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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

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Winning is Losing Unless You Win

By Matthew Yglesias

Jul 9 2008, 10:05 AM ET Comment

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Barack Obama's lead in the polls is good news for his prospects, right? Wrong, says Gallup, who points out that the July polling leader lost in six of the last nine competitive US presidential elections. It seems to me that Gallup is generating a spurious level of counterintuitiveness through use of the "competitive" qualifier. If you look at the most recent fifteen presidential elections, the July polling leader has won big six times, won narrowly three times, and lost narrowly six times. That gives you the totally intuitive result that leading in July is better news that losing in July, but that it doesn't guarantee anything.

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