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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Unlike our Dale Amon, I am not going to endorse a candidate – in fact, I am rooting for a 269-269 electoral tie, just for the sake of making history – but I still find the horse race intriguing. I was overwhelmed with requests (okay, two people asked) to run one last version of the election monte carlo that I offered last week. Apart from updating the probabilities, I did a few things differently this time:
– if the price was greater than 90 or less than 10, I changed it to 100 or 0, so that only the swing states impact the model.
– I kept track of which states were most likely to end up in the winners’ column; I wanted to know which states were the kingmakers. (Well, we already knew which states, but I wanted a way to quantify it.)
– I ran a few different scenarios, taking different swing states off the table (i.e. setting their probabilities to 100 or 0.)
Scenario I: every swing state up for grabs
BUSH: 5972 wins, avg. 275.82 electoral votes
KERRY: 3843 wins, avg. 262.18 electoral votes
TIE: 185
Florida ends up in the winner’s column 7578 of the 9815 scenarios where there is a winner. After that, the most ‘decisive’ swing states are Ohio (6515), Wisconsin (5636), New Mexico (5606) and Iowa (5521.)
Scenario II: Bush wins FL, everything else is up for grabs
BUSH: 8227 wins, avg. 287.70 electoral votes
KERRY: 1586 wins, avg. 250.30 electoral votes
TIE: 187
So basically, Kerry almost has to have Florida at this point.
Scenario III: Kerry wins FL, everything else is up for grabs
BUSH: 3083 wins, avg. 260.46 electoral votes
KERRY: 6692 wins, avg. 277.54 electoral votes
TIE: 225
Bush has more ways to win without getting Florida than Kerry does. Let’s try one more …
Scenario IV: Bush takes OH and WI; FL and other states are contested
BUSH: 8313 wins, avg. 291.05 electoral votes
KERRY: 1515 wins, avg. 246.95 electoral votes
TIE: 172
If Bush can take these two Midwestern states, he becomes a prohibitive favorite.
A few other desultory remarks:
– who says the country is more divided than ever? My favorite political story of the week: South Dakota, except for the Indian reservations, is a conservative state, and it is tough for a Democrat to win. So Democratic Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth, in the heat of a tough reelection battle, has pledged that, should the election end in a 269-269 tie, she will vote for Bush when the House of Representatives has to choose the president.
– Since I’m rooting for the 269-269 tie, here’s one way it could happen:
source: World66.com
– Finally, Megan McArdle, guestblogging for Glenn Reynolds, offers the best election day advice of all: use the electronic political markets to hedge, just like a farmer would use the grain futures markets to hedge against the possibility of low selling prices at harvest time. If you don’t want Kerry to win, bet a few bucks that he DOES win, so you can at least drown your sorrows with some hard-earned beer.
If you want to read about the truly extraordinary and deeply depressing paroxysm of anti-Americanism that has swept like a firestorm through the British media over the last few days and weeks (having merely smouldered for years), you can read about it here.
Of a particularly fatuous TV guide blurb (“Jonathan Dimbleby takes a critical look at the Anglo-US war on terror…”), Mark Holland has this to say:
A critical look! Just for a change. I don’t know about you, but for me all those “Hey it’s all going swell; Bush, Blair and Howard are doing fine; the oil for food scandal has lined the pockets of Saddam, the UN and Total Fina Elf; etc” documentaries have become a tiresome bore.
For me the most depressing British anti-American exhibit of the last few days was a rant by Peter Oborne in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday. Having ignored the Mail, Sunday or of any other sort, for years, I had no idea it was capable of sinking to these depthsm and I only spotted it because I shared some coffee with Michael Jennings in my local Café Nero yesterday.
This picture, of the front cover of the Review section, sums it up well:
Click to get it bigger and more legible. If you really want that.
This is absolutely not mere anti-Bushism, for Oborne is vitriolically nasty about both Democrats and Republicans. Maybe this piece is available to read on the internet, but I cannot myself find it. I am actually rather pleased about that. → Continue reading: British Anti-Americanism gone mad
It seems like everyone has announced their decisions now: even Megan McCardle. So it is my turn… well, actually that isn’t really true. You see, I had to vote about two or more weeks ago to make sure my absentee ballot made it to Pittsburgh by October 31st so my decision cycle was a bit tighter than most.
It is not so much a difficult decision as a painful one. I have had to do something I have never done in my life. I started off Clean for Gene putting up posters when I was still a high school student; friends were out for McGovern… and then the LP came along and made me feel comfortable voting, something I had not really felt in the earlier elections.
I have election after election been perfectly happy voting straight LP. Even if I did not see my candidate take an oath, I at least knew I agreed with what they stood for.
Unfortunately, this year I again became, in Marshall Fritz’s words, ‘Politically Homeless’. The LP stand on the current war has left me in the unfamiliar and awkward feeling position of selecting the least of three evils.
Do not get me wrong. There is really only one of the three candidates whom I really loath and it is not Badnarik.
I also a worry this election might be another squeeker, something I was not expecting. I believed it would be a runaway. That appears not be the case. Votes do matter more than usual this time.
It really came down to a no-brainer though. I have voted for a Republican for President for the first time in my life. I do not agree with George Bush on many issues, but I do indeed agree with him on the war and the war cabinet is one I quite like. There is a minor plus that all the right people are totally off the wall and over the top insane about the prospect of him winning.
There is an undertone of religious intolerance against his obviously sincere and deep faith. I do not find this distressing despite my own total non-belief. I am a pure physical scientist, but just because I do not see need to posit a supreme being does not mean I do not respect those who do. I feel George is a good man and honourable. I simply do not buy the rantings of the left or even of some of our own. Disagree with him if you must, but please do not descend into ludicrous accusations.
I do not like some of his domestic agenda, but for the exact opposite reasons the Kerry side is against it. On the other hand, he has managed a number of political shuffles that appear to be one thing but whose outcome was not really that bad. The cloning research ‘ban’ appears to have been little more than a ban of state funded research, something no Libertarian could argue with.
But that is all secondary. We are in the middle, not merely of a war in Iraq, but of a global war on whose outcome our very lives may depend. I am too close to technology not to realize how much evil can be done by a small number of dedicated followers of the dark side.
I endorse George W. Bush for President of the United States.
Although I am interested in elections, I rarely feel moved to comment on them at all. But I understand that US voters go to the polls this week. Who can predict who they will elect?
Whoever may get elected, they will have to write an Inaugural Speech in January – and there are parts of this Inaugural from Calvin Coolidge, that some US taxpayers may feel merit a second airing… → Continue reading: An inaugural speech worth listening to
For years, more precisely since 8 July 1963, Cuban cigars have been a banned pleasure for U.S. citizens but at least when abroad they could legally indulge. Earlier this month the department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has announced that Americans are barred from not only purchasing Cuban goods in foreign countries, but also from consuming them in those countries.
I quote from the OFAC’s Cuban cigar update (pdf):
The question is often asked whether United States citizens or permanent resident aliens of the United States may legally purchase Cuban origin goods, including tobacco and alcohol products, in a third country for personal use outside the United States. The answer is no. The Regulations prohibit persons subject to the jurisdiction of the United States from purchasing, transporting, importing, or otherwise dealing in or engaging in any transactions with respect to any merchandise outside the United States if such merchandise (1) is of Cuban origin; or (2) is or has been located in or transported from or through Cuba; or (3) is made or derived in whole or in part of any article which is the growth, produce or manufacture of Cuba. Thus, in the case of cigars, the prohibition extends to cigars manufactured in Cuba and sold in a third country and to cigars manufactured in a third country from tobacco grown in Cuba.
The penalties for violating the prohibitions include maximum criminal fines for individuals of $250,000 and imprisonment for up to 10 years. Corporations can be fined as much as a million dollars.
What this means is that the US government claims ‘ownership’ of its citizens. It extends its jurisdiction beyond the territory of the United States and imposes its restrictions wherever you are. If that is not the state’s way of saying it owns its citizens, I do not know what is.
This is not the first time we got our knickers in a twist over this modern form of slavery. Here is what Perry de Havilland says about the matter when you get him started on the US citizenship.
American citizenship particularly (more than any other advanced nation’s citizenship) is rather like being branded like livestock. To have that brand means that, unlike almost every other state on earth, the US government will always claim a pecuniary interest in the private property that you acquire, even if you live outside the USA and make your living outside the USA and keep your assets outside the USA. Unlike other countries, which by and large lose interest in you the moment you step outside their borders, the USA actually makes itself your super-owner. The USA do not just claim a territorial monopoly on the means of force, it actually claims to own part of your labour regardless of where you are.
There you have it. You cannot hide. The US government wants to see even through the haze of your cuban. The good news is that you are welcome at Samizdata HQ as I light up a lovely Trinidad fundadore. Just remember not to inhale.
via Ben Hammersley
A lot of bloggers (e.g. the indefatigable Stephen Green) have been posting electoral maps and trying to anticipate who is going to win based on the latest and greatest polling data. But Green, who had posted many such maps over the past few months, finally threw in the towel on Tuesday, declaring:
Say it with me now: It’s all a bunch of crap.
The polls all suck, for reasons gone into by people way smarter than I am. The predictions all suck, because everybody is working from the same assumptions, based on voting patterns from the last election.
… And yet everyone – myself included – still bases all their predictions on a tight race? I don’t know how this thing is going to pan out. Neither do you. But right now, I feel as though the electorate is going to play all of us pundits – amateur and professional – for fools.
And I think he’s 100% right about that … coloring states red or blue based on poll results is of limited use when there are so many conceivable outcomes, when we have such a hard time extricating sampling biases from polls, etc. Here is one possible way out of the dead end – instead of thinking deterministically and trying to project a winner in each state, let’s look at everything probabilistically, and run a Monte Carlo scenario to see each man’s chance of winning.
For this exercise, I assumed:
– that each candidate’s probability of carrying a state was equal to the current selling price on TradeSports.com. For example, if the price of “Bush carries Iowa” is quoted at 58, then Bush has a 58% chance of carrying Iowa in any given trial.
– No third-party candidates had any chance of carrying a state.
– Colorado and Maine are treated as all-or-none propositions.
– no “faithless electors” shun their commitment to vote for their candidate.
– all 51 events (50 states + DC) are independent.
I ran 10,000 trials, and this is what I got, based on today’s TradeSports prices:
Bush averaged 279.99 electoral votes to Kerry’s 258.01. The standard deviation of the vote was 30.78 electoral votes.
Bush got a majority of the electoral vote in 6283 trials; Kerry got a majority of the electoral vote in 3583 trials, and 134 times the race finished in (gulp) a dead heat, 269 electoral votes to 269.
In 10,000 trials, the most electoral votes Bush got in any one trial was 419; the most Kerry got was 357.
This approach is not perfect either, because it is not true that all 51 events are independent. If Bush’s 6% chance of carrying California comes through, he is probably going to win everywhere else in the country too. It would be possible to build some positive correlation into the model, but I have no idea what the correlation coefficients might be, and just saying that they round down to zero probably isn’t unreasonable.
What I find really interesting is that right now there appears to be greater than a 1% chance that this thing will finish in a tie. (In that case, the House of Representatives breaks the tie, of course, and would presumably re-elect George W. Bush, since the House has a Republican majority. My understanding is that the House vote would take place BEFORE the new Congress was sworn in, so that lame duck Reps who had already lost or retired could cast a vote to determine the presidency.)
If anyone finds this line of thought remotely compelling, I will update this (with current prices from TradeSports) a few times between today and election day.
UPDATE: An astute reader points out that the new Congress would cast the vote in the 269-269 tie scenario … the new (109th) Congress will be sworn in on 1/4/2005, and we need a new President by 1/20/2005, so there’s a two week window of opportunity there. A few of you also noted (correctly) that the House vote goes by state — the California delegation gets one vote, the Wyoming delegation gets one vote, etc. Right now, there are 31 states that have more GOP Congressmen than Democratic Congressmen … and everything is so gerrymandered now, I just cannot see that number changing much no matter what happens on election day. Of course, GOP Congressmen would be under no obligation to vote for Bush.
There has been one instance in US history where no candidate received a majority of the electoral vote and the House had to pick the next president — the election of 1824. But we have come close a few other times — in 1968, for example, if Wallace had carried one or two more southern states, Nixon might well have been unable to get the needed 270 electoral votes. Since the House had a huge Democratic majority at that time, they would have elected Humphrey even though Nixon had more popular and electoral votes.
A few of you asked a question that I had thought of myself — the individual state prices on TradeSports suggest that Bush has a 62%+ chance of winning, but you can buy a “Bush is elected” contract for about 60 or 61. So is there an arbitrage opportunity? In an ideal world, you could buy a Kerry contract for all 51 states and buy 51 Bush Wins Overall contracts, and you could expect to make money, net-net, off that, except of course that transaction costs would certainly render that unprofitable.
I am really looking forward to seeing the new Alien vs. Predator movie, the tagline of which is…
Whoever wins… we lose But I also find it very appropriate to see those sentiments applied here as well regarding the other big fight epic due to be released a few weeks hence. No, I am really not looking forward to that one.
It seems as though I have not really paid much attention to domestic issues in quite some time. Perhaps its because the domestic front has been locked into near-total stasis, with little movement, much less progress, of any kind.
The political scene has resolved itself into the party of 80% hostility to a libertarian agenda (the Republicans), the party of 95% hostility to a libertarian agenda (the Democrats), an irrelevant fringe, and a legacy media complex to whom anything other than the cult of the the state is simply incomprehensible. Frankly, I do not see any significant changes in the relationship between the state and the citizenry in the offing, just a long expansion of the state sphere until something catastrophic/revolutionary occurs. What that might be and when it might happen, I have no idea.
On the domestic political front, I am left rooting for the slightly less bad option, which is not exactly energizing.
All the action and energy seems to be around foreign affairs, and specifically how we stop the Islamic world from oozing its toxic Wahhabist/fascist effluent into our societies. I find the current debate in the US on this issue to be less than enlightening. The Bush campaign has done a terrible job of explaining why they are doing what they are doing, and the Kerry camp is too busy straddling and flopping to make any contribution at all. Suffice it to say that I remain convinced we will not see the end of this without nuclear weapons being used.
Since no one else here seems to have much to say about the Great Debate, let me chip in with a few meandering thoughts. If you do not like meandering, stop now. Strong meandering warning. I have now read the rest of this, and believe me, it meanders. It nuances hither and thither like some damned diplomat who has been at the drugs.
Okay. So far as I am concerned, I thought John Kerry won it. My opinion of him could only improve, and it did. And I have got to admit that not only was I impressed, in the sense of feeling that others would be, by the air of coherence he brought to stating his case. I also think he may actually have an alternative policy that might count for something.
The general opinion in our part of the blogosphere/internet is that the idea of the USA ‘forming alliances’ better with the ‘international community’ is a load of old sneer quotes. Lileks said it yesterday. On what planet is Kerry living? Does he really think that the rest of the world will suddenly swing into line behind President John Kerry, and win/settle the War Against Terror? Will it bollocks, says Lileks, although a little more politely than that.
But I do not think it quite so unlikely as Lileks does that the rest of the world, by which I mean Europe, actually will swing obediently into line, like an eager little Euro-dog. Even those Moderate Arabs may feel less culturally slighted, and contribute somewhat more than they are contributing now. → Continue reading: Some nuanced reactions to Bush-vs.-Kerry Debate One
I have a number of times mentioned that some members of the Democratic Party have been dishonestly spreading rumours about a pending draft. They imply it is being planned behind the scenes in the current administration and will be unveiled after the election if Bush wins. In fact, the only activity behind the noise is a Bill backed by a handful of extremist Democrats and introduced by Democratic Party slavery advocate Charles Rangel.
I have been reading quotes from DOD briefings for almost four years now. Every time the issue comes up, DOD officials diplomatically state it is a bad idea and they do not want it. I believe the continuing appearance of this outright lie all across America is beginning to wear bureaucratic diplomacy thin. Here is a portion of the transcript of Donald Rumsfeld with Albuquerque’s KKOB-AM Radio host Jim Villanucci:
Q: We’re talking with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the
Pentagon. Secretary, there’s been a lot of discussion, I know, and this is a very
political question, but I’ll ask you anyway, because it will become your decision,
ultimately. Will there be a draft? Do you see any present situation where we
might reinstitute a draft in the United States?
SEC. RUMSFELD: There isn’t a chance in the world. It is clearly mischievous. Somebody is going around spreading that nonsense. There’s a couple of congressmen and maybe a senator or two who’ve put in bills to reinstitute the draft. I am dead set against it. President Bush is dead set against it. It simply is not going to happen. And the perpetrating of that myth I think is unfortunate. We don’t need a draft. My goodness, we’ve got, what, 295 million people in this country and we’ve got a 1.4 million on active duty. We can certainly attract and retain the people we need and we are attracting and retaining the people we need. And if we can’t, all we have to do is change the incentives, so that we are a more attractive place for people to come.
The next time someone tells you the current administration is going to re-instate the draft… tell them their source is an intentional, blatant and provable liar.
Legal experts, property developers and lovers of liberty ought to be eagerly waiting for the outcome of a key US court ruling on what is known as the law of eminent domain. The ruling could kill off the practice in which property developers, in alliance with local politicians and bureaucrats, can push property owners from their possessions, seize the land and re-develop it, usually in the hope of grabbing higher tax revenues than was the case before.
I am not an expert on the fine print of this law as it applies in the United States, and readers ought to look at works such as the excellent book by Richard Epstein on the subject. What is clear, however, is that for years Americans, like Britons, Frenchmen, Germans and others, have been living in a world increasingly resembling the law of the jungle rather that of a liberal civil order when it comes to the treatment of property.
I honestly do not know how the ruling will turn out. Essentially, contestants in the case are arguing against the idea that eminent domain can be exercised on commercial grounds. Hard-line defenders of property will, of course, argue that eminent domain does not exist even if the supposed use of property is for something required for ‘public use’, such as a port, military airfield or highway.
Here is a thought – this ought to be a classic ‘left-wing’ sort of issue. It is actually a good issue for libertarians to try to use to convince socialist types that property rights, understood in their fullest sense, are a protection for the weak and vulnerable, not the other way round. The old man in his shabby cottage who refuses to sell up to Big Gleaming Corp. is as much a hero of the free market order as any Ayn Rand character or 19th Century industrialist in a frock coat.
Side observation: I would be interested to know if the hugely loss-making Channel Tunnel link could have been built without compulsory purchase. Somehow I very much doubt it.
Thanks to the excellent Anger Management blog for the pointer.
My nuanced prediction a week ago to the effect that President Bush is going to win huge and that Kerry is going to be put through the electoral mangle is starting to look rather (if you will pardon the expression) silly. It is not so much that the prediction is wrong, more that it is looking more and more obvious by the day. I sold my few remaining Kerry stocks when the Kerry graph was already in free fall.
In addition to the insights I offered in my earlier US election posting – that Bush is clever at suckering his enemies into ground of their choosing, but also of his, and then killing them, and that he is doing this just now (a) in Iraq to the Baathist/Islamofascist/Moonbat tendency and (b) in the USA to Kerry and his cohorts – there are about another two dozen reasons why Bush will win, most of them to do with all the many different ways in which Kerry is a stupid, ignorant twat. Every time he opens his mouth the Anyone But Kerry vote gets that bit bigger.
And since so few people actually seem to like the guy, the fact that he is conducting himself so ineptly in all the pseudo-crises, that must necessarily be heaped upon a non-incumbent Presidential candidate to check out how good he is in actual crises (and the more crass these tests are the more of a test they are), becomes yet another reason not to vote for him, which only intensifies the larger crisis that his entire campaign has now become. He is losing, and do we want to vote for a loser to be President? No. Anyone but Kerry.
I always enjoy reading what Mark Steyn has to say about things in general, and about John Kerry and his supporters in particular, but this piece, of course also linked to by Instapundit which is how I got to it today, is especially fine. → Continue reading: Mark Steyn trashes John Kerry but is too kind to the Old Left
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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