Stanford “Election 2012” Course Draws to Close with a Post Mortem and Predictions

Worth a quick men­tion: Stan­ford’s Elec­tion 2012 course (pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned here) wrapped up with a post-mortem. It starts with Steve Schmidt, a for­mer John McCain and George W Bush advi­sor, giv­ing a fair­ly blunt assess­ment of where the Repub­li­can Par­ty stands right now. (The video above starts with his assess­ment.) Then Tom Stey­er, an asset man­ag­er, phil­an­thropist and envi­ron­men­tal­ist active in Demo­c­rat pol­i­tics, explains why Oba­ma’s vic­to­ry is the prod­uct of trends (not nec­es­sar­i­ly healthy ones) already seen in Cal­i­for­nia pol­i­tics for the past decade. And Simon Jack­man, a Stan­ford prof immersed in polling, shows why data mat­ters and Nate Sil­ver (538 blog) got things right.

The rolling con­ver­sa­tion is mod­er­at­ed by David Kennedy (Pulitzer Prize-win­ning his­to­ri­an), Rob Reich, and Jim Stey­er. We’ve pro­vid­ed YouTube links to the remain­ing lec­tures below. You can also find them on iTunes. Plus we’ve  cat­a­logued Elec­tion 2012 in our col­lec­tion of 550 Free Online Cours­es.


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  • Schneb says:

    I’d wel­come the poll­sters’ views on Ohio 2004. If the data is still avail­able, can we go back and see how it is that GWB polled in Ohio and how Ker­ry polled, and what the elec­tion results were (offi­cial­ly, GWB won, but…) and how those should be rec­on­ciled?

    IIRC, Ker­ry was polling to win by 4 points, but some­how end­ed up losing–thus GWB’s sec­ond term.

    It may be pure­ly aca­d­e­m­ic to some, but if in fact that elec­tion was stolen (see RFK Jr.‘s Rolling Stone arti­cle, below) AND if the same type of machines are in use now, we don’t real­ly have a democracy…maybe. Anoth­er arti­cle looks at oth­er sus­pi­cious races/outcomes: “To The Amer­i­can Media: Time To Face The Real­i­ty Of Elec­tion Rig­ging”
    http://www.opednews.com/articles/To-The-American-Media-Tim-by-Jonathan-Simon-110408–959.html

    re RFK Jr.‘s arti­cle:

    “Was the 2004 Elec­tion Stolen?”
    Very well doc­u­ment­ed account for the theft of the 2004 pres­i­den­tial election—focused on events in Ohio, writ­ten by RFK jr.
    I copied/pasted into a Word doc and the foot­notes start at the bot­tom of pg. 15 and run through pg. 24, in 9 point font. At 208 of them, that’s almost 14 per page. He’s not just mak­ing stuff up.
    (2 links for same thing in case one doesn’t work)
    http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0601–34.htm
    http://www.blueguitar.org/new/misc/political/rs_2004_election.pdf

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