Archive for November 7th, 2007

Hey all you Hoosier Access fans out there, yours truly will be a guest tomorrow on Abdul in the Morning show from 9-10am during a segment on blogs and their affect in the recent municipal election in Marion County. Make sure to check it out. You can either tune into 1430 WXNT or you can check out their website and listen to a live stream from there. Just click the “listen live” button at the top of the page.

I should let you know that you have to sign up as a “member” to listen if you haven’t already, but it’s free so that’s no biggie.

www.greglies.com

I’m really just a numbers guy who likes politics.

I have been looking at the amazing Indianapolis election to start understanding what happened. Clearly this was a protest vote, but it is still amazing that Ballard was able to pull this out. So here is what the numbers tell me:

One of the contentions in the recent Indianapolis Star poll was that the Star should have used 2004 turnout information rather than 2003.

2003: 150,440 votes cast (26.8%)
2004: 323,673 votes cast (53.7%)
2007: 160,857 votes cast (25.8%)

I guess 2007 looked like….a municipal election! Though a bit down on turnout which I find VERY interesting. It was assumed that the turnout would be high, even during election day, but it did not turn out that way. There was a lot of talk about what the turnout numbers would mean. Predominantly what I heard was that high turnout favored Ballard (large protest) and low turnout favored Peterson (the “base” voting). What we had was a low turnout and Ballard winning–so much for conventional wisdom.

So what happened (below the fold)
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