Polling

Baratunde, political vigilante and stand-up comedian extraordinaire, is in Texas working as a volunteer poll worker and tweeting whatever he can.

I'll update more as it comes in.

Ms Unhinged Malkin is using data of the white supremacist organization NumbersUSA, to prove that Latinos who voted for Hillary Clinton were "corruptly" naturalized under her husband's administration.

Is that really so? How can she be so certain that all of those who voted for Clinton are naturalized immigrants as opposed to old American Latino families with no links to their countries of origin?

This is the untold story of Super Tuesday. For all the talk from Democrats and Republicans about whether immigration is or is not a wedge issue in 2008, the fact of the matter is nobody is exit polling and on the look out for recently naturalized citizen voters.

More to the point for pundits who are scrambling to feign to know all things latino, nobody is going out of their way to define demographically what "Latino voter" means.

• Is a Latino a recent immigrant?
• Is a Latino a native Northern Mexican who never immigrated to the US?
• Is it Nuyoricans only or does it include also Puerto Ricans born in the island?
• When confusing Hispanic and Latino, are we also including people born in Spain and Portugal but naturalized in the United States?
• And how many generations does it take before you loose the identity politics moniker and become a "full American"?
• Too many people are tossing around the "Latinos only vote for white Democrats or the Clintons" without qualifying the term Latino or Hispanic and that's a problem.

Well, I've said it several times before, but Bush and the corrupt, extreme right wingers of today will be the death of the Republican Party. Well, it seems this is coming a step closer as Bush's approval rating drops in ALL states. There is now not one single state in the Union where Bush's approval rating is above 50%. Not...one...single...state.

(click to enlarge)

You can also read more about it on Daily Kos.

Utah, Idaho and Wyoming are still the states that cling the most to liking Bush, but even in those tenatiously Republican states Bush has dropped below 50%...and remember that Republicans are having trouble getting elected EVEN in Idaho and Wyoming.

I believe we NEED two reasonable, competing political parties presenting two REASONABLE visions for America. It is how we have always functioned. So I don't celebrate Bush's destruction of the Republican Party. People like Gingrich, DeLay, Bush and Cheney have made the Republican Party so extremist that the vast majority of mainstream Americans now distrust and dislike the Republican Party, and people are leaving it in droves.

The Pew Institute for Research is probably the largest non-for-profit public opinion survey group in the United States. Many people from both the left and right look at them as the source for number crunching anything having to do with elections, media use and the socio-political impact of market demographics.

So it is not shocking to see the reaction around a recent survey they released that pits Hillary Clinton against Rudy Giuliani; especially after the hyperbolic headline published at Politico.com.

I just have to wonder though, how those numbers read when compared to Quinnipac's similar survey for New York state. Giulini's advantage over her is of only 2%. Considering that most surveys have a 2-5% margin of error, that means they are in a dead heat in the Empire state.

Given New Yorkers do know how much of an asshole Rudy is, all I have to say that these polls are more about name recognition and public perception than anything having to do with the facts about either candidate's career.

Which makes it even more depressing to realize that most people really don't vote with the facts; they really just vote with their intuition. Whomever controls the gut instinct wins.

Which is why, this would make for an interesting pairing because, as John Gandelman points out over at The Moderate Voice, it will all come down to immigration.