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Tracking the U.S. Election's Late Innings

Stats, polls, spin and everything else you need to stay in the game.

Tom Hawthorn 29 Oct 2004TheTyee.ca

Tom Hawthorn is a veteran reporter who lives in Victoria, B.C. He shares his obsession with sports oddities with Tyee readers whenever he gets a chance.

Reporting Beat: Sports and culture.

Twitter: @tomhawthorn

Website: Tom Hawthorn

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In this fall's campaign, I think Nixon's the one.

That would be Trot Nixon of the Boston Red Sox, surely the only member of clan Nixon to ever be popular in liberal Massachusetts.

Baseball and politics go together like Johnny Damon and facial hair. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of baseball, was the judge who sent Big Bill Haywood and other union leaders to the hoosegow for sedition. Landis was succeeded following his death by Happy Chandler, a senator from Kentucky who quit politics, temporarily as it turned out, to become baseball poobah.

The Bluegrass State also gave us Jim Bunning, the only member of the Baseball Hall of Fame to also be elected to the U.S. Senate. Up for re-election this year, he was the overwhelming favourite until erratic behaviour - suggesting Al Queda was gunning for him, saying his olive-skinned opponent looked like one of Saddam's sons - called into question the state of his mental health.

George W. Bush was once the frontman for a group that owned the Texas Rangers club. (Insert Bush League joke here.) John Kerry has proclaimed his Red Sox allegiance. . . .

Anyways, now that the baseball season has come to its rightful conclusion with the first Red Sox championship in 86 years - hell having frozen over, pigs having sprouted wings, etc. etc. - it is time to move from sports to blood sports. Also known as presidential politics.

Calling the game

The only stat that matters is hitting 270. The electoral college has 538 voters, so Bush and Kerry need half plus one before getting to use the Rose Garden for photo ops.

All but two states award their votes as a winner-take-all lotto prize. Most are firmly in one camp or the other by now, with 10 leaning one way and five others serving as true battlegrounds.

The Big Three are Ohio (20 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (21) and Florida (27). Kerry needs to win two of three to have a shot at 270. Win all three and he can start measuring the draperies at the White House.

Bush can survive without Pennsylvania and Ohio, a state which every successful Republican candidate has won. But then he would need Iowa (7), New Mexico (5) and Wisconsin (10) or Minnesota (10). Believe it or not, the Cheeseheads of Wisconsin may well decide the next election.

Heaven for political junkies

In recent days, anxious pundits have been moving states around to create a 269-269 tie. That would send the presidential election into the House of Representatives.

So, you can see how much fun can be had by amateur poll readers. But you can't tell the players without a scorecard. The morning read for many is The Note by Mark Helperin and the staff at ABC News. The Note, whose influence made it the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, is like methadone to election junkies not on the campaign trail.

Then, check out the latest scores. An army of pollsters has been pestering voters - likely, registered, or new; white, African-American or Latino; union or non-union, military or non-military. The Centre for Public Opinion and Democracy, which was founded by pollster Angus Reid at the University of British Columbia, has a helpful roundup with recent state and national polls.

RealClear Politics includes polls for senatorial and gubernatorial races. The averaging is bogus, but each cited poll is linked, a handy path for die-hards who wish to know more about methodology, or about how Kerry is doing among female voters in non-military households in the Ohio suburbs.

Reading a poll is a lot like reading tea leaves (or the liver of a slain warrior). You see what you want to see. A helpful place to start unravelling the intricacies of polling is the site run by the Mystery Pollster, whose insights provide an online undergraduate course in the art and science of political polling.

Arnold as MVP?

The big question among pollsters in the final days: What will the Undecideds do with their vote? Mystery Pollster has a useful discussion of the Incumbent Rule, which regards an election as a referendum on the bozo in office. Under this rule, undecided voters break roughly 3-1 for the challenger. The question in this race is whether a hawkish war-time president will hold onto more of these voters.

Cartographic prognostictors are busy with their crayons, too, dividing the states into Blue (for Kerry) and Red (for Bush). (A perverse colour choice, as Canada joins the rest of the world in seeing conservative blue and liberal red.) William Saleton's Election Scorecard for Slate.com is evenhanded and thought provoking. An in-your-dreams Democrat can check out a site run by molecular biologist Sam Wang at Princeton University. Professor Wang is a Kerry fan whose statistics-driven electoral college predictions - as many as 305 for Kerry - drive Republicans batty.

Once you start playing this game there's no end to the obsessive fussing. Will Arafat's stomach flu benefit Bush? Will Howard Stern's legions of pimply-faced free speechers cancel out hordes of glassy-eyed Christian evangelicals? Who has greater pull - Ah-nold (as in Schwarzenegger), or the Boss (as in Springsteen)? How many points will Kerry get from a Red Sox championship?

And, finally, how many votes did Kerry lose when Red Sox ace Curt Schilling interrupted his praises to God's glories to urge television viewers to vote for Bush?

Victoria reporter Tom Hawthorn is a frequent contributor to The Tyee who likes to check out old electoral-college boxscores in his spare time.  [Tyee]

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