John McCain Needs A VP Now June 24, 2008
Posted by justingerman in Uncategorized.Tags: Barack Obama, Charlie Crist, Electoral Map, John McCain, Kay Baily-Hutchinson
2 comments
After a two month break iapprovedthismessage is back for some more exciting political and social commentary, and it couldn’t be at a more ground-breaking time politically. Right now we’re looking at an electoral map that John Kerry couldn’t have imagined four years ago. Here is fivethirtyeight’s current projection.
With Obama seriously contesting in states like North Carolina and potentially winning in places like Indiana, Missouri and Virginia it’s getting to be panic time for the McCain campaign. McCain needs to make a splash somehow to counteract the Obama momentum that he continues to carry from the end of the primary campaign. I think the best way to do this is to pick a VP now and get him (or her) out on the campaign trail as quickly as possible.
I say her because I know there is a school of thought that thinks McCain would benefit significantly from picking a woman. The problem is, there aren’t a whole lot of particularly viable candidates, outside of Condi Rice (who has said she wouldn’t do it), that McCain could pick that wouldn’t cause his selection to look like some kind of gender gimmick. Retiring Texas Senator Kay Baily-Hutchinson could be a possible option but she doesn’t have a whole lot of name-recognition and she has that grandmother-look to her that wouldn’t help McCain either.
I think it seems the obvious pick at this point is Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Crist would, of course, secure Florida’s 27 votes but would also be a defensive pick for McCain. However, he doesn’t have any other particularly good options at this point. But having an energetic and moderate Crist on the campaign trail would be very beneficial to McCain, at least in the short run.
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…)
