[lbo-talk] Re: Americas Leftists, Michael Moore, and Ralph Nader and Walter Mondale

Simon Huxtable jetfromgladiators at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 14 08:47:24 PDT 2004


You're comparing apples and oranges. You're saying that, since F9/11 "polled" 3.7% of the population and Nader has been polling between 2 and 7%, we should judge them similarly. For a start Nader won 2.9m votes in 2000, compared to 11m (est.) for Moore, making Moore four times as popular.

But, to continue your logic:

Spiderman 2's gross for the first 12 days is $256.1m. Using your average price per ticket ($7.28) that means 35.2m viewers have seen the film (ignoring people who saw it twice), which is 8.3% of the population.

Spiderman 2 has proved to be less popular than Walter Mondale! But everybody calls Walter Mondale's run at the presidency a failure - even though it's incomparably more difficult to win electoral votes than make money at the box office! (I assume you mean for a third party candidate, in which case I agree that it's difficult, but hard to compare with the difficulty of making a film with a leftist viewpoint that actually tops the US box office in a time of media self-censorship) I don't know if this means Mondale should make a film or Spiderman 2 director Sam Raimi should be making a concession speech.

Some leftists need to become better at statistics :)

Simon


> From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Americas Leftists, Michael
> Moore, and Ralph Nader


> Fahrenheit 9/11's cumulative gross is now about
> $80,121,002
>
(<http://movies.yahoo.com/boxoffice/latest/rank.html>"Weekend
> Box
> Office Actuals [U.S.]: Jul 9 - 11 Weekend"</a>).
> That's
> approximately the sale of 11 million tickets --
> about 3.7% of the
> total US population of 293,729,072
> (<http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/popclock>).
>
> Since the announcement of his candidacy, Nader has
> polled in the 2-7%
> range of in the voter surveys (some of which polled
> registered
> voters, while others polled only likely voters
> <http://pollingreport.com/wh04gen.htm>) -- the total
> voting-age
> population was roughly 210 million individuals in
> 2000 ("Fact Sheet:
> The Demographics of Voting in America,"
>
<http://www.prcdc.org/summaries/voting/voting.html>).
>
> Therefore, it is safe to say that Michael Moore and
> Ralph Nader enjoy
> comparable levels of support among the general
> public in the United
> States. In fact, it is probably immensely more
> difficult to receive
> 2.7% of the total votes of the eligible electorate
> who actually
> register and vote in a presidential election (as
> Nader did in 2000)
> than to get 4% of the US population to go see a very
> well-made
> entertaining movie. And yet, observe opposite
> reactions on the part
> of US leftists (as evidenced by LBO-talk responses):
>
> * Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is so popular, and
> anyone who
> criticizes it in any way is simply a loser.
>
> * Ralph Nader is so unpopular, and anyone who
> supports him is simply a loser.
>
> If US leftists became better at arithmetics, perhaps
> we might one day
> enjoy the presence of an organized US left, even one
> that would
> present a sharp challenge to the bipartisan
> consensus for empire.
>

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