I got a nice letter from Jeff Mapes, one of the authors of the Oregonian“Voting in a Bubble” article I wrote about. While he was complimentary to my math, he claims it doesn’t contradict the points of the article and that I don’t understand the politics of the matter.
I think I do. And my point to Mr. Mapes was that Oregon’s county boundaries are arbitrary divisions that were set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Multnomah County is geographically small and contains the state’s largest city (Portland) and fourth largest city (Gresham). Multnomah County’s population grew by 100,000 between the censuses of 1970 and 2000 (more than 20%) and became much more urban in the process. It’s almost completely urbanized, unlike any other county in the state. When I was a kid, there were still farms all around Gresham. Now there are subdivisions, apartment buildings, strip malls, and factories. Since urban areas tend to vote Democratic, it’s no real surprise that as people moved into the new city, that the percentage of Democratic voters would go up.
A quarter-century ago, as governments in the Portland region planned for the future, they formed an organization called Metro. Metro handles planning issues for much of Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington counties, covering the entire metropolitan area (at least that on the Oregon side of the Columbia River). So say things had gone a little farther and the three counties had been merged into one sometime in the late ’70s instead of just creating a new government agency. The new county — Metro County — would have cast a total of 748,334 votes. Kerry would have received 451,034 of those votes. That’s 60%. It’s just 9% over the state average, 12% over the national average. Not much of a story there.
Sunday morning’s Oregonian had a conventional wisdom cover article about how out-of-touch the city folk are from the real people of the country, based on the same faulty mathematics and map-reading that have characterized similar coverage. My response:
As Barbie once said: “Math is hard.” A prime example is in this morning’s cover
story “Voting in a Bubble” by Edward Walsh and Jeff Mapes, which posits that a
gap has opened between voters in Multnomah County and the rest of the state,
nay, the country. To bolster their argument, Walsh and Mapes tout the fact that
Multnomah County’s vote went for John Kerry by “nearly 24 percentage points
higher than his national showing” and about 21 points over the statewide
average.
What Walsh and Mapes seem not to realize is that the state average includes
Multnomah County. An average is the middle ground of a set of numbers. For
every outlying data point in an averaged set (Multnomah County for the
Democrats), there has to be some sort of balance. While it’s true that
Multnomah is the only county in the state where the vote is so lopsidedly
Democratic, much of Eastern Oregon is just as out-of-whack with the average
as Multnomah — just the other direction. Baker, Crook, Grant, Harney, Klamath,
Lake, Malheur, Wallowa, and Wheeler counties all voted for George W. Bush at
rates more than 20% of the state average this year. All but two of those counties
did so at rates higher than the 21% deviation from average they claim separates
Multnomah County from the rest of the state. Grant County, where over 78% of
the voters chose Bush (according to state figures available Sunday morning), is
over 30 percentage points off the statewide tallies of Bush voters, making them
the most out-of-touch county in the state, if you accept the terms of the article.
Not only was their vote far off the state average, but according to the majority of
Oregonians, they chose the wrong candidate.
There have been a number of official-looking graphs from news organizations in
the past few days showing “a pattern of heavily Democratic cities surrounded by
a sea of pro-Bush voters” in this election. Most of those graphs are organized by
county. At first glance, they appear somewhat intimidating for Democrats. And it
might indeed be scary if acreage — rather than people — voted.
I’ve provided a couple of charts of my own, which show the deviation from both
state and national averages in this election. There is a disparity from the norm in
Multnomah County. But there’s an equally wide deviation in most of the
counties on the other side of the Cascades. In fact, the only counties where the
vote was within a couple of percentage points of the state average were
Columbia and Washington.
I’m surprised that a 1,300-word article managed to get to print without someone
realizing that if Multnomah County’s numbers are far off in one direction that
there has to be something of equal size on the other side of the average pulling
the other way. It took me all of about 10 seconds to see the problem in the
article’s argument, and I haven’t taken a math class for over twenty years.
Perhaps it’s time, though, for the Oregonian to send a few of its reporters and
editors to some remedial math courses.
The article points out that without Multnomah County, Bush would have won the
state by 80,000 votes. It’s no real surprise that if you eliminate a fifth of the
electorate, the results of the vote might change. Multnomah County accounted
for 343,290 of the 1,754,873 votes in the state, just over 19.5% of the voters in
the presidential race. Ignoring a similarly-sized number of ballots from the
counties with the highest percentage of Bush voters would eliminate the counts
of 19 counties (the nine mentioned above plus Curry, Douglas, Gilliam,
Jefferson, Josephine, Linn, Morrow, Sherman, Umatilla, and Union counties),
288,434 voters — only 16.5% of the total, and would have given Kerry a victory
margin of 161,341 votes, over two-and-a-half times the actual statewide result.
Eliminating Multnomah County from that scenario so that the counties
containing the fifth of the votes most skewed toward each candidate aren’t
counted still gives Kerry a slim margin of 8,827. To someone with even a
layman’s understanding of mathematics, it’s really no surprise that as you
eliminate data that deviates from both sides of the norm, the numbers tend
toward the norm.
I’m looking forward to Walsh and Mapes’s follow-up article, showing how
Eastern Oregon is drifting away from the state and nation because of a more
pronounced shift away from the Oregon norm than they found in Multnomah
County.
I haven’t seen any mention of this New York Times article on the lists or blogs, but not only is there a mention of Director, but it contains information that may be of interest to anyone working on networked games. The NYT site will only have the original article (“For an Inventor, IM Opens a WindowTo a World of Games”, October 21, 2004) available to registered users for a few more days, but the full text is on some kid from Iowa’s web page, and I’ve excerpted interesting points here (emphasis added).
For the past year, Jules Urbach has been crunching computer code in a converted bedroom on the second floor of his mother’s house in Sherman Oaks, Calif., fine-tuning a piece of software that may well revolutionize online gaming.
…
Mr. Urbach hopes they will be inspired to irrevocably change the online gaming landscape. His invention, which he calls Otoy, is a game engine that piggybacks on instant messaging, and thus it is something of a Holy Grail in the software world.
…
Mr. Urbach is a video game prodigy. In 1992, shortly after graduating from Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, he created one of the first CD-ROM games (the best-selling Hell Cab), then became the first developer to design a 3-D video game (Real Pool, www.shockwave.com) using Macromedia Director software, a feat that even Macromedia’s executives had thought was impossible.
In 1998, Mr. Urbach founded Groove Alliance with Chris Kantrowitz and Peter Laufenberg. Groove was one of the first game companies that created 3-D products exclusively for online use, churning out dozens of titles for Nickelodeon, Disney, Shockwave and Electronic Arts, among others, and providing a healthy living for Mr. Urbach, who now pays the mortgage on his mother’s house.
…
”I look at something like Everquest, which is very complex and very addictive, and I see that working for simpler games as well,” Mr. Urbach said. ”That desire to be part of a larger community is just part of human nature.”
To that end, Mr. Urbach has figured out how to use compelling low-memory games, many of them Groove games that occupy less than 70 kilobytes of memory, for Otoy. Users will see a link in their instant-messaging windows that will open a second window, adjacent and slightly larger. This is Mr. Urbach’s versatile Otoy IM portal.
…
Otoy, which Mr. Urbach plans to make available next year for free downloading, can also be used to pull up Web browsers, MP3 files or Excel spreadsheets, depending on the programmer’s intent. Mr. Urbach also has Photoshop built into Otoy.
And Crispine Crispian shall ne’re goe by,
From this day to the ending of the World,
But we in it shall be remembred;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers:
For he to day that sheds his blood with me,
Shall be my brother: be he ne’re so vile,
This day shall gentle his Condition.
And Gentlemen in England, now a bed,
Shall thinke themselues accurst they were not here;
And hold their Manhoods cheape, whiles any speakes,
That fought with vs vpon Saint Crispines day.
In the black and white world of George W. Bush and his followers, one mantra is endlessly repeated: “The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.” My own thought is that this may be but is not absolutely true. I can think of a few situations, for instance, in which the world might not have been better off without Saddam Hussein in power:
If Hussein had actually had WMD, and had shipped them to terrorist cells around the world before dying in his sleep.
If a comet hit the Earth, obliterating all life, including Saddam Hussein.
If a country invaded Iraq, toppling the Hussein regime, leaving chaos, civil war, and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis in its wake.
I’m surprised that in talking about his appearance on Crossfire, you replaced Jon Stewart’s reference to Tucker Carlson with “[male appendage].” It seems unnecessarily prim considering that in the same paragraph you left Carlson’s prior namecalling untouched. Perhaps you’d care to explain to your readers what Carlson meant when he called Stewart Kerry’s “butt boy”, and how it’s less of a sexual reference than calling someone a “dick.” And perhaps you could mention Time/Warner’s stake in CNN, Crossfire, and Carlson’s career.
From the October 25, 2004 issue of TIME‘s People section:
Comic Gets Cross, Fires
Usually when the competition’s biggest star is accused of abusive sex talk involving a fibrous sponge (see story, this page), you’ve had a good week. That was before CNN’s Crossfire invited on JON STEWART, below left, of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Hosts Paul Begala and TUCKER CARLSON, below right, expected some light yuks but got a pointed lecture when the fake news anchor likened their political shout-a-thon to “pro wrestling.” There followed one of the most uncomfortable talk-TV showdowns since Harvey Pekar did David Letterman. The audience laughed and applauded as Stewart called the stunned hosts “partisan hacks” who were “hurting America” by dumbing down the political discourse. Carlson countered that Stewart had acted like Senator John Kerry’s “butt boy” by throwing him softball questions. “You’re on CNN,” Stewart said. “The show that leads in to me is puppets making crank phone calls.” “I was just shocked by how sanctimonious he was,” Carlson later told TIME. “I thought, This must be some elaborate routine, and there’s going to be a punch line at the end.” Which there was, sort of. “You’re more fun on your show,” Carlson told the comic. Shot back Stewart: “You’re as big a [male appendage] on your show as you are on any show.” Easy there, guys. That kind of talk can get a TV star sued nowadays.
Vice President Dick Cheney is pressing the fear button by claiming terrorists could set off a nuclear weapon in the U.S. That’s why we’re supposed to support the administration’s wars. That’s why we have to give up our hard-won civil liberties. That’s why we need to vote (assuming they’ll let us vote at all) for George W. Bush.
Now, I’m not as old as Cheney, but I personally remember a bit of the last half of the 20th century. During much of my early life, this nation lived under the threat of total nuclear annihilation — not just one city being wiped out by a nuke, but most of the country, along with the rest of the world. As far back as the late 1950s and early 1960s this concern was so prevalent that it spawned a whole slew of movies and books still remembered (by some) today: Fail-Safe, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, among others.
Oddly enough, we were able to weather that threat without wholesale abridgement of the ideals of the nation. In fact, civil and sexual rights were expanded during the era of the Cold War. Various administrations fought change — it’s what administrations do — but there was overall progress.
Nor were we locked into a single party’s candidates. From the time the Soviet Union developed its first nuclear weapons to the fall of the USSR, control of the White House changed party hands five times: in 1952, 1960, 1968, 1976, and 1980.
I’d love to see someone ask Cheney why America under Bush and the Republiwimps is so weak that it can only deal with the threat of terrorism by clamping down on dissent when we once we able to simultaneously expand our freedoms and stare down the threat of global destruction.
What world has CBS’s Bob Schieffer been living in all his life? As the moderator of the third debate this was his first question:
Senator, I want to set the stage for this discussion by asking the question that I think hangs over all of our politics today and is probably on the minds of many people watching this debate tonight.
And that is, will our children and grandchildren ever live in a world as safe and secure as the world in which we grew up?
Schieffer was born in 1937. John Kerry was born in 1943. George W. Bush was born in 1946.
Schieffer was born in the midst of the Great Depression. For most of Schieffer’s first decade of life, war raged across North Africa, Europe and Asia, as well as the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were killed.
When Schieffer was 13, the US and its allies went into Korea. In just about three years, over 44,000 American troops died. Following Korea, the Cold War went into one of its greatest periods of buildup, causing the paranoia and angst that led to movies like Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove. The period of Schieffer’s late teens saw the beginning of the end of legalized discrimination, with decisions like Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and actions like the Montgomery bus boycott.
Has Schieffer really forgotten what happened in this country in the 1960s? There were riots across the country in cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, and more. The US and USSR came to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy was assassinated. The US jumped into Vietnam full-force, where we’d lose nearly 60,000 troops and where more than 150,000 (including John Kerry) would be wounded before the war ended in the 1970s.
By the end of 1970, Schieffer was 33. Schieffer was grown up. Does he truly consider the world of his youth to have been “safe and secure?”
