Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, June 12, 2008

McCain, Hallucinations and Allegheny County

By Fester:



Watching the John McCain strategy briefing for victory is painful.  It sounds like a senior class project where the student has a predetermined result in mind and is trying to be agile enough to get the right arguments into place even if they don't make sense.  The one thing that lept out at me was the following map from Ohio and Pennsylvania ( about 8:13 in).  I have modified the map a little bit by adding a couple of geographic pointers:



Mccain_pa



In 2000, Allegheny County was about 6% more Democratic than the nation as a whole, and in 2004, Allegheny County was about 9% more Democratic than the nation as a whole.  And yet this map is projecting that it will flip to McCain, or at least it is implicitly arguing that due to the color schema.  This is not the only type of flip that the McCain camp is projecting.  Erie County is about 4% more Democratic than the nation as a whole, and it is projected to flip.  Beaver and Washington counties were even splits.  The only SW Pa county that went overwhelmingly for Bush and has a significant population was Westmoreland.  Allegheny County floods out the region due to its population and mobilization rates.  A lot of trees and coal mines are in the probable McCain counties, but not a lot of voters.



Ouch, this is just a painful distortion of reality that the McCain campaign wants to persuade its supporters that they can see an effective ten point swing in their favor compared to Bush in Allegheny County.  Their best hope is keeping the margin close but that is an unlikely hope.  Sad....   



Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

2 comments:

  1. JohnJune 13, 2008 at 9:22 AM

    Because you probably don't listen to Rush Limbaugh, you won't have heard of Operation Chaos in which tens of thousands of Republicans and Independents switched party affiliation for a day to vote for Hillary but intend to vote GOP in November.
    Plus, given the legendary "open-minded, non-judgmentalism" of liberals, many folk keep "Democrat" on their county voting rolls to just avoid hassels. "Reagan Democrats" are real.

    ReplyDelete
  2. festerJune 13, 2008 at 9:46 AM

    John --- I live in Pittsburgh so I know the region fairly well. I agree that Reagan Dems are real but I also know that the counties with significant populations tend to vote for Democrats at the state (gov) and federal levels (Pres & Senate) with the exception of Westmoreland County. The population anchor of the region; Allegheny County is about 9 points more Democratic as expressed by the vote share of Gore and Kerry --- that includes defections of Reagan Democrats who voted for Bush in large numbers in Pa-4 and Pa-18. So even accounting for Reagan Democrat defections, McCain would need to run about 10 points ahead of Bush in SW Pa to win the swath he is targetting. I find that unlikely.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)