Redstate

“.....women and minorities hardest hit”

In some parts, $100K family income isn't even "get by." Everything west of the mountains is EXPENSIVE.

In Vino Veritas

Note also the Rs are winning 18-29 by 20-30 points, also suspect.

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Not necessarily. Dino is VERY good at appealing to young people, and Gregoire is VERY VERY bad it it. He's 47 (about) but he looks 10 years younger. She's 61 or so and comes across as the government elitist establishment figure she is.

While younger people generally lean left, they are also very anti-establishment, and the D's have run the show for 24 years straight.

"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas

It was seeing McCain beat Obama by 20 among young voters that makes me question the sample.

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Ah, yes, that does seem suspect.

Then again, cynicism is the language of Washington more then any other place I've been. Perhaps "change" and "hope" are already seen as the silly platitudes they are.

"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas

I couldn't find the breakdown of the 500 voters on their website. No way to know if Rasmussen oversampled R's. (I doubt they would consciously bias their results, like the Washington Post did today when it polled "adults" to get a big Dem edge).

What instances were you referring to when Rasmussen was more pro-R than pro-D, Adam?

The Obama-McCain and Clinton-McCain numbers are always a few points more pro-R than other polls. When other head-to-head polls came out (Rudy, Huck, Romney vs. Ds), this was true as well. Within the primaries, McCain was always under-polled by Rasmussen (in the daily polling).

I presume this has to do with the filter which Rasmussen doesn't give us. I'd love to see how many Rs, Is, and Ds are in each sample. If the WA poll was 35D, 30R, 35I that would be more R than I think WA actually is. If it was 40D, 28D, 32I, then those numbers would be really good for McCain.

But without the breakdown, it's hard to do.

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At the point that head-to-heads were taken, all they told us was who recognized whose name early on. McCain outpaced the others simply because he's better known. The only head-to-head polls that count come in the fall, after both campaigns have ramped up and the candidates have faced each other a few times.

(Unrelated to this topic, please visit my political blog, "Plumb Bob Blog: Squaring the Culture," at http://www.plumbbobblog.com. Thanks.)

Perhaps I am just being too positive, but I would caution that it is possible that the other polls are oversampling Dems, and that they are the ones that are wrong. We probably need a general election to determine how accurate the Rasmussen polls are.

How were the Rasmussen polls for MS and KY governors? Does anyone know?

Of course!

No surprise there at all, not in Washington State. The D's have basically set up shop as a pay-to-play organization ever since Gregoire was in office. It was that way to a certain degree before, but not nearly as bad. But they've always had an entrenched merchantalist system as long as I've been alive.

The majority of the people who make over $100,000 are out-of-state young professionals that come to work for Microsoft or one of their contractors. They are overwhelmingly secular and leftist. They don't call them latte liberals for no reason.

"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas

Rather than speculate, I'd like to see some demographic research to find out their thoughts on the economy, taxes, government spending, etc, as well as their education, occupation, neighborhood, etc.

"Austere, intolerant, well-armed, and blood-thirsty, in their own regions the Wahhabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account" - Winston Churchill, 1921

I'm not sure if it's that they aren't socially conservative, many still are, it's just that they don't trust someone who talks about social conservative issues all the time. There's a not-unimportant distinction between the two. McCain does fit them perfectly though, because he's socially conservative but not outwardly so.

"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas

That's suppose to spelled "talking" and "people feel guilty"

"To believe in nothing is to believe in everything. To believe in everything is to believe in nothing"

it has to do with Rs shifting from focusing on economic issues to social issues. Schiavo, the FMA, etc are not appealing to these groups. In fact, many are solidly pro-gay, pro-choice, and secular.

That's not everybody, but it is true disproportionately among young professions.

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folks. Sell them on the idea that with letting states and localities deal with the social issues, everyone can maximize their happiness.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns
http://thehinzsightreport.com
www.theminorityreportblog.com
www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns
http://thehinzsightreport.com
www.theminorityreportblog.com
www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson

Because many are younger and educated, which implies that they are victims of modern education and pop culture. Once they get older, raise families, live through a few boom bust cycles they become more realistic.

They are the types that don't invest much time into digging for truth on political issues. They go to college and are told that the earth is dying, that corporations are corrupting everything and that America is a racists, sexists homophobic country that needs to atone for its sins. They take all this in and then revert back to their isolated world of computers and gaming with an adpoted sense of guilt.

My daughter lives there, works in the computer industry, and makes very good money. She left Purple/Red Juneau in the mid-'90s a pretty squared away conservative considering her age and college education. These days she's an out and out bleeding heart liberal and I haven't talked about anything political with her in a very, very long time.

I really, really don't like Seattle and spend as little time there as possible, but if you die in Alaska you'll have to change planes in Seattle to get to Heaven or Hell. If you're going to Mexico or the East Coast, you'll have to give them a couple hundred bucks to stay in a hotel over night to catch you're connecting flight.

I hate even hanging out in the Alaska Airlines club room at SeaTac; wall to wall lefties, all very important yelling into cell phones. And for God's sake don't let them know you're from Alaska or you'll get a lecture on eeeeevul oil tankers and caribou.

I live for the day that I can get something in Alaska that has never even seen the State of Washington, and don't get me started on the Jones Act.
In Vino Veritas

What's the beef there.

Both of my brothers fished Alaska and my father is a commercial fisherman as well. I somehow became a lawyer and flirted with some maritime work. Raised in the largest fishing port inthe US. Tough people. Good people.

is the requirement for American bottoms between American ports for freight and passengers. The stuff that would relate to some fishermen, the protections and benefits for seamen, can be troublsome and expensive if you're running a shipping line, but that isn't the real issue.

There simply is not a competitive large ship-building industry in America and there hasn't been since WWII. All the American bottoms are either for the Jones Act shippers to Alaska, Hawaii, and the territories, or for government owned shippers such as the AK and WA ferry systems. They are hideously overpriced and most require far more manning than the state of the art - then the unions make you over-man them even more.

Right now we need to replace most of our large ferries, now around forty years old and the price of an American bottom will be several mulitiples of what we could buy an equal or better vessel for on the open market. I know we need a shipbuilding capability for the Navy and all that, but they can have their own Navy Yards and their own specialized contractors. The civilian vessels should be available from the most competitive builder no matter where the builder is located.

In Vino Veritas

these highbrowed computer types don't cotton to children so far as I can tell. If they do have children it's usually limited to one. So sadly, they won't have the "family influence" to provide the more conservative impetus.

When I talk to these folks, I get the impression either I or they are from another portion of the universe. I dunno, probably some kinda of Einstein time-space continuum going on.

"To believe in nothing is to believe in everything. To believe in everything is to believe in nothing"

about talking so negatively about these folks. "Lord I apologize for taking a shot at highbrowed computer liberals, and please be with all the homeless people and illegal aliens wandering our streets"

Amen!

"To believe in nothing is to believe in everything. To believe in everything is to believe in nothing"

Essentially, computing (or, at least, software development) is a profession that deals almost exclusively with ideas. It is not surprising, then, that such a profession attracts and/or generates a larger proportion of idealists than are to be found in the general population. Further, since the profession is still dominated by people whose social skills, and, by extension, grasp of human nature and behavior, are somewhat lacking, it's unsurprising that ideologies, especially ones that do not admit of the failings of human nature, are going to be over-represented among its members.

If you spend all day looking for a generalized solution to some problem or set of problems in the course of your job, you will probably take a similar approach to activities outside your job. (If all you have is a hammer, etc.) IME, hard-core libertarianism (often big-L libertarianism) is at least as over-represented among tech folks as the vaguely doctrinaire and libertine, socialist enviroweenies that seem to be the liberal stereotype. (I mean, so far the only Objectivist and the only anarcho-syndicalist I've ever exchanged words with were both computer science folks of one stripe or the other.)

Granted, that's supposition and speculation, based on what I know of myself and the people I went to college with. If engineers tend to be more conservative than programmers, it is only because they tend to deal (or be trained to deal) with the oft-recalcitrant situations that exist in the real world, and so are probably more used to not getting their way.

When I was in school twenty years ago, students in computer science, math, engineering, and the hard science majors were overwhelmingly nerdy. This could be because nerds are drawn to these fields. Or, it could be because the cultural norms within these fields, combined with course loads, lab schedules, and design projects, forced nerdism onto techies.

It was hard at the time to see any point to the non-techie core course requirements like english, literature, history, social sciences, and psychology. I did what I had to do to earn decent grades so that I could get down to business with the courses in my major. In most cases, this meant listen in class, memorize material, and regurgitate same on assigned homework and exams. I had almost zero intellectual curiosity about these subjects.

To paraphrase your sig: When you believe in nothing, you will believe anything. Going along to get along can mean drinking deeply of the kool-aid before you realize you've been indoctrinated.

I think there are two major factors that make today's techies into lefty automatons:

1. Academia is now much more leftist than it was when I was in school. This is an objective observation. I have been helping my neighbor with some of his MBA coursework, and the problem scenarios are rife with gratuitous cheap shots at anything conservative. The textbooks I still have from school do not contain such blatant bias.

2. When I hit the job market in '90, the majority of my co-workers were two-year degree types and mostly apolitical or libertarian. During the dot-com boom, the only qualification was a pulse. Some time during the slow-motion explosion following the dot-com bust, the field became dominated by four-year degree types who are reflexively leftist by indoctrination.

Leftism is an acquired form of mental retardation. I say that because anyone with any critical faculties can see the 20th century as a slam-dunk case against the idiocy of collectivism, but too many won't make the effort even to look. If they won't bother to look, then applying reason and analysis to their political beliefs is out of the question.

I suspect, as you do, that these people feel guilty but not for the reason you think they feel guilty. The guilt is the "correct" response to their first-world, non-impoverished bourgeois roles. When standing in the voting booth or discussing politics with you, these guys load their configuration values from some marxism.xml file tucked away in their brains and simply feel, act, and speak as they were programmed to do.

Sounds like you nailed it on the head to me, especially the retardation part. Like Michael Savage says, "Liberalism is mental disorder!"

"To believe in nothing is to believe in everything. To believe in everything is to believe in nothing"

If it weren't for the psychobabble sound of it, I would have used "stunted development" rather than "mental retardation" in my post.

I think there is a part of every person that needs to consider the big meaning-of-life questions about who we are, why we're here, and what we're supposed to be doing. As children and adolescents, this need is filled by dogma provided by family, church, school, and community. As we develop, we are exposed to other systems of rules, gain experiences with real life, and use a mix of reason and emotion to tinker with this belief system and synthesize it into our personal morals, ethics, and character.

The true evil of leftism is that the doubletalk nonsense of dialectical materialism at its core leaves the subscriber no room for actual thinking and therefore no ability to adjust and develop his core beliefs beyond what leftism requires him to believe.

But for somebody with "more important" things to do than to expend time, energy, and thought on this kind of stuff, buying into leftism is essentially outsourcing spiritual development. This is how smart and otherwise reasonable people can get suckered into collectivist claptrap.

I can picture Billy Mays with his bad dye job doing the infomercial now:

Forget Arthur Murray! Just learn a few simple rules like, "four legs good, two legs bad," and you will never again feel awkward in social situations!

On second thought, maybe "acquired mental retardation" was dead-on.

I concur. Your 100% correct regarding academia. I also think they are younger and bit socially retarded, so again I think a lack of real world experience, marriage and child rearing helps their mental retardation.

I thought of another reason however. Many of these types are already prone to libralism, but that liberalism is insulated by geography. Most tech centers are progressive inner city areas like Boston, Seattle, San Jose. Its tough to break from adolescent liberalism when you live in cities like these and all your peers are liberal.

So many things that seemed so ridiculously funny to me as a kid are just sad nowadays.

Do you remember that bit about "would you jump off a bridge just because all your friends are doing it?" I'm turning forty next week, and I can name at least four people I know who I'm pretty sure would jump because they wouldn't want to feel left-out from the group that jumped before them.

There was an Ernie and Bert skit on Sesame Street that made me yell at the TV when I was five or six. Bert left Ernie with five cookies on a plate. He told Ernie not to eat any because he needed them for some club meeting later that day. Ernie ate one and then spent the rest of the skit trying to rearrange the four remaining cookies to look like five. When I was a kid, I thought that was the stupidest thing I ever saw. Of course, at that age, I hadn't heard of collectivism yet.

At least yelling at the TV is still fun.

You're overlooking the fact that Bush did fairly well in both Oregon and Washington, both times. He never won, but he got fairly close considering the fact that we haven't won either since 1984 (maybe Oregon in '88, I can't remember).

McCain is very well liked among the moderates in non-Seattle King County and the suburbs in Snohomish and Pierce County. He's got an excellent chance to win Washington Oregon is very similar.

"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns
http://thehinzsightreport.com
www.theminorityreportblog.com
www.race42008.com
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson

Bush only came close in Oregon because Nader split the D vote in 2000 AND there were Republican-friendly ballot initiatives in both 2000 and 2004. This year is going to be different - Oregon's R senator, Gordon Smith, is up for re-election and it will NOT be a cake-walk. The D's are energized to try to take him out, and Smith is a pretty moderate guy (i.e., he doesn't fire up the base). A recent poll put Smith's support at 48% - he is under 50% for an INCUMBENT, this is bad news. We can only hope that Chuckie Schumer and the DSCC thinks that this race is "not competitive enough" for them and decide not to flood this state with lots of liberal cash.

But you are missing the basic point: Bush was an anathema to the Northwest, in terms of being a Republican who's likely to do well there, and whatever the factors, he still did pretty well. McCain is perfectly situated in terms of what kind of Republican can win in the Northwest. The things that make conservatives not like him, i.e. doesn't support drilling in ANWR, thinks Global Warming is a problem, etc. are the very things that murdered Bush in the Northwest. If even half the things go his way that got Bush close, he'll have a very real chance of winning. I'd put money on him beating Hillary in at least one of either Oregon or Washington. Obama...well, we'll see. Too hard to tell at this point.

Gordon Smith will win, btw. It won't be particularly close. I'm predicting 53% at least. Saying he doesn't "fire up" the base basically means he has a chance of winning. Nobody that would "fire up" the base in the way you mean it would ever be elected in Washington or Oregon. 48% isn't great, but considering the year, the time of year, the unpopularity of Bush, the state, etc. it's fine. He's got a giant cash advantage, and the D's have bigger fish to fry. Why spend millions trying to take out Smith and probably still lose when you can spend them trying to pick up New Mexico, New Hampshire, Minnesota, etc. Smith looked very vulnerable in 2002, and he won big. He looked like he might lose his first race in 1996 when Dole was getting killed in Oregon, and he won easily. It's not going to be that hard.

"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas