The internet is going to be a burden come November: a thought on polls

Let me start out by pointing out something: I am one of those nutbars who thinks Bush stole both 2000 and 2004 via some nefarious trickery. If you’d like details on the latter, I suggest you read Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse. There was certainly sufficient evidence to suggest that who the people voted for did not end up winning on the whole.

Now then. I’m starting to see the downside of the internet when it comes to getting one’s news and politics through it. Because the New Hampshire polls had Hillary behind Obama prior to the primary, only for her to squeak ahead at the end, the internet is now alight with theories of voter fraud.

The claims seem to stem from the following observations. 1) Hillary was behind in polls and then won. 2) Electronic voting tallies are different from paper voting tallies. 3) Ron Paul didn’t win by 115%.

It would be idiotic to claim there were no anomalies and that everything came out exactly squared up in all directions. Ron Paul lost 31 votes (out of 31) in one county, a drop that is unacceptable by any stretch of the imagination. Forgive the Alex Jones link, once in a while he isn’t totally batshit insane.

The point is that not everything went well and we definitely have to grapple with that, but we’re starting to see what happens when the internet rumor mill latches onto a story and then starts to fill out all of the details when all they’ve got is the end results. Like an uneducated man attempting to diagnose his own illness based on his symptoms, we end up with more hysteria than real answers.

So Hillary and McCain take New Hampshire

Okay, so the votes aren’t quite all in, strictly speaking (take a look at the live coverage here), but at this point it’s a fairly safe bet that unless Obama takes all of the remaining votes, Hillary’s got it.

Rachael Maddow made a great point on MSNBC just now, noting that it’s strange that we’re looking at this now as though Hillary had some kind of a surge up from behind, if you look at things on the whole, all that happened was that Hillary simply re-took her spot at the top.

On McCain’s side, I don’t think anyone is surprised he ran away with this one. The Huckster dropped into 3rd, leaving Romney in 2nd yet again. I find it interesting that he sits at 2nd place in both, making me wonder if he’ll manage to do fairly well overall or if he’ll simply sit at 2nd perpetually and lose to someone who bounced between 1st and 3rd.

Speaking honestly, Ron Paul’s showings have been damn impressive considering he started off down in Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich territory, so that he’s even approaching double digit numbers is testament to his support.

Again, look historically, and we find that the New Hampshire primary generally decides the nominee. As a note, the names are listed in descending order, so we also find that in the instances where the winner in NH didn’t get the nomination, the 2nd place guy did. So we have our field quite narrowed.