Daily Archive

You might not believe this (I certainly don’t) but I’m expecting to wake up tomorrow and find that WordPress has registered the biggest day, visit wise, that this blog has seen to date. All because of my posts about Mississippi. It seems that CNN is putting my posts on their ‘referrals’ bar on their web search, in another bar that shows the most popular blog posts on the topic you’re looking at (and Mississippi is getting a lot of coverage on their website), as well as listing my post Wyoming - results, Mississippi - polls as the first return when you search for “Mississippi polls”. The same goes for Google, but by far, CNN has sent people my way quite a bit in the past 48 hours.

Yesterday, Wyoming - results, Mississippi - polls had 95 hits. Today, it has garnered (so far) 379. In the past 24 hours, 272 people have found my blog with the search terms “mississippi polls”. Strange is the second most searched term: “missippi polls”. I now am wondering if I’ve misspelled Mississippi somewhere along the line. I’ll have to check.

At the moment, WordPress’ 24 hours has the visits at 507. My biggest day was February 6 (Super Tuesday in the U.S.) with 520. On that day, my Superdelegates post received 379 views. It looks as though Wyoming - results, Mississippi - polls is going to beat that.

The week’s views (all three days of it) sits at 772 views. It will have quite a way to go to beat the 1,603 week that Super Tuesday was in. The month’s views sit, already, as the second-highest month to date: 2,441. February’s 4,494 is less than double away. Could the magical 5,000 be attainable this month? With these numbers, I’m actually inspired to try and break the 5,000 mark, whereas before I was content with making 2,000 visits.

I look forward to tomorrow’s statistics very much.

Thomas.

Postscript

As I was writing this, Wyoming - results, Mississippi - polls did best Superdelegates’s 379 views. Last I checked it was 381.

Post-Postscript

Now a record day has been set. I checked at around 11:30pm (actually, it was 11:22pm) at the day had gained 522 visits. With many more hours to go, by WordPress’ count, this could be a really big day - especially with Mississippi starting to vote in a short time, and the news outlets beginning to report on the state. Could be very big indeed.

Last week, both Hillary and Bill Clinton brought up the prospect of the Democrats running a ticket that had Barrack Obama and Hillary on it. Of course, Bill and Hillary both noted that it would be Barack Obama who would be the vice presidential candidate, and not a Clinton. While doing so, both members of the Clinton party were able to reference how powerful the Obama name will be on any ticket, whether she is on it or not. Bill Clinton said:

I know that she has always been open to it, because she believes that if you can unite the energy and the new people that he’s brought in and the people in these vast swaths of small town and rural America that she’s carried overwhelmingly, if you had those two things together she thinks it’d be hard to beat. [It would be an] almost unstoppable force.

Unstoppable you say? Would that be because the voters that Clinton is bring to the table are true Democratic voters who would vote for any Democratic candidate, regardless of the party, while Obama brings in swing and independent voters, as well as the wavering Republicans?

Obama quickly, and effectively, squashed the idea for the short term when he came out the next day with this:

You know, we are just focused on winning this nomination. That’s my focus. And you know, I’ve said before I respect Sen. Clinton as a public servant. She’s a tenacious opponent. I think it is very premature to start talking about a joint ticket … right now.

And quickly followed with this statement:

You won’t see me as a vice presidential candidate, you know, I’m running for president.

And thus was shot down probably the last idea the Clinton campaign had to get Obama to pull out the race. What I found funny then was that the candidate who was coming second was ‘offering’ the second place on the general election ticket to the candidate running first. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to find that funny though. Obama himself came out at a Mississippi rally yesterday with these amusing assessments:

With all due respect, I’ve won twice as many states as Senator Clinton. I’ve won more of the popular vote than Senator Clinton. I have more delegates than Senator Clinton. So I don’t know how somebody who is in second place is offering the vice presidency to the person who’s in first place.

On all three, crucial, fronts, Obama is winning easily. But it didn’t end there. What makes the ‘offer’ by the Clinton campaign absurd is that while Bill might be out there floating the idea, and while Clinton supporters might encourage it (like Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell, who said “It would be a great ticket.”), Clinton is still engaged, along with the rest of her campaign, in an attack-and-smear campaign against Obama. While one side of her team is saying he would be a great running-mate, the other is saying that Obama is unqualified to take office, totally the wrong choice for voters, and doesn’t deserve to be in the White House.

Funny. I thought that the role of vice president was to be ready to take over as president if the occasion so arose. I thought you would have to be as qualified as the president (or presidential nominee) to be fit to be the vice president. Obama seems to think like this too:

If I’m not ready, how is it that you think I should be such a great vice president? [The Clinton team is] trying to hoodwink you.

That’s all it really is: An election tactic. The Clinton campaign is only throwing this idea out there in order to make Obama voters think that a vote for her is a vote for Obama, so vote for Clinton. What Obama voters need to ask themselves is will Clinton really pick Obama as her running-mate come the general election after all the negative things she has said? And if she does, is this the candidate that you want: Someone who can’t keep a consistent message? And do you think Obama will automatically say yes? No, no, and no are the answers to those three questions.

Polls among Democrats have been conducted concerning this hypothetical ticket. With the options of the primary race ending now and the ticket being ‘formed’ immediately or the race going through to the end, from Clinton supporters, 59% favoured the ticket option, while only 39% favoured the race continuing. For the Obama supporters, the results were opposite: 52% favoured continuing the race, while only 45% wanted to form the ‘dream ticket’. Among all Democrats, only 51% wanted to see the ‘dream ticket’, while 45% actually opposed the idea.

This probably stems from the following statistics: Only 71% of Clinton supporters believe that she will win the primary campaign. 83% of the Obama supporters believe that he will win it.

Similar confidence was shown by Obama’s political supporters in disregarding the ‘offer’. Senator John Kerry said:

The first threshold question about a vice president is, are you prepared to be president? So on the one end, they are saying he’s not prepared to be president. On the other hand, they’re saying maybe he ought to be vice president.

Tom Daschle, former senator from South Dakota and former Senate Democratic leader, who has also publicly supported Obama (previously saying “[Obama] personifies the future of Democratic leadership in our country” and has a “great capacity to unify our country”) had this to say about the offer:

It may be the first time in history that the person who is running number two would offer the person running number one the number two position.

And it might just be - which makes it all the more ridiculous to be touting the idea. The Clinton campaign slipped off the rails some time ago, so something like this can be totally expected from them.

Thomas.

Yes, there’s a new banner, as you’ve already seen no doubt (unless you’re living with dial-up *cough* Ombudsman *cough*). It’s that picture I alluded to in this post - taken in Queensland, at SeaWorld, at their shark tank. I thought it made a good banner. The picture itself is pretty bad, but when cropped and shrunk, it looks like that. I like it - it might stay up for a short while. Maybe.

Thomas.

And, as the vote draws even nearer in Mississippi, the last round of polls have been released. They seem to dispel the idea that the state will be a tight race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The most telling one though is the latest Insider Advantage one. While it predicted a 6% lead for Obama on the 6th of March, three days later, on th 9th, their data indicated that Obama is, in fact, in the lead by 17% - 54% to 37%. A much healthier, and better, poll for Obama.

As someone commented on the previous post, and as I have stated many times, where the data is collected, what time even, can have a bearing on what the results say. If, for example, the data gathers were in Rankin, Madison, or Hinds (Hinds being the county where the capital Jackson is located), then Obama’s figures are going to be like the 24% lead previous polls registered him with. On the other hand, if the pollsters were out in the North-West counties like Desoto, Tunica, Coahoma, and Bolivar, then you would have a very tight race, as there are only small areas where there are centres of population 5,000 or more. And we know that Obama performs best in the urban and ‘populated’ counties, while Clinton performs best in the rural counties. Similarly, the North-West border of Mississippi shares its dividing line with Arkansas - one of Clinton’s home states. And to the North, the state borders Tennessee - a state Clinton won by 12%.

I’ve covered the demographics before - in this post - and the stakes remain the same. The only new thing to say about this is that the ‘black’ vote is predicted to make something like 45% to 50% (with nearer to 50% being the most spoken number). And with Obama averaging 80% of the ‘black’ vote across all the states, with Clinton only managing 12%, I’d say that Obama has a slight head start. Slight might be an understatement actually …

The Demographics matter quite a bit as the evidence (polls, literature, news, etc.) to come out of the state indicate that there is still a significant degree of racial polarisation. That explains why Obama is performing very well with white males outside of Southern states (65%+), and making in-roads with white females too (splitting them with Clinton on averages), but is losing by 47% to Clinton among white voters in Mississippi. The polling data seems to indicate that a significant proportion of the ‘white’ vote will not vote for the ‘black’ candidate.

A little bit more on demographics. In terms of winning net counties (and, as a result, delegates), it helps Obama that the African-American population is a majority in some of these counties: Yazoo County (54%), Hinds County (61%), Issaquena County (63%), Sharkey County (70%), Humphreys County (72%), Holmes County (79%). These are the counties that make up most of the Yazoo Delta. More of the South-West counties and the central counties have similar African-American majorities. Mainly, it’s from when African-Americans could buy land and set up their own farms, or when they were working on plantations and cotton farms prior to emancipation, and stayed in the area.

Politically, you might expect Mississippi to be running red veins, much less blood. I was somewhat surprised to see that the state only elected Democratic governors for 116 years - 1876 to 1992. Of course, that might have something to do with the whole Civil War, and Abe Lincoln being a Republican who mad the state’s life ‘hell’. Similarly, the Democratic party had previously dominated the state’s domestic politics until the 1960’s. Then the Republican party became more appealing. John F. Kennedy was voted in by the state, and so too was Jimmy Carter. But other than that (and the one-off time the state voted for George Wallace from the American Independent Party) the state has sent its electoral college votes to the Republican party each time.

Another interesting Mississippi politics fact: The state has more African-American elected officials in state politics than any other state in the U.S.

Mississippi should be a convincing Obama win. It will certainly be an Obama win, and the margin could conceivably reach as high as 20%. And in this late stage of the primary race, that’s a big win. And it would mean another 60%+ win - the margin that I said would bring this race back into Obama’s court.

Thomas.