For insane predictors, lets look to sports:
Since the late 1930's there has been 16 elections, all of which predicted the election with the Washington Redskins' last home game. If they win, the incumbant party retains power. If they loose, the chalenger wins. They lost to the Green Bay Packers, Targens favorite team, 28-14. However, the Patriots 22-game-record-win-streak was also broken yesterday, so maybe that could be seen as a nullifying factor?
Also when the Boston (Kerrys home-state) Red Socks won the World Series a few days ago they did it in BUSCH stadium. Wrong spelling to be sure, but you get the point.
As for at least semi-sane predictors:
The site I use most to follow the actual election stats is electoral-vote and he has Kerry up quite a bit. All he does is average the polls done by all the pollsters and make predictions, and he still believes its anyones race, so he seems to provide a very unbiassed view.
Interestingly, he revealed himself today and besides being the creator of Minix (precursor to linux) it turns out that he, himself is quite biased. I could debate his arguments, but instead I congratulate on being at least seemingly very fair to both sides and reporting honestly.
However he also points to electionprojection who has it completely opposite. He does think he has a decidedly Bush tilt, but does not argue with his meathods. So still- who knows.
As for me, well my insane predicions are mostly about the election.
All though statistics seem to be on my side here, I seem to be the only one who thinks that this will NOT be that close. It is anybodys game and it all depends on that "snapshot in time" that the votes are actually cast, but I think when its all said and done it wont come down to one state. You can tell this will be true on election nite when the spinmeisters and even real news people start talking about multi-state combinations. If it is close, this could be strange. There is a record number of absentee ballots this year in many states and they might not know for days or even weeks if its too close.
My sane predictions are mostly about the next four years.
The economy will grow. Thats just the bussiness cycle, few years up, few years down. I think its fairly rare that a president has a major influence in the economy more than if people are confident in him or not. I could even see a mini dot-com like bubble grow if oil prices inspired America to go to hydrogen. But the details I'm bad at, I just think it'll go up. I give both candidates equal footing here.
Iraq will be a success. The only ways Iraq will fail is if we 'cut and run' or we make some HUGE tactical mistake. I dont believe its another Vietnam, but being slightly too young for that whole mess I both dont know vietnam well, and NEVER WANT TO HEAR IT SPOKEN OF AGAIN. (Seriously, Vietnam was like the 1 place we got our ass kicked ever and we just cant get over it, what are we- French?) Things take time, Bush was silly to declare victory so early, but things will stableize when we get them to the point where they can be their own police. Thats pretty much what we are at the moment, except the 'gangs' there have stuff like RPG's and missles. And you thought the LAPD had it bad.... I give the edge on this to Bush, they both will run this war through advisors, neitehr one of them REALLY knows jack about the military or the middle east, but Bush has got experience under his belt now, and Kerry is more likely to cut and run.
Because of these two reasons, you can see it pretty much doesnt matter who will be president in probably the largest two issues facing the country. I guess part of me wants Bush to get credit for what he started, but I really dont want things like national healthcare either. (btw I am uninsured)
Links of the day!
Not today, theyre all in the text above.
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