The Liberal Crab’s Poll of “Poll of Polls” – 31 October 2008

Popular Vote

Obama – 50.5% +6.3

McCain – 44.2%

Electoral College

Obama – 356

McCain – 182

Good news from the popular voting front.  It appears that McCain’s march to tighten the popular vote has stalled out over the last few days.  Obama picked up .1% and McCain dropped .1% since yesterday.  For five days, McCain’s support has remained between 44.3-44.4%.  Unless the polls are incorrect, it looks like McCain’s ceiling may have been slightly lower than the 46% we saw back in September.  The bottom line is that Obama’s support has been solid above the 50% line.  This is great news as it guarantees a popular vote win (providing the numbers hold), regardless how the late independents break.  I tend to think they will break for McCain, but it won’t be in the 75% range.  Also remember, that this is a two person horse race in most polls.  Add Barr and Nader and I think you will see a net -1% for McCain.  McCain now has to make up over 2% per day to capture the popular vote lead.  That looks very unlikely.

We finally see some movement in the Electoral College numbers.  Obama’s lost 4 more EV’s and that’s a total of 9 since last week.  This has been soley the result of a gradual move from each pollster  of Indiana from Obama to McCain.  For the last week I’ve warned we’d probably see Obama finish in the 330’s-340’s for the final poll on Monday.  I still think that will happen based on where Missouri and North Carolina end up (a total of 26 electoral votes).   Regardless, everything remains stable.  The polls don’t appear tightening to any significant degree. Pennsylvania remains solid.  Colorado and Nevada have strengthened for Obama.  Virginia also remains steady.  Obama is also now looking at outside chances of picking up Montana, North Dakota and perhaps Arizona.  The bigger news is that McCain hasn’t pressured any states that Obama ‘needs’ to win back into a tight race.

As my previous post has indicated, if you believe the polls (and I do) then this race is essentially over.  I think even if there was an October surprise, it would be difficult to have McCain come back (depending on what the surprise was).  The only type of surprise that probably could cost Obama the election is one that directly implicates him in something nefarious or awful.  Looking at how the Bin Laden tape of 2004 and the drunk driving arrest affected the last two races, it probably moved the race only a 1-2%.  That would still give Obama a comfortable lead.

Karl Rove’s Electoral Map

For those who want to see Dr. Evil’s map, I am including it below:

 

 

I like Rove’s map because he puts the % that the candidates are up.  You need 270 to win.  McCain needs to win all the ‘yellow’ states and then pick off 41 more Electoral Votes.  If he takes Pennsylvania – he’d still need to get Ohio.  If he gets Ohio, but not PA, he’ll need to take Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.  He could also take  Ohio, Virginia and Nevada.  Here’s the problem, if the polls are correct, he is not going to make up 11 points in Pennsylvania.

There is definitely a doable strategy for McCain – but he’s got to be perfect.  He’s got nine or ten states he is either behind or tied that he needs to win.  And in all the ‘toss-up’ states, except Montana, he is statistically insignificantly behind.

How tough is it to win those states?  Rove’s map matches nearly everyone else’s – including Real Clear Politics (RCP).  In 2004, the RCP map got only one state wrong in their prediction – Wisconsin.  It went for Kerry when they had predicted Bush.  More comparisons.  In 2004, about a week out, the Electoral College was split 234 for Bush, and 211 for Kerry.  McCain only has 157 in his column.  In addition, in every single toss-up state (except Wisconsin), the candidate who was leading – no matter how slightly – won that state.

The question you need to ask yourself is whether or not you believe the polls.  Do you believe in a Bradley Effect?  Do you not believe more Democrats will show up than in 2004? Do you believe that the youth and African American population will increase?  If you do, then the race is over.  If you don’t, then it still is going to be tight.

My theory is based on a finding by Karl Rove on his website:

There has been an explosion of polls this presidential election. Through yesterday, there have been 728 national polls with head-to-head matchups of the candidates, 215 in October alone. In 2004, there were just 239 matchup polls, with 67 of those in October. At this rate, there may be almost as many national polls in October of 2008 as there were during the entire year in 2004.

There are two factors that tend to have me believing the polls.  The first is there are a lot more of them this year.  We do not know the quality of them, as Karl Rove goes on to say in his article, but the fact is they all tend to be in alignment – somewhat.  That is, the traditional pollsters who have good reputations are showing the same basic results as the new ones.  At the National level – McCain has not led one poll in over a month.  That’s 215 polls.  Not one outlier shows McCain with a lead.  Second, there is a little more variability in the state polls, but the outliers are at both extremes and if you go to the mean, I believe you got the right result.  Look, if you have three pollsters who are doing the polling, there’s a good chane their methodology could be wrong.  But when you have 15-20 pollsters in a state, this will reduce variability.  We see some extremes in the state polls, but most are around what the mean ends up being.

The second factor is I believe the pollsters are getting better.  Polling is a science.  The pollsters are learning from each other (e.g. cell phones, etc.) and improving the quality from mistakes they have made in previous elections.  A ‘Dewey Wins’ banner will never again occur the same way it did in 1948 when they stopped polling a week out. They learned.  They learned in 2000 and in 2004.  Additionally, folks like Nate Silver and Sam Wang and Mark Blumenthal have made a science out of projections based on multiple polls.  They’ve also helped keep pollsters honest and throwing out bad polls.

Believing the polls are acurate, means I believe Obama will win this election.  There are too many states that the pollsters would have to be wrong about for Obama to lose.  It’s not like 2000 or 2004 when it was going to come down to 1 or 2 states.  No, for McCain to win, it has to come down to 9 or 10 states.  Thinking of how close Ohio and Florida (and New Mexico) were in the previous election cycles – it’s hard to believe that McCain would come out on the right side of all those close battles.

Keep Donating?

The GOP and main stream media have done a great job of confusing the issue with regard to money being spent by the campaigns.  In actuality, the funds advantage goes to McCain and the Republicans.  As of October 15th, McCain had $84M and Obama had $76M (he spent $105M for the first half of October).  Why are the numbers so different than what’s being reported?  This takes into consideration donations to the National Committees.  While they cannot use the money directly for the candidates, they can make the case and their ads are no less powerful than the candidates.

So believe it or not, please donate (if you can) to the campaign TODAY.  Per the article below, you can see that McCain is committing more than Obama in battleground states for the weekend. A few more dollars can at least keep the advertising equal.  The election is too close in some of these states and the ad advantage may make the difference.

From Jonathan Martin at Politico:

McCain/RNC put more money on TV

 

Obama still enjoys an advantage on the airwaves, but McCain and the RNC are using the last few days of the campaign to spend their remaining dollars trying to catch up in a handful of key states.   The money is in part being re-allocated from states that are increasingly seen as out of reach.

Brad Todd, who runs the RNC’s independent expenditure arm, told me that they would ultimately be up in Ohio, Florida and Virginia with between 2,000-2,500 points — a saturation buy that ensures voters won’t miss the GOP message.

AP’s Jim Kuhnhenn has more:

After weeks of being out-advertised by Barack Obama, Republican presidential candidate John McCain and the Republican Party are nearly matching the Democratic nominee ad for ad in key battleground markets.

Ad spending and ad placement data obtained from Democratic and Republican operatives show that in the closing days of the campaign the Republican voice has grown louder in states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

For instance, Obama had been scheduled to buy about $2.5 million in Florida ads for the last week of the campaign. McCain is now set to spend about $1.6 million and the Republican National Committee added $1.5 million to their buy in the state this week. Obama appears to have added more weight to his ads since.

The ad war is especially noticeable in Florida’s central corridor, which includes Tampa, Orlando and West Palm Beach.

Those near-parity levels in crucial states come with a price. McCain has had to trim back his ads in Minnesota, Maine, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, giving Obama even greater edges there.

A map of the states where McCain and the RNC are spending their money also illustrates the defensive nature of their 11th hour strategy. Except for Pennsylvania, the McCain-GOP focus was on trying to hold states that President Bush won in 2004.

The Liberal Crab’s Poll of “Poll of Polls” – 30 October 2008

Popular Vote

Obama – 50.4% +6.1%

McCain – 44.3%

Electoral Vote

Obama – 360

McCain – 178

The race for the popular vote has some what steadied out now.  McCain was down .1% and Obama was even.  This is the fourth straight day where McCain has been between 43.3% and 43.4%.  Not much movement.  He’s got four campaigning days left, which means he needs to gain 1.5% every day.  But looking over the 19 days the poll has reported, Obama is down .2% and McCain up .6% – a net of less than 1%.  Looking at the polls today, they were flat to slightly leaning toward Obama.  That’s a good sign.  Some of the Poll of Polls has Obama above 50%, some right below 50%.  That threshold is important as it wouldn’t matter how the undecideds broke – particularly with his lead in the Electoral College.  I suspect the polls will point up slightly for Obama tomorrow, based on his Obama-on-the-air-all-the-time technique he’s been employing.  I do caution, I believe there is probably another 2% of McCain support that will ‘come home’ to him prior to the election.  I also believe Obama will stay at about 50%.  The one question – why can’t McCain gain back that 2%?  I think there is an aspect to the McCain support that hasn’t been analyzed yet and maybe influencing why he can’t get above 45%.

Is there anything really to say about the Electoral College?  It really hasn’t changed.  The state polls are probably trending more to Obama.  At the very least, they aren’t tightening.  McCain still needs to flip six states in four days – this includes winning Pennsylvania.  Obama has 311 Electoral Votes in states where he has at least 50% of the vote.  McCain can still win – but everything has to go right for him.  But it’s not impossible

Respected Economics/World Magazine Endorses Obama

The Economist, one of the most influential and important magazine about economics (and Conservative leaning), as well as politics, had this to say today:

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economistdoes not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence.

But their rationale was one of the most powerful arguments I’ve ever heard for making the choice:

Yet there are also longer-term challenges, worth stressing if only because they have been so ignored on the campaign. Jump forward to 2017, when the next president will hope to relinquish office. A combination of demography and the rising costs of America’s huge entitlement programmes—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—will be starting to bankrupt the country. Abroad a greater task is already evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with Guantánamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and strategy…Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?).

Added to that, the Economist goes on to say:

Is Mr Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy is a sham. America’s allies would rally to him: the global electoral college on our website shows a landslide in his favour. At home he would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wound left by America’s history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism.

While middle America may not read the Economist (and I don’t make it a regular habit as much as I should), their opinion matters.  Their reputation is beyond reproach.  But what struck me about their endorsement was the clear illustration of why we need a man like Barack Obama in the White House.   Every election we talk about how this election is the most important of our lifetime.  This one truly has that impact.  No more talk about this being important because an undefined reason like “who should lead us in to the 21st Century?”  Our problems are huge – an economy teetering on the brink of a world-wide collapse the world has never seen, very evident examples of global warming, an extremely low opinion around the world for being an aggressor, terrorists taking aim at our people, and dwindling natural resources.

Think very carefuly about how you make your decision for president.  Do you want a 72 year old man who is living very much in the past and has shown no real acceptance to 21st century technology and ideals? Or do you want a 47 year old president who has taken advantage of every technology to push his campaign and agenda forward?  Someone who is willing to consider out of the box thinking to get the job done?

The Economist was right.  McCain may have been the right President eight years ago to lead us into the 21 century when we were the kings of the world.  We now need a president who is pragmatic to solve our problems, but inspirational to uplift our spirits that have been trampled over the last eight years.

Oops – How Embrarrassing

I don’t know if I’d chalk this error up to tiredness.  I think it is a campaign that has poor communication.  Keep in mind, after Joe’s rants over the last couple of days…the McCain campaign may want a lower profilefor the actual ‘Joe the Plumber’

Two Great Obama Ads

Credit to diarist Slinkerwink at Daily Kos for posting these two ads.

I concur with his opinion that these are two powerful ads.

 

Just continues to prove the effectivness of his campaign.  The first ad really bring shome the promise of America.  The second one does a tremendous job of tying Bush to McCain.

The Liberal Crab’s Poll of “Poll of Polls” – 29 October 2008

Popular Vote

Obama – 50.4% +6.1%

McCain – 44.4%

Electoral College

Obama – 360

McCain – 178

Very bizarre night.  I couldn’t get my polling numbers until after midnight, then my computer lost my data file, and the editor for the blog is acting funky.  Anyway, on to the analysis.

This was Obama’s third worst polling day and tied for his worst day-over-day drop (.7%).  On the surface it looks like there isn’t a lot of good news for Obama.  Any good news, probably not?  But, the ‘ok’ news is two fold.  First, this is the third day in a row where McCain’s support has been flat.  That is never a good sign when you are trying to make up ground with so few days left.   Second, Obama’s drop did not correlate with a McCain gain.  What does that mean?  It means Obama lost some support but it wasn’t picked up by McCain.  These voters are still considering Obama and may constitute some of his ‘soft’ support – similar to what we’ve talked about with McCain.  He is still .2% above his lowest number over the last 17 days.  McCain now has five campaigning days left to gain 6 points.  That’s 1.2% per day.  Since the polls started tightening over the weekend, he’s only gained about .36% per day.  If there is closing, though, this rate will probably accelerate as undecideds start making their decision.  But still, 1% each day may be tough.  Additionally, these trackers are either 3 or 5 days worth of polling.  Which means each day is worth about 1/3 of the poll numbers.  Most polls were flat today and some of Obama’s strongest numbers from early in the weekend have dropped off.  What that means is that we’ll probably see no change in the polls tomorrow or a slight uptick for Obama – I’ll leave all the math reasoning out, for now.  If that premise is right, McCain will have not made an impact for yet another day.

The Electoral College tells a whole different story.  We *still* see no tightening in the state polls.  I have professed the ‘lag’ theory in state polling, which means it takes some times for national poll tightening to occur at the state level.  That has changed a bit as we reach the final stretch of the election.  There were 45 new state polls out today.  This is different from a couple of weeks ago when there might be 4-5 per day.  Polling is much more real-time now.  The point?  Have confidence that the race is about where the Electoral College says it currently stands.  As my graph shows, it really hasn’t changed in 17 days.  I still maintain you will see a drop to the 340’s sometime in the next few days.  I believe North Carolina and Missouri will probably drop out of Obama’s column.

Looking at the individual state polls, the news is nearly all good for Obama.  He is growing his leads in Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada.  He seems to be growing a decent lead in Ohio and gaining more ground in Florida.  Pennsylvania’s new polls shows double digit leads for Obama.  Virginia continues to remain a solid high single digit lead for Obama.

So how can the national polls differ from the story in the Electoral College?  Well, the most common theory is that the red states are getting more red.  Obama’s support is enthusiastic and strong.  He is already over 50% and his base is strongly with him and planning to vote.  McCain is reacquiring his ‘soft’ support.  Much of this is in ‘red’ states.  I suspect if you had polls out in Texas, Utah, and Oklahoma, you’d see his leads getting stronger.  Somewhat offsetting that is Obama’s small, but improving, positive position in key battleground states.  That’s why Obama’s numbers remain stable, while McCain’s improve.

Here’s the warm fuzzy picture:  Obama will win all Kerry states – 253 Electoral Votes.  He will also pick-up Iowa – 260 Electoral Votes. At that point, he needs ten more.  He can take Virginia, where leads about 7.  He can take a combination of (two of three) Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico – where he leads all by about 7 points.  He can take Ohio where he leads by about 6 or Florida where he leads about 4.  He could also still take Missouri or Indiana – both basically toss-ups.  Or, he can come from slightly behind in North Carolina.  The moral of the story is that if he holds Pennsylvania (which is about a ten point lead), he will win.

I am just not sure how McCain can come back in the Electoral College in five days.  However, it is politics and anything can happen.  Finally, if there is any ‘bump’ (and I think there will be one) from tonight’s Obamamercial, we won’t see any real effects until Friday and won’t fully be in the numbers until Sunday.

The Importance of “Selling Obama”

Tonight’s half hour program ‘presented by BarackObama’ is more than a ‘luxury’ as some have stated (or as Elizabeth Hasslback commented – ‘repulsive’). Some have even argued that it is a risk.  However, this program may go down as single most memorable moment of the campaign.  Not because he will have moved mountains and it’s impact will not be fully realized until after November 4th.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was trailing Jimmy Carter by 8 points in October.  They had one debate on October 29th (same as tonight).  On November 4th(same date as this year),  Reagan won by 10 points.  With that debate, Reagan was able to sell the American people on his vision and that he was a safe choice for president.  Sound familiar. 

Leaving out the irony of dates, Obama has the same chance tonight.  His campaign is going well, but some have argued that he hasn’t closed the ‘deal’ yet.  Tonight he gets 1/2 hour to make his case.  No direct rebuttal time by the GOP and very little chance of McCain doing the same (although, I wouldn’t be surprised for him to try to pull that rabbit out of the hat).  I’ve been an absolute avid poll watcher. I’ve analyzed every little tick and campaign event.  What is clear is that every time that Obama has a chance to get in front of the American public – he does and extraordinary job of building support. The Democratic Convention and debates are two prime examples.  People want to believe in him and he actually has the qualities one looks to believe in.  However, so much time by the McCain campaign has been spent attacking his character – his campaign gets distorted.

The polls won’t pick up any change in the support levels until at least Friday.  Most likely it won’t be until Sunday. However, this will make a difference.  I do not believe that it will be an 18 point swing for Obama, but it will be 2-3 points.  This will be enough to swing the toss-ups strongly into Obama’s column.  Obama has a knack for getting a bump when he need it.  Tonight will probably bring the same.

Some argue there is risk in doing this event.  Perhaps, but the risk is minimal and the reward could be great.  Some argue that this isn’t 1980 – the candidates are better known, there isn’t an incumbent in office, people won’t watch, and there are many sources for information.  However, because of all the media attention, it sometimes difficult to see who these candidates are – not filtered with the opinion of their rival.  Tonight, Obama will present himself how he’d present himself in the White House – that, alone, will be reassuring.  Beyond that, the ability to consume at least one, if not two, news cycles will be critical in a campaign where McCain needs the attention every day. Finally, the intial network audience might be minimal, however, the replays on youtube and the news sites will be continuous.

Personal note of Support

Jimmy Buffett, the head of the Parrot Head movement, for which I am a loyal flock member, announced a free Barack Obama concert on Sunday:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/29/jimmy-buffett-to-sing-for_n_138806.html

Just a little light hearted note.