UI in the National Political News

June 2008

Gronbeck: electronic age makes marketing cheaper (Montreal Gazette, June 30)
Shoppers in New York City might be excused for mistaking Barack Obama for a cult hero in the league of Bob Marley or Che Guevara. Retailers in Manhattan and on the Internet are using creative slogans and images to profit from the image of the White House hopeful. There are campaign buttons, jewelry, teddy bears, even women's underwear thongs. As part of the campaign's efforts to reach out to small donors via the Internet, Web site barackobama.com also has a store offering products ranging from T-shirts to winter garb. "We now have the tremendous ability to market and in an electronic age to reproduce so much more cheaply than we did before," University of Iowa communications professor BRUCE GRONBECK said. This article originated with REUTERS. This article also appeared in YAHOO NEWS. Link to article

UI students express support for McCain (Inside Higher Ed, June 25)
In the weeks following Hillary Clinton's concession this month, rumors have been buzzing that disappointed supporters of the vanquished Democrat may cross party lines to support John McCain -- and in a few instances they have. In a letter last week to members Students for Hillary at the UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, the group's co-chairs, Cody Eliff and Nicole Dziuban, expressed their support for the Republican senator from Arizona. The letter cites reasons such as the unfair treatment of Clinton by the media and by the Obama campaign, as well as Obama being "unqualified" to be president. Link to article

Lewis-Beck forecasts election (Eureka!, June 23)
Anticipating what is likely to be one of the most interesting elections in modern history, University at Buffalo professor of political science James E. Campbell and MICHAEL S. LEWIS-BECK, professor of political science at the University of Iowa, have assembled the insights of prominent election forecasters in a special issue of the International Journal of Forecasting published this month. Eureka! originates in Canada. Link to article

Redlawsk studies voters' choices (Science News, June 20)
Political scientists are developing new methods to understand how voters make decisions. DAVID REDLAWSK of the University of Iowa and his collaborators use computers to model campaigns and track how people actually decide whom to vote for in mock elections. Link to article

Hagle comments on flood impact on politics (Washington Post, June 19)
Flooding in Iowa made political campaigning grind to a halt. "People have more important things to worry about, like getting their business and home taken care of," said University of Iowa associate professor of political science TIM HAGLE. Link to article

Peterson comments on political satire (Washington Post, June 12)
Can satirists affect our perceptions of the candidates? RUSSELL L. PETERSON, an American studies professor at the University of Iowa, believes comics who refute satire's power are purposefully insincere. "But they have a good reason for being disingenuous," adds the author of "Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke." "Their comic license depends on them denying that." Link to article

Redlawsk examines voter attitudes (RedOrbit.com, June 11)
The Pew Research Center found last month that 43 percent of those polled thought presidential candidate Barack Obama would be "not tough enough" on foreign policy, while 16 percent gave John McCain that label. The key motivation for this group, said DAVID REDLAWSK, a professor of political science at the University of Iowa, could rest on whether women value more Obama's promise of changes in the sluggish economy or McCain's image of strength and leadership. Link to article

IEM: traders bet Obama beats McCain in U.S. election (Yahoo/Reuters, June 5)
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will beat Republican John McCain in the November U.S. presidential election, prediction market traders were betting on Wednesday. Traders on the Dublin-based Intrade prediction market gave Obama a 61 percent chance of winning the November 4 election, versus a 35 percent chance for McCain. Traders on the IOWA ELECTRONIC MARKETS gave the Democrat an almost 62 percent chance of winning, versus a 39 percent chance for the Republican. Link to article

Neumann, Berg discuss IEM performance during primary season (MSNBC, June 4)
Now that Barack Obama has locked up the Democratic presidential nomination, electronic market experts are looking back to see how futures markets performed during the primary season. GEORGE NEUMANN, finance professor at the University of Iowa and a member of the Iowa Electronic Markets board of governors, sizes up the performance of the markets from a different perspective: How soon did the investors settle on a consensus pick? "The thing that impressed me was how quickly the markets selected the eventual winners," he said. JOYCE BERG, IEM director and accounting professor, is also quoted in the story. Link to article

IEM traders favor Obama in election (Boston Globe, June 4)
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will beat Republican John McCain in the November U.S. presidential election, prediction market traders were betting on Wednesday. Traders on the IOWA ELECTRONIC MARKETS gave the Democrat an almost 62 percent chance of winning, versus a 39 percent chance for the Republican. The article was distributed on the REUTERS newswire. Link to article

Berg: IEM investors not a random sample (American Conservative, June 2)
A story about prediction markets notes that the first political prediction market, the Iowa Electronic Markets, was started by a group of professors at the UNIVERSITY OF IOWA's business school. Joyce Berg, an accounting professor and IEM director, says that the people trading are nothing like a random sample of voters. "In 1988, everyone was from Iowa, and we only had 155 people in the voteshare market. Even now, when we have thousands of people in each market, we are not distributed among states by population. Our traders are overwhelmingly male. They have more education than the average voter. They have a higher income than the average voter. But the market mechanism is one where we don't need a random sample of voters, we need people with information." Link to article

Peterson book says political humor not funny (American Chronicle, June 2)
A review of "Strange Bedfellows" by University of Iowa professor RUSSELL L. PETERSON notes that many Americans gain the bulk of their political news from late-night comics. Subtitled How Late Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke, the book was published earlier this spring by the Princeton University Press. In it the author, a former political cartoonist, asks whether late-night comics are overstepping their bounds in poking fun at politicians and politics itself. If nothing else, Peterson's book demonstrates just how awful and unfunny the whole Leno/Letterman brand of "political humor" is. As Peterson points out, these comics and their writing staffs find one aspect of a politician's character -- George Bush Sr./wimp, Bill Clinton/horndog, George W. Bush/idiot -- and simply base simplistic "jokes" around that persona every night for a decade or more. The object is never to take any political stands, instead preferring to make fun of politics itself. Link to article

Redlawsk comments on Clinton/Obama prospects (Bloomberg, June 2)
Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary in Puerto Rico, but Barack Obama is on the verge of ensuring nomination. "It's pretty clear that once we get past the primaries, Obama will be very close to the new magic number," said DAVID REDLAWSK, a political science professor at the University of Iowa. "The pressure is on superdelegates to announce." Link to article