Politics and Social Movements

I'm reviewing the original Philadelphia Tenants Union proposal that was proposed by David Thompson and Tim Horras for the Philly Socialists in August 2015. At that time, Tim Horras was chair of the organization. And David Thompson currently is chair.

For the record, I'm currently a dues-paying, but inactive, Philly Socialists member. I was very active in August 2015 and before.

Their proposal (see below) might have been slightly modified (before adoption) to include more of a time line.

Longer version of this article for statisticians (Open Office format)

Introduction

I have developed a very tentative prediction model for the Philadelphia District Attorney's race and the Democratic primary on May 16, 2017.

The incumbent, Seth Williams, dropped out due to corruption. This left the city with a wide-open race. The Democratic party establishment has not endorsed anyone. Instead individual Democratic leaders have spread their support among the seven candidates.

My model is based on several weighted factors. The weights are somewhat arbitrary. For instance, I would give polling more weight if there were independent polls and more polls in general.

A couple comments on Trump's presidential election win.

1. Clinton won the popular vote by an estimated 2.09%. This election was the results of a very recent bias in the Electoral College that favors Republicans. A very small percent of the US population are swing voters (5-10%) and a small shift can result in a large change due to our winner-take-all system. There isn't necessarily a need to do analysis of "Why did Trump Win / Clinton lose" or to change our fundamental priorities.

In the 2016 general presidential election, the Green party candidates for State Auditor and State Treasurer beat the Libertarians (including the well-known Gary Johnson). But presidential candidate Jill Stein did not fare as well due to strategic voting against Trump.

I live right next to the center of Green Party support in West Philly!

Category Breaks used in the maps: 0.25%, 0.5%, 0.75%, 1%, 1.5%, 2%, 2.5%.
Click on the image for a high resolution one.

Early findings on 2016 Presidential Election
I have a county-level model that I used to predict the outcome of the Democratic Presidential Primary ahead of the election, and also a real-time model that estimated the state-wide swing based on the county swings. I used this model to make a significant amount of money betting/predicting the outcome on PredictIt.org. I also created my own real-time model for the presidential general election and used that (and the NYT real-time model) to make more money on PredictIt.

My model has this upcoming DC Democratic Primary at around Clinton 88 / Sanders 12.

Here are my predictions for the June 8 Democratic presidential primaries.

This is from my county-level model which includes past election results, age groups, sex, education, FB likes, Google searches, density, income, caucus/primary, whether 17 year olds can vote, and more.

Here are my predictions for today's Democratic primaries in Kentucky and Oregon.

In the national polls Sanders has been losing 0.5-1%/week versus Clinton. The Google Search Trends reflect this. Previously Sanders was getting around 65% of the combined Sanders + Clinton search trend, but now this has fallen to around 56%. For instance, in the past 7 days even though it is one of the few states which has an active campaign left -- Sanders has only got 53.5% of the searches in Kentucky.

For WV I'm predicting Sanders 55.3 %, Clinton 44.7% (percent of the shared Sanders + Clinton vote).