2008 Presidential Punditology: Super Tuesday Winners
Well, it's taken us a full week after Super Tuesday to sort through all the results (and sit around waiting to find out what happened in Missouri and New Mexico.)
Like everyone else, we've been sorting through the state-by-state numbers just trying to figure out exited Super Tuesday with the most pledged delegates (Obama 887, Clinton 869, per CNN as reported on the Ultimate Delegate Tracker.)
First, a word about how we scored things:
On the Democratic side, we asked you to pick the winner - and tell us whether it'd be a big win or a small win. If you got the winner right, that's two points. If you also got the scale right, that's another bonus point.
On the Republican side, we asked you to pick the top two. If you got the winner right, that's two points. If you got the top two right, that's another bonus point.
The Top Punditologists
Once again, our top punditologist was Jonathan Singer - front-page blogger at MyDD.com and law student at Boalt Hall. He scored 108 points, and picked the winning Democrat in each state except Arizona, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Utah; and the winning Republican in each state except Minnesota and Oklahoma. (C'mon, Jonathan, let us in on your secret!)
Here's the top 10% of the punditologists:
Jonathan Singer, 108 points
Tim Crail, 106 points
Kyle Schoenfish, 106 points
Nathaniel Hake, 101 points
Alan Fleischman, 97 points
Maxwell Fritz, 97 points
Greg Packnett, 96 points
Steve Hauck, 96 points
Wayne Kinney, 96 points
Carl Fisher, 94 points
Drew Russo, 94 points
Corey Crowley-Hall, 93 points
David Gikow, 92 points
David Jarvis, 92 points
Kari Chisholm, 92 points
Steven Davis, 92 points
Katie Eukel, 91 points
Dave Porter, 91 points
Bill Ryan, 91 points
Shawn O'Neal, 91 points
David Riave, 90 points
Jake Oken-Berg, 90 points
Justin Schafer, 90 points
Given how much slower the primary season is, I think we're done for now. We'll be back in October with the big 2008 Punditology Challenge (and, for Oregonians, in May with the Oregon Primary Challenge.)
Kari Chisholm | February 13, 2008 | Comments (1) |
2008 Presidential Punditology: January Winners
Here's the final results of the first round of the 2008 Presidential Punditology Challenge, which included all the primaries and caucuses in January.
Congratulations to our top punditologist, Jonathan Singer. Jonathan is a front-page blogger at MyDD.com and a law student at Boalt Hall. In 2006, he managed a legislative race in Oregon.
Jonathan scored 145 points, correctly picking the winners of every single primary and caucus. His only errors? Picking McCain 3rd in Iowa and Romney 2nd in South Carolina.
Second place goes to Jean Lloyd-Jones of Iowa City. Jean was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Iowa in 1992 (losing a tough race to Chuck Grassley.) She scored 134 points, also correctly picking the winners of every single primary and caucus.
All hail Jonathan Singer and Jean Lloyd-Jones! They have the crystal balls that rule them all!
By way of honorable mentions, here are top 54 punditologists - the top 10% of participants:
#1. Jonathan Singer, 145 pts
#2. Jean Lloyd-Jones, 134 pts
#3. Jake Mathai, 131 pts
#4. Richard Luchette, 127 pts
#4. Dave McTeague, 127 pts
#6. Adam Bonin, 124 pts
#7. Alec Oyhenart, 123 pts
#8. Carol Imani, 122 pts
#8. Adam Sharp, 122 pts
#10. Robert Eisinger, 121 pts
#11. Katie Eukel, 120 pts
#11. Eric Adelstein, 120 pts
#11. Michael Adam, 120 pts
#11. Mike Yeomans, 120 pts
#15. Dan Anderson, 119 pts
#15. Bryan Bissell, 119 pts
#17. Jack Roberts, 118 pts
#17. Brain Coty, 118 pts
#17. Josh Revesz, 118 pts
#20. Brian Simmonds, 117 pts
#20. Matt Feldman, 117 pts
#20. Tim Crail, 117 pts
#23. Jake Oken-Berg, 116 pts
#23. Justin Schafer, 116 pts
#23. Nathan Currie, 116 pts
#26. John Turner, 115 pts
#27. Joseph P. Boyle, 114 pts
#28. David Nebel, 113 pts
#28. Tom Wolf, 113 pts
#28. Ben Cannon, 113 pts
#28. Ellen Lowe, 113 pts
#28. Bob Estabrook, 113 pts
#33. Dan Kully, 112 pts
#33. Bill Frick, 112 pts
#35. Jesse Kanson-Benanav, 111 pts
#35. Jay Mobley, 111 pts
#35. Samantha Gaddy, 111 pts
#38. Lori Lodes, 110 pts
#38. Gary A Nord, 110 pts
#40. Maren Giobbi, 109 pts
#41. Terry Webber, 108 pts
#42. Anne Martens, 107 pts
#42. Kenneth I. Wirfel, 107 pts
#42. Kylan Johnson, 107 pts
#42. Howard Park, 107 pts
#42. Adam McCall, 107 pts
#42. Alex Tischenko, 107 pts
#48. Adam Greenspan, 106 pts
#48. Crystal Merritt, 106 pts
#48. wade morris, 106 pts
#48. Jonathan Stein, 106 pts
#48. John Olszewski, Jr., 106 pts
#48. Benjamin Gann, 106 pts
#48. Jason Paul, 106 pts
We'll keep the names of the bottom 90% to ourselves. (If that's you, your secret is safe with us.)
A final word about our collective wisdom. Our collective picks scored 117 points - and were better than 96.2% of the individual punditologists.
Every single subgroup (bloggers, professors, journalists, activists, electeds, etc.) did worse -- except one: As a group, political consultants scored 123 points - and were better than 98.9% of us (and, by the way, better than all but two individual political consultants.)
So maybe there is something to this "wisdom of the crowd" business...
Kari Chisholm | February 3, 2008 | Comments (0) |
The 2008 Presidential Primary Punditology Challenge
You're smart. You're political. When people whisper, "that's what THEY say," you're the one they're talking about.
So, it's time to put it on the line in the biannual Punditology Challenge. This year, we're starting early - with a January edition of Presidential Primary Punditology.
Do you know the top-three order of finish in the Iowa Caucus? Do you know which Republican will win the South Carolina Primary? Do you know which candidates will drop out before Super Tuesday?
Correctly predict the winners and you could be famous. You could be the next Cable TV talking head. There's no money in it, but if your crystal ball is the finest of them all - we'll bow down before your greatness and proclaim it to the world.
(In 2004, Intel policy guy Jonathan Williams correctly picked every governor's race, every Senate race, and all but one state in the presidential race. We're still astonished.)
The deadline for your picks is Wednesday at midnight. So, get on it!
The 2008 Presidential Primary Punditology Challenge awaits your brilliance.
Good luck. And happy new year. 2008 has finally arrived.
Kari Chisholm | December 31, 2007 | Comments (0) |
How to lose an $80 donation: a cautionary tale.
Just got this note from a friend. It's a cautionary tale.
Thought I'd send along this example of how to lose an $80 campaign donation... I've been getting Bill Richardson's emails for quite a while now without donating anything yet. And while I am actually not as attracted to him as I once was, this email and the ads I watched when I clicked through to the donation form motivated me just enough to say "OK, I'll send along some money and help keep the pot boiling in Iowa."So off to complete the form and I fill the whole thing out... without including my phone number since I for sure don't want phone calls coming to me as a result of the donation. Hit the send button and back it comes with the response that the phone number is required...
Now that's a pretty dumb move... and if it was done because its required by the Feds for record keeping, people should be told that on the form itself. Or at least when the form bounces back. But to just insist on the phone number or the donation won't clear... really, really stupid idea.
I agree. If it's not required, don't require it. You don't want anything standing between you and your donor's money.
Kari Chisholm | November 9, 2007 | Comments (1) |
Congressman LaTourette gets blogger fired
The Newhouse family of newspapers and websites - OregonLive.com, MassLive.com, Cleveland.com, NOLA.com - have been scrambling to add blogs to their media mix. Their regular journalists now often write blogs, and the papers have all been adding freelance bloggers as well.
In Cleveland, the Plain Dealer hired two conservative activists and two progressive activists to blog together on a blog called Wide Open.
But today, we hear the news that Congressman Steve LaTourette (R) managed to convince the Plain Dealer to fire one of its progressive bloggers, Jeff Coryell Why? Apparently, because he'd made a $100 donation to the Democratic challenger.
Unbelievable. Here's the relevant posts:
Jeff Coryell's version - posted at Ohio Daily Blog.
The PD's version, posted by the paper's Assistant Managing Editor
The post by progressive blogger Jill Miller Zimon, in which she resigns in protest
And the two posts by the conservative bloggers, Tom Blumer and Dave from Nixguy, who aren't happy about it either - as it seems to have ended this experiment in newspaper-sanctioned partisan blogging: "This post isn't as much a resignation as it is an observation that the whole thing has sort of blown up, and it looks like there's nothing left to resign from."
Ugh.
Kari Chisholm | November 2, 2007 | Comments (0) |
Baffled by Facebook? A quick primer.
At Time Magazine, they've got a quick and easy-to-understand primer on what Facebook is - and how it's different from MySpace and the rest of the internet. Here's the key pieces.
Facebook is, in Silicon Vall--ese, a "social network": a website for keeping track of your friends and sending them messages and sharing photos and doing all those other things that a good little Web 2.0 company is supposed to help you do. It was started by Harvard students in 2004 as a tool for meeting-- or at least discreetly ogling--other Harvard students, and it still has a reputation as a hangout for teenagers and the teenaged-at-heart. Which is ironic because Facebook is really about making the Web grow up.Whereas Google is a brilliant technological hack, Facebook is primarily a feat of social engineering. (It wouldn't be a bad idea for Google to acquire Facebook, the way it snaffled YouTube, but it's almost certainly too late in the day for that. Yahoo! offered a billion for Facebook last year and was rebuffed.) Facebook's appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. It's a website, but in a sense, it's another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that's everything the larger Net is not. Facebook is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmarket feel to it--a whiff of the Ivy League still clings. People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows you're a dog.
Maybe that's why Facebook's fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older: they're refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet's founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook--it's just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you're annoying folks, you'll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid.
Facebook has taken steps this year to expand its functionality by allowing outside developers to create applications that integrate with its pages, which brings with it expanded opportunities for abuse. ... But it has also hung on doggedly to its core insight: that the most important function of a social network is connecting people and that its second most important function is keeping them apart.
And that's just it. There's no reason to "perform" on Facebook - since the only people that can "see" you on it are your friends.
Of course, the best way to understand Facebook is to just dive in, find your friends, and start communicating.
Kari Chisholm | August 29, 2007 | Comments (1) |
Does YouTube hurt or help politics?
Over at TechNewsWorld.com, they've got pre-coverage of the CNN/YouTube debate.
I spoke with Tech News World, and made the case that even the silly stuff is good for our democracy:
"Anything that gives more attention to our political process is a good thing for democracy. I even think videos like the Obama Girl videos [on YouTube], as silly as they are, help make this presidential election a cultural phenomenon," Chisholm explained."Even if people are paying attention at first to a silly parody video, it gets them thinking about the election and the choices they are going to have. I see it all as a good thing -- there's no reason politics can't be fun, wacky and part of the cultural fabric of this country," he added.
Kari Chisholm | July 23, 2007 | Comments (2) |
A history of YouTube & Politics
On their politics channel, CitizenTube, the good folks at YouTube have posted a short four-minute video with highlights of all the big political moments (so far) on YouTube. It's pretty good stuff.
Kari Chisholm | July 22, 2007 | Comments (2) |
