Nate Silver to the rescue. The poll I mentioned in an earlier post, conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow and in today’s Washington Post, may carry less weight than I thought (props to SelectiveEcho).
From FiveThirtyEight:
While it is dangerous to make inferences about the preferences of undecided voters [nearly 30% in the poll, along with 15% who refused to say], the fact that the Iranians in their survey did tend to favor reformist positions on most issues, and had generally tepid reviews of Mr. Ahmadinejad performance, would seem to provide a few hints. For example:
* 68 percent of respondents said they favoried Iran working with the United States to end the Iraq war;
* 77 percent favored normalized trade relations with the United States;
* 76 percent favor having the Supreme Leader be directly elected, rather than undemocratically appointed.And on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s performance:
* 45 percent said Ahmadinejad’s policies had succeeded in reducing unemployment; 44 percent said they had not succeeded;
* 28 percent said Ahmadinejad had fulfilled his promise to “put oil money on the tables of the people themselves”; 58 percent said he had not succeeded.[...]The swing votes in Iran are not those blue-haired ladies who take 40 minutes in the ballot booth and call the election clerk over every few minutes. They are rather the perhaps 30 percent of the population who were trying weigh the potential risk to their persons or their standing in the community in voting against Mr. Ahmadinejad, against what might be a relatively small benefit in voting for Mr. Mousavi, whose reforms could be easily vetoed by the Ayatollah. These swing voters may also have been worried that their votes wouldn’t have been counted anyway: about one-third of Iranians in the survey didn’t believe, didn’t say or didn’t know whether they expected to have a free and fair election.
You might want to check these out, too:
Tags: ahmedinejad · foreign affairs · iran · mousavi1 Comment
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