WHO'S THE BETTER CANDIDATE?

On Saturday, 7 June 08, there appeared on the New York Times op-ed page a rather curious article declaring that Hillary Clinton was the more viable - and electable - candidate of the two in a race against Senator John McCain. The author, Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, author of the book "Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmis Quandries and host of NovaScienceNOW, used a method of analysis about to be published in the journal of Mathematical and Computer Modeling written by two astrophysicists, J. Richard Gott III and Wes Colley. As reported by Dr. Tyson, the two astrophysicists found that "in swing states, the median result of all the polls conducted in the weeks prior to an election is an especially effective predictor of which candidate will win that election - even in states where the polls consistently fall within the margin of error".

That is a pretty profound claim on the surface. Yet when the professors applied these method in 2004, "they correctly," according to Dr. Tyson, "predicted the winner in 49 states, missing only Hawaii". That's fairly astounding as results and struck Dr. Tyson as equally amazing. Indeed, Dr. Tyson was so impressed that he decided to apply the same method of analysis to polls conducted during the past six weeks in 19 different states. Then, he decided to predict the amount of the Fall election by comparing McCain versus Obama and McCain versus Clinton. In doing so, he rigorously adhered to the simple rules established by Professor Gott and Dr. Colley.

"(I)n states in which a poll has not been taken, you give that state to the party that won it in 2004. You do the same for states where the median poll is a tie." I should note that the notion of median poll, according to Dr. Tyson, is based on three polls. Thus, median poll related outcomes can be one of three. One result is 3 - 0 in favor of a candidate, while another outcome might be 2 - 1. What happens, though, when the outcome is 1 - 1 - 1 where the middle or median poll represents a virtual tie between the candidates? In this case, the tie-breaker goes to the candidate whose party won in 2004. Thus, writes Dr. Tyson, "the median poll between Mr. McCain and Mrs. Clinton is a tie. Mr. Kerry won Michigan in 2004, so Mrs. Clinton gets to keep it. But Mr. Obama loes its 17 electoral votes" since "Mr. McCain beats Mr. Obama three polls to zero".

The upshot of this analysis is that "if the general election were held today (7 June 2008), Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, while Mrs. Clinton would win 295. In other words, Barack Obama is losing to John McCain, and Hillary Clinton is beating him". Whew! That's a relief. Unfortunately, the Clinton campaign probably did not have this analysis in its arsenal before suspending its campaign on this self-same day. But, never say never!

Dr. Tyson does caution us that a lot can happen between now and November. Campaigns happen. Gaffes emerge. Candidates falter. Money runs scarce. A lot of things can happen to affect an outcome in November. However, this analysis could be used to track Mr. Obama's progress as he seeks to beat Mr. McCain in November.

Before concluding, Dr. Tyson raised one very important question with regard to the Democratic delegate selection system "when its winner would lose the presidency if an election were held today, yet its loser would win it". A good question indeed! As I have pointed out in another column, the Democratic delegate selection process is flawed, albeit vastly superior to the Republican winner-take-all system that produced very quickly one candidate with an insurmountable lead in delegates. The reason it is is flawed has much to do with the inherent contradiction between its participatory objective and its hodge-podge of electoral mechanisms that thwart a truly participatory candidate selection process. Eighteen million votes suggests that something is wrong when a candidate can effectively organize at the grass roots and dominate a caucus based delegate assignation process. If the results in Texas where Mrs. Clinton won the primary, but lost in the caususes, is not reason enough to question the democratic content of the Democratic delegate selection process, then I suppose the selection of a candidacy based on majoritarian support is not really the aim of Democratic primary politics.

As I argued earlier, Mrs. Clinton was done in by a system that allowed the Bamistas to storm the caucus states and build up a huge lead in mid-February. Once the primary system kicked in, however, that lead began to erode. Had California and New Jersey held stuck to their original primary dates, the momentum gained from victories in those two states might have persuaded superdelegates to side with the Clinton campaign. Of course, Mark Penn and others contributed their share to the Clinton fiasco, but that story has already been told.