Wednesday Open Thread

Welcome to your Wednesday open thread. It’s Wednesday but also humpday. I expect you to celebrate accordingly.

On Monday Jon Stewart did a brilliant takedown on John McCain’s ever-evolving positions on DADT repeal.

Yes, John McCain is a huge, flaming hypocrite. I don’t think “flip flop” is a good enough word to describe what he’s doing. I prefer “Calvinball.” Do you remember the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes? In the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes play a game called “Calvinball” where there are no rules and the rules keep changing. That’s McCain to a T. Also, he sure made his wife look like a fool.

A study found little correlation between the number of Facebook “likes” and the outcome of an election.

Olson is referring to a slew of reports showing how having more Facebook fans or Likes was a good indication of a candidate’s success come election. Indeed, Facebook’s political team said the social network helped predict between 74% to 81% of 2010 races. However, according to Trilogy’s results, the consultancy found only a slight correlation between social media popularity and success in the Senate. That correlation “effectively disappeared” in House and gubernatorial races.

Trilogy says the Facebook margin of victory only explained about 13% of voting results. For gubernatorial races, that correlation is even lower, with the strength of a candidate’s Facebook presence only explaining about 0.8% of the vote margin. And for House races, there was actually a slight negative correlation, meaning a stronger Facebook popularity was associated with a smaller margin of victory.

For the graphically challenged, if Facebook likes predicted outcome, the blue dots would lie along the red line.

Christine O’Donnell had plenty of Facebook and Twitter fans, but many of them were from out-of-state. O’Donnell spam tweeters made #NetDE almost unusable. The only popularity contest that counts is the actual number of votes.