nobody gives a crap about primary voters in NC.

Edwards is ahead in the mail ads, although most of them come from an independent group. I found it notable that one actually mentions support for the Second Amendment.

Richardson seems to be spending more than his poll numbers would indicate.

On the Republican side, Ron Paul seems to be doing well in the yard sign race in rural areas. His poll numbers are low, but perhaps this means the few supporters he does have are more committed. This could make a big difference if the weather is bad on caucus night.

Unless what you have in mind is having all state parties go to proportional representation of their party delegates.

This early primary race has become absurd, though, and I'm not sure what can be done about it. I like the idea of rotating waves of primaries, where 1/3 of the country casts their primary ballots in February, the next in May, and the last in August (or some other arrangement that keeps the primary out of high summer), and the next election cycle the ones who had August have February etc. But that's unlikely to be implemented in our lifetime.

I'd just like to point out that at this point in 1992 I had never heard of Bill Clinton. I barely knew who he was after the NH primary, in fact.

And is Kucinich's support for Obama purely a fit of pique about Edwards and Clinton suggesting there were too many people in the debates?

Personally, I think Kucinich backs Obama because they share a preference for idealistic optimism over cynical pragmatism (something which I, myself, think is a good thing.)

Yesterday I saw one within six inches of the breakdown land on I-5 in the 101 Junction area, which is possibly the most dangerous stretch of freeway in the state.

Also, I'm perfectly thrilled that candidates ignore my state in the primary season.

If I knew who they were, and would still be in the state for the election, I would vote against them for displaying that level of ego.

*One side of the postcard was a family picture. On the back was printed "Merry Christmas, from Joe, Penny, Sarah, and Jake"--Can't remember the real names. There was teeny writing along the bottom saying that it'd been paid for by a group with a frustratingly vague name.

OH MY GOD, I DON'T HAVE A COLD, I CAUGHT THE RON PAUL MEME!

Please, someone get me some Cipro before it's too

If they are, they are in numerous, if not good, company. ISTR a poll 5 or 6 years ago that showed that 40% of all Americans thought New Mexico was not a part of the US. I'd be curious to see a geographical breakdown of that poll by state: were any of these bozos in Texas or Arizona for instance? How about California (I'm taking bets on that one)?

So why are both Gravel and Kucinich in the race?

Because both of them want badly to be President, and both are hoping for the kind of miracle that Clinton pulled off in '92. The candidate pool is always large at first, and the narrowing down is subject to chance enough that it's at least possible that either one could beat out all the others, including Clinton and Obama. Very unlikely in reality, of course, but the reward is huge for someone who wants power as badly as these dudes do.

You'd have to count me out of that poll: I've driven across NM twice, I have cousins there, and my father used to go to 'Albuquerque' on business occasionally.

(I'm pretty sure that people in Utah, Colorado, and Oklahoma also know where New Mexico is.)

So I hear from them on the radio, incidental to their campaigning at you in NH, but does it make any difference at all when they've dropped out of the race anyway by the time I get to vote? Around here, we only hear about Clinton and Obama (multi-million war chests) anyway. The only question is which will be pre-anointed by the time I get to mark a ballot, and which will be a truly wasted vote because they won't even be in the race anymore.

Harrumph.

I like Xopher's idea. And I would like a pony.

Q: "Would you like to participate in a quick two question poll?"
A: "Certainly!!!"

Q: "Are you planning to vote in the [name of party] primary?"
A: "But of course!!!"

Q: "Who are you planning to vote for?"
A: "Oh! I'm sorry, you've just used up your 2 questions. Now, if you had selected a *3* question poll, I could answer that question, but you didn't, did you? Poor planning on your part sir! Good day!"

Q: "What?"
A: "I'm sorry, but 'What?' is technically a question, and thus answering it is, ha ha, out of the question. Good day!"

... and so on. (If they're going to waste our time, the least they can do is be amusing!)

I've worked on a number of telephone surveys, and and we never tested interviewers for their political knowledge. It's rarely necessary, since interviewers are supposed to follow a script closely and keep ad libs to a minimum.

Chances are that the interviewer saw a list of Democratic candidates on the computer screen and Gravel wasn't on it, so she assumed Gravel was a Republican.

Giving you the Cipro would interfere with the invisble hand of the market.

As an aside, living in California I may as well be living in in Canada. No one cares what we think. I'd love to get some dumb push poll calls just to suggest we actually exist on the political radar.

Maybe we could solve the selection dilemma this way: a two-tier primary system. The top 10 states (in terms of electoral votes) go second; the rest all go at the same time first. That prevents California/New York from becoming the new Iowa/New Hampshire, and it forces candidates to decide where best to concentrate their efforts. The breadth of that first round means that a larger variety could, in theory, still compete at "big state" time, while the ones who can't carry even one or two states get weeded out. Not that it's ever gonna happen.

The phone has been ringing off the hook here (Iowa) -- at one point we got four calls in the span of a half-hour. We've taken to hanging up on the robo-calls, but we at least give the live people the time of day, and we've collected the full set of the Democratic campaigns. (Plus one very confused college student on the Ron Paul campaign, who I was a bit brusque to.)

I'm still relatively undecided; I spent a chunk of yesterday reading up on the candidates' health care policy proposals, and today it'll be the Iraq war policies and everything else. I tried watching one of the debates online, but it was worse than useless. I want more detail, dammit.

Specifically, I got an email from a Bill Foster, who appears to be running on a platform of being a particle physicist, former businessman, and (as best I can tell from the email) entirely reasonable and sensible, and capable of hiring a campaign staff that can write intelligently to people who are assumed to be intelligent. Basically, he was asking for campaign contributions, and I suspect he got the email list either from the American Physical Society or something along those lines. (Probably not actually the APS, as I don't think they give out email lists for such, but I could be wrong.)

And, yes, it was spam asking for me to forward it to other people, but I can forgive a lot when it's phrased as "P.S. spreading the word by forwarding this email to others in the scientific and academic community will be exponentially helpful."

http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/new-hampshire.html

If it's accurate, Gravel's invisible, so it's no surprise the interviewer hadn't heard of him. Kucinich is barely a blip either.

Rachel @ 16: I'm a proud idealist, too. That's why I think the candidates' rhetoric matters, even if they don't follow through: Edwards talks a progressive agenda, and Obama adopts conservative memes on things like social security. Edwards broadens the debate; Obama narrows it. This just doesn't seem good to me.

Bruce @ 24: Ego is part of being a US politician. I think Gravel and Kucinich are both sincere, and this does give them a chance to talk about issues the Democrats are generally willing to ignore. But the effect is that they divide the 2-3% of liberals who are willing to take them seriously.

(We made a road trip to Nashua via Exeter last month and somewhere in the middle started seeing wall to wall Mike Gravel campaign signs. Looked at each other and asked in unison, "Who the hell is Mike Gravel?")

So far my vote went to Edwards, not a surprise that Dodd isn't in the running.

Couldn't he just indenture himself to some kind master in exchange for the Cipro?

The candidates hated them--they were asked meaningful questions of actual significance to voters, and they were expected to give genuine answers. The League also had a nasty tendency to invite all the candidates, too. Good times, good times.

Since I'm unaffiliated, I tend to watch the primaries with bemusement, and go and vote on the issues that proliferate on the California ballots like maggots. (When in doubt, vote "no." I'm sorry, the state is broke.)

I look forward to the winnowing of the candidates, if for no other reason than I might actually have the energy to look up their records and see where they actually stand, rather than where they say they stand. Political fatigue indeed.

And the props that aren't openly about spending money tend to be poorly thought out, when they aren't actually insane. (Been looking at them for far too many years, sorry.)

I can see why you might not like what Obama's been saying about healthcare, but I don't agree with you that Obama narrows the terms of political debate. I used to live in his (state) senate district, and I've seen firsthand: the guy has a real talent for making the system address topics that aren't part of the normal political discourse.

Which is to say, I'm not too worried about how he's positioned himself in the election. I think he'll be at least as effective at moving progressive legislation through Congress as anyone else running.

I don't think that it was, in this case. I understood it to be referring to the fact that forwarding the message to multiple people would be of ongoing and multiplying helpfulness (assuming that each of those people did likewise).

And that's why I considered it a good thing, rather than a bad thing -- he used it _correctly_.

I prefer idealistic pragmatism myself. This is why I back Edwards.

I would hope they come to their senses and recognize that reality is more important than politics. I enjoy reading fantasy, but living in it isn't quite so much fun.

/nitpick mode

I'd vote for RuPaul in a New York minute. Especially if he* were running against R-n P--l.

* He? She? What's the correct pronoun here? Modern life is complicated.

One poll last night. Told the pollster I was definitely voting for Ron Paul.

That might have been the Union Leader saying to WMUR and Fox that this guy is, indeed, a candidate, and who are they to exclude him from the primary.

Yesterday's phone calls: Two Edwards, one Clinton, one Obama, one Opinion Research.

I'm tempted to send you the one from the city of LA, on revising the utility tax.
They've 'discovered' DSL, VoIP, and Blackberries, and think they're missing out on a major revenue source: they want to trade taxing all the accesses to the Internet (many of which are already taxed) in return for reducing the tax rate from 10% to 9%. (The increase in revenue is supposed to be used for more police officers. We've heard that one before, and somehow it never works out that way.)

((That's reaching a while back--let's see if McCain comes up with an endorsement from ex-Governor Sununu (famous for abusing his Washington job as Bush I's Chief of Staff to have a government driver take him from DC to a stamp auction in NYC, among other things). Sununu's son, now-Senator Sununu, was the beneficiary of the New Hampshire Phone Jamming scandal, for which a Republican operative went to jail.)

Doyle got a recorded call from some governor who's pro-McCain.

[UPDATE] ...and just now a call from the Edwards people! First Democrats of the day!

N.H.'s contrarian Yankees".

New Hampshire voters are sick of the political process -- but they still want to go first. CNN's Richard Roth reports

I note that, based on their video, they managed to get as far as a whole twenty miles from the Massachusetts border.

Robo-call from the Ron Paul people reminding us that the primary is tomorrow.

Robo-call from the Huckabee people, reminding us that "'Massachusetts Mitt' Romney" is soft on abortion.

Human from the Obama campaign reminding us that the primary is tomorrow and asking if we need help getting to the polls.

Robo-call from the Ron Paul people asking who we were planning to vote for.

As someone who lives in a state taken for granted as being R, I want to add in my thanks for the updates.

Did you tell it that you'd be voting for RuPaul? "I think she's really hot..."

A Hillary flyer in the mail. Just got a robo-call for Ron Paul (this one was Ron's wife, talking about his children and grandchildren).

Human call for Edwards.

Human call for Obama, asking if anyone needed a ride to the polls.

Flyer for Hillary.

Except on the lunatic fringe of radical feminism*, 'I', 'me', 'my', and 'mine' are considered gender-neutral.

*Back in the 1970s I actually read a paper by a woman who claimed that 'I' was gender-specific because it was phallic. She typed it with a slash through it**, the castrating bitch!***

**No doubt she now thinks that the impossibility of doing this in HTML is part of a patriarchal conspiracy.

***I am JOKING about this. Ha ha, slash? Through the phallic symbol? No? Oh, well.

(Yes, of course I do. Just too much fun to pass up.)

*Well, it oughta be.

All it will take is one popular DJ or one character on a TV show...

So we should use the Dutch formal second person to balance it out. U. Nice and yonic*.

-----
* The fact that I even know a word like "yonic" is due, of course, to attending UC Berkeley in the late 1980's and early 1990's.

One robo-call from Ron Paul.

(It's Coit, BTW)

...and no interruptions were allowed?

As for the misspelling, I blame the Bay Area's FM station for it, but I'll still shamble away in shame and in embarassment.

Well, there's always this symbol, if you're desperate: ¦

Someone should have told her she was looking at it in the wrong direction (like 'It's not phallic at all. It's really feminine.'). I don't know what the results would have been, but the confusion should have been wonderful to behold.

I know it, and I only spent one day on the Berzekeley campus....

(I burst into laughter on a bus, years ago, reading Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, when he introduced a villanous character named "Mahalingam".)

I only know the word because I spend time with frighteningly literate filkers.