

• nonpolling aspects of the election
  
• ruminations on the American empire—this is Rubicon, after all
  
• the Iraq war
  
• religion, particularly as it is related to government
  
• terrorism
  
• or the other subjects listed under "Categories" in the left column

I welcome your comments and emails on anything you see here. For now, it's time to figure out what we should be doing in the next year or two to ensure a different result for the next election. That's clearly a cooperative effort, already begun at many of the blogs listed over to the right.

So take a short break, friends and comrades. Tomorrow it's back to the barricades!

Comments

[Frank]

Hi from your equally rueful but defiant sib.
I've been following your blog with complete agreement and don't have much to add. On those electoral maps, however, we can take some heart by looking at the cartograms produced by Mark Newman and others on http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7emejn/election/. They give a truer picture of the evenness of the divide than the traditional geographic maps because they scale the size of the states (and even the counties) by population or electoral vote. Keep the faith!

[Robert Silvey]

Those maps are heartening. Thanks for the URL. It was a very close election, not at all the mandate Bush is claiming, especially since most people had no idea they were voting to abolish progressive taxation and cripple Social Security—they voted for fear, too frightened to engage their brains, or at least to discover the facts. How can Bush claim a mandate to do something when he didn't make that something clear during the campaign?

And besides, who is this man George has a date with?