This is part of a new series I am calling Do The Math. Applications of mathematics to the rest of the world.

Brewer has a 97% chance of winning as of September 3rd. Source: NY Times

First we need to explain what we mean by 97%.

The most recent polls have Brewer on top of Goddard by 14 points. This is the plot you see on the left. So how does the plot on the right figure in?

The plot on the right simply shows how many times Jan Brewer will win the election if you run 100,000 simulations with the current poll data. Remember that it doesn’t matter how close they are, all that matters is who is on top.

Since Brewer’s lead is well outside the margin of error, or the 95% confidence interval, she will win most of the time.

In other words, and you can see this illustrated with the light red and blue shading on the left plot, 95% of the time Brewer will be at 55 +- 8 which ranges from 47 to 63 and Goddard will be at 41+- 8 which is from 33 to 49. So every once in a rare while, 2.7% of the time to be exact, Goddard will go up to 49 and Brewer will drop to 47 points, and thus Goddard wins.

This is highly unlikely, and if Three Sonorans had to bet his house on the outcome TODAY, he would bet on Jan Brewer with these odds.

Is there hope?

Of course there is hope. First of all notice the evolution of these plots. Back in February Goddard had an 80% chance of winning. Then there came the turning point in April… hmm, what happened in April?

Recall that Brewer was also facing challenges from Buz Mils and that even Sheriff Arpaio was thinking about running for governor. After SB1070 though, Brewer became the super-star of the right, with frequent visits on Fox News and on Greta. She had a summer of free publicity.

Now Brewer is the only Republican running against Goddard. SB1070 is now the law, and Goddard has been quite silent on this injustice until now, and actually pro-Brewer in the sense that he was telling Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, to back off of their lawsuit against Arizona and SB1070, and that Goddard would defend Brewer and Arizona as our own Attorney General.

That turned off a lot of Latinos.

But now Goddard has found his voice and is speaking out strongly against Jan Brewer and her follies. He is taking her to task for losing her head over false claims of beheadings. And after the debate Jan Brewer came out as the nation’s laughingstock for the week.

The caveat

Jan Brewer has decided that she will not debate anymore. This debate also came before our 3-day Labor Day weekend. The debate was also broadcast on PBS, a channel not a lot of people watch.

And while the national news networks have been having fun with this brain-freeze, Fox News has yet to cover it, and they probably never will.

The election is two months away, and in about a week or so people will forget all about what happened. Sure, the liberals will know because they keep sharing the video, but we are preaching to the choir. We are not preaching to some rural conservative in middle of the desert who is afraid of all the Muslims and Mexicans coming to take their Bibles and their daughters. And of course their jobs and freedom and liberty and…

These Arizonans did not watch the debate, and even if they did they will make excuses for Jan, and in a week or so Brewer will be back on Greta and Fox News will be escalating her to greatness again.

The reason Jan Brewer may win is because of two reasons:

1. We are not changing the minds of those that DO vote, those conservatives (and Mormons) in the rural areas outside of Phoenix and Tucson.
2. The ones that would vote for Goddard will not show up to vote due to voter apathy.

The right-wingers have their national channel, and it has tons of models and flashy graphics to keep their attention. The liberals have nothing like this, and even Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann are not made for the masses but rather a higher-intelligence crowd.

How do we reach out to the masses of apathetic voters in a way that Fox News does?

This is quite the challenge, because first you would have to be flexible with the facts and you would have to use demagoguery, just as Fox does with the “ground-zero mosque” and every word that Glenn Beck utters.

You would also have to replace our most awesome women such as Amy Goodman with Miss America, because heaven knows good Jesus loving folk love their beautiful women (such as the 700 club and their former Miss Americas).

The closest Latinos have to this is Sabado Gigante, which is also the proof of concept. Even abuelitas will watch this in amazement and not even blink an eye at all the chi-chis and nalgas being displayed.

So in a sense, Fox News is equivalent to Sabado Gigante, but at least Latinos admit it is entertainment and not news.

They both have flashy colors and beautiful women, and they both have viewers. So how do we have a Sabado Gigante type news broadcast?

Would Democrats even stoop to that level? Should women be objectified for their bodies in order to win the devout Christian and Mormon vote?

And therein lies the problem

Since the left doesn’t have Fox News nor will it ever have anything like it, we have to rely on one thing.

Education.

Unfortunately Arizona ranks last in education, but we can combat this by educating our own family and friends. Tell all of your neighbors, tell your church members, tell any group that you belong to that they must vote for Terry Goddard.

Tell them that Russell Pearce has the votes to become the Senate majority leader, and that he has two bills coming up ready to be signed into law by Jan Brewer if she wins. The first aims to have teachers turn in their undocumented students to Border Patrol, the second aims to undo the 14th amendment and deny citizenship to “anchor babies.”

It doesn’t matter if it is unconstitutional. It will still become law and there will be millions of dollars and countless hours and energy that will go into undoing it. It will be undone, have no doubt, but it would be easier if it was never “have did” in the first place.

This is why Terry Goddard needs to win. But more importantly, this is why YOU need to work NOW to EDUCATE your friends, family, and networks on this election.

And most importantly, we need to make sure our community is VOTING. We have the answer to our problems right now, all we need to do is vote the right people in.

We have the numbers, all we need now is the ganas.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 5th, 2010 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Do the math, Election 2010, Headline news, political news. Tags for this post: arizona news, democrat news, election, jan brewer, national news, phoenix news, polls, progressive news, terry goddard, tucson news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.