Saturday, August 05, 2006

Cold Showers From Bowers

Chris Bowers at MyDD has the mother of all Don't-Get-Cocky posts:
Due to the low information voters factor, analysts have always believed that higher turnout, which will bring in more low-information voters, will help Lieberman....

....The closer Ned Lamont appear to come to victory on August 8th, the more the media pays attention to what could potentially become a major event in recent American political history. The media attention n this race could now barely become any greater. It is now regularly among the top three U.S. stories on Google News, and at numerous times over the past month has been the number one U.S. story on Google News. Every major national news outlet, as well as every news outlet in Connecticut, has become obsessed with this story. The rather stunning amount of attention that has been paid to this race will drive up turnout. This will increase the number of low-information voters within the electorate, and that will help Joe Lieberman. That fact alone makes the polls less favorable to Ned Lamont that they currently appear to be.

(...)

Combine new voter registrations with low information voters with what is clearly a still massive Lieberman ground game--a ground game that analysts have said can add up to five point for Lieberman in this election--and suddenly you have an election within the margin of error. Throw in both public and internal polls that show the race closer than the 13 point Lamont lead from the Q-poll, and you have an election teetering on a knife edge. For Lamont backers, our concern right now should not be with blowing Lieberman out, but rather with winning this election at all. We can only do that if we get on the ground in Connecticut and help out.
My belief has always been that turnout would favor Lamont, because I expect Lamont's supporters to be more passionate and motivated than Lieberman's. But if everybody wants to vote because suddenly the primary is a big deal, then that neutralizes Lamont's advantage.

And so, it comes down to Passion vs. Ignorance, and The People vs. The Powerful. Go, Passion! Go, The People!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

The 10-13% lead Lamont holds in the polls is huge by today's standards in polling. Loserman inspires almost no one (except Rethugs), while Lamont supporters seem to be on fire! I'm guessing that if Holy Joe loses the primary, he's got the scarlet *L* on him in the general election and goes down in a ball of flames. The *L* is NOT for Liberal, BTW.

Eli said...

That's certainly what I'm hoping. The only thing that worries me is how often the election results seem to diverge from the poll results, and how often they seem to skew to the right...

Anonymous said...

Eli,

Yep. It's called Diebold voting machines. Or corrupt Rethug election officials. It's amazing that in virtually every close election in the last 5 or so years, the republicans came out the *winners*. Go figure the odds of THAT.

Eli said...

CT's voting machines are all mechanical, thankfully.

Not sure who's in charge of the elections - I know they have a Republican governor, but I haven't heard about any Blackwellesque maneuverings, so hopefully there won't be too many shenanigans, other than Liebergoons trying to intimidate Lamont voters at the polls.

oldwhitelady said...

CT's voting machines are all mechanical, thankfully.

I'll drink to that! We'll see what happens, but it would do my heart good to see Lamont win the primary. The biggest problem I see is that the Republicans will all decide to vote Dem and vote for Lieberman. That's what happened in the governor race in Mo - they voted for the one they knew would not win against their man.
I hope my comment makes sense to others (it makes sense to me.. but that's me:)

Eli said...

By the time the Republicans realized Lamont was a serious threat to their boy, it was already past the deadline to switch affiliation from one party to another.

So only the unaffiliated are switching to Dem to vote in the primary. But no-one's really sure whose side they're on.

Anonymous said...

Hey Young White Lady!

Long time no type. You doing OK?

I'm kind of bummed out by the Atrios site these days. It's all the same old shit over and over again. It's like a one trick pony, "FUCK LOSERMAN"

Yeah, he sucks, but there is other stuff going on here that's more important than that. The Paris of the Middle East (Lebanon)is being bombed into oblivion and we just pass it by. Disgraceful.

flory said...

Maybe I'm looking thru a biased eye, but I just don't see that Lieberman is generating enough excitement to have a lot of new voters jumping on his bandwagon.

And I think Chris' post is self contradictory. You can't have a a race that's generating so much coverage and excitement that its causing people to register to vote for the first time, and yet have those people also be 'low information' voters. If the race is generating that much buzz and excitement, its because information is getting out there. And I don't think its information that's going to have hordes of people suddenly recognizing what a swell guy Joe is.

I think there's an awful lot of netroots overcompensation going on in this race. We've been disappointed so many times -- Kerry, Hackett, Ciro, Francine -- that everybody's a little afraid of optimism this time.

Anonymous said...

So only the unaffiliated are switching to Dem to vote in the primary. But no-one's really sure whose side they're on.

Bowers or Stoller wrote a post about that and said most un-affiliated registrants tend to lean liberal, iirc. Still, it's going to be a tense two days.

I wonder if the heat will affect turnout.