The 2014 Midterm Elections

The 2014 midterm elections will soon be upon us.  Whether you are buoyed the President's fall in popularity and failure to panic the public with dire predictions of consequences of a 3% cut in the growth of spending, or you are just raising your head above the depressing waters that inundated you last Fall, you need to consider the ground on which the battle for the House and Senate will be fought next year.

The evil lord of collectivism even now musters his dark forces for this, his final battle.  Here is a look at those craggy heights, rugged canyons, rolling hills, and expansive plains where the armies of freedom must this time triumph or face decades of oppression.

A Tale of Two Electorates (Part IV)

Here Niall Stanage of The Hill tells us about two different data sets reporting on the ethnic makeup of the 2008 electorate.  The first and most often quoted is a set from 18,000 interviews by media polling organizations at the exit door of the polls presumably on election day.  The second is a set from 60,000 interviews by the Census Bureau, presumably weeks or months later.  About the first, note that election day voters were about 40% of the total in New Mexico in 2008, while regarding the second, voters memories are notoriously faulty.

Here are the two ethnic breakdowns compared:

A Tale of Two Electorates (Part III)

My son Matt got wound up on the national vs. state poll question reading Dan McLaughlin, who writes the Baseball Crank blog.  If you are a baseball fan, a fan of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, or you've ever heard of the baseball uber-statistical methods known as Sabermetrics, you'll like this almost as much as Matt does.

It was number four with a bullet -- as Variety used to say -- on today's late edition of RCP.

A Two of Two Electorates (Part II)

The picture is becoming clearer.

Here is Jay Cost -- once an election analyst with RCP, now with The Weekly Standard -- pointing out what should have been obvious weeks ago: that the two different kinds of poll results for Romney v. Obama, whether in individual states for incorporation into an electoral vote model, or nationally for estimating the popular vote, are the result of sampling different populations.

[Oops!] A Tale of Two Electorates

Out of lack of familiarity with Rasmussen's site -- I've not been following it -- I picked up Pennsylvania's numbers instead of Ohio's and concluded that Ohio wasn't leaning Romney.

Rasmussen's national and state numbers are much more consistent than the RealClearPolitics national and swing state averages are, just as they should be, having been drawn from the same data sets and analyzed by the same techniques.

More to follow.

A Tale of Two Electorates

The national horse race polls show Romney up an average of a point or so, while the state polls show Obama winning the key swing states.

The question from my elder son Matt this weekend was "How can both be right?"  He argued at length that there simply weren't enough votes to push toward Romney without changing the result in any of the larger states.

Some Encouragement

With this election's final act only a week from tomorrow, individual state polls and electoral analyses seem stuck.  Romney's surge in the popular vote doesn't seem to be reflected in the swing states that will determine the winner in the electoral college.  That could be because the pollsters doing those state polls aren't all that competent -- many are not national polling organizations with reputations to protect -- because they are tweaking the results to push their agenda, or because those polled are just not willing to give up their personal decision.

Gallup's First Likely Voter Poll Out

Here is Gallup's first likely-voter result.

Gallup's likely voter screen is basically the same one they have used forever.

In this poll, the Romney margin on the if-the-election-were-held-today question is 5 percentage points higher among those who pass the likely voter test than among the registered voters who don't.

The Choice We Face

I have written to you that this election is the most important since Lincoln's in 1860.  If we allow this President to continue in office for another four years we may never recover the foundation of our prosperity: our economic liberty.

Obama Will Not Easily Recover from his Denver Debacle

Mitt Romney's performance in the first face-to-face meeting with Obama was surprisingly good.  His strength in defending his proposed economic policies from sound-bite attacks was the least of it.  His assertive attitude at the podium -- fairly stated as "I have as much right to stand here as you do, Mr. President." -- was not the biggest part of it, either.  The fact that he almost never looked down to refer to notes, but rather looked pleasantly at the President as he spoke was not the key, though the contrast with Obama's near constant smirk while staring at his notes was remarkable.

The Fruits of Anti-Colonialist Strategy

Dinesh D'Souza's point in his now-famous analysis of Obama's motivation on foreign and domestic policy alike is clear in the present Middle East policy crisis.

Our President knows exactly what he wants to do about the loss of respect for the U. S. in the Middle East: first, apologize for American values; then insult any American who dares speak up to point it out.

Polling in Individual Swing States Infrequent

Many of you look at the RealClearPolitics electoral map with some regularity, so you probably know it presently shows Romney trailing Obama in electoral votes by 191 to 221 with 126 electoral votes in swing states that are close enough not to call right now.  You are to be congratulated for not paying too much attention to the horse-race polls, of which the RCP summary and average is here.

The End of Democratic Socialism

Seldom does a political observer nail a problem in such clear language as this:

Whither the Campaign Now?

The WSJ's Kimberly Strassel hit the nail on the head in her column this morning.  With his selection of Paul Ryan as running mate, Mitt Romney has an opportunity to change the debate about the future of "entitlements."

The Demagogues... er... Democrats will screech that the devil Romney/Ryan ticket will steal your Medicare savings and give them to their rich fat-cat Wall Street friends.

The Romney/Ryan campaign will be judged by the electorate on how well it hammers home the twin messages that Obama seeks to remain on the track that leads over the cliff in ten years, and that maintaining Medicare and other middle class entitlements at the current planned levels can only be paid for by job-killing middle class taxes.

On the Obama plan, we all will have less.  The elderly will have their health care rationed as more physicians refuse to take the prescribed payments.  With higher taxes, the middle-aged and young will have less incentive to produce the necessary goods and services to trade to the health care sector to meet the needs of our aging society.

As usual, central planning assures its own failure, and fails to plan for it!

Does Romney's Selection of Ryan Clarify the Electoral Issues?

I often enjoy Walter Russell Mead.  His thoughtful blog has been very much worth reading over the last two years or so.  He has defined the progressists' goal as a "blue social model" in which the government supplies all the things it thinks we need.

Here, Mead points out how Romney's selection of Ryan crystallizes the argument between those progressivists and the conservatives who argue that economic freedom produces the most for everyone, even the poorest among us.

Mead hopes that the debate will be better for the country after Romney's pick of Ryan.  So do I, but I fear that the Obama camp will cry havoc and loose the dogs of war.  Rather than arguing rationally, I believe they will continue to engage in nothing but demagoguery and slander.

Romney Makes a Great Decision, Chooses Paul Ryan for VP

It's amazing how one great decision can so strongly effect your opinion of a man.

In announcing Paul Ryan as his choice for Vice President yesterday, Mitt Romney showed judgement and courage, as the decision focuses his campaign on the big issues raised by Obama's progressivism and its failure.

Ted Cruz Interview Video

If you didn't see Ted Cruz's interview on Fox News Sunday, you missed one of the best ever.

Here it is.  It is10 minutes of thrills for a conservative political junkie.  Watch it!

Cruz Wins Texas Senate Runoff -- Part II

Here is an in-depth analysis of Ted Cruz's victory yesterday by a lefty who should probably remain in the shallow end of the writer's pool with his water wings firmly attached.

The headline claims that with Cruz's selection by the Republicans and probable election in the Fall general election, the Senate will become a lot more conservative.  Yet our intrepid author says Cruz's positions were hardly different from Dewhurst's.

Kilgore's point comes through his prose but dimly: Cruz's victory hammers home the Lugar message that the conservative wing of the party is not prepared to compromise with the Spendican wing.  No one should be wondering where the tea party is, now.

Maybe that's why FreedomWorks' President Matt Kibbe's new book is titled Hostile Takeover.

Cruz Wins Texas Senate Runoff

Up the Establishment!

Tea Party v. Establishment in Texas Today

Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, 41, is the candidate for the Republican nomination for US Senate of the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and the tea party.  Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, a Texas oilman with deep pockets, is his establishment supported opponent.    This is Texas, so the Republican primary winner will in all probability win the seat.  Here is the complete story.

In May Dewhurst beat Cruz 45% to 35% in a 4-way contest but fell short of the 50% he needed to avoid a runoff. 

Yesterday, a poll taken over the weekend was released that showed Cruz leading Dewhurst by 10 points.

The runoff is today.  You'll want to pay attention tonight.