Bad year for third parties?

As is stated every election, voting for a third party is pointless, steals votes from more viable candidates, etc. Certainly, after the 2000 election, people are skittish about voting for third parties if not out right opposed. However, even after the 2000 debacle, 2004 wasn't the worst year for third parties, although it was pretty bad. Every year since 1992, the number of third party votes has declined. Of course, 1992 was an exceptional year, it certainly seems to set a pretty strong trend.

Year - Total Third Party Vote
1992 - 19.55%
1996 - 10.05%
2000 - 3.74%
2004 - 1.00%

According to a regression model I made, this would mean that in 2008, third parties would only get 0.44%. Of course, the third parties do have a few things going for them. For one, the Libertarian Party and Green Party are running former congress members as their candidates. So for once, the third parties are running experienced candidates. Unfortunately, most Libertarians seem disappointed with Bob Barr who is more or less just a Republican and the Green Party candidate is a nutjob whose ability to maintain her seat for 12 years completely shocks me. For those interested, Nader is running again, but I think he'll do worse than he did last time.

Best Political Blunder

Republican Congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, appeared on MSNBC to drum up support for McCain by criticizing Obama and his connections to Bill Ayers. In the course of the interview she insinuated that people with liberal views were anti-American and that members of congress should be investigated for holding anti-American views. This set off an interesting chain of events:

-Instead of energizing the Republican base, it energized the Democratic base, angry about being called anti-American.
-By the next morning Bachmann's opponent, Tinklenberg, had raised roughly half a million dollars.
-The DCCC (which helps funds Democratic candidates) gave Tinklenberg's campaign $1 million having previously ignored the campaign.
-The RNCC (which helps funds Republican candidates) dropped funding for two TV ads it was running for Bachmann.
-A former Republican governor of Minnesota endorsed Obama citing Bachmann's comments as a turning point for him.
-Polling from before the interview had Bachmann ahead by 3%, afterwards Tinklenberg was ahead by 4%
-40% of voters in her district said that they were less likely to vote for her because of her comments. Only 8% said they were more likely to vote for her.

It's a good day for democracy when people realize that criticizing traditional political beliefs isn't treasonous.

2008 Election Trends

A long time ago, I made some charts using data from the 1996, 2000, and 2004 elections to predict possible trends in how states vote. I did this by removing the overall swing from each state's results and looked out how votes in each individual state changed independent of national trends. I then extrapolated these numbers to find what the results might be in 2008. One of the things I found was that many of the states that were very close in the 2004 election were trending towards becoming more Democratic, but nearly all of the states that were trending towards Republican were already Republican. Based on these trends I found that if the final popular vote in 2008 was exactly the same as in 2004, the Democrats would gain 10 electoral votes, from Nevada and New Mexico. Not enough to win, but give the Democrats just a 1% swing, they would win Iowa, Ohio, and Colorado and thus the presidency. To win, Republicans would have to keep the national swing towards the Democrats to less than 1%.

I had forgotten about all this for several months, but I became interested again after North Carolina became a swing state. I didn't remember anything in my model saying that North Carolina could go Democrat even in the best scenario. I used the current numbers (as of Oct. 12) on Fivethirtyeight.com to find the predicted swing for the 2008 election, 7.9%. Putting this number into my model gives McCain just a 3% lead in North Carolina. While this is still a comfortable lead for McCain, it's much closer than Bush's 12.4% margin of victory in 2004. I found a lot of other random things in my model when comparing it to the current polls, like Obama is doing incredibly well in Alaska despite Sarah Palin, but I'll leave all that until after the election.

Now I have to eat kangaroos

BBC News

Whenever I go to a restaurant that serves buffalo, I have to get a buffalo burger. My reason for this is that in the regions were buffalo live, they are better for the environment than cattle. So by choosing buffalo over beef, I'm, hopefully, creating demand to shift ranches from cattle to buffalo production.

Now it seems that I should add kangaroos as a food I should always get if a restaurant serves it. Kangaroos produce much less methane than cattle so they're better for environment in terms of climate change. I would also imagine that they're better also for the local environment just like buffalo are. One problem though, I've never been to a restaurant that had kangaroo meat on the menu.

The Jury Verdict

BBC News

After criticism that Eurovision voting is biased in favor of Eastern Europe countries, they have decided to reintroduce juries. Next year's Eurovision winner will be decided by a mixture of televoting of juries how exactly it will work though has not be decided.

Actually, they used a jury during the 2008 Eurovision semi-finals. Nine finalists were selected by televoting and the tenth was picked from the remaining contestants by a jury.

I know way too much about Eurovision.

Republican Failure Week

Coming off the high of the announcement of McCain's VP pick, it seems that Republicans have a tough week ahead of them. Most important is Hurricane Gustav, which has thankfully been handled very well. Unfortunately, it took the near destruction of New Orleans three years ago to get this kind of response. Gustav is also causing problems for the Republican Convention. Most first day activities were canceled and speeches by Bush, Cheney, and Schwarzenegger have been canceled. There's also some speculation that McCain will give his acceptance speech in New Orleans instead of Minneapolis. This seems to be a huge blow to loyal party members that have already made plans to be in Minneapolis.

Also, a rumor that I never expected to gain traction has led to an interesting conclusion. Basically there was a rumor that Palin's most recent son was actually the son of her teenage daughter due to the fact that seven months into the pregnancy, Palin did not appear pregnant. Well it turns out that it couldn't be her daughter's child because her daughter is currently pregnant.

A big deal has been made that this shouldn't be an issue, but I think it's important because it highlights both the hypocrisy and failure of Republican policies. Palin is an advocate of abstinence-only education, but the fact that her own daughter couldn't even hold to that gives little hope of it working as a national policy. It was also brought up on fivethirtyeight.com that it took a rather absurd rumor to bring this to light. Now the Republican Party is trying to spin this as showing what a supportive mother Palin is, but if the rumor had never surfaced, were they just hoping that no one would find out?

In another bit of irony, Focus on the Family had asked its members to pray for torrential rain to begin during Obama's acceptance speech as a sign that God doesn't want him to be president. Looks like God decided to rain on someone else's parade. Of course, Focus on the Family will say this isn't a sign that God doesn't want McCain to be president, God is just testing him. Isn't great when you can have your cake and eat it too?

Radiosynthesis

Cosmos Magazine

Using a robot to explore the inside of the reactor at Chernobyl, scientist came across a black fungus that was able to live inside the abandoned facility where the radiation level is 500 times the background level. Many fungi are pretty resistant to radiation, so that's not the extraordinary part. Scientist think that the fungus is actually converting radioactive energy into biological energy it can use to grow. The reason the fungus is black is due to a large amount of melanin which scientists believe is being used in a similar way as chlorophyll is used in plants to convert solar energy into biological energy.