2016 Election - Iowa Caucuses 2 weeks out

Gillibrand Campaign

With the Iowa Caucuses in 14 days, the Nevada Caucuses in 20 days and the New Hampshire Primary in 21 days the next three weeks will be tough.

I've decided to make leadership, taxes and immigration the themes of my campaign. We need to provide guest worker programs and amnesty to illegal immigrants that are otherwise abiding the law and contributing to society. We need to close most of the loopholes in our tax system that unfairly benefit the rich and corporations; the savings can be applied to lowering middle class tax rates and paying off our debt.

To highlight my leadership qualities I've started to produce a cable news advertisement, I need to be quick on this issue before my opponents hit me with attack ads.

With my resources I'm building up my ground game in Iowa and Nevada. I'm holding campaign events in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and back to Iowa to finish out the week.

Democratic Primary

Warner's lead has been cut down to a single point nationally, but his lead in the first three states going to the polls is larger. Warner leads by 3% in Iowa, 2 % in Nevada and 4 % in New Hampshire.

Candidate	Nat %	Delgates	Est. Del
Cuomo	12.2	0	96
Schwietzer	9.3	0	31
Warner	18.9	0	2340
Gillibrand	17.9	0	2009
Beebe	2.3	0	0
Casey	3.0	0	251
Hagan	5.5	0	87
O'Malley	3.4	0	120

Republican Primary

Thune has jumped ahead of Rubio in the number of delegates that the candidates are expected to win. With one week remaining before the Iowa Caucuses and 20 % of the voters still undecided this state could go to any candidate. The one point lead Thune had over Rubio has extended to three points, also happy is Christie with a one point bump in the polls. With a race this close though the winner could be the candidate with the most momentum in the last weeks of the campaign, Jindal has spent every second this past week in the state has been making big inroads.

Upcoming republican primaries include New Hampshire in 14 days and Florida in 19 days. Both states are expected to go to their native candidates, Kelly Ayotte (NH) and Marco Rubio (FLO).

Candidate	Nat %	Delgates	Est. Del
Thune	18.6	0	318
Rubio	19.6	0	224
Christie	13.3	0	79
Jindal	8.1	0	60
Daniels	4.1	0	54
Ryan	8.2	0	57
Brownback	4.0	0	48
Ayotte	3.7	0	12

General Election

In the latest polls Colorado has moved 3 points towards republicans, New Hampshire has moved a point towards republicans, Iowa has moved a point towards republicans, and Pennsylvania has moved a point towards democrats. This is starting to look like the general election could be a cakewalk for the republican contender that emerges.

Party	Nat %	Δ %	Est. EV	Δ EV
Democratic	36.4	+0.2	201	-4
Republican	39.6	0.0	294	-5

A Clash of Kings - Part A

I don't know if Varys is my favourite character but he truly has a web of lies befitting his nickname. Can I take it on face value that he has the safety of the realm as his motivation? Why was he consorting with someone from the free cities? They discussed the advantage to the lion and wolf fighting, doesn't sound very pro realm to me.

Theon Greyjoy, did he learn nothing at the side of Eddard Stark? I hope he gets what is coming to him.

Clever Tyrion setting up each of the 3 remaining members of the kings council, after he booted the leader of the gold cloaks to the wall. Is he serious about reaching out to Dorne and the Vale or is it just part of the trap? Could you imagine Lyssa Tully siding with the Lannisters over the Starks? If I'm the Dorne I join forces with Renly, smash the Lannisters and crucify Ser Gregor; why would I need to join forces with the Lannisters to get at Gregor?

These interlocking alliance systems remind me of World War One. King Robert Baratheon dies pushing the Starks and Lannisters into war. Unofficial treaties start enacting: the Tullys side with the Starks, Kings Landing sides with the Lannisters, Storm's End and the Reach create their own faction, Dragonstone and Iron Islands say fuck it to everyone and the Vale and Dorne are just a push away from tumbling into the fracas themselves.

2016 Election - Introduction

I'm coming off a bit of a 2012 election high and since it's too early to start following the 2014 midterm elections I have decided to have some fun and simulate the 2016 presidential election.

I'm using President Forever 2008 with the United States 2016 (XL2) campaign. I used a random number generator to pick my character and Kirsten Gillibrand was the lucky candidate.

There are eight candidates for both major parties. There seem to be five front runners for the Republicans and four for the Democrats.

Democratic Candidates:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer

Virginia Senator Mark Warner

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand

Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey

North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan

Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley

Republican Candidates:

South Dakota Senator John Thune

Florida Senator Marco Rubio

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels

Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback

New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte

Democratic Primary

The Democratic primaries have main contenders New York Senator Gillibrand and Virginia Senator Warner. Warner leads in most states but is not a lock for the nomination with Gillibrand nipping at his heels both in the delegate count and national polls. With the Iowa caucuses two weeks away the race is expected to take a tilt towards the winner: Warner has a slight lead of 20%, Gillibrand 17%, Cuomo 11.5 % and Schweitzer 10%. Most polling has 27.8 % of the electorate still undecided.

Candidate	Nat %	Delgates	Est. Del
Cuomo	11.9	0	0
Schwietzer	9.5	0	31
Warner	19.1	0	2753
Gillibrand	17.6	0	2103
Beebe	2.3	0	0
Casey	3.0	0	251
Hagan	5.7	0	158
O'Malley	3.3	0	120

Republican Primary

The Republican race this year is wide open. There are 5 candidates polling above 8% and 3 candidates projected to win more than 100 delegates. No clear leader has emerged outside the home states of the candidates. The first test of the candidates appeal will occur in two weeks with the Iowa caucuses: Thune and Rubio are locked in a 20% tie for first followed by, Christie 13%, Ryan 8.5% and Jindal 7.5%.

Candidate	Nat %	Delgates	Est. Del
Thune	18.1	0	115
Rubio	19.5	0	423
Christie	13.6	0	77
Jindal	8.2	0	15
Daniels	4.3	0	54
Ryan	8.4	0	101
Brownback	3.9	0	49
Ayotte	3.6	0	13

General Election

The general election starts off tilted towards a generic republican. The democratic candidate that emerges from the primaries will have their work cut out turning this map blue.

Party	Nat %	Δ %	Est. EV	Δ EV
Democratic	36.2	0	203	0
Republican	39.6	0	299	0

US Supreme Court Openings

With President Obama winning another term there is already talk about his legacy. Now one of the largest parts of a President's legacy is their appointments to the Supreme Court. This got me thinking about the possibility of a retirement; an investigation was required.

There are 103 former Supreme Court justices along with the current 9 justices. I decided to shorten the list by looking only at justices appointed since WW2. There are 20 former justices appointed over this period to analyze.

First there are two ways for a Supreme Court justice seat to open up. A current justice resigning or a current justice dying. Justices dying in office is an unlikely event. Only two justices have died in office both chief justices: Fred M. Vinson and William Rehnquist. Because only 2 of the 20 openings have resulted because of death I feel it appropriate to use age of retirement to calculate openings.

Now the mean age of retirement for justices, that were appointed by Truman onward, is 73.25 with a standard deviation of 9.48. The age at time of death of these former justices, only 17 of died as of the time of writing, is 79.71 with a standard deviation of 8.35.

Looking at the retirement there seemed to be a correlation between age at retirement and year of retirement. After further review there was a modestly strong correlation between the two variables using a 2nd order polynomial.



Using the line of best fit, and its standard deviation, I was able to calculate the probability that each justice will retire in a year. Their age in the table below is on Dec 31, 2012. The percentage under each of the following four years is the probability they will retire based solely on age.

Justice	Age	2013	2014	2015	2016
Ruth Bader Ginsburg	79	66.58%	70.67%	74.54%	78.16%
Anthony Kennedy	76	52.73%	57.28%	61.79%	66.19%
Antonin Scalia	76	52.73%	57.28%	61.79%	66.19%
Stephen Breyer	74	43.19%	47.75%	52.39%	57.05%
Clarence Thomas	64	8.51%	10.45%	12.71%	15.33%
Samuel Alito	62	5.35%	6.73%	8.38%	10.34%
Sonia Sotomayor	58	1.82%	2.40%	3.14%	4.07%
John G. Roberts	57	1.35%	1.80%	2.38%	3.13%
Elena Kagan	52	0.25%	0.35%	0.49%	0.69%

There are four elder justices on the court, two liberal, one staunch conservative and one moderate conservative.

Now obviously this is a rather simplistic way to look at openings. There really isn't a chance that Scalia retires under President Obama. He and Obama are on different sides of the political spectrum. Scalia will only be 80 at the end of Obama's term.

Would Ginsburg risk being replaced by a conservative justice? If so, she might only have 3 years left on the court. There has only been one occurrence of a party holding the presidency for three terms in a row. If she does not retire under Obama she could be 88 or even 92 before she got another chance to retire under a Democratic president.

The next oldest liberal is Breyer at 74 years old. It would be very average to see him retire, fellow liberal Souter retired a few years ago at the age of 70. Breyer would be 78 at the start of the next presidency. If he feels that he has accomplished a lot he could retire and be guaranteed a liberal successor. Otherwise he could continue on and could possibly outlast a two term republican president being 86 years old, 12 years from now.

Kennedy is the trickiest and most important retirement. Kennedy, a moderate conservative, finds himself the swing vote more often than not, and is one of the elder statesmen of the court. If he retires in the next 4 years the court will swing liberal. After that a republican could inhabit the white house and the court would swing even more conservative.

Game of Thrones

 Well I've finished Game of Thrones and I am 178 pages into A Clash of Kings. Game of Thrones was incredibly similar to the show. Even the more memorable lines were spoken word for word. Reading added a bit of depth and history to this part of the series. As nice as it was to see that the show stayed faithful to the source material it made for a bit of a boring read.

Blackfish Tully is quite the character, it seems in fact that the entire Tully family has a rich history and interesting story. When riverrun swore oaths to the King of the North I was surprised. Robb Stark for King!

Peter Dinklage is much too handsome for the role of Tyrion. Almost every chapter with Tyrion makes fun of his grotesque features.

I'm glad that the show did not burn off Daenerys' hair. Those blonde locks are gorgeous. Her story line is quite bizarre and is a bit distracting from the Westeros stories; furthermore her story feels forced. Where the other stories involving Baratheons, Starks, Lannister, and Greyjoys grow, her story is being pushed so that she can join up with Westeros.

A Song of Ice and Fire

I have it in my mind that I will begin reading the popular series 'A Song of Ice and Fire.' There are 4273 pages in the 5 published books, according to Wikipedia. By the by don't look at me like that, I can source Wikipedia. I'm assuming that it will be enjoyable to keep a record of sorts: thoughts about what I'm reading and page count.

Toronto Blue Jays & Adjusted Divisions

Toronto plays in a difficult division. Some have referred to the AL East as the toughest division in professional sports. It's lofty praise, but a little hard to deny. Being a fan of Toronto I get what feels like the unique experience of cheering for a good team that has a hard time making the playoffs. Toronto plays 72 games against Boston, Baltimore, Tampa Bay and the Yankees. The table below illustrates the difficult time Toronto has against the AL East versus the rest of the American League.

Against	Wins	Losses	Win %
AL East	33	39	0.4583
Non-Division	40	32	0.5556

I've put in a little bit of time to create a program that would switch Toronto for another team in the American League. A little bit of fun to see how Toronto would do outside of the East. As of this moment I've used the winning percentage between teams while switching schedules between Toronto and each team in the AL (one at time). I might do an update using runs per a game and the Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball to determine wins; it would be more accurate but I felt that increased accuracy in fantasy land wasn't a priority.

Without going to the trouble of Pythagorean Theorems the adjusted wins for switching divisions are in the below tables. The first table is what would happen if Toronto switched with a team in the West. Toronto was quite close to being AL West champions in three of the scenarios. Switching with Oakland produced a three way race for the division. Switching schedules with Seattle produced the worst result, 3rd place 7.5 games back, which is still a huge improvement over 4th place and 14 games back. 

Switched Team	Adjusted Wins	Place in Div	Games Back
LA Angels	86.1222	2nd	3.2111
Oakland	85.5270	3rd	1.2825
Seattle	82.9476	3rd	7.5190
Texas	83.9221	2nd	3.1921

Now we can look at the Central Division. The change you will notice, if you turn your gaze to the table below, is the added column. The Jays come in second place save for the time they win the division. Detroit had a heck of a ball club and it is not a surprise that they win the division each time they are in it. What is a surprise is the complete lack of parity in the Central. The Jays have a sizable lead on 3rd place in four of the scenarios, and the other the Jays have less then 81 wins.

Switched Team	Adjusted Wins	Place in Div	Games Back	Games Ahead of 3rd
Chicago WSox	84.5778	2nd	9.7556	4.1413
Cleveland	84.8333	2nd	10.1667	7.8413
Detroit	88.2143	1st	(7.1937)	7.5825
Kansas City	86.4270	2nd	9.2397	6.9905
Minnesota	80.8079	2nd	12.8567	2.5937

If the Jays played in the west in 2011 it would have been a dogfight, a battle to the last week to see who could come away with the division. The hypothetical Central would have been a cakewalk for Detroit or the Jays. The 4th place team in the East, would have been a solid 2nd in the Central or in a fight for the division in the West. Oh fantasy land, where dreams come true.