CO-04 (Special Election)
See Full Big Line
(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
See Full Big Line
(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
See Full Big Line
(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
See Full Big Line
(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
See Full Big Line
(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
See Full Big Line
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
October 20, 2010 04:28 PM UTC
128 Comments
Seeing the title, I fully expected some 3 sentence vanity diary about how awesome Buck is and how it would be impossible for him to lose (Beej-style).
I may not agree with the legitimacy of your “conventional wisdom,” principles or further extensions you’re utilizing, but it is an interesting statistical perspective.
Kudos for the time you must have put into this.
Is the 3% for Charley Miller. Didn’t see that coming.
Unafilliated 8%
Republicans 5%
Dems 1%
The green party candidate is not doing very well.
David I have been away for a while so I am hoping your Cory Gardner SIG is a joke?
“At a town hall meeting Wednesday evening, Cory Gardner remarked, “I think the administration is trying to say he was born in this country.” [Coloradoan Executive Editor Bob Moore’s blog, 8/20/09]
According to the Coloradoan, Republican congressional candidate Cory Gardner believes President Barack Obama ‘is most likely a citizen’ of the United States, his campaign manager said Thursday in response to criticism of Gardner’s statement on the issue a day earlier. [Coloradoan, 8/21/09] ”
Sorry David. That scared me for a minute.
without doing an even perfunctory review of the video Breitbart edited. Pardon me if I hold all of their reporting suspect.
You’re counting on the fact that numbers are boring to most people, so people will skim through the diary and think you’ve done some really profound mathematical analysis.
All you did is made some assumptions based on a single poll, ignored any trendlines or the fact that there are still two weeks until the election, and then fiddled with the numbers a bit to get the result you wanted. Anyone can do that.
The “undecideds break for the challenger” theory is no longer true and hasn’t been since the then-shocking way that undecideds went for Bush in 2004. So that’s a pretty serious assumption you’re making.
It’s also kind of weird how you’re splitting up the 65-and-older vote from the 64-and-under vote in order to get a few extra votes for Buck. Why not split up the male and female vote? Oh, right: because it wouldn’t give you the result you wanted, even though women may be especially motivated to vote in this election and really dislike Buck.
In fact the only reason to promote this weak diary is to demotivate Democrats. Wonder why David did it.
Looked at the author.
Skipped the article entirely and went right to the comments.
which I forgot to mention is that there are only 1000 voters surveyed. By itself that’s not bad, but when you start analyzing poll results based on breaking the categories up into Democrats over 65 and such, you’re dealing with much smaller numbers of voters (only a couple hundred or so). The margin of error shoots up then, and three or even two decimal places of accuracy are completely meaningless.
Typical polls are somewhere around 500-800.
He’s talking about the MOE on the subsamples, not the entire survey.
I’m talking about the entire survey. Plus, the MOE on the subsamples with 1000 total voters is still going to be better than the MOE on the subsamples with less total voters. It’s a non-argument.
Reread my post until you understand it.
what he says is on point:
Headline of that article:
And just below your cherry pocked quote –
Nate SIlver has completely debunked this theory, subject to all the vagueroes of polling and MOE weeks out.
What 538 says most incumbents who are tied or leading, even when not over 50%, WIN
You may or may not be right, but citing statistical certainties? Gimme a break. You’re not a mathematician or a scientist and lots of Polsters are.
All you’re really doing here is substituting your likely voter model for fox’s. Except your likely voter model makes assumptions that are more skewed to Buck.
I think Republicans will vote in this race at a rate higher than their percentage of active voters sugests. I used a 40-30-30 model instead of 35.4-33-31. Among other things that suggests that to me are the Republican vote in their primary was much larger than the Dem vote in their primary; that Republican requests for absentee ballots exceeds Dem requests by 45K and that where voting is occurring in other states it appears that the group showing up most has gone from black women in 2008 to white men in 2010.
As to the age demo older voters more often than not dominate in off year elections. 65% of the vote was 45+ was how it worked in the last mid term. That is why I thought 30-30-40 was a reasonable model for the 18-39;40-64; 65+ demographics.
I think my model’s assumptions are reasonable. We will know in a couple weeks.
It’s meaningless to compare your assumptions today to the results in 2 weeks. What would you compare it to, exit polling on election day? You could be right or wrong about turnout and still come to the same election result, meaning that you haven’t validated your assumptions.
I took a lot of econ in undergrad and grad school, and all the models we used carried the warning, “Assumptions may not be valid in the real world.”
Truer words were never spoken.
And I would add, Fox’s model results in a 10/45/40 split, Maes/Hick/Tanc. If anything, Fox’s model seems skewed Republican in order to get that result. H-man’s “analysis” is just a justification to skew the results further Republican.
I’ve talked to several solid Republicans who are not voting for Buck.
Like Ralphie, I saw the title and author and skipped the article. One more thing I noticed was who front-paged this: David Thielen, Mr. Passive Aggressive “Democrat” himself. Yet another reason why the rules shouldn’t have been broken adding him as an ColoradoPols editor.
that put David into his front-page editorship, maybe Dan Maes can also be governor. This year is cra-a-a-a-azy! Why follow the rules when it’s so much for fun to suspend them?
It is not a question of blindly touting the line, it is a question of supporting the party candidate. You of course can support whoever you want just quit calling yourself a Democrat.
I just don’t think they’re perfect.
Forget about their deficiencies for now. It is too late.
Vote them in and then start pushing them to be more progressive!
If that doesn’t work to your satisfaction… find a Progressive to run against them next time in the Primary.
Primaries are the time for the type of discontent that you are exhibiting.
David has always been a strong liberal voice at Pols, even if he breaks from the Dems on an occasional issue or candidate.
I always enjoy hearing his thoughts.
but in general I agree. I just don’t think it helps us to attack and criticize, in essence hand our opponents ammo during a very tough election season.
I have always believed in challenging the administration or those in power at any level. I do not believe it helps anyone but our opponents to constantly hand-wring.
but he does seem to be on the right side of issues 90% of the time.
I could only hope to get that much from our elected officials.
🙂
DT was 3rd in a two way race. And yet, still “won.”
It points out how “likely voter” models affect the result of a poll.
I think we can all agree that some of H-Mans assumptions are suspect.
But at least he’s trying to contribute with substance, as opposed to some others on the site.
Republican Ken Buck has a dwindling lead over Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet, who has gained ground in Colorado’s U.S. Senate race since August, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.
More than half of Colorado voters say the struggling economy is the top issue and the state is on the wrong track, but Buck, a former prosecutor, has been unable to make political headway despite the sour voter mood.
“This race is narrowing pretty substantially,” Ipsos pollster Julia Clark said, noting Buck’s support had remained essentially frozen since August, while Bennet had improved by five percentage points.
“Bennet seems to have some momentum,” she said. “A Tea Party candidate like Buck should be doing better in this political environment.”
________________________
Undecided voters are clearly starting to break for Bennet especially given Bucks alcoholic “buyers remorse” day on Sunday. No real polls out since that grand performance.
His motivations have been very questionable since the primary. His I am a Democrat, but… shtick has gotten very old.
a thread bashing David. Not without equally bashing H-man for his — ha! — two-decimel-point precision on subgroups with huge margins of error (as sxp pointed out) and his likely voter model even more forgiving than the one used by Fox News. Can’t we bash both?
I am in.
Yet when a Democrat speaks up about imperfections in our own candidates, some then pound them for not being fully supportive. I put what I think is best for the country before what is best for the party. If you don’t like that prioritization – tough.
Are poised to take at least one house of Congress and make gains in the other.
Why? Because they march in lockstep.
If you don’t care what’s good for your party, maybe it’s not really your party.
I don’t want to be a lockstep party like the Republicans. I like that you challenge and are willing to criticize in order to constantly strengthen our party. We definitely need that.
I don’t think it’s helpful, appropriate, or in any way constructive to do it during the election season. I certainly don’t think you’re helping anyone but yourself (a lГЎ your mentor Sirota) when you attack our party during a very hard election season like 2010.
Here’s a link:
http://www.realclearpolitics.c…
The earlier Reuters poll finished polling on August 22, 60 days ago, and then had Buck up 49-40. At the rate Bennet has closed the gap he would not catch Buck by November 2nd.
Because voter opinion moves at the same glacial pace two weeks before the election as it does more than two months earlier, right?
I really appreciate the fun you’re having with calculating slopes and such, but a big part of applied math is that the numbers you have are not precisely known. The difference between 48 and 45 is not 3 when you’re talking about polls. It’s anywhere between -2 and 8, or between 0 and 6, depending on the margin of error.
It’s fine to do a scatter plot between many points even if you don’t know them precisely, since you tend to get some meaningful information about trends. You can’t get a meaningful trend out of just two points especially if they’re not precisely known.
This is assuming you actually care and aren’t just saying anything that will help make Buck look better.
it’s almost like we need not bother to have the election at all.
I’m pretty sure the law requires it, and besides, the ballots are printed so we may as well.
Buck was up by 3%. So let’s recap:
Internal Bennet polls show Buck up by 1
Rasmussen shows Buck up by 2
Reuters shows Buck up by 3
Holy crap it’s a trend! Trend, trend, trend!
Nobody drew any conclusion about a trend based on different polling companies. The conclusion was drawn based on the same company releasing several different polls, in which there’s a trend.
Hey, it turns out if you lie about one thing, you can draw any other conclusion you want!
Two polls do not make a trend. If Rasmussen comes out with another poll showing Bennet winning, then a trend will have been established.
… before you basically had an online orgasm, writing a post titled something like “Boom!” and touting Tanc’s newly awesome odds. My point, because you’re sure to miss it unless I whack you in the hesd with it: you get pompously sanctimonious about 2 polls not being a trend (“as i have explained so patiently…”) barely days after you gleefully party about one (or was it two?) poll showing a Tanc surge. This is just too easy; thanks.
http://www.coloradopols.com/sh…
Bennet internals last week showed BENNET UP 1.
Bennet internal polls predicted the primary results much more closely than the public polling did. In fact they had it pretty much nailed.
Bennet’s polling company is in COlorado. They understand Colorado. They understand this cycle.
I’ll never forget having a discussion with the pollster for a presidential campaign a few years back. He admitted he had never done any polling in COlorado, but felt it “should be similar to New Hampshire, just bigger.” He thought this mostly because, both states were approximately 1/3 R, 1/3 D. 1/3 registerd but not D or R. He didn’t completely ignore the difference in urban-rural mix, he just felt that was easy to adjust for and the registration distribution was the key.
Suffice to say he did not understand Colorado, and as a result his polls were poorly constructed. It’s gotten better since then – but most pollsters don’t sample well in Colorado because they don’t understand us. Or they don’t understand what’s going on cycle to cycle.
However, there are four factors which could change the outcome in favor of Senator Bennet.
First, whenever the gubernatorial candidate for one of the parties is weak it usually reduces the number of affilated voters from that party who vote. There is no question the Republican candidate for governor is very weak. That could suppress the number of Republicans who vote.
Second, the momentum, at least for the past two weeks, has turned in Senator Bennet’s favor. Mr. Buck has continued to make gaffes and received a lot of negative publicity.
Third, negative advertising always suppresses those least likely to vote which usually means unaffiliated voters. That fact could cut into Mr. Buck’s lead among unaffiliated voters and shift the election to Senator Bennet although it is impossible to determine whether the unaffiliateds who favor Senator Bennet may also not vote.
The fourth factor is the under 35 vote. Most of my younger friends tell me they do not subscribe to a landline phone. They only have cell phones. Have the pollsters adequately polled this group. I don’t know but if they haven’t, the young will break for Senator Bennet which, again, could tip the election in his favor.
We’ll know November 2nd or sometime on the 3rd.
Tancredo is the all-but Republican candidate for governor, and his place on the ballot is going to bring out some number of voters who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered.
There’s a potential for an anti-Tancredo backlash vote (among Latinos, liberals and suburban women), but without air-time driving that, it’s hard to see that materializing yet. The assumption Hickenlooper is cruising to victory will also have an effect on Democratic and like-minded voters.
But in any case, it would be a dangerous assumption to think the Republican vote might be suppressed this year. If anything, Buck is driving it and Tancredo is helping it along, not the usual model.
The fact that YOU are voting for him does count. Do you have a source? Anything?
Scroll on by.
chalk it up to them having absolutely NOTHING to back up Beej’s bullshit assertion. Nothing new there.
Not sure why Beej MSU still seems to surprise me.
There were dueling rallies at Auraria on Monday. The Bennet rally was easily twice the size as the Buck rally. Half of Bennet’s rally chanted “If you vote for Buck” then the other half answered “you’ll have buyer’s remorse”. It was pretty humorous.
This is why I called bullshit on Beej’s claim. What I saw leads me to believe college kids are going for Bennet. I wasn’t going to post it as I have no link or source to cite.
to talk to their respective college political clubs and Buck outdrew Bennet significantly, like 3 or 4 to 1. I recall reading an post to that effect.
Student Involvement Fair – lots of students signing up at the Republican booth, few if any at the Dem booth.
Even at CU they have a huge College Republicans group. Bennet came to CU and about 5 people came to see him. Buck packed the house with several hundred. Ask Jess Johnson about it.
I was on a college campus recently for a political event and there were a lot more R students present, at least based on volume.
Oddly, I grabbed my clipboard I did my own little random survey. Registered to vote? Here on campus or “home”? Is “home” in Colorado.
Yeah, I believe there were more R’s present. I believe many were from out of state. Or not registered.
H-Man at least tries to back up his facts.
Beej is like a leaky faucet spraying acid in all directions.
Burning anyone that dares to approach it.
What are you talking about?
You’re a fake campaign away from becoming Charley Miller.
I’ve seen this used frequently, but know of no evidence to support it. Perhaps it is another one those ‘everybody knows’ things that is not real but you are not allowed to disagree with.
Check out this link to an article fro 538 as to how undecideds break which was cited above.. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.n…
Now that’s audacity!
Headline of that article: Incumbents Polling Below 50 Percent Often Win Re-Election, Despite Conventional Wisdom
What 538 says most incumbents who are tied or leading, even when not over 50%, WIN
First an apology for not chasing this back to the source, but I’m lazy and you already did the work…
What is the nature of the numbers you start with? Are they raw data, or have they already been subject to a likely voter screen?
If the latter is true, aren’t you applying a (presumably) pro-Republican bias twice?
Just wondering.
So basically, it’s the pre-weighted data. You can’t really weight the “Republican” category with more Republicans if that’s all you’re reporting.
The cross tabs by age show only the 18-39 group supporting Bennet. H-man’s likely voter model weights this group at 30% of all voters, based on an AARP analysis. Using his screen, Buck wins 50-45. Yet this poll says it’s a 2-pt race, not a 5-point race. It would appear that the only way to do this would be to significantly increase participation of 18-39 yo’s, at the expense of 65+ yo’s.
Or is there another explanation?
But they also reported the raw crosstab data, which H-man weighted differently to get the 5 point gap. Just depends on your likely voter model.
http://www.civicyouth.org/PopU…
Midterm elections, 18-29 yo’s vote at ~30% (31% in 2006).
Turnout(%) increases with age.
So, H-man’s age correction is probably flawed.
Can’t speak to the rest of it.
I am not saying that 30% of 18-39 year olds will vote and that 40% of 65+ will vote. As your chart indicates the numbers for 18-29 are slightly higher than that and for the 65+ demographic they vote over 60% as a group.
What I am saying is the total amount of 18-39 year olds that vote will represent 30% of the total amount of voters and that the 65+ demographic will represent 40% of the total amount of voters.
In the last off-year election 65% of the people that cast votes were 45+ demographic according to AARP.
which I beleive results in not double counting assumptions. I was trying to make the analysis clean.
See my comment above to Beej. It looks like Fox thinks there will be more young voters.
which means yes, they have already had a screen applied. H-man is applying an additional screen on top of that. Good question.
The fact that neither bjwilson83 or H-man knows this (despite the fact that it’s clearly stated literally a hundred times in the linked PDF) means their opinions aren’t worth much.
If BJ now takes H-man’s diary and applied an even stronger pro-Republican screen, and then H-man takes BJ’s diary and applies another one, I think by election day they might have Buck leading by 110%.
is clearly not very good at math. H-man is applying the screen to the original crosstab data rather than the final weighted data.
He’s not using any “original” data.
Do you know how Fox News figures out who a “likely voter” is?
You haven’t read the data, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.
The beej has patiently explained that Buck is going to win because he is going to win. Isn’t that enough for you?
If I use the % of republicans who are going to vote for Buck, it does not matter if the poll thinks that % is 20% or 50% of the universe, I am just using the % of republicans. After I did the same thing for Dems and unaffiliated, then I weighed the percentages.
If I used their combined numbers, I would have incorporated their weighing process. I did not.
Because Fox News isn’t just assuming Republicans are more likely to vote. Fox News is also asking each Republican how likely s/he is to vote. Maybe conservative Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting than moderate Republicans. In that case the number you got about Republicans is skewed in the direction of conservatives being more likely to vote. Same is true for 65-or-older voters; some may be more enthusiastic about voting than others depending on their political affiliation.
The likely voter model is more complicated than just the distinctions you used, which means there’s a lot of cross-group contamination, and so the numbers you’re using are not raw data.
Fox News already tried to do what you did, and their result is the set of numbers you saw. Manipulating it further is pointless at best.
The Dems do have a pretty good GOTV machine, so I think they may do slightly better than predicted in motivating people to vote. However, Republicans have a good GOTV machine this year too, and with the voter registration numbers there is no way more Democrats vote than Republicans. This means that if unaffiliateds break for Buck or even slightly for Bennet, Buck will win.
you writing a diary that is more than just random cheerleading or howler monkey screeching with nothing to back it up. You did some research and critical thinking and gave us something to discuss. This is what this site is all about.
I wish your protege, bj, would follow your lead.
What do you think the correct assumptions are as it relates to party affiliation and voting in the Senate race. We know the baseline 35.4 republican, 33 Dem, 31 unaffiliated. If we just use those numbers we pretend there are no voter enthusiasm differences. It is pretty clear to me there is a differential but estimating it is guess work. What is your guess?
Once again, and hopefully for the last time, Fox News has already incorporated the voter enthusiasm differences. That’s why their crosstabs deal with likely voters. You are not dealing with raw data here. You are manipulating data that has already been manipulated in your favor.
As Pols points out below, the Republican share of the vote has consistently been 35-36% every midterm election for the past 14 years, including 2002 when there was a lot of Republican enthusiasm and 2008 when there was a lot of Democratic enthusiasm.
That is not what the link shows.
so naturally I’ll take your word for it.
who are clearly smarter than I on the matter.
Unlike BJ, I know where my limits of understanding are. I am reading and attempting to learn but so far it all Greek to me. 🙂
There are many Dems who are doing a pretty good job refuting your points.
The data is what it is, ie, not perfect.
The “critical thinking” seems to have started with a desired conclusion, and worked the data to derive the desired conclusion.
I’ve seen other polls, and data analysis, that point to a very, cery close race. (If the election was held late last week, it would have been + – about one half of one percent.)
Meanwhile, the only assumptions that help now are the ones on actual turnout. If R’s don’t turnout as assumed, Bennet wins. If U’s break R as predicted, and turn out low Bennet wins. If D’s don’t turnout or vote D – Buck wins.
This last category is the most troublesome.
How many Norton voters will sit out or not vote? I suspect very very few.
How many Romanoff supporters will not vote Bennet? More than the Norton R’s.
That would be a big jump from historical numbers.
From 1996-2006, the average turnout percentage in Colorado for each party is as follows:
Republicans: 36%
Democrats: 30.5%
Unaffiliated: 33%
No Party in Colorado exceeded 36% turnout during that time period, so to suggest that Republicans are going to surge to 40% is quite a bit too optimistic.
I would have expected more variation.
That would seem to rebuke the whole enthusiasm gap argument. The same percentages of party affiliations are going to vote no matter what.
They quoted the registration numbers for active voters. The people that actually vote range from the mid 40s% to mid 50s% in midterms and somewhere in the 60s% range in a Presidential year.
I understand you may not agree with my assumptions but come on.
That could never, ever happen.
Of course, H-Man looks at the subjective “likely” voters.
The republican GOTV effort in Colorado is third world compared to OFA. I was at a lunch recently with Dick Wadhams and they were proud that they had their informaiton in a computer databse this year compared to 2 years ago. It really sounded quite archaic. Amazing.
1) You really think “This race is not, and has not been for months, close”?
* Real Clear Politics polling average: Buck + 1.0
* Fivethirtyeight: Buck +2.0
It’s close; there’s really no way to dispute that unless you’re cherry-picking polling — which you are:
2) You cite a Fox poll showing Buck winning independents, but ignore the PPP poll showing Bennet winning independents by a much larger margin! You dismissed that PPP poll on the logic that PPP is doing more Dem polling… but c’mon, Fox isn’t just as partisan? When you cherry pick, the cherries aren’t really that tasty.
Don’t get me wrong: I think you’re much less of a hack than Pols is for unfathomably predicting a super-happy 2010 election night for Colorado Dems; and I think your Buck by 5 prediction is better than the prediction of a Bennet win by 72% of Pols folks answering the Pols poll. But it is hackery for you (1) to deny this election has been close, and(2) to cherry-picking evidence on independents from one Fox poll while ignoring another contemporaneous poll showing just the opposite.
In some quarters that is close. I don’t think it is a 1 or 2% race or that it has ever been that since August.
Look at the Dem vote, 1% undecided and Bennet is at 45%. I don’t see him getting to 47%. The undecideds are republicans and unaffiliateds and will break for Buck.
But the data are not indicative either way.
Elections have deadlines and this one hasn’t come yet. Please, get Buck on Face the NAtion, or MTP or CNN. Hell, I’d be happy to seem him on Colorado PBS or News9 another time.
Everytime he opens his mouth in front of a microphone now, it’s good for Bennet.
It’s an hour or so. I though his responses on health care reform were total mush, but I’ve been too busy to get a diary together. Maybe by the end of the week…
Repeal the death panels. (myth)
Repeal the 16,500 armed IRS agents. (myth)
Repeal the gov’t take over (myth)
Keep the part about preexisting conditions (true)
Keep the part about no life time caps (true)
keep the part about kids on parent’s family policy (true)
In short- Repeal the bad mythical parts-keep the real stuff.
“Clarification” (Buckpedal) to follow.
But I’m mostly concerned with what he sees as an alternative. Somehow he thinks that HDHPs with HSAs will cure all so long as we separate insurance from employment and offer an income tax deduction.
And while he says he’s against a mandate, he says that if you get sick and don’t have insurance, there should be some sort of financial penalty (your assets will be at risk). Huh? How’s that work? Either it’s like the new system (penalty for not having insurance) or you go broke if you get sick.
What percentage of Americans are driven to bankruptcy by health care bills? And tax deductions? Doesn’t he realize that poor people don’t get tax deductions?
Anyway, it’s all hokum. Total BS.
– balanced budget amendment and TABOR for the Feds
Buck acknowledges this could take many many years to pass, and may not ever pass.
So, his point is he has no idea to address the budget deficit now. Next year or the year after.
– jobs
Buck claims business is holding off expansion and hiring because of “uncertainty” due to the health care reform and talk about cap and trade
Hooey. I’ve run small businesses. The only question can I hire someone today to make my company more profitable or competitive. Not some bs about how I can’t predict my health insurance cost three years from now.
Buck claims US manufacturing is stuck because of “over regulation”. His example is the one Bennet talks about with great effect- that the US imports solar panels from China. Buck then makes a bunch of spurious noise about things that aren’t at issue in the US, and whines about wages here being too high.
Well, I guess we could follow the communist China’s lead and have gov’t set wages and manipulate our currency to increase our “competitiveness.” Somehow I think that would be a problem – and it would be better to provide the kinds of market moving incentives that would get panels made and bought here.
– Bush tax cuts
Buck (checks hand) and says we should make them permanent. Deficit? What deficit?
When the interviewer pushes back with data that shows the Bush tax cuts ballooned the deficit and the debt, Buck counters by saying he doesn’t have that data, but intuitively he knows trickle down works.
budget fairies
– health care
Buck: keep the pre-existing conditions rules, and the rules about kids on the parents’ family plan. And portability. But no death panels and no gov’t take over.
abortion
Buck – almost never legal, only if in the 1 in million case where the life of the mother is at risk.
The interviewer asks if that means criminalizing the doctors and women. Buck says he hasn’t thought about that.
And goes on to say we need to reduce the number of abortions.
The way to reduce abortions is to provide education and counseling about birth control and abstinence, to make it less necessary, not less available.
Then there was some hooey about some other stuff.
Important stuff – but not important comments.
He is a shill, but one, the only one on this site, who produces (occasionally).
My thoughts, no poll data. I think and hope Bennet wins. I don’t think Buck would be good for CO or the US. I also think that Personhood is going to drive folks to the polls and those folks are not going to vote NO on Personhood and YES for Buck.
Workmis so busy that most mornings I do a quick read, post maybe a minor news story, and go to work. The stuffntoday got a lot of replies but work is very very busy and so I had to go and leave questions to me unanswered.
Thanks to those who replied.
Then you don’t have time to promote.
Today has been tough. The frozen waffles burned in the toaster oven and the dog tore up the front page of the newspaper bringing it in the door. Not to mention I put on a pair of blue socks that didn’t really match — does that ever happen to you? I felt off balance all day!
I’ll be posting pictures of my niece’s school recital soon, so don’t worry.
… wait, this isn’t Facebook? Must’ve clicked on the wrong tab! These newfangled browsers! Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em!
Anyhoo, time to order up a pizza — treat the fam to some delivery tonight! Nice of y’all to check in. Bye now.
I read through all 122 comments following the excellent work by H-Man. What stuck out was the consensus among the contributors that this is purely a progressive site. I found it entertaining the exchanges were akin to a conversation one might find in the politburo. Of particular interest was the attacks on David for not towing the party line. This was priceless. I assume Coloradopols has assigned someone to tail him for fear he might talk bad about THE PARTY.
Now back to the topic of the thread. H-Man is spot on with his analysis. Nate Silver has Buck with a 66% chance of winning. Nate and anyone else not engaged in deceiving themselves recognizes Bennet has not been able to move above 45% This in spite of outspending Buck 4 to 1. $4 million on negative ads since September 15th and he has not been able to bust through the 45 ceiling. Certainly Buck’s numbers have dropped from 50% but so what. He as led from the jump and Bennet is stuck!
The tell tale sign will be if Obama comes to town. If Obama comes to town they are admitting defeat and hoping to energize the base at the risk of backlash from the Bennet Obama message.
Okay back to my gulag before the reds attack me for being a shill and not loyal to Dear Senator.
You just sound kind of dumb.
I liked your “No2Dems” account better. Your posts were shorter and easier to scroll past.
(almost) to change mine to, “That sig line smells like shit.”
It can be read in at least three different ways, depending on how you interpret the punctuation.
Those who don’t, less so.
And those who only question the methodology were ignored when they could come up with different results.
This race is a coin toss.
If it snows next weekend – it will change the result.
If Bennet burps – it will change the result.
If Buck goes on tv and says something erceived as dumb or controversial – it will change the result.
But I’m probably wrong. It’s an R year – your work is done. Ballots are already cast and in th email or getting dropped off. It’s over – and Buck won.