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R, Robot: Could this be the election that validates automated polls as more accurate than regular polls conducted by humans? Robopollster Rasmussen may have more riding on the New Jersey results than Obama. Mark Blumenthal (citing Nate Silver) discusses whether the reluctance of some potential voters to answer automated surverys eerily replicates the reluctance of some potential voters to ... vote--in effect giving robo-polls an effective screen for "likely" voters.** .. Also, in an especially exciting development, the Incumbent Rule may make a comeback ... P.S.: If robopolling really does focus accurately on "likely" voters, this latest Rasmussen-heavy health care chart will terrify wavering Democrats. ...
**--Post Election Update: Rasmussen and the other robopollsters were more accurate, but Blumenthal now attributes this to their "simulating a secret ballot, thus pushing voters harder to make a choice" between anti-Corzine candidates Christie and Daggett." Does this mean the robots' "likely voter" screen wasn't any better? ...10:30 P.M.
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Bonus Conditional CW: If conservative insurgent Doug Hoffman defeats the Democrat in New York's 23d District (after Republican party candidate, Dede Scozzafava, dropped out)--
Old CW: Sure, Scozzafava is a moderate Republican but that's what her constituents want.
New CW: It's a conservative district, what did you expect?
9:49 P.M.
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kf--Always the Positive Spin: The UAW's Ford workers have rejected contract concessions that would have almost-but-not-quite lowered Ford's labor costs to match GM and Chrysler's new costs, which are said to almost-but-not-quite match Toyota and Honda's. But is that really so bad? It means pattern bargaining is broken. The UAW strategy was always to take labor costs out of the auto industry's competitive equation by making basically the same deal with each of the Big Three. Yet Ford's workers obviously saw that their company was doing better than Chrysler or GM, and they refused to get in line. It's now clear that the fate of even unionized auto workers will vary with the success or failure of their individual employers. They're back to competing against each other, not just against the "bosses." ... P.S.: Too bad the GM and Chrysler bailouts, with their minimal UAW contract concessions, may have given Ford workers an excessively rosy impression of what it really means to have a failed employer. Were Ford workers scared enough to avoid the UAW's too-little-too-late tradition of concessions? Obama has short-circuited bankruptcy's shock-and-awe function. ... And not just in this case. [via RCP] ... 3:33 P.M.
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That Mid-term CW in Full:
Old CW: Wow, Corzine's a goner. Voters are pissed.
New CW: Mixed message! Mixed message!
Next CW: What do midterms mean, anyway?
2:21 P.M.
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Uncensored Twitter Vitriol Unleashed! Someone calls Stephen Fry "a bit ... boring." Can't have that. ... More evidence that many celebrities have skins of pre-Internet thinness. It seems plausible that they would have to be insulated--or have their public insulated--from what's really tweeted about them. ... 2:21 P.M.
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Hostages to Fortune: Mid-term Edition [E.A.]
[NPR Host: ...[N]ext week, the off-year election could be a political weathervane for the Obama administration. ... E.J., what do you - what do you find of interest in next Tuesday's elections?]
I think the weathervane is going to be going in circles in the end. I mean, what you're looking at in New Jersey, an embattled Democratic governor, Jon Corzine, on today's numbers is likely to squeak out a narrow victory. He's run a very, very tough campaign against Republican Chris Christie. It's as if Corzine lost the referendum on himself, then he turned it into a referendum on Christie, and Christie lost that one. And there's a third party candidate called Chris Daggett who's drawing off enough votes that Corzine will come through. And Corzine has hugged Barack Obama.
--E.J. Dionne, All Things Considered, Friday Oct. 30
John Corzine by all estimation is going to be reelected Governor of New Jersey.
--Walter Shapiro, KCRW's Which Way L.A.?, Thursday, October 22 **
Reader submissions accepted. (Email to Mickey underscore Kaus at MSN dot com). ...
P.S. I was sure this Bob Shrum column would yield a potentially embarrassing quote, riddled as it was by the assumption that Gov. Corzine was headed to unexpected victory (because unlike Creigh Deeds he "refuses to yield on core Democratic values.") But it's worded very carefully. ...
**--Maybe Shapiro left out the qualifiers speaking on a radio show? Here's the written version: "Aided by a superior Democratic get-out-the-vote drive, Corzine is now widely expected to prevail ..." 2:16 P.M
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Too Catty to Twitter--The mask of adopted authority slips: Someone who admits he thought the Ford Fiesta was "already out" --i.e. being sold in the U.S.--is maybe not the go-to expert to explain the "5 Reasons Ford Bounced Back." ... 2:14 P.M.
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"[M]ore people read the Newark Star-Ledger than watch Anderson Cooper": Jerry Skurnik claims I've failed to see the forest for the lede (about CNN's last place finish). The real story is how few people watch CNN and MSNBC and FOX combined:
And it’s not like the bigger names in Cable are reaching a vast audience either. The “giants” of cable news do much better but still reach a puny number of viewers (O’Reilly, Beck & Hannitty reach 2-3 million a night) in a country where 130 million voted for President last year.
Skurnik claims this reinforces his theory of the growing gap between the "two electorates"--the tiny minority of super/faster informed politicos and the vast mass of less up-to-speed voters. But the driver of the two-electorate phenomenon isn't so much the increased knowledge of the superinformed, its the decrease (or leave-it-until-the-last-minute delay) in the common knowledge of the less informed, no? Sure, cable news' audience is tiny in a nation of 130 million voters. It's small compared to the 20 million who watch broadcast network news. But even that 20 million is small in a nation of 130 million voters! What about the other 110 million? There's your lede! (They used to watch Walter Cronkite or Huntley/Brinkley. Now they don't. Do they remain relatively uninformed, or inform themselves at the last minute--and if so, how? On the Web? If so, where? ... Word of mouth from neighbors? Neighbors in the first electorate? Neighbors who watch cable news? ...)
P.S.: I'm not so sure about Skurnik's near-CW point that
Cable news does sometimes play an important role in our politics. But that’s only when a story they report gets picked up by those parts of the media that bloggers & cable news say is dead or dying.
I suspect Dede Scozzafava might disagree. Did the conservative rebellion in her district gain unstoppable momentum because of coverage in the broadcast and newsprint MSM? ... Update: No! It was New Media! [via Insta] ... 2:12 P.M.
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Paranoia Strikes Tweet: [UPDATED] After learning that CNN President Jon Klein had rejoined Twitter, I decided on Monday to post a "tweet" teasing him for killing "Crossfire":
@ You axed Crossfire, sucked up to Jon Stewart + MSM! Don't you wish you had Crossfire back now? Just askng!
To be honest, this was as nasty an item as I thought I could write and not come off like a total prick. Perhaps I failed at that last task. But it was also an experiment to see if nastiness pointed criticism worked on Twitter. Maybe there could be a productive, or at least entertaining, debate.
A few hours later I checked to see if there was any response from Klein or one of his defenders. But my hostile twitter didn't show up in a search for "Jon Klein," or his twitter handle "JonKleinCNN." In fact it didn't seem to turn up in a search for any of the terms used in the item, like "MSM" or "Jon Stewart."
This morning, I did get a response from Klein, and the item briefly turned up in one of my searches, only to seemingly disappear again.** It hasn't vanished entirely--it's at least still in the list of items I've posted, and presumably in the general river of tweets that flows by everyone who "follows" me. It just doesn't turn up if you search for twitters about Jon Klein.
People tell me I shouldn't read a lot into this incident--twitter search engines are notoriously flaky--so I won't. But it did get me thinking. Why do the searches for "tweets" that mention various twitter celebrities-- Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, and Alyssa Milano, and even CEOs like Klein--almost invariably turn up such pleasant comments? Here's a search for @Jon KleinCNN.. With one or two relatively mild exceptions, it's a tame (and lame) series of attaboys, welcome-backs, and this-is-what-he-saids. Don't a few more people have criticism of Klein, or CNN, on the weekend it hit last place in the ratings? Are twitterers that polite and deferential?
I mean, this is America. If you really opened up a line of communication where every horny 20-year old dude sitting on a couch in a basement typed 140 characters about Alyssa Milano for the world to see ... well, would you really want to see that stream of tweets? People would ... criticize her acting! They'd bring up her famous ex boyfriends. They'd say she looked bad in that dress and otherwise comment on her appearance. Perhaps approvingly! I'm keeping it clean here. But it wouldn't be pretty.
And yet it is. If you actually search for @Alyssa Milano, this is the sort of thing you get:
Last night @AlyssaMilano asked: How do you want to be remembered in this life? I ask you, my followers, how do you want to be remembered?
Haha I saw @AlyssaMilano RT'd u. She's so chill...and hot too!
: @alyssamilano describe yourself in 3 words. Describe your husband in 3 words.
<----watching a rerun of @alyssamilano in who's the boss :)
You get the idea. Something doesn't add up. Does Twitter maybe censor "curate" the search results for its celebrity Twitterers?
This thought would be too paranoid even for me, if I hadn't read Nicole LaPorte's article in The Daily Beast on how celebrity publicists have connections at Twitter HQ:
[V]irtually every publicist in Hollywood has a go-to person at Twitter—the equivalent these days of having an “in” with famed MGM publicity chiefs-cum-fixers Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling during Hollywood’s Golden Age.
“We’ve had a relationship with Twitter for quite some time,” said one. “We have contacts at most of the sites, so that they can help us out and give us quick tech support.”
(Perhaps journalists are shown less love? Twitter did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.)
Hmmm. Questions:
Would it even be technically feasible to delete nasty items from searches? Having once met a top Twitter tech guy who seemed incredibly competent, I'd have to guess yes.
Why would Twitter want to sanitize celeb tweet searches? That one's easy: Celebrity Twitterers like Milano, Moore and Kutcher have been very important to Twitter's growth. They take care of Twitter. Twitter takes care of them. At least that would be the equation--a familar one to anyone who has ever tried to round up bold-faced names for a party. The job of actually weeding out hostile tweets could be delegated to the celebrity's "social media director." Or the social media director's assistant. But presumably there are also Twitter staffers whose job is celebrity troubleshooting.
(Is Jon Klein such a celebrity? You might not think so--though he's listed as one. In this paranoid theory he might qualify under a Bigwigs-at-Media-Companies-Who-Might-Buy-Twitter-One Day loophole.)
It woudn't even be all that sinister--certainly less sinister than, say, the typical roped-off VIP section at a party. Web sites police comment sections all the time, after all. Alyssa Milano does talk with ordinary people on Twitter, and her twitstream or whatever you call it--which she seems to write herself--is quite informative on a fairly wide range of topics. When Obama threw out the first pitch at the All Star game, Milano's twitters gave a better account of where it landed than the Fox telecast, which had a bad camera angle..
On the other hand, if Twitter sanitized searches, that would make the site a more fake and less democratic place than it initially appears to be. Here we thought we were meeting bigshots in a virtual public square, and really it was maniuplated like the Truman Show.
Is my paranoid suspicion right? Anyone with answers--including people at Twitter--can tweet a response to @kausmickey or email me at Mickey underscore Kaus at MSN dot com.
Update: Responses on Twitter from Milano
Interesting. cc: @ RT @: Does Twitter protect celebrities? (via @) about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck
and from Twitter CEO Evan WIlliams
@Alyssa_Milano I think that guy has a pretty dire outlook on humans. :) about 1 hour ago from web in reply to Alyssa_Milano
Oracular! A non non-denial denial non-denial ...
Update II: Gawker ... a cartoon ...
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**--An earlier anti-Klein tweet that I myself deleted does turn up on one site's search of "Jon Klein." 1:28 A.M.
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