Princeton Election Consortium

A first draft of electoral history

Entries Tagged as '2008 Election'

At TEDxSF – Neuroscience and willpower

November 13th, 2009, 1:00pm by Sam Wang

I’ll be coming to San Francisco next Tuesday for TEDxSF, a spinoff of the famous TED conference. It’s at the California Academy of Sciences. Mayor Gavin Newsom will launch the event. The event will be LiveStreamed – tune in around 4:00pm Pacific. I’m on a little after 4:30pm to talk about the neuroscience of willpower.
Other [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: 2008 Election

Orly Taitz gets her court date

November 11th, 2009, 2:17pm by Sam Wang

Back on the false-belief beat…sort of. I’ve previously written about false belief formation from the standpoint of neuroscience. A prominent category these days is the delusion, mostly on the right, that President Obama is thought to be hiding something really big. These days it’s his citizenship: “birthers” claim that he is not a Hawaii-born US [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: 2008 Election

Senate race re-cap

June 30th, 2009, 10:08pm by Sam Wang

Last year I recommended a donation strategy that nearly 400 of you followed to give nearly $45,000 to one side (and an unknown amount to the other side). Now that Al Franken is finally on his way to being Minnesota’s junior senator (by 312 votes, a 0.01% margin), was it a good strategy?

[Read more →]

Tags: 2008 Election

Obama’s signing…statement?

February 18th, 2009, 2:23pm by Sam Wang

Today at 6:50pm ET, I’ll be on CNN’s Situation Room to talk about left-handed presidents and their brains. It might be re-broadcast tomorrow at 6:50am ET and/or 8:55am. I free-associated a bit – let’s hope nothing embarrassing emerges.

Update: here’s the video. Note that Obama curls his hand to avoid smearing ink. A more efficient but [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: 2008 Election

Lunchtime talk on Campaign ‘08

February 5th, 2009, 3:36pm by Sam Wang

For locals – next Wednesday the 11th at noon, I’ll be giving a talk on a polling geek’s view of Campaign ‘08. It’s part of our Office of Information Technology’s Lunch ‘n’ Learn Series. Come on by!
Update: here’s the podcast. And here are my slides (PDF).

[Read more →]

Tags: 2008 Election

Amazing Inauguration photo – 1.5 gigapixels

January 25th, 2009, 11:00am by Sam Wang

Taken by David Bergman. Check it out here.

[Read more →]

Tags: 2008 Election

The brains of southpaw presidents

January 24th, 2009, 12:52pm by Sam Wang

Tomorrow I’ll be on Good Morning America Weekend, talking with David Wright about the mysterious abundance of left-handed presidents. (watch it here) Barack Obama is left-handed – as were Bill Clinton, the first President Bush, Ronald Reagan (maybe), Gerald Ford, and Harry Truman. What’s going on?

[Read more →]

Tags: 2008 Election

Forbes’s top 25 “liberals”

January 23rd, 2009, 11:22pm by Sam Wang

Forbes has an article on the “25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media.” It’s unintentionally amusing.

[Read more →]

Tags: 2008 Election

The end for Coleman?

January 23rd, 2009, 9:27am by Sam Wang

Two recent events suggest that Coleman’s contest of the Minnesota Senate election result is nearing an end.

[Read more →]

Tags: 2008 Election

Satellite view of the inauguration

January 21st, 2009, 11:56am by Sam Wang

Taken by Geosys and visible with 0.5-meter resolution here, at Popular Science.
Thanks to Marc Ambinder and Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic.
Now, how to estimate the crowd from this image? Update: an interactive version via the Washington Post is here.

[Read more →]

Tags: 2008 Election