Monday, October 23, 2006

Cook versus Rove: Quien Es Mas Metrix?



(image via cpnys.org)

Whose Metrix are most macho? The affable Charlie Cook, a reliable, nonpartisan source of political data predicts that Republicans are looking at, more or less, a net loss of 20 seats. Karl Rove, however, claims that Republicans will keep the House.

Quien en mas Metrix?

Ordinarily we would say Charlie Cook without reservation. Cook's data is the industry standard in DC. However, remember November 2004? That's when every exit poll showed Kerry was the President-elect. Those polls led alot of people the morning after to lament, like Charlie Brown, "How can we lose when we're so sincere." The Corsair is just saying ..

No doubt, Karl Rove is an expert --like his hero Napoleon -- at victory. He, through Ohio (as brilliantly chronicled by Matt Bai in the NYTimes magazine) -- reshaped the landscape of the political game, adding new Evangelical voters, who flew under the radar of conventional data polling, confounding the Eastern elite metric methodology.

Can he do so again?

Although every poll says otherwise, it is entirely within the realm of possibility -- Jesus logic -- that Rove is right. Then again, as he spoke at the Tom Reynolds Buffalo fundraiser (Intersting how the Republicans made the floundering Reynolds their point man on the Buffalo snowstorm, eh?), couching stale political rhetoric about "security (Averted Gaze), it does seem -- on purely face value -- that Rove may be posturing, gaseously, trying to counteract the headlines of the daily newspapers, so as to not dispirit the already dispirited base and get a decent turnout. Then again, you never know ...

A whole host of questions arises as a result of this. The Corsair wonders: If Rove is right and conventional polling is wrong then -- dare we say it? -- ought we to rethink our whole reliance of "science." If Karl Rove's methodology confounds pointy-headed liberals then: Might the Earth be 4,000 years old, as Evangelicals maintain? Might dinosaur bones be planted by ... The Devil?

Naaaah ..

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