Dave Helling Misquotes Himself

On Wednesday, I did a brief post chiding Dave Helling for his sloppy research and factual misstatements in claiming that the turnout for the 2008 election will fall short of the turnout four years ago, in his post titled "Turnout lower than 2004?".

Yesterday, he defensively addressed the issue, and claimed that "I'll stick by my original post: While impressive, the actual 2008 turnout was not the overwhelming vote many predicted." But that's not what his original post claimed! Helling is trying to play off his blunder by backing away from his bold proclamation.

In his original post, he claimed " . . . it appears almost certain turnout for the 2008 election will fall short of the turnout four years ago, when George W. Bush beat John Kerry," and "Late returns may boost the turnout number a bit, but it appears unlikely it'll be more than 2004."

Now he's trying to pretend he only said turnout wasn't as large as expected. That's like writing a pre-season baseball article saying it is virtually certain that the Royals will win the World Series, and, at the end of the season, claiming that you are sticking with your original post that they would win a few more games than the previous year. Actually, that would be a little less egregious, in that everyone would know the baseball prognosticator was making a guess, while most people probably assumed that Dave Helling's post was based on real analysis of real numbers by someone who is paid to interpret them.

Humorously, he misquotes me, too, in a minor fashion, by claiming I said that everyone agrees with Dr. McDonald's prediction about voter turnout. I'm neither surprised nor upset by the minor misquotation, though, in light of his much more serious misquotation of himself. He got the gist of what I was saying correct, but he changed the entire import of his own post.

Meanwhile, Helling has no explanation whatsoever about the egregious factual mistake in the Star's editorial on the Storm Water Amendment.