In the course of commenting on voter turnout today, HoCo Rising complained about use of the term “unaffiliated” to describe voters who don’t register as Republicans or Democrats: Do you get the feeling that Boards of Election went out of their way to give a more passive word like “unaffiliated” as opposed to the affirmative stance of “independent”? Reminds me of an Orwell essay. I’ll mildly disagree with HCR on this point. I don’t think “unaffiliated” is that bad an example of bureaucratic language, and it’s certainly not an Orwellian euphemism on the scale of, say, referring to “taxes” as “revenue enhancers.” It has the advantage of being precise, and of not claiming more than the evidence warrants: These are simply voters who have chosen not to be affiliated with a political party, no more, no less. ...

HoCo Rising recently highlighted a Baltimore Sun poll showing Martin O’Malley 14 points ahead of Robert Ehrlich in the Maryland gubernatorial race (52% vs. 38%), and (among other things) pointed to a post at Red Maryland questioning the assumptions of the poll: What were the demographics of the poll? . . . The story says that turnout patterns were “averaged over the last four Maryland general elections.” Well, which general elections? The last four in total (2002, 2004, 2006, 2008) or the last four statewide off-year elections? (1994, 1998, 2002, 2006)? . . . And what defines a “higher-than-average Republican turnout this year?” What were the determining factors in determining that “estimated” higher Republican turnout, and did the pollster take into account the lower Democratic and higher Republican primary turnouts last month? ...

I’m not in any shape to blog anything that requires concentrated thought, but I didn’t want to let the night pass without noting that I had a great time at the HoCo blogger (and blog reader) meetup at Kloby’s Smokehouse tonight. Due to work and family commitments I don’t often get a chance to go out to local events, and to be honest I’m not so politically obsessed that I find attending a local candidate forum to be my idea of a good time. So it was good to be someplace where I could meet the people who’ve been reading my blog and meet other bloggers whom I follow, and where a conversation about local restaurants was as on point as a discussion of local politics. ...

In my previous post I made some projections about the likely percentages of Democratic, Republican, and unaffiliated and other voters in the upcoming general election, projections that I thought were reasonably well supported by the evidence. In this post I wanted to publish more data for anyone who’s interested, and also explore a little further a topic that I touched on in the last post. First, the data. From various Maryland State Board of Elections reports1 I’ve collected together two related data sets, one of which I discussed in the last post and one that’s new: ...

Previously I discussed the recent Gonzales poll on the Howard County executive race, focusing on the poll’s margin of error (part 1 and part 2). As I noted in a comment, the margin of error was not really a controversial topic; other than having fun computing margins of error, the major reason I wrote the post was to note that the breakdowns by county council district had very high (and unreported) margins of error, and therefore probably didn’t have much more than entertainment value. ...

In part 1 of this post I discussed how to calculate the margin of error on polling results, using as an example the recent Gonzales poll on the Howard County executive race. In this post I’ll finish up the discussion with some other bits of information relating to margins of error. (Incidentally, I don’t mean to focus on margin of error to the exclusion of other issues. As wildelakemike noted in a comment to the previous post, “Polling is as much of an art as it is a science. A good pollster will set the parameters for the sample of voters to be tested based on what the pollster believes will be important in any given election.” One of the most important parameters for a political poll is how the pollster selects that subset of registered voters who are most likely to vote; indeed this has become a point of contention in relation to the Gonzales poll. I decided to look at margin of error first not because it’s the most important issue with this poll, but rather because it was something I once knew how to calculate and wanted to learn again, and also because I was curious about the margin of error on the council district breakdowns.) ...

HoCo Rising recently highlighted a new poll on the Howard County executive race. This occasioned much comment among HCR’s readers on the political implications of the polling numbers. Rather than add to that discussion (fun though it may be) I want to address a different issue, namely how confident can we be that these or any other poll numbers are actually correct, or at least close to the truth? For example, the stated “margin of error” on the county executive polling is 5%; what does that actually mean? Also, even in the full results no margin of error was stated for the results broken down by county council district; can we mere mortals figure that out ourselves? I thought it would be fun to explore these questions, and in the process rediscover a bit of the statistics knowledge I had lost since college. If anyone else is interested in this topic so much the better. ...

Continuing my series of posts related to my political beliefs, today I thought I’d look at the issue of independent voters and what their “independence” actually entails. One of HoCo Rising’s comments to me was regarding whether the concept of a “partisan moderate” actually made sense. Whether the label actually applies to me is a separate question, and one which after thinking about it I’ll likely end up answering in the negative. However I did think it was interesting that the concept of being a political moderate seems to be getting conflated with the idea of being relatively nonpartisan and independent in one’s political views. ...

Saturday I went down to downtown Ellicott City for the fall festival, which turned out to be a much more popular event than I thought it would be. (I had to park on Rogers Avenue a couple of hundred yards up from Main Street.) If I were a normal person I’d be posting about the events and including some photos; however I couldn’t help filtering my experiences through the perspective of my previous post on government and public goods (not to mention private goods and club goods—I skipped discussing common goods for reasons noted in a comment to the post). ...

A while back in the course of a comment thread for a HoCo Rising post I promised to write more about my political views, so that people could decide whether I was a rabid lefty or just a wimpy lefty. Rather than do this in an organized way (“these are the things I believe,” “this is my position on the Nolan chart,” and so on), I thought it would be more fun to expose my beliefs in a more informal and indirect way by commenting on various issues that have come up on local blogs. (Warning: This is to a large degree me “thinking out loud,” so don’t expect it to be either totally comprehensive or totally coherent, just expect it to be long.) ...