A Moment of Political Weakness.

It was an election year when I was in fourth grade. In our Social Studies class, we spent a lot of time learning about it and the process for electing a president. Mr. Danks was my social studies teacher back then. He had taken one wall of his class room and hung cork board panels up, one for each candidate that was running. I know I could do research to tell who the candidates were, but I'm not gonna. I'm feeling too lazy to do it. But I do remember there was an independent running (Anderson?) who seemed to have a real shot. We also had cork boards for the other lesser known parties at the time, like the Libertarians and believe it or not, the Communist Party. We were entrusted by Mr. Danks to go out and find any campaign swag(for the lack of a better word) for each candidate and place it on the cork boards. The democrat and republican candidate cork boards filled up quickly with pins and posters, as did the independent candidate, while everyone else was a little bare.

I learned a lot about the process of electing a president back then. I learned about the electoral college, why no other parties had a real shot at winning the election besides and Democrats or the Republicans, and sometimes an independent. Mr. Danks would often preach to us about the greatness of our political process and the greatness of the independent candidate. A week before the actual election, we held a mock vote in class with a ballot that featured all the candidates.

The independent candidate, John B. Anderson (I looked it up), won. The Democrat (Carter) was second, and the Republican (Reagan) was third. No one else received any of the precious 30 votes in our class. But it goes to show you two things; 1 - Mr. Danks standing on his soap box preaching about the great independent had an effect on the outcome. And 2 - 4th graders have no idea how to vote. Well maybe that's not true, but without hearing all the facts, my 4th grade class voted the election backwards that year.

During all this, I would ask my father what he thought about the presidential candidates and who he would vote for. He never did tell me who he voted for. He always believed in the privacy of his vote. When pressed he would answer, "I will be voting for the lesser of two evils," A motto he uttered every election year.

I have a motto I utter more often than every election year, "There are three things I don't discuss, religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin." Why? Because those are three hot button topics that everyone has a different view on and none of us will ever see things the same (especially the Great Pumpkin). Like my father, I never tell anyone who I'm voting for. Nicole may think she knows, but I don't think I've ever told her outright. It kind of gets her goat when she presses me and I say, "I'm voting for the lesser of two evils."

All this to make a point, I'm never going to blog about political stuff here. It's not my nature and if you really want to know what's going on in the elections, there's plenty of places on the net for that. But today is a moment of political weakness (of sorts) and I am going to post a link that I find very interesting.

If you have HD television, somewhere in the fray is a channel called HDNet. When Dan Rather was unceremoniously forced into retirement, HDNet gave him a 60 minutes like show called, "Dan Rather Reports". Aside from it being stunning to watch in HD (although in my opinion, they over-light Mr. Rather in an attempt to soften his wrinkles), he has some really interesting stories. I couldn't tell you what night the new episodes are, it seems to be on a few times a week in the afternoon, but yesterdays edition had a couple of interesting stories.

The one I'm posting about today featured an analyst that started a website called fivethirtyeight.com. He was a former baseball analyst who took his theorems that he created for baseball stats and applied them to the polls for president that we have today. The government and the media seem to put a lot of emphasis on polls. Entry polls, exit polls, debate polls, rolly polly polls. This guy and his website take all the raw data from the dozens of polls done daily and applies them to what seem to be "real life". On Dan Rather Reports, he said something interesting that I'm going to attempt to summarize; Most polls claim a +/- accuracy of 3%. When in reality it's closer to 5 or 6%. Why? The example that struck me the most is that most 18-30 year olds today don't have a home phone and most conduct business on a cell phone. Because cell phones are on a "do not call" list, the amount of 18-30 year olds that pollsters can get a hold of is fewer, so they fudge the facts a little. As an example, if they get a hold of 10 youngsters and 6 are for McCain and 4 are for Obama, they will balloon the figure, make the assumption that if this holds true for 10, then there is a strong likelihood of it holding true for 100. So they report 60 for McCain and 40 for Obama.

While this all seems wrong, according to fivethirtyeight.com, the data needs more processing. Which they do. Have a look, it's a very non-biased website (I think) no political lean that I can see. FYI, the name, fivethirtyeight, refers to the number of electoral college votes available.

And in case you're wondering who I'm voting for... I'm voting for the Great Pumpkin.

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