Three more days to November 4th, to what is one of the historic elections in the history of the US. If polls turn out to be true, and there is no Bradley effect, this country could see the first non-white President in its chequered, almost two hundred fifty year old history. Not just Americans, but I suspect, a large part of the world awaits with some interest the outcome of these elections. Many people point out to me, independent of the outcome, the glory days of the US as a superpower are over.
The country seems to be in the grip of an election anxiety. The Montreal Gazette says: “..they [Americans] lie in bed till 4 a.m. in panic, mentally calculating the latest hourly polls, divided by the projected ethnic voter turn-out.” AP reports: “Voters around the country, whether they support McCain or Barack Obama, say they are experiencing nail-biting, ulcer-inducing anxiety ahead of next week’s election and all that’s riding on it”. Huffinton Post has letters from various readers around the country on their feelings of election anxiety.
I check the polls every morning, my pulse racing a little if I see the race tightening, ignoring the statistical fine print. I read articles that ask whether the polls are accurate predictors of the outcome. I learn about the 1948 mishap when polls stopped polling a week earlier because the Republican Thomas Dewey was well ahead of Democrat Harry Truman and missed the late surge by Truman to win the election. I read that in 1980, Ronald Reagan similarly came from behind to defeat Jimmy Carter largely on the strength of his performance in the last debate. And then there is the more recent misfire in New Hampshire when Hilary Clinton trumped Obama in the primaries despite Obama being ahead in the polls. The variation between the results between different pollsters adds to the anxiety. Ramussen reports the difference to be as small as three percent around the same time that Pew Research Center reports that difference to be 15%. The only thing that all polls agree is that the larger number is currently pegged on Obama’s name.
I found Pollster.com and FiveThirtyEight.com (538 being the number of electors in the elector college) to be good aggregators of all the different polls and providing some perspective and independent commentary on the numbers. For example, today’s article in pollster.com said: “Not surprisingly, yesterday was another heavy day of new poll releases: 37 new statewide surveys and 10 national releases, yet these surveys indicate no clear trends and leave our bottom line electoral vote count unchanged.” FiveThirtyEight lists the chances of Obama winning at 96.22 percent and the chances of McCain winning at 3.78%; there is a 0.15% chance of a tie.
Some folks (including me) are wary of the Bradley effect, named after the African-American contender for the governor of California who polls showed to be winning in a landslide, but who lost, because people lied to the pollsters to avoid being called racist i.e. they said that they’d vote for Bradley but voted for his opponent because Bradley was black. I’ve read reports that quote people who say that they’re afraid of a country run by a black. Two skinheads were arrested for plotting to assassinate Obama. But many are fairly confident that the Bradley effect is not a factor this time.
Some others speak of the bandwagon effect, the cognitive bias that makes people do things because that’s what they think a large majority of people would do, in this case switch votes because the odds favor a candidate overwhelmingly over the other. 7 in 10 Americans polled by Gallup thought that Obama would win. So, the proponents of the bandwagon effect claim, Obama may win by an even bigger margin because of the bandwagon effect.
While most non-US powers and people believe that it is sunset time for might of the US, a Gallup poll found that people the world over prefer Obama to McCain by a 3-1 ratio. People in 73 countries were polled with the questions of whether who won the US elections would affect their country and who they would like to see win. Indians largely claimed that they didn’t know if the elections would affect them. Even in Pakistan, only 10% claimed that it mattered who won the elections (and Obama and McCain were evenly split as their favorite) while 72% claimed that they didn’t know or refused to answer.
Some of my friends and family, who were new to this country and are seeing the spectacle that is the US elections for the first time, are appalled. They had hoped to find the elections much more erudite, the speeches more about issues and the people more knowledgable. “This doesn’t seem very different from India”, one of them commented to me, “Religion seems to play a huge role in who people vote for”.
A colleague at the Internet standards body that I go to said to me over a difference of opinion that we had: “Oh, I don’t want conceding the point to you in return for the election going right. If it doesn’t go right, I maybe forced to move to Canada”. A neighbor echoed the same sentiment today and we discussed the benefits and disadvantages of Toronto vs Vancouver. Another colleague asked me why I was so upset with the Palin nomination (he’s so radically left and un-nunaced that everybody looks right to him and so he doesn’t care if Obama or McCain wins, it’s all the same, he says) and I told him that I’d seriously consider moving back to India if McCain won because that’d be a step in the worst possible direction for this country.
Psychologists like Daniel Gilbert, the author of last year’s immensely popular Stumbling on Happiness, has written extensively about how bad we’re at predicting our behavior after certain outcomes. In 2004, a year when a lot of us held our breath hoping Kerry wouldn’t be swift-boated to defeat, many people spoke openly of moving to Canada if Bush won. Gilbert wrote after the elections, in January 2005: “By now, most of the people I know should be Canadians. At least that’s what they said they’d be if President Bush won re-election. And yet, my unofficial tally suggests that the number of disgruntled Democrats who actually emigrated northward is roughly zero, plus or minus none. November saw more than its share of cursing, wailing and gnashing of teeth in some quarters, but by the middle of December the weeping had largely subsided and most of the people I know were busy buying gifts. With the exception of the junior senator from Massachusetts and a few hundred others whose lives and livelihoods hinged on the election’s outcome, most Democrats had a good cry, kicked something until it broke, then slipped quietly back into their daily routines of family, work and television.”
Palin and McCain meanwhile continued their ignoramus, unscientific posturing. In the latest gaffe, Sarah Palin mocked the research on fruit flies. She is reported to have said: “Sometimes these dollars, they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” Attacking science, demonstrating xenophobia and being folksy, all in one. The blogs took up the war with the lefties howling in the aisles over Palin’s comments while the right attempted to show that the left didn’t know that Palin meant the agricultural pests and not its famous cousin, the fruit fly used as the the basic research tool in genetics. The Science magazine carried what I thought was the more neutral report. It concludes the remarks by an entomologist who understood what the research was about and why it mattered to people. He said: “This kind of stuff always drives me nuts. It’s a total lack of understanding of the importance of research.” Do Palin and her supporters really think that the US got to be where it was without the investment in science and research ? And do they really forget that one of the proudest moments in their history, the first man to land on the moon, was largely a government project ? They point to certain bureaucracies as reflective of the inefficiencies of a government while forgetting that there are a lot of inefficient companies propped up artificially by these very same people. They ridicule Obama of being a socialist while voting for the nationalization of investment banks. They deride the role of the government while supporting a ban on abortion and declaring homosexuality illegal. They take pride that their country came up with innovations like the Internet while deriding basic research. They applaud free markets while continuing to support farm subsidies. Attitudes that scare me. I worry about the future of this country, no the future of Maya in a country that elects such people to power.
I cast my vote for Obama already, glad for having cast my very first vote in my entire life, in such a historic election.
The country seems to be in the grip of an election anxiety. The Montreal Gazette says: “..they [Americans] lie in bed till 4 a.m. in panic, mentally calculating the latest hourly polls, divided by the projected ethnic voter turn-out.” AP reports: “Voters around the country, whether they support McCain or Barack Obama, say they are experiencing nail-biting, ulcer-inducing anxiety ahead of next week’s election and all that’s riding on it”. Huffinton Post has letters from various readers around the country on their feelings of election anxiety.
I check the polls every morning, my pulse racing a little if I see the race tightening, ignoring the statistical fine print. I read articles that ask whether the polls are accurate predictors of the outcome. I learn about the 1948 mishap when polls stopped polling a week earlier because the Republican Thomas Dewey was well ahead of Democrat Harry Truman and missed the late surge by Truman to win the election. I read that in 1980, Ronald Reagan similarly came from behind to defeat Jimmy Carter largely on the strength of his performance in the last debate. And then there is the more recent misfire in New Hampshire when Hilary Clinton trumped Obama in the primaries despite Obama being ahead in the polls. The variation between the results between different pollsters adds to the anxiety. Ramussen reports the difference to be as small as three percent around the same time that Pew Research Center reports that difference to be 15%. The only thing that all polls agree is that the larger number is currently pegged on Obama’s name.
I found Pollster.com and FiveThirtyEight.com (538 being the number of electors in the elector college) to be good aggregators of all the different polls and providing some perspective and independent commentary on the numbers. For example, today’s article in pollster.com said: “Not surprisingly, yesterday was another heavy day of new poll releases: 37 new statewide surveys and 10 national releases, yet these surveys indicate no clear trends and leave our bottom line electoral vote count unchanged.” FiveThirtyEight lists the chances of Obama winning at 96.22 percent and the chances of McCain winning at 3.78%; there is a 0.15% chance of a tie.
Some folks (including me) are wary of the Bradley effect, named after the African-American contender for the governor of California who polls showed to be winning in a landslide, but who lost, because people lied to the pollsters to avoid being called racist i.e. they said that they’d vote for Bradley but voted for his opponent because Bradley was black. I’ve read reports that quote people who say that they’re afraid of a country run by a black. Two skinheads were arrested for plotting to assassinate Obama. But many are fairly confident that the Bradley effect is not a factor this time.
Some others speak of the bandwagon effect, the cognitive bias that makes people do things because that’s what they think a large majority of people would do, in this case switch votes because the odds favor a candidate overwhelmingly over the other. 7 in 10 Americans polled by Gallup thought that Obama would win. So, the proponents of the bandwagon effect claim, Obama may win by an even bigger margin because of the bandwagon effect.
While most non-US powers and people believe that it is sunset time for might of the US, a Gallup poll found that people the world over prefer Obama to McCain by a 3-1 ratio. People in 73 countries were polled with the questions of whether who won the US elections would affect their country and who they would like to see win. Indians largely claimed that they didn’t know if the elections would affect them. Even in Pakistan, only 10% claimed that it mattered who won the elections (and Obama and McCain were evenly split as their favorite) while 72% claimed that they didn’t know or refused to answer.
Some of my friends and family, who were new to this country and are seeing the spectacle that is the US elections for the first time, are appalled. They had hoped to find the elections much more erudite, the speeches more about issues and the people more knowledgable. “This doesn’t seem very different from India”, one of them commented to me, “Religion seems to play a huge role in who people vote for”.
A colleague at the Internet standards body that I go to said to me over a difference of opinion that we had: “Oh, I don’t want conceding the point to you in return for the election going right. If it doesn’t go right, I maybe forced to move to Canada”. A neighbor echoed the same sentiment today and we discussed the benefits and disadvantages of Toronto vs Vancouver. Another colleague asked me why I was so upset with the Palin nomination (he’s so radically left and un-nunaced that everybody looks right to him and so he doesn’t care if Obama or McCain wins, it’s all the same, he says) and I told him that I’d seriously consider moving back to India if McCain won because that’d be a step in the worst possible direction for this country.
Psychologists like Daniel Gilbert, the author of last year’s immensely popular Stumbling on Happiness, has written extensively about how bad we’re at predicting our behavior after certain outcomes. In 2004, a year when a lot of us held our breath hoping Kerry wouldn’t be swift-boated to defeat, many people spoke openly of moving to Canada if Bush won. Gilbert wrote after the elections, in January 2005: “By now, most of the people I know should be Canadians. At least that’s what they said they’d be if President Bush won re-election. And yet, my unofficial tally suggests that the number of disgruntled Democrats who actually emigrated northward is roughly zero, plus or minus none. November saw more than its share of cursing, wailing and gnashing of teeth in some quarters, but by the middle of December the weeping had largely subsided and most of the people I know were busy buying gifts. With the exception of the junior senator from Massachusetts and a few hundred others whose lives and livelihoods hinged on the election’s outcome, most Democrats had a good cry, kicked something until it broke, then slipped quietly back into their daily routines of family, work and television.”
Palin and McCain meanwhile continued their ignoramus, unscientific posturing. In the latest gaffe, Sarah Palin mocked the research on fruit flies. She is reported to have said: “Sometimes these dollars, they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” Attacking science, demonstrating xenophobia and being folksy, all in one. The blogs took up the war with the lefties howling in the aisles over Palin’s comments while the right attempted to show that the left didn’t know that Palin meant the agricultural pests and not its famous cousin, the fruit fly used as the the basic research tool in genetics. The Science magazine carried what I thought was the more neutral report. It concludes the remarks by an entomologist who understood what the research was about and why it mattered to people. He said: “This kind of stuff always drives me nuts. It’s a total lack of understanding of the importance of research.” Do Palin and her supporters really think that the US got to be where it was without the investment in science and research ? And do they really forget that one of the proudest moments in their history, the first man to land on the moon, was largely a government project ? They point to certain bureaucracies as reflective of the inefficiencies of a government while forgetting that there are a lot of inefficient companies propped up artificially by these very same people. They ridicule Obama of being a socialist while voting for the nationalization of investment banks. They deride the role of the government while supporting a ban on abortion and declaring homosexuality illegal. They take pride that their country came up with innovations like the Internet while deriding basic research. They applaud free markets while continuing to support farm subsidies. Attitudes that scare me. I worry about the future of this country, no the future of Maya in a country that elects such people to power.
I cast my vote for Obama already, glad for having cast my very first vote in my entire life, in such a historic election.
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