Is Hillary Really More Electable? May 28, 2008
Posted by justingerman in Uncategorized.Tags: 2008 Presidential Election, Barack Obama, electoral college, Hillary Clinton
5 comments
That’s at least her strongest and most articulated argument at this point. See this story from CNN. If by more electable she means currently polling ahead of John McCain she is certainly right. Most polls have Senator Clinton ahead in the Kerry states as well as Florida, Ohio and Arkansas. Fivethirtyeight.com reflects this by producing a Clinton electoral victory about 62 percent of the time. The Clinton campaign has also issued a graphical memo that exhibits her advantage.
While this map takes some liberties with Kentucky and maybe New Hampshire I think it’s generally pretty accurate. But I should also point at that Hillary’s surge in the last month or so is likely due to Republicans picking up their attacks on Obama, which has driven up his negatives. If the situation were reversed it’s likely Obama would be doing better than Hillary against McCain, but at the same time a lot of Obama’s woes have been self-imposed.
Hillary’s Obama/McCain map (after the flip) shows Obama 46 points behind McCain but shows McCain winning in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio in all of Which Obama is actually about even or slightly ahead. If Obama were to win two of these three he would surpass 270.
Tim Russert Is A Pretty Smart Guy April 9, 2008
Posted by justingerman in 2008 Presidential Election, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain.Tags: 2008 Presidential Election, Barack Obama, electoral college, Electoral Map, Hillary Clinton, John McCain
1 comment so far
I say that because his 2008 electoral map prediction for an Obama-McCain race looks very similar to the state-by-state probabilities that I made in my post predicting the electoral college expected values. This map can be found on theelectoralmap.com.
The only real differences between this map and my probabilities are the states of Arkansas, South Carolina and Michigan. It’s more or less imperative that Obama wins Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan to win the election. I think Russert is right in assuming that Michigan will be the closest of the three, but I still think it leans to Obama due to the economic circumstances in the state and McCain’s support for freer trade.
For some reason Russert also thinks that Obama stands less of a chance in South Carolina than Georgia or North Carolina. This may be true to a point, but I still have trouble writing it off to McCain at this point.
Geoff pointed out in a comment to my expected values calculation that he thought my probabilities for Arkansas and West Virginia were escessively low and that Obama has at least a marginal chance of winning in each state. However, I stand by my projections and say that Hillary likely would win in both states but Obama really doesn’t stand a chance in either due to the highly white, low income, low education democraphics. Russert seems to agree with me on West Virginia and with Geoff on Arkansas.
Below the fold I added Russert’s Clinton-McCain map just for fun. I think this map shows that Obama’s and Clinton’s expected values would be about the same, but with different strengths in different places. But I’m definately not going to take the time to add up Clinton’s values. (more…)
