Caucus Countdown

Well, folks, next week we get to find out how accurate the polling has been. And, of course, I can't resist the temptation to predict (especially after finally getting it right last year for once).

My initial prediction for the Iowa caucus back in early November didn't account for the "Huckabee surge" of the last month -- I had Mitt Romney picked for a solid 1st-place finish, followed by Rudy Ghouliani and Ron Paul. I also left out Fred Thompson, who continues, for reasons unknown to me, to attract some support.

New prediction: Romney (~30%) still wins the state, with Huckabee (~25%) falling back a little. Fred Thompson and Ron Paul will scrap for third, and I'm predicting that Paul (~15%) will win the scrap with Thompson (~12%) taking fourth. Ghouliani (~10%) in fifth, McCain (~5%), with a few holdouts casting votes for also-rans/drops Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo et al.

Poll-watchers: Yes, I know you think I'm nuts to call Paul in third, but his supporters are going to make the effort to get out and vote for him. There's more support for Romney, Huckabee and Thompson than for Paul, but it's "softer" support and Thursday is "ER" night.

Paul cultists [1]: Yes, I know you think I'm nuts and that Paul is going to carry Iowa with 90% of the vote. Put down the crack pipe. I won't be surprised if he does better than I predict. I will be surprised -- and not as unpleasantly so as you probably think -- if he carries the state. As a matter of fact, I'll probably have to go to the real ER to get my ticker started again.

Of course, the Republican caucus in Iowa is set up to allow for fuckery -- hand-written ballots to be counted by local party bosses, with non-binding results and actual national convention delegates chosen later at a state convention. If Paul comes in at less than 10%, I'll be right in there with the folks claiming a stolen caucus. I just won't believe that Paul was actually at 90% before his votes got disappeared.

The Democratic Party's caucus is more open -- people stand in groups and identify themselves as supporters of the candidates they prefer. Then they do-si-doh and allemande and all that stuff until everyone is where he or she has finally chosen to be, and the delegates are distributed among the candidates who meet a "viability" threshold of between 15% and 25%.

Prediction: A three-way wash between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. They'll split the bulk of the vote, and five points will cover the spread between them. My guess is that Clinton will just barely edge out the other two -- she's more popular and more organized than Edwards and more organized than Obama. The real question is whether Edwards's organization or Obama's popularity will carry 2nd place, and if I had to bet, it would be on Edwards. Call it Hillary ~29%, Edwards ~27%, Obama ~25%.

I've left 19% of the vote open to account for Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel. What's going to happen there? I won't be surprised if Dodd makes that 15% "viability" threshold and gets some souvenir delegates, bringing the top three each down a point or two. I will be surprised if Richardson or Biden break 5%. And I guess we'll find out how many diehard Kucinich and Gravel supporters there are in Iowa: What those guys lack in money and organization, they make up for in having devoted supporters who will brave the weather to stand up for their man. Neither of them will break out, of course, but it's conceivable that either or both might do as well as Biden or Richardson.


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[1] -- Not Paul supporters, Paul cultists. There is a difference. If you think Paul might get first, second or third place in Iowa, that doesn't make you a cultist. If you're absolutely sure that he'll carry a majority of the GOP vote in Iowa, then you probably are one.

Stage WSPPer

Right now, the URL wspp.info points to a collection of posts on this blog related to the World's Smallest Political Platform. Pretty soon, though, it will point to a site I'm building to more actively promote the WSPP. Content so far:

- Link to a signable petition asking the Libertarian Party to adopt the WSPP as its platform.

- Link to a Yahoo! Group for discussion of the WSPP.

- Some buttons for linking.

Check it out. If you're a better button designer, etc., than I am, I'd welcome some assistance in making those things prettier.

Life's important questions ...

Does anyone know what port "COM 1" is in Kubuntu/KPPP? For some reason, Kubuntu doesn't seem to be autodetecting my external modem, and I haven't figured out which port to tell KPPP to find it on (there's a huge list which doesn't include "COM 1").

This question brought to you by Susan Hogarth, who just gifted me my first reasonably modern computer (a 1.4 GHz Shuttle PC) in forever, which was delivered by Bev Wilcox on her way through St. Louis taking her granddaughter Kennedy to see the Anasazi cliff dwellings in New Mexico. We had a nice little day yesterday, touring the old courthouse in St. Louis (the place where Dred Scott won his freedom before Taney's US Supreme Court took it away) and then having lunch (Hunan-style buffet, per Kennedy's extremely wise choice). Thanks to Susan for sending the machine, and thanks to Bev for a dropping it off and just for dropping by with a smart kid.

But anyway, back to the machine: It works, and its Windows XP partition recognizes the modem just fine. The other partition was an old Suse distro which didn't even recognize my mouse for some reason. I've had my Kubuntu install CD for some time, and was waiting breathlessly for a computer I could install it on. But I can't connect to the intarweb with it until I get it to recognize that modem (I don't like to spend much time on the Net when running Windoze -- matter of fact, the only reasons I didn't trash the XP partition are that my kids want to play games and my significant other has yet to recognize the clear superiority of OpenOffice over its Microshaft Ohfiz equivalents).

I may try a re-install of Kubuntu tonight, or else retreat to a distro I'm more familiar with like Xandros or Vector. I'm really hot and bothered to get the new machine in action. This old box I'm using now is a 650MHz P3 with 128Mb of RAM -- unimaginably fast and huge ten years ago, reasonably well-equipped when I got it in 2003 or so, completely antiquated now.