Ok, I'm not a Poblano stalker (much), even though my last diary was also about Poblano in the press; but I've got to give as many props as I can to the man. The reason is I am big user of statistics and regression daily in my job at Google, and I love to see these methods being used so successfully for political prediction.

http://www.newsweek.com/...

Teaser:

Nate Silver, an all-star in the world of baseball stats, may be the political arena's next big draw.

More below...

I, like probably most of dailykos readers am a huge fan of Poblano, who recently unmasked himself as Nate Silver. I wandered over to fivethirtyeight today, and found a link to a NY Post article that he wrote as a Guest columnist. It's really great to see bloggers cross over into mainstream media, and even better when it's by sheer talent that first got noticed (at least with regard to polling data analysis) here at dailykos.

I am glad that he is getting ready to close the door on Hillary. I'm also glad they let her stay in this long, this way her supporters can hopefully see that they lost this thing in a fair fashion. I just hope that whatever comes out of RBC tomorrow is seen as generally fair to most people.

Two highlights from the article, but the rest is below

And he ventured this prediction about the outcome: "Probably just simple math indicates that on next Tuesday, after we get the results from Puerto Rico on Sunday and South Dakota and Montana on Tuesday, Obama will probably have the necessary number at that time anyway."

also, I was happy to see this

"The nominee is not determined on popular vote. It's determined on delegates," Reid said.

Barack Obama has overtaken Hillary Clinton in the NBC NEWS superdelegate count with the endorsement of Hawaii's Dolly Strazar. This is his second of the day and puts him now officially over the top, 277-276.5.

From: http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/...

Somebody asked for a concise list of the supers, so here we go:

• Rep. Tom Allen (ME)
• DNC Dolly Strazar (HI)
• DNC R. Keith Roark (ID)
• Sen. Akaka (HI)

The last one is not "official", but Obama won 80% of the vote in Idaho. Does anybody doubt he's going to come out for Obama?

So far it's all speculation, but it does seem to be going that way. I'm glad we're continuing to see superdelegates continue to go for Obama in 2-4 per day. At this rate, we'll have the superdelegate lead by the end of this weekend! Right, according to DCW, Obama is only 10.5 delegates behind Clinton: http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/...

Like many on this site, I've been watching the HBO John Adams miniseries recently, and Ben Franklin's sentiment "Join, or die" (later "Unite or die") has been running through my mind. Especially since now some of the vitriol between the Clinton and Obama campaigns is starting to die down (I hope).

Originally this sentiment was a cartoon, but later it was turned into a flag, and used during the revolution, and in subsequent wars. We are now approaching a point in the democratic nomination where we can either unite, or die.

From the Great State of Illinois, Dan Lipinski:
http://www.suntimes.com/...

This went around a time back, and her campaign mentioned that they were not suggesting that they would try this. Well, once again, they allude to this without specifically mentioning it. The squirming they are doing around this issue is getting very tiresome

http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/...

Looks like the Michigan Primary will not happen.

Short diary, but this was just released: http://www.tampabays10.com/...

So no redo for Florida!

I've thought about this analogy today while I was waiting for delayed flight, and I want to share. In my mind, this primary election season is like a game of Monopoly. Barack Obama owns a good deal of the medium and smaller value properties, Hillary Clinton owns a much smaller number of the larger value properties. There is a third player, The Superdelegates who have a significant number of key properties. This player wants to get out of the game, but would like to decide who to cash out to in a way that will tip the balance of power, and avoid a long protracted (say 10 hour) game. If the properties are sold to the right player (Obama), the game will end quickly. Otherwise it's unclear who will win, but the game will go on for a long time, given that the other player (Clinton) has a lot of cash and small number of important properties. If Clinton wins this game due to the Superdelegates selling to her given her weaker position, it will hurt our chances in the all important next game.

Continued below...

There are still two contests coming up in the next five days, with one in Wyoming, and one in Mississippi, but it's becoming very clear that Hillary Clinton will not be able to close wide gap Barack Obama has opened in delegates thanks to his very strong post Super Tuesday February performance. He built a lead so strong, that it would be nearly impossible for Clinton to catch up. This diary will first take a look at who really won the race on March 4th, and take a detailed look at why Obama has such a commanding lead.

Hats off to Hillary Clinton for remaining in the game. She did what she needed to do for her campaign which was to stay alive, though that really is not what she needed to do to win the nomination, which now seems beyond her grasp. She still is up against almost impossible odds to win the nomination, as she is over 150 pledged delegates behind even after her wins last night. In this diary, I'll use past election data from this year, and old exit polls from Mississippi (2000, and 2004) to predict the vote and margins in Mississippi and Wyoming.

There is currently a nasty anti-Obama e-mail going around in the Jewish community. Mostly it's what you might expect, saying he supports Louis Farrakhan, is anti-Israel, and the like. I recently got forwarded a e-mail like this was very disheartened. My brother and I (both being Jewish) decided we would reply with a point-by-point refutation of each falsehood in the original e-mail and send it to the many people who's e-mail addresses appeared throughout the e-mail chain.

Recently, Barack Obama has been outperforming polls. The goal of this analysis is to look at how exactly how he is doing this. I will look at pre-election polls that have crosstabs (usually SurveyUSA) with race included vs. actual election exit polls courtesy of CNN. I am going to look at each group independently in different posts, and I am going to separate the analysis into three categories: Pre super Tuesday elections, Super Tuesday elections, and post Super Tuesday elections. I am picking a total of 5 states for this analysis:

• Pre Super Tuesday: South Carolina
• Super Tuesday: California, New Jersey, Missouri
• Post-Super Tuesday: Wisconsin

I chose these because they represent a pretty good cross-section of the electorate. I did not analyze any other states, and perhaps the trends could be less or more significant if I had taken a more detailed look at other states. In this post, I'll look exclusively at Black voters. My next post will have Latinos, and the final one will be on White voters.

There is some recent polling data on the democratic primary in Ohio that is set to happen on March 4th, 2008 showing Hillary Clinton with a 17% lead, but I wanted to leave the polls aside and look at a few other factors for a moment. The reason for this is that I expect the polls to significantly change once Obama starts spending more time there. My brother tells me that Ohio will go for Obama because he has a lot of natural constituencies, but I want to do at least a little bit of analysis to see if we can get something more than a gut reaction here. I was looking at demographics on Wikipedia and some past election data on uselectionatlas, and I have come to the conclusion that Missouri could be a bellweather in predicting how Ohio is going to vote. I'll detail the reasons below.

That's a good question, but it's one that outsiders to the Obama campaign can't answer right now, because the Obama camp has stopped publishing the fundraising amount, and instead just listed the number of donations they've received so far this year. Not advertising the actual amount of money raised was probably a good move for the Obama team, as this just sparked the Clinton team to rally around "Look how much Obama's getting in donations... we need to match/beat that". Since the Clinton campaign will never be able to match the number of individual donations the Obama campaign has received, the number of people that have donated is probably a much better number to post. However my brother asked me to do a projection based upon the number of donations this year, and I think that's a good idea so we can get a rough estimate.