So, my addiction to fivethirtyeight.com continues. Four years ago I was watching electoral-vote.com pretty closely, but FiveThirtyEight is more satisfying somehow. I think I appreciate the effort of making models, as opposed to simple poll tracking. I don't mind watching the good news, either.

I'm slowly working on figuring out California's propositions, though I'm running into some complications. My particular strategy for informing myself doesn't make it easy -- I make a gut decision, and then try to find substantive arguments against it. It works pretty well, but when it feels like both sides of the arguments are oversimplifying issues and the proposition is absurdly long, it can get pretty frustrating. (I'm looking at you, Prop 5.) All things being equal, though, I can fall back on my opinion that the populace really shouldn't be making legislation directly, nor should changing California's Constitution be so easy.

Local candidates remain a mystery. I've been getting flyers in the mail listing endorsements, purchased promotion, and purchased "endorsements". The last one I find rather distasteful, though I'm feeling a bit of cognitive dissonance, having more sympathy for the purchased promotions (wanting for a better word). Even though they were really only a little bit less misleading, I agreed with them more. What I really would like to see is something pointing out where candidates disagree (if they even do). As it is, it feels like I might as well flip a coin.