This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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I was going to wait until I saw a “100% reporting” number, but I guess 99% will do. On this week’s Curmudgeon’s Corner I predicted that while I didn’t know where he would place exactly, that Ron Paul would beat Rudy Guiliani in New Hamphshire. With 99% reporting on CNNs Tally Page the final was 20,387 for Guiliani and 18,276 for Ron Paul.
I guess the Paulites just didn’t get enough turnout to manage it, and Giuliani did OK enough on his last couple debates to reverse his slide in the state.
Also, the revelations about Ron Paul’s newsletter a couple decades ago can’t have helped, although that was new news while the voting was going on. And despite Paul’s disavowal of the content that was published under his name, I think he has reached his high water mark. This stuff has hurt him. And failure to break 10% in the first two states will dampen a lot of the enthusiasm of his big supporters. He may go a bit longer because he has the cash to do so, but I’m not sure how much longer.
And I think the stuff from the newsletters, disavowal or not, has enough people shaken that the support for pushing him to go ahead and run third party will falter. Paul has gathered a lot of strength, but his flaw has always been a failure to distance himself from the complete kooks that are drawn to him… and to fail to just know when to push some things and when to just shut the hell up… IE: The anti-war humble foreign policy stuff – Good… the government should leave us all alone stuff – Good… the limited federal government and federalism stuff – Good… the follow the constitution stuff – Good… the Federal Reserve is evil and lets go back to the gold standard stuff… just drop it, not going to happen, not a winning issue, just makes people think you are crazy…
I desperately want a good Libertarian oriented candidate who leans strongly in that direction… but yet makes some reasonable concessions to reality and distances himself from the crazies and nutjobs… and of course isn’t one himself. Paul isn’t that candidate.
I still agree more closely with Paul than any other candidate running on quite a large spectrum of issues. But he is not a candidate who will be able to move any of these ideas any further than he already has due to a lot of these fatal flaws he has.
Having said that, I still give him credit for pushing this kind of thing further than anybody else in recent years.
But I’m thinking his time is almost done.
If I were to vote in the Republican primary or caucus here in Washington state, or if Ron Paul ends up on the ballot in November would I vote for him??? A month ago I definitely would have. Today would I? Dunno. I’d have to think about it more carefully. I’m guessing a lot of folks who like(d) Ron Paul are having similar thoughts these days.
Just saw this posting by Brendan Loy. It points out that of course in delegates determined by the primary it was actually a tie, 9 Clinton, 9 Obama, 4 Edwards… but if you add in the votes of the 5 superdelegates (known before the primary) it becomes 12 Obama, 11 Clinton, 4 Edwards.
Oops. We’ll have to change all those headlines now, right? Oh, guess not. Oh well.
Hillary Clinton did not win New Hampshire
(Brendan Loy, Irish Trojan)
If the convention were held today, New Hampshire’s turn in the roll call would go something like this: “Mr. Speaker, the great state of New Hampshire, the Granite State, proud home of the first-in-the-nation primary, led by our great Democratic governor, John Lynch; New Hampshire, home of the 2007 Canadian-American League champion Nashua Pride baseball team and the 2006-2007 AHL Atlantic Division champion Manchester Monarchs hockey team; New Hampshire, whose state motto ‘live free or die’ was once again embodied last year when we became the first state to legalize same-sex unions without a court order or a threatened court order; New Hampshire, which cast its four electoral votes for John Kerry in 2004, and will once again proudly support a Democrat for president in 2008; Mr. Speaker, New Hampshire casts 12 votes for Barack Obama, 11 votes for Hillary Clinton, and 4 votes for John Edwards!”
I wanted graphs over time of the delegate counts, but hadn’t seen one yet, so I went ahead and made a set of them. Since it was the easiest way for me, I just set this up on my wiki page. I will update these after each new primary or caucus (or if I notice any changes in between as superdelegates commit and such).
For those interested, click through below:
2008 Presidential Delegate Graphs
The following are graphs of the delegate counts for the US presidential race in both parties on a day by day basis. Data is taken from CNN’s Democratic Scorecard and Republican Scorecard pages. At a minimum, graphs will be updated after new primary and caucus results. Changes to superdelegate totals between primaries and caucuses may or may not be caught on the day they occur. The totals are as of the start of the day, so typically results of primaries and caucuses will show up on the day following those contests.
Results are shown both as a total number of delegates, and as a percentage of the delegates which have been allocated as of that date.
It is interesting to note how everybody didn’t start at zero before Iowa due to superdelegates and unpledged delegates who had already stated a preference.
New standings as of this moment in terms of everybody with at least 1 committed delegate:
Democrats (2025 needed to win):
- 183 (55.0%) – Clinton
- 78 (23.4%) – Obama
- 52 (15.6%) – Edwards
- 19 (5.7%) – Richardson
- 1 (0.3%) – Kucinich
Republicans (1191 needed to win):
- 30 (42.3%) – Romney
- 21 (29.6%) – Huckabee
- 10 (14.1%) – McCain
- 6 (8.5%) – Thompson
- 2 (2.8%) – Paul
- 1 (1.4%) – Guiliani
- 1 (1.4%) – Hunter
Apparently the delegates that Dodd and Biden had collected became uncommitted after they dropped out.
CNN just declared the winner. Obama has conceeded.
Hillary pulls out an upset, completely contrary to all recent poll results. And once again the dynamics of the race change completely again. Will Obama’s new found lead in South Carolina start to evaporate? Will Hillary’s leads elsewhere consolidate?
If Obama had won the way the polls said, this would probably have been nearly over as the momentum grew.
Now… it is all wide open again… and the advantage has to go back to Hillary… she is ahead on delegates, and she is ahead in more of the upcoming states… and has better organization in the Super Duper Tuesday states.
And of course the Republican map is still completely crazy.
Wow. This is such a fun election season. Can’t get better than this.
Here we are on yet another Primary day. I’m such a junkie. It is hard to concentrate on other things. But I will… for the next few hours. But at 01:00 UTC when results are supposed to start coming in, I’ll make sure I’m in front of at least my XM Radio if not a TV. Not like Iowa where by the time I got to where I could hear live coverage they had already called it for Huckabee. No no… none of that. I’ll make it in time for the beginning of the live coverage this time.
Cause I have a hunch we won’t have to wait deep into the evening for the networks to start calling the winners.
Sam and Ivan talk about:
- Obama’s Generational Support
- Racism and Obama’s Chances
- Beyond the Baby Boomers
- Desire for the Center
- Republican Wedge Issues
- Iowa Republican Results
- Rise of McCain
- Obama’s New Hampshire Surge
- Hillary’s Debate Performance
- Iowa Speeches
- New Hampshire Debates
- Best Race of our Lives
- Scattered Republicans
- The Democrats in Later States
- New Hampshire Debates Again
- Prediction: Paul Beats Guiliani in New Hampshire
- The Ron Paul Phenomenon
- Why the Gold Standard is Insane
- Ron Paul as Third Party
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There were a few moments, but for the most part the Dem debate was nowhere near as interesting as the Republicans. Whereas the Republicans were very much interacting directly with each other, even when the Dems were talking directly about each other, for the most part they seemed to be talking to the audience or the moderator, not REALLY talking to each other. Although it lightened up later, it seemed like all four of them spent the first half of the debate or so trying to avoid eye contact with each other.
A lot less of it seemed to be spontaneous. They all got in their prepared lines. I heard lots of things which I had heard verbatim previously in other debates or speeches. That was disappointing.
It was amusing to watch all four of them try to claim the “change” mantle.
Don’t get me wrong, there were a few fireworks that were interesting. But it was a very different kind than on the Republican side. And the tension between them (well, maybe not Richardson) was much higher. You could just feel the antipathy. And there was less dynamic back and forth that seemed like actual conversations. Just talking past each other and a few attacks and parries.
I’m not sure how much either of these debates will change anything for Tuesday’s vote. I don’t think there were any clear knockouts on either party.
Now I’ll have to spend some time into reading other people’s reactions (I waited until I was done watching). Then sleep. It is past my bedtime and I have a podcast to record in the morning.
I *so* wanted to be able to hear what they were saying to each other when the Democrats and Republicans were on stage at the same time… which, by the way, was a great touch.
As for the rest of the Republican debate, I think it would have been even better if the whole thing had had the format of the first half. But even with the supposed rules in the second half, Gibson stood back and barely enforced them. It was also very good.
Definitely the best debate in either party so far by a long ways.
And Ron Paul can certainly not complain about the amount of attention he got. He got a LOT in. I’m not sure if they were in some way trying to make up for him being excluded tomorrow, but either way, he got a lot of good time. He didn’t always make the best use of it, but he certainly had the time.
At this point I’ve only watched the first hour out of the four hours of debate tonight. And only about 45 minutes of it was actually debate. And this is of course only the Republicans, the Democrats come later.
But I’ll say right now that the format for this first 45 minutes… Very few interruptions from the moderator, just occasional questions to get conversation started… and a lot of interaction between the candidates… and long form answers without buzzers or time limits… this is by far the most substantive and informative debate I have seen so far this election cycle. And at this point I have watched ALL of them. 17 Democratic debates and 14 Republican debates. Most of them sucked. Most of them just let the candidates make little speeches, or posture for the sound bites.
In this one I’ve seen the candidates interact with each other in a far more natural way. And I’ve seen them have the chance to spend several minutes explaining themselves, and then ask questions of each other, which were then answered in turn. There were some chaotic moments at times, but even then one learned something.
I gather the rest of the Republican debate will not have this same format. That is a shame. This is how all debates should be. I look forward to seeing the Democrats in the same sort of format once I watch the rest of the Republican debate.
I just needed to go ahead and post this now, because I was somewhat dumbfounded that, for once, I was actually seeing a real debate with some real content too it where I actually had the possibility of learning something new about the candidates.
3 hour delay aside, good job ABC and Charles Gibson. Bravo.
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