Nate Silver Ought To Leave the Internal Illinois Politics to Others
The Republicans are extremely disorganized in Illinois, but both the governor’s seat and Obama’s senate seat now need to be considered viable pickup opportunities for them in 2010. The Republican with the strongest statewide brand name is former senator Peter Fitzgerald, who retired from the Senate in 2004. With that said, the Democrats have several rising stars of their own, such as Alexi Giannoulias, Jan Schakowsky, Lisa Madigan, and Luis Guiterrez, all of whom have pretty clean reputations.
Peter lives in Virginia now and was a crappy Senator. Yes, he appoint Fitzgerald which was great, but he had horrible constituent service and was probably the least popular state politician until Blagojevich took over that mantle. His polling sucked when he dropped out. The Republicans have no one statewide with a good brand other than Tom Cross. They have a few prospects, but given the state’s demographics, winning is still tough and most contenders washed themselves of Blagojevich’s taint some time ago.
Gutierrez is not a rising star, he’s a guy near the end of his career who has several questionable real estate deals. They don’t appear to amount to much, but one of them involves Rezko. I think we can say stick a fork in that career.
December 9th, 2008 at
Hey, Bill Brady wants to run again.
(pause)
(longer pause)
OK, you can stop laughing now.
Maybe Pat O’Malley’s available.
Really, stop laughing.
December 9th, 2008 at
Agreed. I love FiveThirtyEight but when I read this, I was pretty disheartened. Maybe I like it so much because I don’t know much about what he’s talking about (Idaho polling history, for example), so I buy into it.
December 9th, 2008 at
I think Nate is brilliant when he’s talking about polling, but this gets to a far different area than his expertise. It doesn’t mean he’s dumb, it just means he’s beyond what his expertise is.
December 9th, 2008 at
This is just an example of ‘the more you know about a subject, the more you realize how little the so-called experts know.” I have read and heard quite a bit today about indictments (no indictment) and the connection between Blago and Obama (actually they are rivals) and other ruminations of so-called experts. Nate can crunch numbers but he is a little out of his league on Illinois politics.
December 9th, 2008 at
Stuart, I hear what you’re talking about. Stephanopolous said, “Obama worked on Blagojevich’s 2002 and 2006 campaigns…”
No. He sure didn’t.
It’s bad enough you have supposed “news” outlets like Drudge and WLS AM (and even politico) leaving out enough details to make it appear there’s a connection. When the supposed real news outlets get at it, it’s a disaster.
December 9th, 2008 at
Arch:
I worked for Peter Fitzgerald and saw an internal political poll and you couldn’t be more wrong. His numbers were quite solid and slightly better than Durbin’s at the time. He was right about corruption and he was right about O’Hare. He had guts that almost every other politician in Illinois lacks. You are right, however, that he now lives in Virginia.
December 9th, 2008 at
[...] Silver kool aid as anyone (of both the political and baseball variety), but I have to agree with Larry Handlin that Nate is off track with his conjecture that soon-to-be Illiois Governor Pat Quinn could select [...]
December 9th, 2008 at
====Mr. Fitzgerald, the first Illinois senator to bow out after one term since the 1930′s, said he was confident he would have won in 2004, pointing to a poll his campaign conducted last week that showed he would beat all the prominent Democrats considering the race. But only 45 percent of the 600 people surveyed said he deserved re-election, and he was favored by 43 percent to 52 percent in the various head-to-head matchups, low for an incumbent.
Now, I was wrong on the point because George Ryan was far more unpopular by then
, but Peter’s numbers were far from good.
December 10th, 2008 at
OH NO! Facts!
December 10th, 2008 at
His poll numbers were good enough to put him in a position to win the race had he decided to run and fund properly. Whether he would have won is another question, but those who suggest he couldn’t have won are rewriting history.
December 10th, 2008 at
===and fund properly===
Key point.