11 January 2008
I was looking at the MSNBC exit poll Tuesday night. Chris Matthews apparently has exit polls he finds more reliable. Congressman Kucinich has asked for a recount. “(NH Secretary of State) Gardner said he has heard one of the lesser-known Republican presidential candidates may also seek a recount.” Who might that be?
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The Washington Post has broken down the townships in past elections without supplying their data, making the case that differing voter demographics in townships of different population accounts for the discrepancy between paper and machine. In the case of Kerry-Dean and Gore-Bradley, the New Hampshire results corresponded to the opinion polls before the primaries, with Bradley slightly outperforming expectations but still not coming out ahead. There is a continuum between the demographics of the supporters in the three primaries, where a party endorsed candidate faces a challenger financed by individual contributions from the middle class and supported by voters with a postgraduate education.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/01/10/method_or_the_map.html
For people who are familiar with how these stories work, there is a predicable pattern. The phenomenon of Chris Matthews bringing up exit polls that don’t correspond to the results is likely to go away in the next news cycle, after the overzealous talker is reined in. No single report from the corporate media cites either exits polls that don’t relate to the result, the previous public opinion polls, past history of Diebold, or mention the influence of John Silvestro over the NH computer counting. Dismissive pejoratives are used to describe the people who bring the accusations, which is why Kucinich is being helpful here since he is a congressman in the race.
Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting and the subject of Hacking Democracy on HBO, has this to say (the two links she supplies for data are both currently inoperable):
“New Hampshire, for the Democrats, was the exact opposite of Iowa. They used one of the worst voting systems in America and then handed programming of every memory card in New Hampshire over to a private outfit run by John Silvestro.
First order of business needs to be examining the published precinct results and comparing the hand count locations to the optical scam locations.
The results web site does not make this easy. You have to hover your mouse over each one of about 250 municipalities and then take a screen grab and then type it into a spreadsheet.
So far, no one I know has completed that task.
Here is the site with the municipality results:
http://www.politico.com/...imaries/nhmap-popup.html
Here is a comma delimited data file I created with the municipalities and whether they are hand counted or opscam:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/N...-08-votingsystems-NH.txt
I took the information from the NH Sec State site. A few of the locations do not have the voting system specified; if they have a low population, they are probably hand count.
Whoever gets the handcount vs opscam spreadsheet done gets two points. The tools are in the two links above."
It turns out that the Republican sponsor of the recount was Albert Howard, who garnered 44 votes. I really have no idea what the result of the recount will be. Urban precincts in NH have much fewer minorities than in states further South, so they may go for Hillary, in response to some columns I’ve read like Dave Lindorff’s in Counterpunch.
Of course NH is all about perceptions rather than delegates. After losing NH, Obama got his biggest bounce in the tracking polls of the last few months, probably because his name recognition keeps going up and Hillary and Guiliani’s name recognition advantages are becoming less important.
I watched Bill Clinton’s rant on Obama a few days ago and thought it was absolutely ugly. I think I’m not heavily PC about ethic commentary and jokes but I’m glad African Americans have reacted to how a little less sleep make Bill and Hillary’s true feelings come out. Their clear message is that the ‘MLK gets shot, and then LBJ the syndicate Southern white gets the legislation passed’ script will be replayed eternally and that blacks should know their political place. Obama is NOT a civil rights leader partially because he has a black immigrant father and a white mother and he has every right to be who he is and make his case for executive authority but the Clintons want to typecast all Africans as civil rights activists. I have always attributed the black adoration for Bill to Bill’s BS and the racism of the rest of the political class, since he did little for Black America as president and did much that was harmful.
Also ugly was Bill calling Obama a liar for calling attention to the Iraq war authorization bill that Hillary voted for. The bill was written so that it would serve as legislative consent for Bush but it was unspecific enough for people to say that they didn’t want THAT invasion. Still, legislative approval is what it is, and everyone knew what it meant including Hillary. Hillary’s statements that she was duped by false WMD intelligence are a lie, as she was prompted to vote the way she did by lobbyists and these months are the only time in her whole life when she has to put up with the opinions of the Democratic base, which means her positions on the war and health care have been tweaked a little until summer when they return to form.
But who is Bill to call people a liar? Like all pathological liars he is convinced that everyone else is a liar. Is he going to smear every Democratic nominee from here on in because he wants his wife to be President?
And what is this 35 years of experience for Hillary? Is she counting being on the board of directors of Walmart as political experience?
Flicking around the radio during the football I heard NPR dispatch Juan Williams, who yucks it up with Tony Snow and Bill Kristol on Fox, to take on this ‘unreported’ ethnic row. He is supposedly reporting on phenomenon but instead decides to give an editorial about how the Clintons are better for African-Americans because they have better contacts with civil rights leaders, using Andrew Young as the sole example of such a civil rights leader.
Young has had a fundraiser for Clinton and has a common sponsoring lobbyist. While Hilary served for six years on the board of directors on WalMart, having not filled a vacancy on the board and, after quitting right before Bill declared in 92, not replaced on the board, Andrew Young was the National Chairman of Working Families for WalMart, a astroturf (fake grassroots) organization to undercut the national labor movement paid for by WalMart. On behalf of WalMart, Young said in response to the question of local stores being run out of business “Well, I think they should; they ran the 'mom and pop' stores out of my neighborhood, ... But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs; very few black people own these stores.”
It should be noted that WalMart’s utilization of Chinese manufacturing was the impetus for Bill and Hillary passing the resolution that hurt American manufacturing more than any other in American history, the bill ratifying permanent trade relations with China.
Young’s advocacy of the Clintons has extended to his saying that "Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack" and then going on to say that Hillary began the campaign to neutralize Bill’s girlfriends, using this as an example of the Clintons being more presidential than Obama because they are meaner. Of course, none of this was mentioned on the NPR report.
no mention btw on NPR of Jesse Jackson supporting Obama
Looking at the MSNBC exit poll from Iowa, Obama had a 40-23 lead over Clinton in cities with over 50,000 people, a 30-25 lead in suburbs, and lost 31-33 in ‘small city and rural.’ That is a strong indication that he performs better in urban areas than rural areas.
NH towns with large margins of victory for Hillary:
Salem, Pelham, and Hudson, middle class suburbs of Boston
Somersworth, Rochester, post industrial mill towns
Manchester, post industrial with some gentrification and immigrant populations
Hampton, beach resort
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