Are You Freaking Kidding Me?

So the majority of Republicans don't think Obama legitimately won the election and that somehow ACORN stole it. This is just completely idiotic and unhinged. But I also really do not believe that it is true. This is one of those questions that is so reliant upon party identification and sample size and . . . . but seriously -- are you fucking kidding me? How is it possible that a single human being could think something so monumentally stupid never mind even a poor and surely not representative sample? Even if the margin of error were 30% that would be batshit crazy.

Go to the Polls

Hands down the best polling aggregating website out there is the data-rich Fivethirtyeight, the brainchild of, among others, Nate Silver (also a founder of the incomparable Baseball Prospectus -- and Silver is only thirty). Prospects look very good for Barack Obama right now. The GOP will convince themselves that McCain hit the ball out of the park. He didn't. Nor did Barack Obama. But Obama's up by several runs in the late innings. A tie in a debate like this is no good for the team down big, and none of the polling data indicates that this was a tie, McCain-supporter spin notwithstanding.

The Early Polls

Over at WaPo's Fix Chris Cilizza provides some insightful parsing of the recent polls on the 2008 contenders. I suppose I fall into that category of people who will feign indignance at the encroaching campaign while paying more attention than I'd like while throughly being fascinated by the whole sordid spectacle. These numbers mean little -- as Cilizza points out, they are largely a function of name recognition. Still, it seems to me that we already have a pretty good sense of who most of the big names will be from here on out.