Date: 05/18/2009

Category: · Writing  » News Coverage  » The San Francisco Appeal · Writing  » Topic  » misc

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Because Nate Silver won't respond to the saucy love letters we keep sending him, we've had to resort to this to get his attention: a statistical analysis of endorsements for Tuesday's election. (BTW: There's an election on Tuesday.)

We combed through every major endorsement we could find -- about seventy -- and charted out who was saying yes and who was saying no. We counted newspapers like the LA Times and Sacramento Bee, professional groups like the CA Medical Association, politicians like Gray Davis (bless his heart), and even Tom McClintock (conservative), Meg Whitman (opposed to gay people), and The East Bay Express (loiterers). Did we miss anyone? Check out the full list of endorsements that we consulted, and let us know who we left out.

We did not count SF Weekly and the SF Examiner because we couldn't find any evidence of their endorsements online. Enjoy your early retirement, newspapermen!

So, what did we discover? VERY LITTLE. In general, opinions on measures 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, and 1F are spread into a grey goo. Some folks oppose all; some folks oppose none; and most everyone is pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. Politics! (Also, bear in mind that since this analysis is based almost entirely on our ability to Google, the margin of error is plus or minus one hundred percent.)

Of the endorsements we found, Prop 1F (which would withhold pay raises from legislators until they pass a budget) enjoys the only majority support, and also the fewest detractors. It also has the largest number of neutrals. Prop 1A (temporary tax hike) has a near-majority of supporters, and also the fewest ambivalent endorsements. Prop 1B (retools how money gets spent on education) has fewer detractors than most other measures. Prop 1G, which does not exist, is the only measure with unanimous support.

Ugh. We've spent hours on this now and we still have no idea how we should actually vote, if at all. The only endorsement we can distill out of this data is that it is pretty safe to have no strong feelings one way or another about any of this.

But if you really want to make sense of these endorsements, here's what you should do: check out our full list of all the endorsements we could find. Find five to ten groups that you know you trust. Look at their recommendations, and ignore everyone else. So much of politics, after all, is figuring out who to ignore. (Protip: everyone.)