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Fritchey on Potential Stroger Replacements

ArchPundit March 23, 2006 1 Comment

He brings up some interesting ideas. Emil Jones being one–and it doesn’t risk mixing up the state ticket and might have some personal appeal to Jones.

My one concern is the President Jones has done a hell of a lot better job than I think anyone thought he would when he became minority leader–perhaps better than Jones himself. He’s a real asset down there, though I do think the Senate bench is deep enough to find a reasonable replacement.

The other choice is the one I keep hearing and that being Jesse White. I think Democrats need to think through this pretty hard–Jesse will beat Rutherford, but putting a less beloved candidate in there could be a problem–Dan is a very good candidate. I like him generally, though Fritchey’s idea of Dan Hynes stepping into that race would be something that I could easily get behind.

I also like the idea of Clayborne stepping in for Hynes—downstate, non-white guy hits some key demographics and Pankau isn’t a strong candidate so someone stepping in wouldn’t face having to gear up extremely fast.

I think the Speaker is correct about needing a downstater on the ticket, but clearly Mangieri wasn’t the particular downstater needed.

All That Effort

ArchPundit March 23, 2006 No Comments

And 4000 fewer people showed up in the Democratic Primary in the 6th District than in 2004.

36158 votes in 2004
~31996 votes in 2006

It’s about 20% up from 2002 (the first year of these boundaries. Even given the Barack effect for 2004, the District is still remarkably lacking in infrastructure—this isn’t a slam especially since I know Rick, Hiram and others who have worked so hard, but despite one candidate doing essentially 3 years of organizing, one reaching out to new primary voters, and one spending $700,000 in the primary, not many people showed up.

Roskam has virtually identical numbers to 2004, but that is down from 2002 when Republicans produced 66,000 votes to the 50,000 votes this year and in 2004.

Don’t Bring Back the Chads

ArchPundit March 23, 2006 3 Comments

Okay, I was wrong about the whole late night thing, but I assumed that the problems were only with getting people to vote, not with collecting the votes. What is strange about the problem is that collecting everything should be even easier than ever—collecting cards is easier than collecting boxes from all of the precincts.

But don’t even think about bringing back Votamatics

Punch Cards are outdated technology–don’t believe me–how many out there have ever used a card for computer programming? Yeah, and we were still using them for counting votes. They disenfranchised poor voters at higher rates than any of the newer technology and were just as vulnerable to tampering.

I’m pretty confident David Orr will get this right by the General Election, but not so much with the City where election judges weren’t even given video training. Hands on training should be mandatory, but that also means those out there should sign up to be judges.

Personally, I’m on the Citizen Audit Panel in Saint Louis City. So I’ll report back on how their first election goes (it’s a muni election so it’ll be a good test.

The Republicans Did Give Me One Fun Race

ArchPundit March 22, 2006 No Comments

Carole Pankau for Comptroller

Ohhhhh….Jake. You are so going to hate me.

And Congrats to Dan Hynes who will be celebrating reelection in November.

Am I missing something here?

My Low Tolerance for People Who Can’t do Story Problems

ArchPundit March 22, 2006 No Comments

Is documented here.

Shore in Second

ArchPundit March 22, 2006 No Comments

With 87% of the vote in, Shore is in second place with 14.7% of voters choosing her—that puts her up about 30,000 votes over third place and about 35,000 votes over the fourth place candidate. With about 72,000 votes to (just an approximation) that should make her election pretty safe. The dynamics are a bit funkier in a 3 way race, but it looks good.

Who Is More Bitter?: Discuss

ArchPundit March 22, 2006 8 Comments

Oberweis Supporters or Cegelis Supporters

My take–Oberweis supporters. Cegelis supporters are certainly disappointed after a really great job, but ultimately, the candidate isn’t ideologically toxic like JBT is to the loudest Oberweis supporters.

Conley’s Take

ArchPundit March 22, 2006 1 Comment

Dan Conley has his take on the Illinois Primary over at the Political Wire (Taegan graciously linked to here, Capitol Fax and IlliniPundit last night)

I’m largely in agreement with the above. Dan also takes on the Governor on his own blog. I’m not convinced the Governor is in bad of a spot as he thinks, though clearly having approval ratings in the 40s means he has problems ahead.

Probably Stroger

ArchPundit March 22, 2006 2 Comments

Given the breakdown of votes left, Forrest would have to outperform even what he did in the suburbs to overtake Stroger.

So, now the question is, who will be the next Cook County Board President?

If People Only Read Newspapers They’d Be Better Informed

ArchPundit March 22, 2006 1 Comment

Georgie Ann Geyer seemingly attempts to blame blogs for people having limited knowledge of the world because it causes people to pick and choose their news and it’s leading to the decline in that knowledge.

Think for a moment of what might have happened had we had better (really, any) coverage of Afghanistan during the 1990s, when the Taliban and Osama bin Laden were cooking up a second attack after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Could we then have been so amazed by 9/11? Wasn’t it criminally irresponsible to be so amazed?

Think a little further. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world — the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week — it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people.

Empirically, there is a big problem with this argument–largely people have always had little knowledge about the world and they even have less ability to fit that knowledge into a systemized understanding of the world. The data over time are consistent that the norm is a low level of knowledge about world affairs. This hasn’t changed since the beginnings of the research on public opinion in the 1950s–supposedly the hey day of great newspapers.

The dumbest thing to do is to blame blogs and blog reader who, by the very fact they read some news, are well ahead of the average person on the street.

Let me offer a different argument–news organizations drawing upon the tools of blogging are making themselves more accessible and improving access to news–Eric Zorn not only writes his column, but points people to stories around the web in other news sources. Lynn Sweet adds full text of briefings and interviews instead of synopses in columns. They do need to figure out a business model that works on the web, but that’s not the fault of bloggers.

Technology allows me to read far more papers every day than I could when I couldn’t access them online. I may not read every story, but I didn’t when I only had a dead tree version either. The larger problem is that people are happy and so many don’t read news because they have other options for their time.