Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the traders on the Iowa Electronic Markets, who, on the last day of the campaign, have bid Kerry up to 51% chance of winning. Thus ensuring that, whoever wins, I will have ample material to spend the next four years teasing James Surowiecki about the “Wisdom of Panicky Crowds”.

(the really interesting thing is that the single most probable IEM outcome is still Bush to win with less than 52% of the popular vote. The big move of the bids has been from Bush>52 to Kerry >52!)

Currently “Tradesports”:http://www.tradesports.com/ has Bush at about a 56% chance to win the Presidency. But the “Iowa Electronic Markets”:http://128.255.244.60/quotes/78.html shows a slight lean towards a Kerry victory.

To be sure, the IEM tracks overall votes and Tradesports electoral votes, so these leanings could be consistent. And if Kerry wins the popular vote and loses outright they will be. But that looks rather unlikely. Kerry’s national vote has trailed his battleground states vote in just about every poll that’s looked at this split. This is not particularly surprising since the Bush campaign and its surrogates have massively overspent the Kerry campaign (and its surrogates) on _national_ advertising with Kerry focusing almost exclusively on battleground state advertising.

The IEM numbers are fairly close, but if they hold I suspect one or other (or quite likely both) markets will end up on the wrong side of this election. On the other hand, if Kerry does repeat Al Gore’s efforts and win the popular vote without taking over the White House, I might have to revise my faith in the success of these markets. (Of course if that happens I’ll have much more to worry about than being wrong on a technical question like this one.)

The results for Dixville Notch are in !. Bush 19, Kerry 7. In 2000, Bush got 21 to Gore’s 5. There was a similar swing in Hart’s Location. Repeated nationwide, this swing would give Kerry a thumping victory[1].

fn1. As bases for spurious predictions go, I’d rank this one somewhere between the Washington Redskins home games and Ray Fair’s econometric model.

The organization Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility is cosponsoring some important vote protection initiatives.

A U.S. toll-free telephone hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1 866-687-8683) and a great set of Web sites at http://voteprotect.org and http://verifiedvoting.org, help citizens to vote and have their votes counted as intended. Voting questions and problems can be reported, tracked, and responded to by thousands of specially trained operators, attorneys, and technologists, now and beyond November 2nd.

There is also a “do-it-yourself” 24/7 incident reporting form on the Web at http://voteproblem.org, as an alternative recording method, without real-time follow-up.

The more people hear about and use the Web sites and hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1 866-687-8683), the better the world can trust U.S. elections to be.

Drove back to Columbus today, listening to Bill Clinton’s My Life on CD. It’s only six CDs, an abridgement and – judging from the reviews – an improvement of the book. The reader is… Bill Clinton. He is, of course, a terrific storyteller (double entendre intended).

When I got home, I found a Republican encampment across the street from my house. Apparently the law firm that owns the building is giving them the parking lot, and perhaps office space. Lots of strangers milling around. There are over 30 cars with W stickers, and 6 white vans (there are probably more about, because one van is numbered ’10’).

Is this HQ for South Columbus? Or just for my precinct (we and they are about a block north of the church where we vote)?

I’m not suggesting that there is anything wrong with this. Just experiencing shock and awe at the resources they are deploying.

It isn’t every day that I read a British newspaper story about the small Ohio town where I grew up, but these are interesting times.

But there are signs that Hudson’s longtime reputation as a Republican centre is changing. “The joke has always been that you could fit all Hudson’s Democrats into the phone booth at Saywell’s drugstore,” says Susan Terkel, a leader of the Kerry campaign in Hudson. “But now lots of Democrats have come out of the closet. The former mayor is campaigning for Kerry and lots of others. We had a gathering of 400 people which was exciting. But now some Republicans are boycotting the restaurant where we had the meeting. Isn’t that terrible?”

Well, yes, it is.

For a little local color, I remember checking my home zip code at opensecrets.org during the 2000 election and being shocked; a non-systematic scan showed that more people had donated to Buchanan than Gore. This year, my dad says that there are roughly as many Kerry signs as Bush ones in the neighborhood. (I realize that these two facts are not directly comparable, but they still leave me optimistic.)

Chris’ post made a point that’s central to a post I’ve been planning for some time, so I may as well jump in and complete it. Talking about US airstrikes in Iraq, he writes

The risk of the operation is transferred by deliberate and systematic policy from soldiers to bystanders. Such a policy runs contrary to traditional views about who should bear the risk of operations: we can’t insulate civilians completely but where there’s a choice soldiers both in virtue of the role they occupy and the fact (here) that they are volunteers should take on more exposure in order to protect civilians. It is hard to escape the thought that were co-nationals of the people dropping the bombs the ones in the bystander position, different methods would be used.

An obvious comparison is with the police force. If any of us were involved in a confrontation between police officers and armed criminals, we would expect the police to risk their lives to save us[1]. A police force that viewed protecting the safety of its own members as the primary priority would not be very effective. A police force that was prepared to pursue criminals with deadly force, and treat deaths among the general public as “collateral damage” would be worse than useless. But that is, in essence, what has been given to the Iraqi people.

This raises, I think, a fairly general point in relation to the kind of liberal/humanitarian interventionism exemplified by Bosnia and Kosovo, and (from the viewpoint of some of its backers, particularly on the left) in Iraq. Unless the intervening powers have the willingness and capacity to provide peacekeepers who will operate as a police force, with the associated attitude that protection of the civilian population is the top priority, then intervention is bound to produce bad outcomes.

[click to continue…]

For CT readers and others in the DC area …

DID BLOGS TIP ELECTION 2004?
IHS and Reason magazine present Ana Marie Cox, Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell, and Michael Tomasky debating the role of blogs in the election on November 18.

WHAT:
A free-for-all discussion on the role of blogs and politics featuring Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox, blogger and University of Chicago political scientist Daniel Drezner, blogger and George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell, The American Prospect’s Michael Tomasky, moderated by Reason’s Nick Gillespie.

Drinks and hors d’oeuvres to follow remarks and Q&A.

WHEN:
Thursday, November 18
7:30-9:00 pm

WHERE:
Topaz Bar
1733 N Street NW, Washington, DC
“Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/entertainment/profile?fid=5&id=1067031

Space is limited, so please reserve a place by RSVPing to Alina Stefanescu
at astefane@gmu.edu. Free drink tickets will be given to the first 50
respondents!

I’m very glad that “Daniel has taken on the job of addressing the statistical arguments”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002780.html around “the Lancet study”:http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04art10342web.pdf because, quite honestly, I’m not up to it (though I did spend part of yesterday trying to get impromptu tutorials from friends on concepts like “confidence interval”). Reading the text of the Lancet piece, I was struck by three points especially. First, they let us know exactly what they did, so that critics can address their claims. Yes, there’s a highly controversial headline figure which the Guardian and others seize upon, but what the study actually says is that they asked such-and -such questions of such-and-such people, and extrapolation of the responses would generate such-and-such a number. Second, they notice a big difference between the numbers of people apparently shot by US troops (hardly any) and the numbers killed by aerial bombardments (lots). Third, they remark on the fact that the coalition forces have an obligation to find out for themselves how many civilians have been killed but have shown hardly any interest in doing so.

[click to continue…]

“Glenn Reynolds”:http://instapundit.com/archives/018780.php and “Roger L. Simon”:http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2004/10/prediction.php tell us that if Kerry wins, it will be the fault of the mainstream media, and that the blogosphere will have its revenge. Simon’s post is especially creepy.

bq. If the Kerry does win, the mainstream media will have gotten him elected with their biased coverage and they will pay for it more than they could imagine. And it will be the blogosphere and you, our supporters, who will make them pay. Our strength will grow incremently [sic] with a Kerry victory in terms of influence and even economic power. And both will be at the expense of the mainstream media. Yes, we too have “plans.”

This is surely the blossoming of blogosphere triumphalism into a fully-fledged pathology. A self-sustaining narrative about the perfidy of Big Media is allowing certain bloggers to “explain” why their preferred candidate might be defeated, without any uncomfortable re-examination of prior beliefs that have turned out to be wrong. As a bonus, this provides them with a sort of tinpot revanchist mythology. If Kerry does indeed win, I’ve no doubt that Reynolds, Simon and company would be able to maintain a Regnery Publications-style alternative narrative about how they were robbed, how the invasion of Iraq really would have been a success if it weren’t for those perfidious newspapers’ insistence on ignoring “adorable little kitten stories”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002273.html etc etc. But given that warbloggers, like the rest of us, aren’t great shakes at going out there and digging up actual new information, the best they can realistically hope for is to become a distributed version of what the Drudge Report was during the Clinton years, dishing out dirt, conspiracy theories and the odd bit of useful information, but fundamentally parasitic on the mainstream media that they claim to despise.

Update: see “here”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_10_31_fafblog_archive.html#109935816604258290 for the unmissable Giblets remix.

Nothing on the election or the war from me. Instead, a mention of one of my favourite radio comedies, Men From the Ministry. My younger daughter gave a CD with numerous episodes to my elder daughter for her 8th birthday; the look on the elder’s face was one of unalloyed joy when she realised what it was. UK readers of a certain age know what I’m talking about. But the Finnish readers, lucky things, know what I am talking about regardless of their age. Extraordinary. The rest of you, if you have 30 minutes to spare, can learn why you should envy the Finns by clicking here. Only in English, not Finnish. Sorry.

For those of you who think your tastes are more sophisticated, Radio 4 is running a 4-part life of Peter Cook, the funniest Englishman who ever lived, presented by Michael Palin, who now, sadly, has one competitor fewer for the title of the nicest Englishman alive. The first part will be available till Friday. If your candidate loses tomorrow, it’ll cheer you up. If you don’t know before Friday, listen anyway.

The hitherto anonymous votemaster at the excellent “electoral-vote.com”:http://www.electoral-vote.com/ website “has outed himself”:http://www.electoral-vote.com/info/votemaster-faq.html . He is Andrew Tanenbaum, professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and already mildly famous as the author of MINIX (an important precursor of Linux).

Mark Steyn promises to resign if Kerry is elected.

Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn’t bother a lot of chaps in this line of work — Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert ‘Mister Robert’ Fisk, etc., — and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate. My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else — organising coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the Presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.

I doubt he’s quite up to it, but at least his heart’s in the right place.

As usual before the first Tuesday in November, Australians are closely studying the papers, trying to predict the winner in tomorrow’s race, and planning the well-lubricated parties that are essential as we wait for the results. A critical question here, and one that has been the subject of vigorous debate, is whether betting markets are efficient predictors. While some have argued strongly in favor of the markets recently, long-standing Australian tradition holds that they are utterly unreliable. There’s also a lot of debate about whether the whole turnout may be affected by the weather, and if so, in whose favour.

The level of interest is so high that the event is almost impossible to avoid. Even those who are completely apathetic have found it easier to pick an allegiance at random than to admit to not caring one way or the other.

Work will stop around the nation as we try to digest the results, and the champagne. Victorians, who take all matters of this kind more seriously than other Australians, will take the entire day off.

Update 2/11 A triumph for the betting markets, as the favorite Makybe Diva came home on the inside, the first mare to win two successive Cups. I managed a successful arbitrage on the office Calcutta buying the favorite for $25 in a pool of over $150, as opposed to market odds of 5/1 or less.