Hillary Clinton
gregladen | March 22, 2016This post was written in two parts, pre-primary and post-primary. To see the result and a discussion of what they mean, skip down to the last part of the post, where I'll discuss why Tuesday's results may mean that Sanders could win the primary.
Pre-Primary
As already discussed, Clinton is likely to win the Democratic nomination. Sanders is too far behind to catch up without extraordinary results, as outlined here. However, it is also true that Sanders is likely to win a majority of contests from here on out, while at the same time, Clinton is likely to win many (if not most?) of the actual…
gregladen | March 16, 2016Almost exactly 50% of the votes have been cast in the Democratic Party primary and caucus process. I've been updating a model to predict primary and caucus results all along, and the model has done fairly well. The most recent update, however, was a bit off. That update involved separating states into two groups, southern vs northern, then calculating different sets of likely voting patterns by ethnicity for those two groups, and integrating that with estimates of ethnic distribution ("white, black, hispanic") among Democratic voters by state.
What I did not do in those models was to…
gregladen | March 13, 2016Speech by a famous feminist on the importance of empowerment of women in the business world:
gregladen | March 2, 2016As you know, I developed a simple model for projecting future primary outcomes in the Democratic party. This model is based on the ethnic mix in each state, among Democratic Party voters. The model attributes a likely voting choice to theoretical primary goers or causers based on previous behavior by ethnicity. Originally I made two models, one using numbers that the Clinton campaign was banking on, and one using numbers that the Sanders campaign was banking on.
The results of the Super Tuesday primaries demonstrated that the Sanders-favoring model does not predict primary outcomes.…
oracknows | February 19, 2016One of the most frequent claims of supporters of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), which goes by the Orwellian name "integrative medicine," is that it represents "integrating" alternative medicine with science-based medicine to produce the "best of both worlds." Of course, when I think of the best of both worlds, I usually think of The Best of Both Worlds, which might well be appropriate, except that, unlike the case when the Borg assimilate a species, when science-based medicine is forced to assimilate quackery, the quackery changes it, making it weaker, not stronger…
gregladen | February 12, 2016Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are viable candidates to win the Democratic nomination to run for President of the United States.
There are polls and pundits to which we may refer to make a guess as to who will win. Or, we could ignore all that, and let the process play out and see what happens. But, spreadsheets exist, so it really is impossible to resist the temptation of creating a simplistic spreadsheet model that predicts the outcome.
But we can take that a step further and suggest alternate scenarios, based on available data. So I did that.
I have removed the so called "Super…
gregladen | September 22, 2015This just came in from NBC
Last week, Clinton said,
"I have been waiting for the administration to make a decision," she said last week in Concord, NH. "I thought I owed them that. I worked in the administration. I started the process that is supposed to lead to a decision. I can't wait too much longer. and I am putting the white house on notice. I'm gunna tell you what I think soon because I can't wait. I thought they would have it decided way, you know, way by now and they haven't."
And moments ago she said:
"I think it is imperative that we look at the Keystone XL pipeline as what I…
sheril | March 6, 2009On Monday, I'm delighted to be attending a panel discussion in honor of the 2009 International Women's Day celebrations! This global holiday celebrates the economic, political, and social achievements of women past, present, and future. Here in NYC, the World Policy Institute, the Women's Leadership Initiative at Demos, and The American-Scandinavian Foundation have organized:
The Hillary Effect: How Will the Secretary of State Change the Status of Women Worldwide?
Though Mrs. Clinton is the third female US Secretary of State, some think that her appointment could herald a new chapter…
scientificactivist | June 4, 2008Last night was a historic night, with Barack Obama finally effectively clinching the Democratic nomination by surpassing the "magic number" of required delegates. Barring any last-minute fight over delegate rules from Hillary Clinton's campaign (something that I think is not likely to happen), Barack Obama in the Democrats' nominee. Of course, we knew from the beginning that 2008 was going to be a trailblazing election--we just didn't know which way it would swing. Although it's been pretty clear since Obama's string of victories in February that he would eventually be the nominee, now it'…
scientificactivist | May 3, 2008This morning, I had to wake up to another article about John McCain's and Hillary Clinton's proposal to temporarily waive the gas tax this summer. That's it. I'm just going to have to come out and say it: this is a really, really, really stupid idea. Period.
I'm not an economist--far from it--but you don't have to be one to see the flaws in this plan. I'm not going to go into the details too much here, but for more check out this article from the Washington Post or this op-ed from Thomas Friedman. Also, Jake has a nice summary at Pure Pedantry. The intended purpose of this gas tax…
scientificactivist | March 5, 2008Back when I was at Texas A&M University, I knew plenty of Democrats who would vote in the Republican primary instead of the Democratic one. Although I refrained from such activity, their rationale was totally reasonable: in such a conservative area, the real contest was almost always the Republican primary. By the time the general election came around, the winner was already a foregone conclusion: it would be whichever candidate had the "R" beside his name. These crossover voters preferred a moderate Republican to a right-wing extremist. Fair enough. And, they probably helped keep…
scientificactivist | February 25, 2008It's difficult to find too many substantive policy differences between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (especially considering the much larger gulf that exists between them and the Republican candidates), but one area that's brought up time and time again is health care. In light of this, it's worth taking a look at how much the two agree and disagree here, especially since health care policy is purportedly one of Clinton's selling points.
To look at the actual plans from each of the candidates, you can click here for Obama's and here for Clinton's. The most thorough--but still accessible…
cevans | February 25, 2008As a blogger, I usually willfully delineate a giant chasm of non-communication between myself and political issues, preferring to dabble in the absolute: time, space, theoretical technological infrastructures, and, recently, aliens. I wrote one very reticent entry in 2005 about chimeric research, prefacing it with the pronouncement that "this blog will rarely concern iself with Pressing Science Ethics Issues," a statement that has proven in the intervening years to be true.
However, I can't deny that my love of the sciences has blossomed under the steely wing of one of the most anti-science…
scientificactivist | February 13, 2008Yesterday, Barack Obama won all three contests (Maryland, Virginia, and DC) in the "Potomac Primary", all by sizable margins. This means that he has won all eight contests that have occurred since Super Tuesday. He now leads the delegate race--even when superdelegates are included--and he maintains an incredible amount of momentum going into the February 19th contests of Hawaii and Wisconsin, where he is expected to do quite well again. However, his delegate lead is still slim, and if he wants to become the true frontrunner, he'll have to have a strong showing on March 4th, particularly in…
scientificactivist | February 10, 2008Barack Obama swept all three Democratic contests yesterday, winning the popular vote convincingly in Louisiana (57-36), Washington (68-31), and Nebraska (68-32). In case there were still any doubts about his broad appeal, for the record that's a largely African-American Southern state (Louisiana), a white progressive West Coast state (Washington), and a white conservative red state (Nebraska). This means that Obama and Hillary Clinton are virtually tied in delegate counts, with Clinton holding a small advantage if preliminary superdelegate counts are included, and Obama holding a larger…
scientificactivist | January 30, 2008Today John Edwards officially dropped out of the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. However inevitable this was, it was still sad to see it finally happen. Edwards fought a clean, issues-driven campaign, but it wasn't enough to compete against the wild but justified excitement of the prospect of a formative Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton presidency. It's unfortunate to see Edwards leave, but I'm sure many more good things from him are still to come.
The obvious question--one that remains to be answered--is who will his supporters turn to now? The two overriding themes…
scientificactivist | January 27, 2008Last night, Barack Obama won the South Carolina Democratic Primary with 55% of the vote, doubling second place finisher Hillary Clinton's 27% share of the vote. John Edwards came in third with a disappointing 18% of the vote. Nobody should have expected Obama not to win South Carolina, but a victory of almost 30 points was not widely anticipated. He needed a big victory to gain some momentum going into Super Tuesday (February 5th), and he certainly got that last night.
While Clinton still seems to be the favorite candidate of the Establishment, the numbers tell a different story. Last…
grrlscientist | January 9, 2008tags: politics, NH primary, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, 2008 Presidential primaries, news coverage
Past Primary campaign buttons from the collections of the NH Historical Society and the NH Political Library.
Image: WBUR, Boston's NPR affiliate.
I was hanging out in my local watering hole last night, watching the primary coverage for New Hampshire on television until the results were announced. While I was there, I overheard a particularly empassioned conversation between the bartender (a musician in his mid-forties) and a "regular" (a medical doctor in his mid-fifties) where they were…
scientificactivist | September 20, 2007While thousands march today in protest of modern day racial injustice, it's pretty difficult to not be aware of the Jena Six. Certainly all of the Democratic presidential candidates are.
Apparently, though, staying up to date on current events isn't a prerequisite for the Republicans.
Asked about the Jena Six case today on his way into a San Antonio fundraiser, [Fred] Thompson said, "I don't know anything about it."
Thompson's comments come as he and his Republican colleagues are taking increasing flack for ignoring minority voters, particularly for skipping out on forums aimed at black and…
scientificactivist | August 12, 2007Last week, I attended a seminar at the Oxford Internet Institute presented by J. Ignacio Criado and entitled "Political Blogging in Campaign and Political Communication: Political Leadership 2.0?" (see my announcement and the event's abstract here). My impressions are mixed, particularly in relation to the relevance of the seminar and the methods and conclusions of the presenter. I'll touch on these methodological issues briefly, but the main point that I took home was this: campaign blogging is fundamentally different from everyday political blogging, and it doesn't truly fit into the…