Tuesday, October 28, 2008 - Posts
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Politics is a horse race whether you like it or not, so you might as well gamble on it with your friends. Here are the rules the Slate staff is using for our (no stakes) Electoral College pool.
Contestants choose a winner for every state. Points are awarded based on how certain the state looks to go to one candidate or the other, rewarding correct picks that go against the current political winds, like so:
- 3 points for correctly guessing a tossup state
- 2 points for correctly guessing a leaning state in the direction it's leaning
- 6 points for correctly guessing a leaning state against the direction it's leaning
- 1 point for correctly guessing a safe state in the direction it's leaning
- 10 points for correctly guessing a safe state against the direction it's leaning
The status of each state is determined by our "Election Scorecard" feature, which uses data from Pollster.com. As a tiebreaker, players guess the percentage of the popular vote for both McCain and Obama.
If you want to organize your own pool by these rules, here's a form (Google spreadsheet or Excel file) that lists the tilt for each state and calculates the electoral score for each set of picks. We'll post another spread after the election that calculates the score for each set of predictions.
A note on strategy: Some have wondered whether it would make sense to gamble the other way on all the safe states, given that an upset in one of them is worth 10 times as much as guessing according to the polls. This strategy would pay off only if more than 10 percent of the safe states flipped between now and the election, a sufficiently low probability to make it a risky move.
Got any good stories from your office Electoral College pool? Send them along. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the sender specifies otherwise.)
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Farhad Manjoo has a great piece up about the Obama campaign's text-messaging superiority. But the campaign's technological dominance extends to all corners of the Internet, as evidenced by this new video:
It's a prime example of the Internet gap in 2008. Obama's people understand the Web—what works, what doesn't, and what's funny about it. They realize that you can take a popular YouTube clip (and a great moment of FAIL), add some silly Photoshopping, and make a better ad than a snoozy Fred Thompson pep talk. Now if only they'd BarackRoll McCain.
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See all Swift Boat Watch entries here.
Who They Are: Let Freedom Ring
Purpose: To promote a conservative agenda and to counter liberal messaging. In this election, they support John McCain.
President: Colin A. Hanna
Funding: NPR reports that John Templeton, a physician and wealthy Republican donor, is a contributor.
Cost of the Ad: $5 million for the whole campaign.
Where It Ran: Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., starting Oct. 24.
Claims: Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank Gaffney says that candidates who are determined not to use force or invest in a strong military convey "weakness" that "invites aggression." (He doesn't explicitly name Obama.) The ad then quotes Joe Biden's statement that "it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama."
Accuracy: Frank Gaffney writes editorials theorizing that Islamist groups are using Obama to take over the United States. The ad implies that Obama is determined not to use military force or to maintain a strong military. Both of these claims are false. In fact, both Obama and McCain want to expand the armed forces. In a 2007 speech, Obama said, "I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America. ... I will ensure that our military becomes more stealth, agile, and lethal in its ability to capture or kill terrorists." The Biden statement, made at a rally in Seattle, is accurate.
Background: The group's Never Find Out campaign features individuals addressing Obama's tax plan, energy plan, and use of the present vote in the Illinois Senate. Other ads have attacked Obama on his comments about small-town Pennsylvanians, his position on the Employee Free Choice Act, and offshore drilling. Ronald Reagan nominated Gaffney for assistant secretary of defense; Gaffney served for seven months until the Supreme Court blocked the nomination.
Swift Boat Rating: 
Biden did warn Americans that an international crisis would test Obama. But the ad's implications—that Obama would not use force and would weaken the military—are inaccurate. The ad gets an extra boat for featuring Gaffney, who is not the most credible spokesperson.
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Yesterday, Sarah Palin said that this election is going to "come down to the wire." She may have meant it's going to be close. But she also may have been suggesting that this election rests in the hands of the hit HBO series.
If so, McCain's screwed:
Cast
of "The Wire" Campaigns in North Carolina for Obama
Stars Will Make Stops
in Raleigh Sunday and UNC Chapel Hill and Duke on Monday
RALEIGH—
Tomorrow, members of the cast of the Peabody Award-winning drama series, The
Wire will attend a Backyard Brunch for Barack in Raleigh. Seven of
the show's cast members will visit the Tarheel State in support of the
change Barack Obama will bring across the country and in North Carolina.
Chad
Coleman who plays Dennis "Cutty" Wise, Deidre Lovejoy who plays
Rhonda Pearlman, Jamie Hector who plays Marlo Stanfield, Clarke Peters who
plays Detective Lester Freamon, Sonja Sohn who plays Detective Shakima
"Kima" Greggs, Seth Gilliam who plays Sergeant Ellis Carver, and
Gbenga Akinnagbe who plays Chris Partlow will all appear at the backyard brunch
on Sunday.
Look for the attack ads citing Obama's shady drug-dealer connections. Some members of the cast also went knocking on doors, which obviously means kicking them down. On a side note, Akkinagbe, who plays Chris Partlow, confirms via a friend that Season 4 is "definitely the best one."
John McCain wants it to be one way. But it's the other way.
Update 3:51 p.m.: They also made this video.
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