Comments on: Run, Ralph, Run!, Part II

By: B. Durbin

B. Durbin — Sun, 29 Aug 2004 00:15:02 +0000

Doc Rampage – have you tried using a different browser? I can resize the window in Safari… I’ll assume you’re using Windows and point you at mozilla.org; their Firefox browser is free and has tabs!

By: likwidshoe

likwidshoe — Sat, 28 Aug 2004 02:53:48 +0000

Kerry isn’t just punishment for abortion. Hell is.

By: SCSIwuzzy

SCSIwuzzy — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 16:35:03 +0000

I think for Nader to matter, he’ll need to match/exceed the kind of numbers that Ross Perot got in the 92 election. The best/worst (depends on your viewpoint) you can say about Nader’s last run was that he siphoned off the nuttiest of the nuts who otherwise would have voted democrat. Or written in Mickey Maus or other nonsense anyway.
For Nader to be a real and true threat to the Dems, the Dems base would have to be much, much farther to the left than it is. That would mean that they would alienate even more of America (and maybe lose a big chunk of the union bloc) or that country itself was going more socialist.
Until Nader gets a real share of votes, the Dems won’t go further left in a noticable way, and sure as heck the Reps won’t either. If anything, the Reps would play on the chaos on the leftish side, and shore up their position.
Personally, I see that as a win-win.

By: La Shawn

La Shawn — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 09:14:27 +0000

Don’t know how, Doc! Hopefully I’ll figure it out before September is over. Can you believe I’m still re-tooling? I like tinkering with this thing. Now when are you leaving Blog*Spot?

By: mike from oregon

mike from oregon — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 05:00:33 +0000

I agree that Kerry polling so close often amazes me too. However I live in one of the most liberal places in America (we fondly call it – Moscow on the Willamette, it’s Portland Oregon) and from what I can gauge you can look at about 40% of the population that is a “Anybody but Bush” group of advocates. Now hopefully that will translate to a fair amount of them voting for Nader, but you never know.

Kerry isn’t the worst of the bunch (I shudder every time I think of Hillary running or winning) but he won’t be good either. We can only hope that Kerry makes some major screw ups in the near future.

By: Doc Rampage

Doc Rampage — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 04:54:37 +0000

I think Nader has already had a good effect on the election. Kerry has to worry about Deaniacs getting disgusted with him and voting for Nader instead. This kept Kerry from moving to the center as decisively as he needed to after he clinched the primary. As a result he is going to have real problems coming up.

Hey, La Shawn. Can you do anything to make the comment window resizable? Right now, I can’t change the size and it cuts off about three letters from the side of the comment box.

By: Mark Slater

Mark Slater — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 02:37:15 +0000

I must humbly take issue with LaShawn’s premise. If a strong showing by third-party, un-reconstructed Marxist Nader costs Kerry the election, it is my fear that the Dems, and possibly the GOP as well, will move to the left to compensate. This is the last thing we need.

I base this on history. When the socialists were gaining power and influence in this nation (1910′s and 20′s), a major party (Democrat) compensated by adopting much of the socialists positions, culminating with Wilson, and later, FDR. I wish corvair-hating Nader absolutely no luck, except the bad kind.

By: La Shawn

La Shawn — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:21:04 +0000

Dishonest? Speak for yourself. I honestly want him to run and siphon off as many votes from John Kerry as he can. And believe me, I’m not “all smiles” about any of this mess.

By: Expertise

Expertise — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:14:43 +0000

I think this is dishonest. Nader is still a socialist. You wouldn’t be all smiles for Nader if he had a legitimate chance to win this election. You and I both know that.

By: Omar

Omar — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 15:34:47 +0000

‘I just don’t understand why a man like Kerry is polling so closely’

Just like a lot of people cant understand why a man like Bush is polling so closely. Its a bitterly divided 2 way thing.

Anyway, go Nader. Some more established third party candidates aint a bad thing. Good luck to Badnarik too.

By: John C James III

John C James III — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 14:58:28 +0000

Hurry up Nov 2 – Lets get this thing DONE!

By: actus

actus — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 14:36:01 +0000

“Hopefully the Nader Effect will have an enormous effect.”

in 2000 nader got about half the votes he was polling at. I think it’ll be even less this time around. I knew several Nader voters and none are going along with him now.

By: meep

meep — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 14:29:31 +0000

There are a couple possible problems with polls.

#1 – polling registered voters, not “likely” voters… we all know that nowhere near everybody votes who can, and the differential is not even across different interest groups.

#2 – Timing. There are a lot of people who haven’t seriously paid any attention to the political race, believe it or not. I actually have heard very little of John Kerry’s voice (mainly because I can’t stand it, and mainly because I don’t watch TV news). Wait til the debates, and then we’ll see how he’s polling.

#3 – The best pollsters actually do stratified sampling, and if they screwed =that= up (sampling too many Dems, too many people from urban areas, etc) then that can skew.

In any case, we all know there’s only one poll that counts. If it turns out that the actual vote is very close, I do think it would be well for us to ask why that might be.

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:57:20 +0000

Kerry is leading in the polls for several reasons, none of which have anything to do with real results.

These are based on my own observations of polling and pollsters over the last forty years — nothing scientific.

Most quoted polls are paid for by newspapers or some other political/media group. The questions tend to require biased replies. One recent example came from a newpaper poll conducted in SoCal — “How do you feel about the Bush-sponsored SwiftVet attack on Kerry?” (Not a direct quote – I heard this on Hugh Hewitt)

People lie to pollsters. Heh-heh. And the pollsters refuse to accept that fact.

Democrats, especially, seem to believe their own polls. They can’t see the inherent bias in the questions. True believers never see their own prejudices.