Pennsylvania Indifferent

Following what's being said in the blogs, but oddly indifferent. Exit polls seem strangely non-informative this primary.

I'm surprised I'm indifferent, I know exactly what I want. I want Hillary to absolutely cream Obama. If that happens the race continues and more information comes out about Obama. I've developed an extraordinary skepticism of the guy, and I would like the expose' to come from the Clinton people, rather than from Republicans.

I'm staying with my prediction of a fourteen point margin for Clinton. On balance, nothing I've read in the last hour supports that --or refutes it; just too much that's uncertain, but It would be a nice result.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - Women and older voters came out in force Tuesday in Pennsylvania's presidential primary, encouraging signs for Hillary Rodham Clinton as she sought a win to sustain her campaign.

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7:14
McCain Wins GOP Primary!

No call yet on Hillary/Obama

Fox is saying it's "too close to call." I suppose that's possible. Huge numbers of new voters and young voters. There probably are no certain models to predict their turnout, and since exit polling has so often been so wrong, and since how this turns out is very important psychologically to the race, perhaps they're just sitting on their guesses until a lot of real numbers come in. I can't imagine that Hillary doesn't win, but perhaps they don't want to say anything until there's have some solid sense of the margin.

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7:39
Clinton 67, Obama 33.
Now that's what I call a wipe-out!
One percent in.

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UPDATE: (From Geraghty referencing Fox):

Hume notes that they're "very worried" about the accuracy of the exit poll data that they're getting. But so far, she is up about 6 percent in their numbers.

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8:46
Fox News calls Pennsylvania for Hillary.

No numbers. They're waiting to weight the exit polls against actual numbers. It seems there's a presumption that the exit polls will be off in a consistent enough fashion so that if some can be weighted against actual votes, then the rest can be used to predict actual numbers. One presumes some voters lie about whom they just voted for?

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9:10

Numbers are looking good. 42% reporting, 55 -- 45 Clinton, according to Drudge, and that would be with most of Philadephia County having reported, which is Obama's only really strong county. So as the night goes on it looks very stron for Hillary.

From Geraghty:

UPDATE: The King Number-Cruncher, the great Michael Barone, says that if Hillary ends up winning with 160,000 votes (his back-of-the-envelope margin), and you throw in the results of Michigan and Florida (even though Obama wasn't on the ballot in Michigan, just "undecided"), she actually takes the popular vote lead.

I think this is better than anybody expected. Also, from the tone of comments I've read (an uncertain thing) I get the impression that a lot of the media actually expected Obama to stage an upset, which might explain some of the reluctance to declare a winner: They just couldn't believe the numbers they were seeing.

Barack

Have to make an entry. The idea this election season has been to put down my thoughts and predictions as a way of testing my understanding. If it's written down I can't misremember how perceptive I was. I have lost interest in the race.

Six weeks ago --whenever, but after Texas-- I said Barack was no longer the Messiah, so his support would have peaked. From then on the horse race would be just between a part of a horse and a hack from Chicago. Hillary's support wouldn't go down, because everybody who supported her already knew she was a jerk, but Obama's wouldn't go up because he was now just a politician, and not a very good one at that.

He certainly does have baggage, but the polls haven't gone quite as I'd expected. Some fluctuation, more to Obama's benefit than Hillary's, but actually fairly steady; neither has collapsed, neither has taken off. Obama is accumulating negatives, but so far it hasn't shown up in the polls.

McCain has gone up steadily. For this time of the season, with supposedly immense public dissatisfaction with his party's president, with woes economic and other, his numbers are extraordinary. He should be down ten or fifteen points, but instead he's even with, or leads, either Obama or Hillary. This rise is the general public's response to Hillary the horse and Barack the hack. There is movement among those only marginally attracted to the new king. But what about Democrats?

This is where I lack insight. It appears both camps are pretty firmly dug in and emotional and not about to change their preferences, whatever new information might come out. This surprises me, because, as I said, while I thought Hillary would be solid, I thought Barack could only be damaged, and to my mind he's been damaged more, and more quickly, than I had expected. Yet he has gone up in the polls. This makes no sense.

There has to be a pathology here. Maybe it's just that if you're a Democrat you can't criticize another Democrat if he's black? That would be racist. It seems this is a party piety, it's the faith by which you know you're a liberal.

I take pieties as being public. Always the right thing must be said. But how internal is that perfect faith? Can you say one thing, yet vote another? I don't know. I do know that among a certain set of liberals the more a back Democrat is attacked the more he must be defended, and the more justified the attack the more vehement the defense, the more powerful the commitment to the candidate.

This is pathology but it is a Democrat thing and it's going to happen. But what percentage? How many will say one thing but in a polling place do another? There have got to be Democrats who have followed the same path as myself, initially considering Barack a decent honest fellow fundamentally unconscious of race, who now find him not quite that; maybe rather: loser, jerk, snot, hypocrite and flim-flam man. Are they going to vote for a guy like that? After all, there is another Democrat available. It's true Hillary does have her own descriptive identity, but the difference between what she says and what she is doesn't fool anybody, and at least she's not a loser.

So, Hillary by fourteen points in Pennsylvania.

There. I've made my prediction. On this prediction my reputation will rest, to rise or to fall. Actually, mostly I'm just taking information from Jay Cost. He notes that Ohio and Pennsylvania are demographically very similar, and that the pattern of polling over time-- Hillary's fall in percentage, Barack's rise, though Hillary still maintaining a lead-- are virtually identical between the two states. That's all Jay Cost says. He makes no prediction. He says: "You can't predict tomorrow by yesterday", or something like that.

But he's just protecting rep. In fact the probabilities are that the dynamisms are the same (though some psychologically obscure) so the pattern will be the same. Add to that Obama's new negatives (which has to mean something to at least some Democrats) and I think Hillary's numbers will be better in Pennsylvania than in Ohio. Ohio she won by ten, so Pennsylvania she wins by fourteen.

My personal argument is this: polling is PC, and a public statement is a party piety, it's reflexive; but the voting booth is private, and I just bet'cha that in private a lot of Democrats will sin.

Bambi Meets Godzilla

A friend of mine's wife has cancer. It may be very bad, we don't know yet, the tests aren't all in. I have a numbness in my left hand. For the past week we've been talking (via email) about the numbness in my left hand. It's a lot easier to talk about the insignificant numbness in my left hand than it is to talk about his wife's cancer.

A few weeks back we learned that for twenty years Obama has been a congregent to the hate spewing Rev Jeremiah Wright, a man he considers his spiritual mentor. We also learned that Hillary did not face sniper fire in Tuzla. Oh my gosh! Hilllary is a liar! Who would have thunk it? It's Hillary who went down in the polls, not Obama. It's a lot easier to be angry that Hillary told yet another lie (the response should be a yawn) than it is to face that the new American messiah is actually a black cracker who hates whites. That's painful, that's scary, so we pretend it's not true. The anger appropriate toward the black man is displaced to the damsel.

But a few days back Barack delivered himself of this bit of elitist contempt --towards Pennsylvanians "bitter" about job loss:

And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

In America it is not acceptable to state that a black man is a racist; it's not acceptable to even feel or acknowledge that a black man can hate, though absolutely everyone knows that racist hatred in America pretty much only goes in one direction. But while that can't be felt, acknowledged, or stated, it is totally acceptable in America to feel contempt for an elitist snot, of whatever color. In democratic America a snot is called a snot.

Barack is going down. There are plenty of reasons to find him --how should we say-- "unacceptable", but now there's one that can be faced, felt, and stated: a snot is a snot is a snot; and there are plenty of other emotions to fuel the one that now can be publicly declared.

"Vote for Obama? Are you kidding me? Vote for that elitist Harvard out-of-touch rich guy snob with the whiny bitchy wife? Have you listened to what he says...?"

And so now that it's acceptable to find fault with the dear boy fault will be found. Few will point out that he's a racist, some will question his associations, and all around the edges of that concept there will be criticism. In a month he'll be a con man and a hack.

This will be good public discussion because one that's honest.