Jared Mauch's Comments

Bloomberg is reporting that the super delegates at stake for the Democratic nomination will actually be swayed more by the popular vote than backroom deals. This combined with a growing anti-incumbent feeling that may be growing, we may be in for a significantly different Washington DC after the November election. It just could be this is a turning-point in our country that will drive us to record voter turnout and community participation. With Clinton and Obama calling for community service by young people to help offset the cost of attending that College/University, perhaps we will see a more-engaged society as a whole.

McCain keeps rolling towards the nomination with a critical win last night in Virginia. Obama keeps rolling down the path to success starting with important wins last night in Maryland, Virginia and DC.  While this is not surprising that he won, the underlying demographic data that showed up in the exit polls is.  He’s starting to win in what are traditionally Clinton’s core supporters.  Those that are over 65, make less than $5ok/year and women.  Turnout is also astounding for a primary election.  It seems the game is as strong as ever.  States that were worried they wouldn’t matter and didn’t make the jump to “Super Tuesday” are now seeing visits from their candidates.  Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas are the next battleground states.  Clinton appears to be facing quite a number of challenges moving forward with the potential erosion of her base of support, campaign reshuffling and looking like she’s attempting to compete for Wisconsin delegates again after all the media reports that they were going to focus on delegate rich Ohio and Texas.  Time keeps on rolling and the next contests aren’t until the 19th.  It’s going to be a long wait until next week for those of us that are becoming the campaign-watching junkies.

With Super Tuesday now over, the race continues to move on.  The Democrats continue their nominating race neck-and-neck as McCain seems to have the nomination as his to lose.  Given that, I’d like to focus briefly on the Clinton vs Obama race.  While there’s a lot of other cogent analysis that is done, I don’t expect anyone to find this interesting but perhaps you may.  (more…)

The 2008 election race continues the preparations to super-tuesday but there may be no clear picture after those races. The Associated press has done analysis and determined that neither the Republican side nor the Democratic side will be able to eliminate the major candidates.

If Hillary continues to win on the (D) side and the (R) side has no compelling winner after Feb 5, expect Bloomberg to jump into the race.  Within the past week there’s bee numerous stories from him talking to ballot experts that assisted Ross Perot to him criticizing Washington(DC) as a whole on a range of issues from infrastructure to pork barrel projects. Expect this year to be quite an exciting one for politics as it’s the first totally open race on each side without a sitting VP running for office. Don’t expect Bloomberg to enter the race if there is someone compelling in the running like Obama is currently. He’s attracted a lot of attention and certainly has the under-30 crowd won over. This is the same crowd that usually doesn’t get around to vote come election day. Perhaps some of those new media companies like Facebook/MySpace will offer free SMS reminders to vote every hour until you mark a “I Voted” or similar on their profile or respond to the SMS. I’m expecting [predicting] record turnout this year among the under-30 crowd.

The Washington Post notes today that DHS HSIN is likely to go away. Apparently the users do matter and the system will be replaced. What impact this will have on information sharing within the government and the public-private partnership model presented by HSPD-7 is still to be seen.