Recently, because nothing makes you flip on CNN or buy a newspaper more than a white-knuckle dead heat, the mainstream media have been making a lot of noise about the Presidential race being "essentially tied". Some have then had the temerity to ask, "Given how strongly Democratic a year this is, what's wrong with Obama that he isn't farther ahead?"
All this is, frankly, a wagon load of chicken manure. For your reading pleasure, here are five reasons why:
1) The electoral map. First of all, ignore national tracking polls (see #2 & 4, below). They don't mean anything. We don't elect the President in a national election. We do it state by state, in a race to 270 electors. To get a real read on how this race is going, go to www.fivethirtyeight.com (https://www.waccobb.net/forums/www.fivethirtyeight.com). This is Nate Silver, a nationally recognized statistical analyst (he created a model for predicting performance of individual baseball players which has revolutionized sports betting), whose analysis outperformed all the major polling outfits in the primary season. Obama's chance of winning has been up around 60% or higher for a long, long time. When you look at the specific states McCain needs to carry to win, and consider their demographics--especially in light of the Palin pick--it's a very uphill battle for him to pull it off.
2) Sampling. Other than the fact that they are measuring something that isn't relevant except for making a complicated contest into an oversimplified horse race, national polls are useless this year particularly because there is no way to know how to develop an appropriate sample. Polls test opinions of "likely voters" that the polling company has been able to get to talk to them. But everyone knows that this year, any established model for what constitutes a "likely voter" is out the window. Young people are voting in droves. African-American turnout is up as much as 20% in some places. And polling firms are still living in the 90s: they think they can get an accurate sample of voters by calling people, but they don't have cell phone numbers, and most young people have cell phones, not landlines. This skews the sample away from a key Obama demographic, just because pollsters can't find a way to reach them.
3) The ground game. Obama isn't pouring all his money into just advertising: for the first time in decades, his is a campaign that believes in grassroots organizing and is opening hundreds of offices nationwide to do it. The scale of this operation is ten times that of McCain's. That means that in terms of personal contacts--door-knocking, phone-calling--Obama will swamp McCain between now and the election, and will have a get-out-the-vote effort unlike anything we've ever seen before. Person-to-person contacts are vastly more persuasive than 30-second TV spots, pundit bloviating, media coverage or mail. It's the gold standard of campaigning.
4) Registration drives. This is another x-factor for pollsters--there are vast numbers of new voters registering throughout the country (largely due to a $10 million effort of the Obama campaign), and by sizable proportions, they're registering Dem or Independent. Pollsters have no way of knowing if these new registrants are "likely voters" or not, since they have no voting record, so they tend to grossly underestimate how many of them will go to the polls. But this year, the reason people are registering is because of their enthusiasm (more on that in a minute)--typically for Obama--or because they're so galvanized by the mess the Republicans have made. Which brings me to...
5) A majority of the public links McCain's policies to Bush's. Yep, that's right. They do. Personally, I don't believe there is any force on earth that can wash that stink off him. Certainly not his hail-Mary Veep pick.
Okay, and one more, a freebie:
6) The enthusiasm gap. Obama's base is "very enthusiastic" about their ticket by a margin of more than 20% more than is McCain's base enthusiastic about theirs. Enthusiasm translates into volunteers, turnout and--in Obama's case, as he is not taking public financing--money.
What this boils down to is that if you support Obama, you still need to do what you were going to do: volunteer, give money, tell your friends, reply to the scurrilous Internet rumor emails with the facts, all that. But recently, it seems people have gotten panicky--about VP choices, about "rifts in the Party" (another media creation, with Obama beating McCain by 12 points among women, and 87% of Clinton supporters now on board with Obama).
So work hard, but relax a little. Conditions are excellent.
Mike Peterson
09-01-2008, 11:49 PM
And as of today, Monday, the first day of the Republican chaos event with Hurricane Palin, the presidential race has become a no contest comedy show of Republicans hitting their heads on the wall, in unison!
Oh, man, am I digging it! Woo hoo!
Mike
Recently, because nothing makes you flip on CNN or buy a newspaper more than a white-knuckle dead heat, the mainstream media have been making a lot of noise about the Presidential race being "essentially tied". Some have then had the temerity to ask, "Given how strongly Democratic a year this is, what's wrong with Obama that he isn't farther ahead?"
All this is, frankly, a wagon load of chicken manure. For your reading pleasure, here are five reasons why:
1) The electoral map. First of all, ignore national tracking polls (see #2 & 4, below). They don't mean anything. We don't elect the President in a national election. We do it state by state, in a race to 270 electors. To get a real read on how this race is going, go to www.fivethirtyeight.com (https://www.waccobb.net/forums/www.fivethirtyeight.com). This is Nate Silver, a nationally recognized statistical analyst (he created a model for predicting performance of individual baseball players which has revolutionized sports betting), whose analysis outperformed all the major polling outfits in the primary season. Obama's chance of winning has been up around 60% or higher for a long, long time. When you look at the specific states McCain needs to carry to win, and consider their demographics--especially in light of the Palin pick--it's a very uphill battle for him to pull it off.
2) Sampling. Other than the fact that they are measuring something that isn't relevant except for making a complicated contest into an oversimplified horse race, national polls are useless this year particularly because there is no way to know how to develop an appropriate sample. Polls test opinions of "likely voters" that the polling company has been able to get to talk to them. But everyone knows that this year, any established model for what constitutes a "likely voter" is out the window. Young people are voting in droves. African-American turnout is up as much as 20% in some places. And polling firms are still living in the 90s: they think they can get an accurate sample of voters by calling people, but they don't have cell phone numbers, and most young people have cell phones, not landlines. This skews the sample away from a key Obama demographic, just because pollsters can't find a way to reach them.
3) The ground game. Obama isn't pouring all his money into just advertising: for the first time in decades, his is a campaign that believes in grassroots organizing and is opening hundreds of offices nationwide to do it. The scale of this operation is ten times that of McCain's. That means that in terms of personal contacts--door-knocking, phone-calling--Obama will swamp McCain between now and the election, and will have a get-out-the-vote effort unlike anything we've ever seen before. Person-to-person contacts are vastly more persuasive than 30-second TV spots, pundit bloviating, media coverage or mail. It's the gold standard of campaigning.
4) Registration drives. This is another x-factor for pollsters--there are vast numbers of new voters registering throughout the country (largely due to a $10 million effort of the Obama campaign), and by sizable proportions, they're registering Dem or Independent. Pollsters have no way of knowing if these new registrants are "likely voters" or not, since they have no voting record, so they tend to grossly underestimate how many of them will go to the polls. But this year, the reason people are registering is because of their enthusiasm (more on that in a minute)--typically for Obama--or because they're so galvanized by the mess the Republicans have made. Which brings me to...
5) A majority of the public links McCain's policies to Bush's. Yep, that's right. They do. Personally, I don't believe there is any force on earth that can wash that stink off him. Certainly not his hail-Mary Veep pick.
Okay, and one more, a freebie:
6) The enthusiasm gap. Obama's base is "very enthusiastic" about their ticket by a margin of more than 20% more than is McCain's base enthusiastic about theirs. Enthusiasm translates into volunteers, turnout and--in Obama's case, as he is not taking public financing--money.
What this boils down to is that if you support Obama, you still need to do what you were going to do: volunteer, give money, tell your friends, reply to the scurrilous Internet rumor emails with the facts, all that. But recently, it seems people have gotten panicky--about VP choices, about "rifts in the Party" (another media creation, with Obama beating McCain by 12 points among women, and 87% of Clinton supporters now on board with Obama).
So work hard, but relax a little. Conditions are excellent.
beatricepenelope
09-06-2008, 12:57 AM
Wow, SonomaMark, you know how to navigate to the Gallup website!
You must be SMART!
Recently, because nothing makes you flip on CNN or buy a newspaper more than a white-knuckle dead heat, the mainstream media have been making a lot of noise about the Presidential race being "essentially tied". Some have then had the temerity to ask, "Given how strongly Democratic a year this is, what's wrong with Obama that he isn't farther ahead?"
All this is, frankly, a wagon load of chicken manure. For your reading pleasure, here are five reasons why:
1) The electoral map. First of all, ignore national tracking polls (see #2 & 4, below). They don't mean anything. We don't elect the President in a national election. We do it state by state, in a race to 270 electors. To get a real read on how this race is going, go to www.fivethirtyeight.com (https://www.waccobb.net/forums/www.fivethirtyeight.com). This is Nate Silver, a nationally recognized statistical analyst (he created a model for predicting performance of individual baseball players which has revolutionized sports betting), whose analysis outperformed all the major polling outfits in the primary season. Obama's chance of winning has been up around 60% or higher for a long, long time. When you look at the specific states McCain needs to carry to win, and consider their demographics--especially in light of the Palin pick--it's a very uphill battle for him to pull it off.
2) Sampling. Other than the fact that they are measuring something that isn't relevant except for making a complicated contest into an oversimplified horse race, national polls are useless this year particularly because there is no way to know how to develop an appropriate sample. Polls test opinions of "likely voters" that the polling company has been able to get to talk to them. But everyone knows that this year, any established model for what constitutes a "likely voter" is out the window. Young people are voting in droves. African-American turnout is up as much as 20% in some places. And polling firms are still living in the 90s: they think they can get an accurate sample of voters by calling people, but they don't have cell phone numbers, and most young people have cell phones, not landlines. This skews the sample away from a key Obama demographic, just because pollsters can't find a way to reach them.
3) The ground game. Obama isn't pouring all his money into just advertising: for the first time in decades, his is a campaign that believes in grassroots organizing and is opening hundreds of offices nationwide to do it. The scale of this operation is ten times that of McCain's. That means that in terms of personal contacts--door-knocking, phone-calling--Obama will swamp McCain between now and the election, and will have a get-out-the-vote effort unlike anything we've ever seen before. Person-to-person contacts are vastly more persuasive than 30-second TV spots, pundit bloviating, media coverage or mail. It's the gold standard of campaigning.
4) Registration drives. This is another x-factor for pollsters--there are vast numbers of new voters registering throughout the country (largely due to a $10 million effort of the Obama campaign), and by sizable proportions, they're registering Dem or Independent. Pollsters have no way of knowing if these new registrants are "likely voters" or not, since they have no voting record, so they tend to grossly underestimate how many of them will go to the polls. But this year, the reason people are registering is because of their enthusiasm (more on that in a minute)--typically for Obama--or because they're so galvanized by the mess the Republicans have made. Which brings me to...
5) A majority of the public links McCain's policies to Bush's. Yep, that's right. They do. Personally, I don't believe there is any force on earth that can wash that stink off him. Certainly not his hail-Mary Veep pick.
Okay, and one more, a freebie:
6) The enthusiasm gap. Obama's base is "very enthusiastic" about their ticket by a margin of more than 20% more than is McCain's base enthusiastic about theirs. Enthusiasm translates into volunteers, turnout and--in Obama's case, as he is not taking public financing--money.
What this boils down to is that if you support Obama, you still need to do what you were going to do: volunteer, give money, tell your friends, reply to the scurrilous Internet rumor emails with the facts, all that. But recently, it seems people have gotten panicky--about VP choices, about "rifts in the Party" (another media creation, with Obama beating McCain by 12 points among women, and 87% of Clinton supporters now on board with Obama).
So work hard, but relax a little. Conditions are excellent.
Sonomamark
09-06-2008, 10:52 PM
Actually, I don't read the Gallup site. Individual polling outfits don't provide information that's sufficiently reliable, which is why I recommend sites like fivethirtyeight.com.
The analysis in the post you snarked was mine. If it matched Gallup's, well...gosh, you've convinced me, I guess I must be smart.
You, on the other hand, leapt to a conclusion with insufficient cause, and shot your mouth off based on that conclusion. You might be smart--hard to tell, with a one-sentence playground putdown--but a bit of remedial critical thinking training may be in order.
Have a nice day! :wink:
SM
Wow, SonomaMark, you know how to navigate to the Gallup website!
You must be SMART!
Braggi
09-18-2008, 07:09 AM
https://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
A McCain supporter would take comfort in this poll today.
It's hard to imagine this is reality in light of recent Bush administration failures.
-Jeff
[edit] Thankfully, this website's prediction has changed for the better making my post outdated. Whew!
Sonomamark
09-18-2008, 12:22 PM
Bear in mind, Jeff, that fivethirtyeight ISN'T a poll. It's a statistical analysis model which uses data from many polls, weighting them by their past reliability and in the context of demographics, state by state.
As such, it takes awhile for a shift to show in its results. It takes several days of poll numbers to move the 538 numbers--they've already begun to move back toward Obama, and they will continue to as the growing number of polls showing McCain rapidly sinking are weighted more and more heavily in the modeling. You need to remember that the 538 model is still using some data that's more than a week old, during the height of the Palin bounce. That is over in the recent polls, and, in fact, her negatives have now risen such that they are higher than any of the other four ticket toppers.
Give it a few days. Especially with the new polls in VA, NM, OH and FL, that projection is going to swing hard back over to Obama. He's already got the Kerry states plus Iowa and New Mexico sewn up. All he needs then is either Virginia or Colorado, and he's there. He doesn't even need to carry either Ohio or Florida.
From where I sit, this is looking pretty good.
https://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
A McCain supporter would take comfort in this poll today.
It's hard to imagine this is reality in light of recent Bush administration failures.
-Jeff
Sonomamark
09-18-2008, 03:57 PM
I should have waited three hours, and my point would have been made for me.
From DailyKos:
At Nate Silver's great site https://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ there was a dramatic change in the last few hours.
Earlier today, his projection had Obama with a 45% chance of winning. His latest update has Obama with a better than 61% chance of winning.
We have to wait for Nate's update to fully understand the drivers, but key were new polls in the Midwest and Colorado, together with steady progress in the national polls.
<!-- polls come after this -->
Note that the electoral vote projections there are averages across many scenarios, not the single most likely outcome (which is that big spike in his simulation graph showing a high chance of a narrow Obama win).
To add some context, here's Eric Kleefeld over at [Talking Points Memo (https://www.talkingpointsmemo.com)]:
Obama Expanding His Lead In The Tracking Polls
By Eric Kleefeld - September 18, 2008, 1:56PM
Here's a wrap-up of the four major national tracking polls for today, with all four of them showing some small positive movement for Barack Obama as he expands his recently regained national lead:
Gallup: Obama 48%, McCain 44%, with a ±2% margin of error. Yesterday, Obama moved into a narrow lead of 47%-45%.
Rasmussen: McCain 48%, Obama 48%, with a ±2% margin of error. Yesterday, McCain had a bare edge of 48%-47%.
Hotline/Diageo: Obama 46%, McCain 42%, with a ±3.2% margin of error. Yesterday, Obama was up 45%-42%.
Research 2000: Obama 49%, McCain 43%, with a ±3% margin of error. Yesterday, Obama was up 48%-44%.
Adding these polls together and weighting them by sample sizes, Obama is now ahead by a margin of 47.9%-45.1%, compared to yesterday's lead of 46.9%-45.6%
https://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpoi... (https://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/obama_expanding_his_lead_in_th.php)
But again, remember that the tracking polls are only about the national popular vote. You can win that and not win the election. Watch the state polling: Obama is starting to move in the battleground states.
Ground game, baby.
https://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
A McCain supporter would take comfort in this poll today.
It's hard to imagine this is reality in light of recent Bush administration failures.
-Jeff
Braggi
09-18-2008, 10:32 PM
Bear in mind, Jeff, that fivethirtyeight ISN'T a poll. ... He doesn't even need to carry either Ohio or Florida.
From where I sit, this is looking pretty good.
Aha. Thanks for that reality check.
Hopefully all will go well, he can take office, and quit trying to act like a hawk.
-Jeff
Sonomamark
09-19-2008, 12:10 PM
You know, he is not going to be a raving liberal on every issue. He's serious about bringing people together, and that means that conservatives will have a place at the table.
On the other hand, he's also very serious about a return to the Roosevelt vision of the role of government. This market-force-rules-all crap will be over when he takes office, and I think we will see a renewed active role for government in health care, energy, environmental protection, regulation of markets, worker safety and labor issues. Not to mention a huge rollback of the Bush disaster's regulations, executive orders, "signing statements" and extralegal programs.
He will disappoint us sometimes. He strikes me as a sober, thoughtful, judicious person who isn't going to fly off on some ideological tangent, and at times, those of us more out on the narrow end of the political bell curve will want him to do more than he's willing to. I expect he will instead pursue practical policies rooted in his democratic (small "d") and populist values, and in factual truth. The good news for us is that that will be a huge change in our direction.
SM
Aha. Thanks for that reality check.
Hopefully all will go well, he can take office, and quit trying to act like a hawk.
-Jeff
Mike Peterson
09-19-2008, 01:00 PM
This sounds on target to me. One of the issues that is troublesome to most Americans, that of big government, does not bother me at all and it excites me in a positive way to hear that Obama is driven by a New Deal vision of our republic.
Mike
You know, he is not going to be a raving liberal on every issue. He's serious about bringing people together, and that means that conservatives will have a place at the table.
On the other hand, he's also very serious about a return to the Roosevelt vision of the role of government. This market-force-rules-all crap will be over when he takes office, and I think we will see a renewed active role for government in health care, energy, environmental protection, regulation of markets, worker safety and labor issues. Not to mention a huge rollback of the Bush disaster's regulations, executive orders, "signing statements" and extralegal programs.
He will disappoint us sometimes. He strikes me as a sober, thoughtful, judicious person who isn't going to fly off on some ideological tangent, and at times, those of us more out on the narrow end of the political bell curve will want him to do more than he's willing to. I expect he will instead pursue practical policies rooted in his democratic (small "d") and populist values, and in factual truth. The good news for us is that that will be a huge change in our direction.