This Is Not The Right Year For This

I just don't think it's the right year. There's too much at stake, and a vote for Clinton is too risky. Firstly, we need to seriously consider the fact that Donald Trump has no chance of winning. As of October 28, the most recent poll shows Clinton ahead by 5 points. In 2012 the largest poll completed on October 28 showed Obama and Romney tied 48% to 48%. Obama still won, and not by a small margin. He won by 126 electoral votes. Romney could have won California and Oregon, and he still would have lost the election. To win this election Trump would need to get at least 63 more electoral votes than Romney won in 2012. The easiest way to do this would be winning the four states that Obama won by the narrowest margins: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado. (Of course he would also need to maintain all of the states that Romney won in 2012). Looking at some of the details of Colorado show just how impossible it will be for Trump to win that state. In case you hadn't noticed, this election is an interesting little rematch for the two major third party candidates. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson were the Green and Libertarian candidates in 2012. The Colorado vote totals in 2012 were 51% for Obama and 46% for Romney. Part of the reason it wasn't even close is that Johnson did relatively well there with 1.4%. I think it is safe to say that Johnson will improve substantially on that number this year. Personally, I would be very surprised if trump were even to win any of the other three states.

And what if Trump does win. We need to take an honest look at the fact that this scenario would not be the nightmare that liberals imagine. Donald trump is a notable candidate. Notable for his eagerness to offend people, but not particularly notable for how right wing his positions are. According to insidegov.com Trump is to the left of Ted Cruz in every category (individual, domestic, economic, and defense). He is left of Marco Rubio in every category except economic issues. Notably, his score for defense issues is identical to Clinton's. As for the crazy stuff that Trump has proposed for immigration policy, this is some of the least concerning, since it has no chance of being enacted even if he were to somehow get elected. Trump has made numerous enemies among Republicans in Congress. A Trump presidency would resemble something similar to Jesse Ventura's term as governor of Minnesota. Trump's proposals would be ignored and Republicans and Democrats in Congress would negotiate to govern without him. 

Then again, we must consider the possibility of losing the progress we've made. After all, Guantanamo is closed, and the wars in the Middle East have been ended. Actually, never mind, I just checked; 60 people are still detained in Guantanamo, and 8,400 troops remain in Afghanistan. What happened in Libya illustrated the fact that Obama oversaw continuation of the imperialist aggression that George W. Bush began. Any notion that the bombing of Libya had any humanitarian motives were shattered when it was revealed that the CIA had been collaborating with Muammar Gaddafi for its torture programs. Scott Horton wrote of the Justice Department's handling of this information, "But this very whitewashing raises fundamental doubt about the Obama Administration’s commitment to ending torture by American intelligence operatives. To the contrary, the Obama Administration’s handling of the matter appears to retain torture as a viable option for American foreign policy." Remeber that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State during this time. Perhaps some of Obama's shortcomings can be explained by the fact that Republicans controlled at least half of congress for most of his presidency. We should look back to the golden age: 2009 to 2011 when Democrats dominated the Senate, House, and the White house, and the Holy Grail was obtained: healthcare reform. We on the left were hoping for nationalized healthcare: a free system under which the hospitals and clinics would not be controlled by for profit corporations. We were willing to settle for single payer healthcare. We didn't get that either. At least universal healthcare is progress right? Except that we didn't get that either. While I do recognize that Obamacare is a slight improvement from what we had previously (particularly for people who were unable to get insurance due to preexisting conditions), in the end we got regressive taxes on medical devices and Cadillac insurance plans, premiums that are continuing to become less and less affordable, and all for a decrease in the uninsured from 17.1% to 11%. 

Why waste your vote on Clinton when you have the opportunity to contribute to real change? Jill Stein will not win this election, but the more votes she gets, the more it builds the confidence of the working class, and develops a movement. Getting 5% of the vote in some states can result in important ballot access, major party status, and federal funding. The more people vote for Democrats, the more the cycle continues. People don't support third parties because they don't get many votes, and people don't vote for third parties because they don't have much support. 

What world will we live in twenty years from now? Will we be overwhelmed with refugees fleeing rising sea levels, water shortages, war... Will we be refugees? Will we tell our children that one day long ago we had an opportunity to build a movement that had the potential to create a rational economy and a real democracy, but that we didn't take it. Because we were just used to voting for the second worst candidate. 

Best Cities In The Best States

In my last post I ranked the states by debt to gross state product ratio and homicide rate. Here I will use two filters, and then four criteria to rank the best cities to live in.
First, I calculated the percent parkland of the top 13 states from my previous list. I'm using a very broad definition of parkland here. I used the sum of state park properties and National Park Service Properties. This included the acreage of parks, recreation areas, natural areas, historical areas, environmental education areas, scientific areas, forests, fish and wildlife areas, and miscellaneous areas from the Statistical Report of State Park Operations. I added this to the acreage of national historical reserves, historical sites, historical parks, recreation areas, and parks. I had to use some approximation for the second category because it was difficult to find breakdowns of acreage for national parks that span multiple states. Trails were ignored. I doubt that fixing approximation errors would lead to any change in the overall rankings, however.

State	Parkland %
Massachusetts	5.93
Washington	4.32
New Hampshire	3.90
Utah	3.20
Idaho	2.40
Wyoming	2.02
Vermont	1.14
Minnesota	1.08
South Dakota	0.81
Maine	0.65
Wisconsin	0.62
Nebraska	0.38
Iowa	0.20

I decided to focus on just the eight states with more than 1% parkland. I then moved on to ranking the cities. The four criteria for cities were Transit Score (as published on www.walkscore.com), weather, natural disaster risk, and air pollution. Generally, a Transit Score is only published if a city has a 2010 population greater than 200,000. This limited my analysis to just six cities in the eight states I considered: Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Boston, Seattle, and Spokane. I excluded Salt Lake City and Seattle because they appear on the American Lung Association's list of most polluted cities. I used a natural disaster map published by The New York Times to assign each city a relative risk (1 being the lowest risk and 5 being the greatest). The final formula to rank the cities was Transit Score/(natural disaster risk(temperature variance + mean number of rain/snow days per year)). Temperature variance is the sum of the differences of the July mean high and the January mean low from 70 degrees F. The final rankings and there scores:

Rank	State	Score
1	Spokane	0.211
2	Minneapolis	0.111
3	Boston	0.100
4	Saint Paul	0.086

Although Spokane is the winner by a large margin, further investigation led me to conclude that I will not be moving there for now. Spokane has no public universities. I think the presence of a large university (especially public universities) can be important for the cultural and intellectual health of a city. For now, I will be staying in Minneapolis, unless the weather gets even worse, in which case I might be moving to Boston.

Best States To Live In

This is the first of a two-part series on the best place to live. Here I will rank the states according to just two criteria: the ratio of debt to gross state product, and homicide rate. Unlike some other ranking systems, I wanted to use criteria that is completely objective, and criteria that actually measures how moving to the place is likely to affect you. For comparison, the American Human Development Index ranks states by health, education, and income. I don't think this criteria is bad, but just because other people in a state are healthy and rich doesn't mean that you will become healthy and rich just by moving there. A states debt can be expected to impact the level of government services you will receive relative to the amount of taxes you will pay. I used 'total state debt', which includes unfunded pension liability. I obtained gross state product from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Many people discuss crime rate, but I use homicide rate because it is a more reliable figure. Crime rate can be influenced by differences in reporting rates, and in differences in what is considered a crime from one location to another. Homicide has a nearly 100% reporting rate. While most people don't think of homicide as something they are seriously at risk of, it correlates with other crime that is more common. In the table the 2012 rate per 100,000 population is expressed.

Rank	State	GSP (millions)	Debt	Homicide Rate	GSP/(Debt*HR)
1	New Hampshire	64,697	18,425,567	1.1	3,192
2	Iowa	152,436	37,783,060	1.5	2,690
3	Vermont	27,296	7,866,666	1.3	2,669
4	Nebraska	99,557	13,139,045	2.9	2,613
5	Idaho	58,243	15,094,322	1.8	2,144
6	Utah	130,486	35,727,752	1.8	2,029
7	Wisconsin	261,548	45,026,643	3.0	1,936
8	Minnesota	294,729	85,879,526	1.8	1,907
9	South Dakota	42,464	7,707,458	3.0	1,836
10	Massachusetts	403,823	129,550,263	1.8	1,732
11	Maine	53,656	16,717,250	1.9	1,689
12	Wyoming	38,422	9,951,523	2.4	1,609
13	Washington	375,730	89,579,477	3.0	1,398
14	Indiana	298,625	46,377,635	4.7	1,370
15	Virginia	445,876	91,339,102	3.8	1,285
16	North Dakota	46,016	9,263,742	4.0	1,242
17	Kansas	138,953	39,025,693	2.9	1,228
18	Tennessee	277,036	41,049,738	6.0	1,125
19	Colorado	274,048	86,879,414	3.1	1,018
20	Oregon	198,702	86,678,268	2.4	955
21	Montana	40,422	15,769,183	2.7	949
22	Texas	1,397,369	340,944,239	4.4	931
23	New York	1,205,930	387,465,667	3.5	889
24	North Carolina	455,973	107,580,297	4.9	865
25	Rhode Island	50,956	18,863,153	3.2	844
26	Arizona	266,891	61,082,635	5.5	794
27	Florida	777,164	197,871,611	5.2	755
28	Hawaii	72,424	46,100,856	2.1	748
29	West Virginia	69,380	24,972,461	3.9	712
30	Delaware	65,984	15,991,093	6.2	666
31	Oklahoma	160,953	44,151,947	5.7	640
32	Georgia	433,569	115,193,862	5.9	638
33	Pennsylvania	600,897	184,903,767	5.4	602
34	Nevada	133,584	52,838,629	4.5	562
35	New Jersey	508,003	213,933,875	4.4	540
36	Maryland	317,678	94,211,004	6.3	535
37	Missouri	258,832	76,489,010	6.5	521
38	California	2,003,479	777,918,403	5.0	515
39	Connecticut	229,317	112,372,072	4.1	498
40	Arkansas	109,557	37,704,936	5.9	492
41	Kentucky	173,466	86,245,730	4.5	447
42	Alaska	51,859	29,780,396	4.1	425
43	Michigan	400,504	142,668,026	7.0	401
44	Alabama	183,547	68,343,597	7.1	378
45	Illinois	695,238	321,354,115	5.8	373
46	Ohio	509,393	321,340,764	4.3	369
47	South Carolina	176,217	71,105,557	6.9	359
48	New Mexico	80,600	50,137,504	5.6	287
49	Louisiana	243,264	83,280,815	10.8	270
50	Mississippi	101,490	54,686,815	7.4	251

Obama vs. Romney: Most Recent Polls

To update my previous post, as of November 4 the polls indicate that Ohio, Florida, and Virginia have all become Obama territory, while Colorado is now tied. This means 323 electoral votes for Obama, and 191 for Romney. To win the election Romney will need another 79 electoral votes. He could do this by picking up the two tied states, North Carolina and Colorado, as well as the currently Obama leaning states of Virginia, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. 

Here is an updated chart, the poll numbers are shown above the columns, the electoral votes of the respective states are shown below the state abbreviations.

Obama's Lead by State

This shows Obama's lead over Romney as of November 2 (states where Romney leads are shown as negative). The states are ranked from Obama's greatest lead on the left to Romney's greatest lead on the right. For most states I used the most recent available poll results. If more than one poll was done at about the same time, I used the results of the one with the smaller margin of error. For the few states where no poll has been conducted, I used the results of the 2008 presidential election. This places the electoral vote count at 272 to 251, with Obama in the lead (I didn't count North Carolina on either side since the polls say there is an equal split there). To pull off a victory, it now appears Romney would have to win over North Carolina and Iowa. I'll try to make some improvements for future versions on this chart.