The Booth and Beyond: The Global Impact of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
The Booth and Beyond will be cross-posted on Voices Without Votes, a collaboration between Global Voices and Reuters that highlights conversations about the elections in non-American blogs and citizen media.
Live Blog Below
Live Blog Recap
With less than a week before the U.S. Presidential elections on November 4th, voters and non-voters the world over are eagerly awaiting the results. Though the financial crisis has hit America hard, the United States remains a global superpower and the result of the elections will undoubtedly have an impact on foreign policy.
The title of The Morningside Post‘s live blog coverage of the election returns covers what we see as two crucial aspects of the election: The Booth — the nuances of American electoral politics and what voter trends say about the United States at its current point in time — and Beyond — the possible implications of the election results for other countries.
The Morningside Post is thrilled to bring you students from top policy schools worldwide and experts on American electoral politics to comment on the election returns as they come in. This group of first-rate bloggers will be contributing to our live blog from 12 p.m. to 12 a.m. Eastern Standard time on November 4th.
We encourage readers of the live blog to comment throughout the day with their own thoughts or questions.
A guide to participants and usernames follows the blog box below.
Participating Schools:
Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs, United States; GPPN
London School of Economics, United Kingdom; GPPN
Sciences-Po, France; GPPN
Hertie School of Governance, Germany
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore; GPPN
Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Russia
Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil
University of Toyko Graduate School of Public Policy, Japan
Columbia University Faculty:
Sharon O’Halloran: A political economist and expert on statistical analysis of voting districts, O’Halloran co-authored A Social Science Approach to Race, Redistricting and Representation and Measuring the Electoral and Policy Impact of Majority-Minority Voting District.
Brigitte Nacos: A professor of political science, Nacos is an expert on the link between terrorism, the media, and presidential politics. She keeps a blog at reflectivepundit.
Andrew Gelman: A statistician and expert on voting patterns, Gelman is director of Columbia’s Applied Statistics Center and recently published Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. He keeps the blog Statistical modeling, causal inference and social science.
David Epstein: A political economist and expert on racial redistricting, legislative organization, Internet voting and ethnic politics, Epstein served as a consulting expert during the state of Georgia’s redistricting efforts following the 2000 census. He currently blogs for The Huffington Post.
Guide to the Usernames
Hertie School, Berlin: Hertie School of Governance, Germany
Bloggers: Sebastian Duwe (Germany), Naomi Woods (Canada), Donald Blondin (USA), Andrew Gomez (USA)
LSE: London School of Economics, UK
Bloggers: Anne-Marie Jeannet (Switzerland), Farah Bhanji (UK)
Sciences-Po: Sciences-Po, France
Bloggers: Carlos Gastelum* (Mexico), Massimiliano Rocco (Italy), Roopa Dhatt (USA), Daphne Descurieux (France), and Kenny Galloway (USA)
* Carlos is an exchange student from SIPA partner school El Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)
LKYSPP: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore
Bloggers: Sanjana Govindan (India); Pratyush Dubey (India); Zak Yuson (Philippines); Kiran Malik; Nidhi
MGIMO-University (Russia): Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Russia
Bloggers: Stay Tuned
Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil
Bloggers: Theo Araujo (Brazil)
University of Toyko Graduate School of Public Policy, Japan
Bloggers: Mamoru Okuma (Japan)
SIPA: Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, United States
Bloggers: Ben Colmery (USA); Rebekah Heacock (USA); Senior Associate Dean Rob Garris* (USA); Adjunct Professor Tanya Domi* (USA); Courtney Doggart (USA); Andrea Wong (Canada)
* The views expressed here are their own and do not represent the University’s.
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I keep hearing from a lot of people, Democrats in particular, that this election is not in the bag for Obama. There is a sentiment out there that deep rooted racial issues, voting irregularities or right wing conspiracies might turn this thing upside down hand it to the Republicans. That is not going to happen. This thing will be decided by early Wednesday in favor of Obama. Midweek.
Here is a website that lists every major poll in the country, and a consolidated average. There isn’t one poll that shows Obama with less than a 5 percent lead. That means even with a margin of error, at the most conservative estimate he wins by 2 percent. The average across 14 polls is 7 percent, so worse case scenario for Obama (on average) he beats McCain by 4 percent -given the standard margin of error. It is going to be a landslide.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls/
Lets forget these numbers for a second and assume that the polls were showing Obama and McCain running even at 50 – 50%. Still that would bode well for Obama. Why? Polls are created to take a balanced and representative sample of the voting population. So if they are asking 100 people to give their opinion they take 45 Republicans, 45 Democrats and 10 Independents. This assumes that both parties will get equal voter turnouts. This is almost never the case. In 2004 the reasons the polls seemed closer than the actual election was because more Republicans (particularly Evangelicals) voted. In 2008 the Democratic primaries had a much greater turn out than the Republican primaries. So even if they were polling equally it can be expected Barack will win. By a landslide.
The Senate and House go to Democrats. With big majorities.
A Land Slide Victory for the Democrats
I keep hearing from a lot of people, Democrats in particular, that this election is not in the bag for Obama. There is a sentiment out there that deep rooted racial issues, voting irregularities or right wing conspiracies might turn this thing upside, down and hand a victory to the Republicans. That is not going to happen. This thing will be decided by early Wednesday in favor of Obama. Midweek.
Here is a website that lists every major poll in the country, and a consolidated average. There isn’t one poll that shows Obama with less than a 5 percent lead. That means even with a margin of error, at the most conservative estimate he wins by 2 percent. The average across 14 polls is 7 percent, so worse case scenario for Obama (on average) he beats McCain by 4 percent -given the standard margin of error. It is going to be a landslide.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls/
Lets forget these numbers for a second and assume that the polls were showing Obama and McCain running even at 50 – 50%. Still that would bode well for Obama. Why? Polls are created to take a balanced and representative sample of the voting population. So if they are asking 100 people to give their opinion they take 45 Republicans, 45 Democrats and 10 Independents. This assumes that both parties will get equal voter turnouts. This is almost never the case. In 2004 the reasons the polls seemed closer than the actual election was because more Republicans (particularly Evangelicals) voted. In 2008 the Democratic primaries had a much greater turn out than the Republican primaries. So even if they were polling equally it can be expected Barack will win. By a landslide.
The Senate and House go to Democrats. With big majorities.
Hi all, I would like to bring a correction to a statement I made during blogging night about elctions and poles in France. I said that they were banned a week before elections. This is now untrue. In fact the law on polls has been reformed in 2002 (19th of Janaury 2002 Loi n°2002-214) and they are prohibited the night before an election and on election day.
A differenciation is made between estimations at 8pm on the elctionday as voting booths are closed at that time, and polls that could influence votation and bias elections.
Thank you!
Daphné