…than the thousands upon thousands of words I’ve read today about Pennsylvania and the Democratic primary.
The graphic is from the Iowa Electronic Markets, and reflect “real-money futures markets where contract payoffs will be determined by the outcomes of the 2008 U. S. National Conventions.”
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Perhaps it’s worth “a whole lot more” than “thousands upon thousands of words,” but you are certainly frugal with words that might make it understandable for those of us too retarded to read your thoughts. What units, for instance, on the Y-axis? Lives? Hours? $? $/day? And what does -NOM mean? Nominees? I thought I might run an analysis of published campaign info to see whether I could make associations with the data presented in the graph. But then I thought, “What’s the use?”
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Correction:
I should have said:
“What’s the use? It’s not worth it!”
April 24th, 2008 at 2:39 am
Although the graph looks interesting, I’m not sure what I am looking at. Would you mind providing some clarification please?
For example what do the dollar amounts represent — money spent on the campaign? how they are trading on some ‘popularity’ stock market? Inquiring minds want to know!!
Thanks!
April 24th, 2008 at 5:37 am
Yeah, I think at least a source with be good. Thank you though!
April 24th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Sorry, my bad. My assumption being the graphs are commonly recognized. From the Iowa Electronic Markets. Source and definition added.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Richard:
I know Obama is your favorite, but have you seen this video? It’s interesting, at least.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iW5kOB1pmg
Scott
April 24th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Scott,
Fascinating. My first guess was that it was because Ron Paul appeals to geeky libertarians, etc. who are more likely to do Internet searches and post to YouTube.
While I think that explains much of it, the other interesting thing when I did the Google Trends match was the bar charts at the bottom, showing much of the raw numbers for Paul coming from two Texas cities — Austin and Richardson. I wonder what that’s about? I assume Richardson is his home district but still, I certainly don’t do web searches for my congressman.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
To see why the Iowa market is so heavy for Obama, check out CNN’s delegate tracking tool. For the remaining states and Superdelegates you can choose the percentage vote for each candidate. Even leaving the Superdelegates split at 50-50, there’s virtually no way for Clinton to win the nomination if they each do roughly as well as predicted in the states.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/29/delegate.counter/index.html
I’d be happy with either one, but the campaign seems to have outlived its usefulness. Neither is putting forth new proposals, the media is focusing on trivia, it seems to be just wasting time and money.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:48 am
The picture is meaningless. It still shows that the so-called ‘futures markets’ have been wrong for 3/4 of the election. What kind of basis is that for a prediction market? Why should we take it seriously?
April 25th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
While I could go on and on for hours on why graphics like this one from the Iowa Electronic Markets were originally thought of as “just for fun,” but now, for some reason, are taken so seriously, I won’t. And while I could just make it easy for myself and admit how “The Decision Tree” by Amanda Cox is the final infallible authority on how only dumb white people who live in poor areas support Hillary Clinton, I won’t do that either.
What I will say is that we all are all learning a lot about how “place” affects politics. This is very important.
Richard Florida’s idea that the world and the United States are “spiky” becomes more interesting when the facts of this election are presented in a “spiky” context. Hillary Clinton has won 16 or so states to Obama’s win in 28 or so states. So why is Clinton still in contention for the Democratic nomination? I say it’s because of spiky politics.
California, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas are all “spikes” in terms of economic activity, population and, according to the “CO2 Map” posted by RF on this blog yesterday, major CO2 emitters. CA, NY, PA and TX are also states Clinton has won in. Illinois, Georgia, Alabama and Iowa are not significant “spikes” in terms of population, economic activity, or CO2 emissions. Of course, they are still very important places. IL, GA, AL and IA are states Obama has won in. Another interesting issue, if Obama is truly an “elite,” why did he win states like South Carolina and Missouri? We can all count on one thing in the next few weeks: The mainstream press will not be covering these issues. Cheers!