Well, today are Florida's primaries

[kierthos]

And while it's tricky to guess which Republican will win it, McCain and Romney being in pretty much a tie, one thing is certain.

It won't be Guiliani.

That is, unless all the polls are wrong. For them to be wrong, the pollsters would either have to have called the completely wrong sample of people every time in the last couple of months and been truly off especially in the last couple of weeks, or the people who are being called are flat out lying.

I really don't think that either possibility is the case. Yes, it is possible to call a number of people for the poll where their responses are not a proper sampling of the population. But these pollsters have been doing this for a while. So I feel reasonable certain that while they might be off by a point or two (or three) here and there, they're not going to be off by the 15 or more points that Romney and McCain have over Guiliani and Huckabee. And while I could see a small group of people working together to lie to pollsters, there's no way to guarentee that they will be the ones called, or that their lies would be statistically significant.

Likewise, the same has to apply to the Democratic race in Florida, which puts Clinton far ahead of Obama and even farther ahead of Edwards. (Edwards needs to drop out after Florida and endorse Obama. But that probably won't happen.) Mind you, some of these polls are from before Obama won South Carolina, and while a few others are after that, they're really before two Kennedys endorsed Obama. So, I'm still seeing a Clinton win in Florida, but not by nearly as much as the polls show.

And of course, delegate-wise, Florida doesn't count for anything for the Democrats. It would be a good PR victory, but that's it.

Comments

[the-corruption.livejournal.com]

Yes, because polls from Florida are FLAWLESS!!!!

I thought you were smarter than this!? Polls are ONLY accurate by ACCIDENT! Just because you like the results they show is no reason to get excited.

Look, I'm not saying Juliani is gonna win. There's no chance of that. He went Republican to the skin but not all the way to the heart. I like him on the surface, but (particularly his record on gun control) inside him is just unacceptible.

Everyone thinks they know Florida, but there's a LOT the media just doesn't understand about the place. I mean, Florida is only outpaced by Texas as far as gun rights and state executions, for God's sake. Parts are Radical (revolutionary) leftist, parts are Montana militia culture, lots of old people and retired New Yorkers, illegal Cubans and Haitians, West coast ganglands, Pink Pistol clubs, most of the Eastern Bloc European import warehouses are there, etc. How can any ONE person understand it all??

[kierthos.livejournal.com]

Look, I know polls can be off. That's why they have a margin of error. But what I said is that they would either have to wildly off (to the tune of about 20 percentage points, which isn't very damn likely) or the pollsters would have had to continually make giant fuck-ups in their calling patterns. Yes, that's possible too, but not likely.

Now, the polls were off in New Hampshire to the tune of around ten to a dozen points, but they're doing a recount of the votes there anyway. We'll have to wait and see what happens there.

[mierandra.livejournal.com]

A lot of Florida depends on who votes *where.* Miami/Palm Beach is really the only huge seriously far liberal area in the state (most Floridians consider them to be sorta like aliens, or Californians, than actual Floridians). I will agree with the other comment that people don't realize how conservative Florida culture generally is politically if not qualitatively.

As for Clinton, another factor to consider is that Jeb Bush was a very popular governor with a Cuban-American wife for many years in Florida, and whatever his brother may've done with the White House, Jeb was a good governor, particularly in the wake of some seriously bad hurricane seasons. There's a lot of anti-Clinton simply because a lot of people are pro-Jeb if not exactly pro-Bush and those two families have been seen as diametrics for a long time.

I'm curious to see how Hilary does overall in the south. Honestly her politics, while not my thing, still don't produce the gut-response loathing in me as does the simple fact that while she may be a woman, she is most certainly not a lady. Of course I'd like to see this nation put a woman in the White House, but if that woman isn't a credit to the rest of us, then it's really worse than never putting one there in the first place.