Maureen Dowd Zings the Republicans!

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column today shows no mercy on the Republicans and their losses in this year’s elections.  Here are a few examples:

“Team Romney has every reason to be shellshocked. Its candidate, after all, resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing. Mitt Romney is the president of white male America.  Maybe the group can retreat to a man cave in a Whiter House, with mahogany paneling, brown leather Chesterfields, a moose head over the fireplace, an elevator for the presidential limo..”

“As W.’s former aide Karen Hughes put it in Politico on Friday, “If another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue.”

Or what I thought was the best:

“Until now, Republicans and Fox News have excelled at conjuring alternate realities. But this time, they made the mistake of believing their fake world actually existed. As Fox’s Megyn Kelly said to Karl Rove on election night, when he argued against calling Ohio for Obama: “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?”

Worth the read!

Tony

 

Nate Silver Evaluates the Presidential Election Polls!

Dear Commons Community,

During the final few weeks of the recent presidential election, it seemed like everyday, there was a poll conducted by some organization showing the preferences of likely voters.  If you were someone who watched or read different news reports, it was difficult to figure out in which poll to believe since in many cases they were not consistent.  Nate Silver, a most respected statistician and author of the best-seller, The Signal and the Noise, on his blog, has done an analysis of the election polling and has ranked all of the major polling organizations for the 2018 election.   The rankings are above but in a nutshell:  IBD/TIPP, Google Consumer Surveys, and Mellman were the most accurate while Gallup, Mason-Dixon and American Research Group were the least accurate.    As can be seen in the rankings, there is a a good deal of disparity among the pollsters.

His conclusion:

“it turned out that most polling firms underestimated Mr. Obama’s performance, so those that had what had seemed to be Democratic-leaning results were often closest to the final outcome.

Conversely, polls that were Republican-leaning relative to the consensus did especially poorly.”

Thank you Mr. Silver!

Tony