May 2012
17 posts
7 tags
New Mobile Technologies for Campaigns
By Matt Hill
Political campaigning has incorporated a new form of outreach to potential constituents – mobile technology. With the rise of mobile applications and global positioning systems (GPS’s), President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney will attempt to attract voters as well as encourage them to vote on election day through their location aware mobile devices. In 2008, the Obama...
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A New Digital Government
by Ian Rosoff
I don’t know what the numbers are on the raw tonnage of data the various government agencies generate every year, but it’s so large and complicated that finding anything across the myriad of .gov sites available for perusal is a daunting task. So the White House’s new Digital Government initiative is a promising idea. Basically the plan is to consolidate the information created by...
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Why Americans Elect is a Success and not a Fail
By Lou Aronson
Americans Elect did not fail. The group and its followers launched themselves headlong into the rapidly changing intersection of politics, democracy and technology. Although they fell short of the goal of fielding a candidate in 2012 AE demonstrated some of the potential of how technology can reshape little “d”emocracy.
I recently left the full time practice of law and started...
What to Make of the Egyptian Elections
By Andrew Beilein
Since no candidate won more than 50% of the votes in Egypt’s presidential election last week, the top two vote getters, Mohammad Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood and ex-air force chief and Mubarak ally Ahmad Shafiq will compete in a run-off election in mid-June.
Mursi won 24.3 percent and Shafiq 23.3 percent of votes, out of 12 candidates whom Egyptians had to choose from in...
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Chasing the Latino Vote in 2012
By Andrew Beilein
The 2012 election could be highlighted by a battle for the determined by the fastest growing voting bloc—Latino voters.
Realizing this, Votifi is running an online survey of Latinos in America called LatinoVoice where we’re hoping to peel away some of the layers here and better understand the mobile and increasingly vocal Latino community.
Not only are Latinos the fastest...
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The phone gap
This more or less speaks for itself on why polling methodologies need to evolve.
It should not be a surprise that the outcomes of landline and cell phone surveys are vastly different given the basic assumptions about age and demographic of cell phone vs. landline users. That’s what polling is supposed to disentangle for us.
However, the harder it gets to run polls by calling people,...
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Whither polling?
Pew just released some new data on the declining response rate for telephone-based opinion surveys.
Everything from contact rates to cooperation rates to response rates are on the decline. From 2009 to 2012 the drop in response rates was particularly significant at 40%, the highest drop since they presented data over a span of 15 years. Even when Pew set out to really try and persuade people...
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JP Morgan Stanley and the aborted birth of...
This past week, the United States’ largest bank JP Morgan Chase, announced that it has lost at least $2 billion (and probably much more) on a “complex hedging strategy.” The loss led the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon to call the move of his own company a “terrible, egregious mistake.”
The JP Morgan’s loss is just another blunder on a laundry list of financial sector failures over the past few...
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Graduating from college, unemployment, internships...
By Andrew Beilein
Four years ago I dreamt I would fall into job with a hefty, annual salary of around $60k. I could use that to repay my loans and start building my life as an adult. Isn’t that at least part of the reason why American families work so hard to put their kids through college - because there is a clear return on investment? Studies show that on average, a college degree is...
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Peer pitch
Edwin Rios, a journalism and psychology student at Northwestern University, just posted his feature story of me at the TechCocktail Spring Startup Showcase. Eddie found us online when he was researching tech startups from Chicago that are working on issues related to politics. We had a great conversation at TechCocktail and met again for hot chocolate on a chilly day in Hyde Park. The article...
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Starting up America at #Fosterly
We were at Day of Fosterly on Saturday for a mini-SXSW of sorts for the DC Area, Day of Fosterly. I had a great time catching up with friends from the Fort, Startup America, 10 Pearls and meeting a bunch of new people.
One of my favorite parts of the day was the talk by former White House CTO Aneesh Chopra. He presented some facts and figures on how important the startup economy is to the United...
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On Dick Lugar
In any American history text, you will read about Henry Clay—politician from Kentucky, architect of the Missouri Compromise, served three terms as Speaker of the House, and regarded as one of the greatest Senators of all time. However, I can’t help but wonder if a man like Henry Clay—who’s nickname of “The Great Compromiser” is his true claim to fame—would have any shot at being elected...
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Gay Marriage Rights
President Obama’s unexpected anticipated statement in support of gay-marriage rights yesterday comes after a weeklong crescendo of gay marriage taking over the headlines.
On May 1st Richard Grenell, an openly gay foreign policy advisor on the Romney campaign, resigned after only two weeks with the campaign. He cited the “hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from...
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On getting elected...
Unfazed by Jimmy Kimmel’s “boiled cat” joke, CNN analyst/talking head James Carville reminds us of a fundamental fact of getting elected:
You can shoot five Bin Ladens, you can save 10,000 banks and 20 car companies, even pass the most sweeping legislation in modern American history; if people don’t think that you are connected to their lives and are fighting for their...
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The Student Loan Debate
The total amount of student debt held in the United States exceeds $1 trillion.
Tuition at public, four-year universities have nearly tripled over the past two decades, while the cost of attending private institutions has nearly doubled. Currently, the average student graduates from college with $25,000 of debt and many students are saddled with six-figure debt.
These figures should make it...
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The Big Debate Over Stimulus Spending
I was speaking with an old friend today who lives in San Francisco and we starting talking about politics, stimulus and the yin and yang between local projects and federal obligations. The driver from the conversation was the demolition of Doyle Drive an old elevated highway, ostensibly a shovel ready project.
To provide some background, my buddy is a Republican who considers himself a...
