Will the winner be the one with the biggest war-chest?
December 29th, 2007
Is Iowa down to a battle of money?
With just five days to go before the critical Iowa caucuses the heavyweight campaigns for the Democratic nominations are throwing everything at the state to ensure that their candidate comes out on top in the first test of opinion in the 2008 White House Race.
ABC News has been reporting overnight how Obama is trying to totally dominate the TV screens on Wednesday evening - on the night before the caucuses. One plan was to buy the time for a live broadcast on a range of channels.
The state has become critical for the three front runners - Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama and John Edwards who came second to John Kerry in Iowa four years ago. If Hillary can win on Thursday then it’s going to take a massive effort for any other contender to stop her. If she finishes in second or even third place then the race becomes less of a foregone conclusion.
It’s here where Obama’s great successes in fundraising might start to pay off. The received wisdom was that it was the element where the formidable Clinton team had total domination. That all changed earlier in the year and in the next few days in Iowa having deep pockets might be everything.
On the Politico site Jeanne Cummings had a good article a few days ago. Hillary, she says “was stung in March, however, when the little-known, first-term senator from Illinois reported raising a headline-grabbing $26 million. He passed her in the second quarter, raising $33 million compared with her $27 million. The Clinton camp came roaring back in the third quarter, raising $28 million to Obama’s $21 million, but her hard-won fundraising victory came too late to change the campaign’s dynamics.“If he hadn’t raised the money that he raised, his candidacy would not have become so serious so quickly,” said Tad Devine, a consultant for 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry.”
In recent days the sentiment has moved back to Hillary in the betting and the latest Betfair price has her at 0.49/1 to get the nomination. Obama is now out to 2.95/1.
Even if Iowa proves to be a disappointment to Obama he still has the resources to mount serious challenges in other states.
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Definitely looks like one for the history books. I read on CNN Politics a few days ago that Hillary bought an ad buy of 2 minutes on all the Iowa channels the day before the Caucus to air her final ad. With record numbers of undecided voters it could be an important bit of campaigning.
(from the previous thread)
I am a bit confused about the two links at 121. Am I supposed to click on the second one first (to download something) and then the first one second (to play the game)? I’m not sure about the dodgy-sounding “Are you sure this is safe?”-type messages. It sounds as if it’s a fun game but I don’t want to risk something squaggling my computer. Is it safe? How do I do it safely? I need an answer in English, not technogobbledybabblegook.
2.
a) If you don’t have Excel, don’t bother…
b) If you do, first download and install WinRAR 3.71
http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm (first link at top of page)
c) then download the spreadsheet
http://www.titanictown.plus.com/electsim.rar
and the WinRAR program will uncompress the spreadsheet..
Congratulations on winning the Iain Dale award, Mike! I’m familiar with the other websites listed, and your win was totally deserved, IMO.
3. Thanks for the clarification. I do have Excel, but my computer is telling me
“Should you run downloaded software that has no valid digital signature?
Probably not. A valid digital signature identifies the publisher of the software and verifies that the software has not been tampered with since it was signed. Without a valid digital signature, you have no way to verify that the software is what it claims to be.
If you have software on your computer that you downloaded from the Internet, don’t open or run it without asking these questions:
Did you ask for the software?
Did you click a link on a website to start this download, or did the software show up without any action on your part? If you didn’t start the download, you should be very cautious. If you don’t need the software, cancel the download. If you choose to run the software, make sure you know what it is for and what it will do to your computer before you proceed.
Do you know who published the software?
If the file has no valid digital signature, you cannot be certain that the software is actually from the source it claims to be from, or that it has not been tampered with. You should not run the software unless you trust the publisher, have scanned it for viruses, and know what the software will do to your computer.
Do you know what the file will do to your computer?
The website providing the file should tell you what the file is for and any special details you need to know about the file to run it. Be sure to read any terms of use or license agreements, and look for anything you don’t agree with, such as having to accept unsolicited advertising, or that the program sends data back to the publisher. If this information is not available, you should be cautious about downloading the file.
Note
It’s always a good idea to scan downloaded software with an up-to-date antivirus program before running it, regardless of the answers to the questions above. “
… so I reckon I ought to manage without it. I suppose I can always just imagine the fun results anyway
re 3. Rod - How large is the uncompressed spreadsheet? This would be much simpler if it was just a straight Excel down-load.
5. Fair enough
http://www.titanictown.plus.com/electsim.xls
It’s over 1 Mb, while the compressed version is only a quarter of the size…
Also congratulations on the well-deserved award, Mike - actually we’re congratulating ourselves too, as it’s a collective effort.
I don’ treally know Iowa dynamics, but general political experience suggests that Edwards and the less-fancied candidates are going to get squeezed in Iowa. You’re a Democrat in the first state to choose, you have this huge opportunity to influence the choice of next President, and the media tell you it’s Clinton or Obama. You might have planned to vote Edwards, but will you really stick to it in that situation? Do we know poll data on Edwards supporters’ second choices?
O/T: I keep an eye on the German polls, see
http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/landtage/index.htm
and what always amazes me is how utterly static and consistent they are. The Chistrian Democrats at about 38%, the Social Democrats at 28%, and 10% each for Free Democrats (liberals), Greens and Left. Give or take the odd per cent or two, all five institutes have been reporting these figures for at least a year. Does nobody ever change their mind? Have the Germans abolished sampling error? By contrast, the Land (county) polls jump around all over the place - possibly a sampling problem like regional samples here.
The Iowa result doesn’t have a particularly strong record in picking the candidates that ultimately go on to win the nominations, so a defeat shouldn’t be critical - unless they choose to make it so.
It seems a bit of a high risk strategy going all guns blazing so early on. While Giuliani has probably gone too far the other way in ignoring the early fights, this is potentially a long campaign, at least in terms of states to win. Placing so much emphasis on just one risks losing big if they lose at all. Obviously, the alternative risk is appearing to concede defeat to whoever chooses to spend heavily.
Going back to the first point though, caucuses are different beasts from primaries. The ability of those attending to talk to each other, attempt to persuade and to see how the tallies are going locally should dampen the effect of media spend. The sort of people who turn out may also be less influenced by advertising than those in a primary.
Another point perhaps worth considering is the nature of the advertising. Just as mass negative campaigning by the Tory and Labour parties in Britain only really benefits the Lib Dems, so it might be that the winner in this game could be Edwards if it starts to go negative, who won’t be expected to do that much if Clinton and Obama start throwing even bigger money at the state, but could pick up support for behaving more ‘decently’. There are, admittedly, a lot of ‘ifs’ there, but he has a good warchest of his own and expectations management could be key in this to keep him in the running through to Super Tuesday.
Well done, Mike. And my thanks too to everyone who posts here - it’s an amazing on-line community and what Peebies collectively don’t know about politics probably ain’t worth knowing
The trouble is that most of the population believes that what we do know about politics ain’t worth knowing either.
On another subject what does the delay on the electoion simulator do - and why if you reset it to say 50 does it go back to 200 anyway?
Will the winner be the one with the biggest war-chest?
Mike, for me the winner is always the one with the biggest chest!
Re: 6 - Rod, why don’t you create a self-extracting zip-file of the spreadsheet? Or even a self-extracting rar file? Then others don’t need the extractors…
Congratulations.
On the subject of languages, from the previous thread, Latin would make a good official language for the EU as it is fairly easy to learn, and so many European languages are derived from it.
WRT Wales, wouldn’t a law requiring all businesses to be bilingual be hugely unpopular among people who don’t speak the language? I’d have thought that in areas where there is a substantial Welsh-speaking population, there are already sound commercial reasons for businesses to be bilingual. But in places where Welsh is only spoken by a handful, it would just be an imposition, and surely it would be widely resented? Nationalists seem to love using language as a stick with which to beat their opponents.
[13] You remind me of a story I heard a while ago know about an Englishman who decided to contest a speeding ticket he picked up on the Heads of the Valleys Road in court.
He noted that if he wished, he could present his case in Welsh. It happened that his mother tongue was Urdu, which led him to wondering how long Urdu-speakers (who are, after all, more numerous amongst Brits than welsh-speakers) would have to wait before Urdu became an official language, too. After all, this country doesn’t discriminate on the basis of colour or having immigrant parents, does it?
It will certainly cause fury amongst small businesses in the South East. I can see why Plaid want it. It will please their core support in the North West and they have little to worry about in the South East. It’s Labour who’ll be taking the risk of a backlash. May explain why their MPs opposed any deal with Plaid so strongly
[14] Stray “k” in the first line there, of course…
“MPs to ask questions about expenses claims from Commons Speaker’s wife after cabs used to ‘get food for formal dinners’.”
A mere 40k it seems. Only taxpayers’ money after all.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/
Rod
Your election predicter is great fun but mine stopped at 574 with a bug alert
17 You are clearly an establishment stooge working to block the fairytale rise of working class man from Glasgow to become the most disregarded Commons Speaker in History. 12 years in the Gulag for you!
19 Guilty as charged, m’lud.
Nick Palmer@7: “Do we have polling data on Edwards’ second preferences”?
Apparently Zogby has been polling second preferences, and there’s stuff here about how they break down:
http://zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1395
Looking at the Zogby site I couldn’t find specific numbers which breakdown which candidates’ supporters’ second preferences go to whom, but the commentary seems to be suggesting that overall second preferences work better for Obama than for Clinton, but that the second preferences of candidates most likely to miss the 15% viability threshold - Biden and Richardson, who get 13% of first preferences between them - break disproportionately for Hillary.
11. The delay controls the speed of the declarations. “0″ is fastest, 200 is the default. You can only change it after you’ve pressed run, and it resets to 200 for every new run. I may alter this in the next release…
12. I don’t quite know how to do the self-extracting zip, but I’ll look into into that also..
All suggestions are welcome…
The simulator is supposed to show how FPTP works in practice. For any given set of inputs (the overall votes in the top-left) each seat is declared (in the same order as 2005, although I’ll add a bit of randomness to this later.) Each seat result is generated from a normal distribution of each party’s change in the vote.
For example if the Tories are up 4% nationally, we would expect the Tory change in seat X to lie in the range -2% to +10% (95% of the time), with it lying in the range +1% to +7% about 2/3rds of the time. A handful of seats would lie outside the 95% range, producing exceptional result.
Similarly for the Labour change, which is a bit more variable, and the LibDem, which is a lot more variable.
The program selects at random for each party in seat X a vote change from the distributions described above, and assigns a seat winner and majority based on these changes. For each run of the election, given the same inputs, each seat result will be different from the previous run - some previously won seats will be lost, and vice versa, but the TOTAL seats won for each party will be similar to the last run.
Looking at the scoreboard as the declarations progress, one can see how a few seats in each column buck the trend, where their neighbours are mostly going blue, one or two stubbornly stay red, and there are also some exceptional blue(or yellow) gains deep into red territory. This is exactly what happens in a real election, but broadly these outliers cancel each other out.
This also shows why uniform swing projections are reasonably good predictors over the *overall* result, although individual seats are “free” to buck the trend…
17: Disgraceful. It never takes long, does it…
Interesting how the list of most expensive MPs is dominated by Labour, despite them generally having urban constituencies.
18. Hmmm, that very occasionally happens to me too (not necessarily at seat 574). I suspect it may be something to do with the number of floating-point calculations being too many for your math-chip to cope with! This mother is doing a hell of a lot of sums, and perhaps your machine can’t cope!… Just restart the run, and it should be OK…
[22] Many many thanks for your “toy” Rod, which is great fun. If I may make a couple of (I hope) constructive suggestions - like John Wheatley mine came to a sudden halt - at 632 seats - I wondered if this was because Northern Ireland had given it indigestion! Also, and I’ve no idea how tricky this would be, a “pause” button would be really handy… and if it could display say the last three seats to change hands instead of just the last one that would be neat - on the run I did Labour held a seat in Scotland by 2 votes after seven recounts, and I nearly missed it because the very next seat was a Tory gain! Oh, and I find the SNP majorities of 18,000 or so in the Western Isles (as was) a bit disconcerting - surely it only has an electorate of 25k…
Are we going to mention the New Years Honours list?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/29_12_07_hons_queen.pdf
And can I ask the obvious question why people who are already paid to do jobs like:
Permanent Secretary at MOD
Head of NI Civil Service
Prime Ministers Official Spokesman
should receive public honours?
I mean, I doubt they’ve even donated much money to Labour…
Thanks Rod - whiling I can see it will be something for me to pass the time at work instead of slumping face down on the desk.
23MBoy Yes, didn’t I see somewhere that the most expensive MPs were Labour in marginal constituencies?
But I can’t remember where.
25. Ha! yes it’s supposed to end after the 632 GB declarations… I am not going to try to predict the NI results! I’ll look into the pause button, and a list of the latest gains. It’s trying to fit it all onto one sheet that is the problem…
And yes, well-spotted about the majorities in the Western Isles. For simplicity, and to save hours of work and space on the spreadsheet, I work in percentages only, then multiply the majority by the average value of 440 votes (1%). Doesn’t affect the winners or losers, but in some seats the numerical vote majority will be a tad unrealistic…
Snippet of betting news from Ladbrokes. We took a £10,000 bet on Clinton at 1/2 for the Democratic nomination yesterday.
New thread - How much can you make from political betting?
Cheers, Rod!
To 30,
Indeed there seems to be some big amounts backing Clinton (look at Betfair ‘Next President’)
Still I find her price for winning the Presidency too expensive and would rather back her to win the nomination.