Do you believe the numbers?
February 10th, 2008 -- Posted in American Politics | 5 Comments »Well Saturday has gone and past and we are left with Senator Obama winning decisively in Saturday’s contests which doesn’t say too much considering he was expected to win those contests. It’s almost 12am here in Ireland and as I write this blog, democrats are voting in Maine where it is supposed to be a tight contest. Hillary Clinton has achieved the endorsement of the Governor there but I am hoping for a Barack Obama win which I won’t be able to find out until tomorrow. I spent a lot of time watching the news incidentally today on CNBC, CNN and Fox. I find it quite amazing how intensely the elections are being covered which is a great thing and I came across a few interesting statistics in the process of my television watching:
1. A CNN-Time Poll calculated that almost 20 million people have participated in the primaries so far on the democratic side while a mere 13 million people have participated on the Republican Side. These are incredible numbers which is why a Congressman (Not sure who his name was) was estimating that there will be a landslide victory for the Democrats come November. I hope this is the case, if the Republicans continue to avoid the primaries and the general elections than we will definitely have a change for the better.
2. A New Time Poll shows that Senator Obama would captured 48% of the Vote in a theoretical matchup between himself and Senator McCain who captures 41%, these kind of numbers really made my day today but after hearing that news I switched on Fox to see President Bush openly advertising for Senator McCain in terms of massaging the conservative bases’ lack of trust in McCain. There are still a lot of Presidential loyalists out there and if President Bush pushes the message hard enough I this will narrow the gap significantly. If you examine the article it states that Independent’s tend to favor McCain (McCain vs. Clinton) but prefer Obama (McCain vs. Obama) which should tell the Democratic Party who needs to be elected.
3. Lastly I found a great article at the New York Times that I stumbled across emphasizing how little we can trust the delegate numbers in the case of the Democrats. My mother who also follows the elections continually reminds me how far Obama is behind but if we look at the picture below this text, it tells a totally different story:
So who do we believe? I for one, after reading this article will look at the numbers a bit more skeptically so maybe you should to?
