Progress Illinois

On the first Friday of every month, Mark Bazer hosts "The Interview Show" at The Hideout in Chicago, in which he conducts engaging discussions with three different figures from the area -- whether writers, artists, chefs, etc. Recent guests from the political/media sphere have included Rick Perlstein, John Williams, and Kevin Davis.  Earlier this month, Bazer sat-down with FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver. 

You can watch a clip of that interview below.  Fair warning for all the kiddies out there, though: Silver's got a mouth like a sailor:

Chicago's own Nate Silver sits down with Dan Rather on his HDNet program:

Front and center during the primaries, the Tribune's Jill Zuckman reports that health care has receded from the presidential campaign, eclipsed by other concerns:

The continual tussle between the two presumptive presidential nominees — Obama and McCain — has largely centered recently on national security and the high price of gasoline. Public opinion polls have shown that among the top issues of concern to Americans, health care is languishing far behind the economy, the war and the price of gas. One CBS poll from July put voter interest in health care at just 3 percent. In August, it was at 8 percent.

Obama's spokesman Bill Burton counters, claiming the problem is the reluctance of the press to cover the issue, not that voters don't care about it. But if this is the case, as The New Republic's Jon Cohn blogs, it should be Obama pushing the agenda forward:

But candidates aren't exactly powerless to shape the agenda. If Obama wanted to shift the conversation back towards health care, all it would take would be a few advertisements, maybe a major policy speech, plus a little one-on-one promotion to reporters.

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver agrees that Obama hasn't pushed as hard as he can on health care, a missed opportunity considering the gravity of the recession this election cycle and John McCain's decidedly weaker plan.

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Think that trip to Denver in August is going to be all fun and games? The Obama campaign says think again:

Those 75,000 Democrats who will pack a football stadium for Barack Obama's convention speech won't be there just to whoop and holler on television. They'll form the world's largest phone bank to boost voter registration -- fired-up supporters using computer targeting the campaign has spent months putting together.

The move to the Invesco Field at Mile High stadium for the convention's final night next month -- at an additional cost of $5 million—will capture a huge crowd the Obama campaign plans to put to work. They'll be armed with data gleaned through "microtargeting" unregistered voters the campaign believes are ripe to back Obama if pressed to get on board.

What has the Democrats "micro-targeting" gleaned? By comparing registration lists with lists of potential voters gathered by mining consumer databases, deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand says the campaign has identified 55 million unregistered voters across the country, two-thirds of whom would vote for Obama if they were "registered and motivated." Like Nate Silver, the campaign sees the advantage in motivating underrepresented populations:

The campaign has found about 8.1 million unregistered yet eligible blacks, another 8 million unregistered Hispanics and nearly 7.5 million unregistered people between the ages of 18 and 24. Officials also are looking at more women versus men, more highly educated voters, people on fixed incomes and those who have moved across state lines in recent years and could change the voter makeup

Hildebrand's faith in the plan is obvious. "If we do this right," he says, "we'll be unbeatable."

FiveThirtyEight.com founder and Baseball Prospectus managing partner Nate Silver hit the cable networks this morning, appearing on CNN to give some of his state-by-state polling analysis. Check it out:

In other Poblano news, Silver has partnered up with The New Republic, where he'll have an in-print feature every week and will be cross-posting his morning polling wrap-ups.

For those interested in experimenting with his youth and minority turnout model, we posted an updated version earlier this week.

For those who've spent the past month toying endlessly with the youth and minority turnout model created by statistician and FiveThirtyEight.com author Nate Silver, boy have we got a treat for you: a new version of the model with updated baseline figures!

You can download it here. To play around with different turnout scenarios just change the percentages in the yellow box at the top and recalculate (hit F9 on a PC, or Command + = on a Mac).

Be sure to check out the profile of Silver in the latest issue of Newsweek (and, of course, my interview with him from last week).

Also, our own Adam Doster has an In These Times cover story on the potential of Barack Obama's "Vote for Change" 50-state voter registration drive. Adam prominently highlights our piece on the "Poblano Model." Here's an excerpt:

Vote for Change is the latest iteration of the Obama campaign’s comprehensive electoral ground game, one that will build off the methodical and underreported registration efforts staged by Obama supporters during the primary season. Just in the late contests alone, campaign volunteers enlisted 200,000 new Democrats in Pennsylvania, 165,000 in North Carolina and more than 150,000 in Indiana.

“Recent voter registration drives conducted by our campaign have registered significant numbers of voters across this country,” says Obama spokeswoman Shannon Gilson. “We feel like this really scratches the surface of what’s possible."

Be sure to jog over to FiveThirtyEight today and check out their new general election layout. It's nice. Very nice. Author Nate Silver (aka Poblano) has incorporated a few new features, including a "scenario analysis" and a map that illustrates how Obama and McCain are performing as compared to Kerry and Bush, respectively.

Also, you can find Silver's first column for The Guardian here and his New York Post op-ed here. The Wall Street Journal also profiled him earlier this week.

And finally, don't forget to check out my interview with him from earlier this week.