Oops, my bad
Hmm, what is this taste? Kind of like poisson, but gamier. A bit like squab, only leaner and chewier. Oh, I know, it’s crow.
Yes, I was wrong. I can take some solace in the fact that every other election prognosticator in the country was similarly wrong. Hillary surprised us all and knocked off Obama in New Hampshire. This wasn’t exactly Dewey Defeats Truman, but in these days of daily tracking polls, crosstabs, and statistical analysis, this is as surprising a victory as we are likely to ever see. There are many theories on why the pollsters failed. I think the best summary I’ve seen was done by Chris Bowers over at OpenLeft, and can be read here.
But that's the past now. The question is, what's next? Well, the Nevada caucuses (1/19)are up next, and Obama has received some high-profile union endorsements (which are historically very important in Nevada) and looks to have the inside track. Pollsters have been largely ignoring Nevada so anything could happen (though, as we learned last week, anything can happen anyway). Well, and Michigan (1/15) is also up, but Hillary's the only one on the ballot, so the impact should be limited. Then it's down to South Carolina (1/26) and Florida (1/29) before heading into the critical February 5th primary featuring a huge collection of states.
From here out, I'm not going to try and prognosticate any more, both because crow doesn't taste very good (even with a nice ginger, rosemary and pepper spice rub), and because there's a very good argument to be made that focusing on the horse race at the expense of other issues is, in fact, detrimental to democracy in general. So, I will continue to talk about the issues and interpret results, but won't be making any more silly predictions.
Finally, I'm spending this entire weekend at the Rebooting Democracy conference put on by the Oregon Bus Project. It's a great event and we've been discussing a lot of interesting things. In the coming days I'll be posting more about what we talked about, what I've learned, and where we go from here.
Yes, I was wrong. I can take some solace in the fact that every other election prognosticator in the country was similarly wrong. Hillary surprised us all and knocked off Obama in New Hampshire. This wasn’t exactly Dewey Defeats Truman, but in these days of daily tracking polls, crosstabs, and statistical analysis, this is as surprising a victory as we are likely to ever see. There are many theories on why the pollsters failed. I think the best summary I’ve seen was done by Chris Bowers over at OpenLeft, and can be read here.
But that's the past now. The question is, what's next? Well, the Nevada caucuses (1/19)are up next, and Obama has received some high-profile union endorsements (which are historically very important in Nevada) and looks to have the inside track. Pollsters have been largely ignoring Nevada so anything could happen (though, as we learned last week, anything can happen anyway). Well, and Michigan (1/15) is also up, but Hillary's the only one on the ballot, so the impact should be limited. Then it's down to South Carolina (1/26) and Florida (1/29) before heading into the critical February 5th primary featuring a huge collection of states.
From here out, I'm not going to try and prognosticate any more, both because crow doesn't taste very good (even with a nice ginger, rosemary and pepper spice rub), and because there's a very good argument to be made that focusing on the horse race at the expense of other issues is, in fact, detrimental to democracy in general. So, I will continue to talk about the issues and interpret results, but won't be making any more silly predictions.
Finally, I'm spending this entire weekend at the Rebooting Democracy conference put on by the Oregon Bus Project. It's a great event and we've been discussing a lot of interesting things. In the coming days I'll be posting more about what we talked about, what I've learned, and where we go from here.
Labels: Politics
posted by Nate Currie at
4:28 PM
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