Fake Americans Take Charge

I, for one, am feeling less icky by the hour

$100M+ in negative advertising

bought the Clinton and McCain campaigns what, exactly?

Obama's favorable rating is 62% -- the highest that any presidential candidate has registered in Gallup's final pre-election polls going back to 1992

Link

Best debate commentary yet

Take it away Dagblog

post-debate thought

Just one, indicative, post-debate assessment:

As he did for the first presidential debate, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg gathered a group of undecided voters in a swing state (this time Colorado) to watch the town hall, polling them before and after to gauge how their reactions to the presidential candidates changed. The audience of 50 voters was slightly more female (58%), mostly middle-aged, dominated by former Bush voters, and split evenly along partisan lines…

…Even more dramatic was the shift in the voters’ personal reactions to the two candidates. Before the debate, McCain had a 48/46 favorability rating; that improved to 56/36 by the end. But that’s about where Obama started the evening—54/36. After an hour and a half, Obama’s favorability numbers were 80/14. As Joe Biden would say, let me repeat that: 80% of the undecided voters had favorable views of Obama and only 14% saw him negatively for a net rating of +66. Not even Bill Clinton got such a warm response in town hall formats.

Obama also improved his standing on several key attributes. Only 38% of voters thought he “has what it takes to be president” before the debate but by the end he had convinced more than half the room (56%). One of McCain’s goals for the evening was to convince viewers that Obama was a liberal who would raise their taxes and hike spending, but the number of voters who thought Obama was “too liberal” actually decreased throughout the evening. That could be because Obama used tougher foreign policy rhetoric than Americans are used to hearing from Democratic nominees. But he also got an assist from McCain, whose efforts to make him seem risky instead often position him as more hawkish than McCain. If viewers come away from the debate thinking Obama will do more to go after bin Laden and al Qaeda than McCain would, that’s probably a plus for Democrats. And it makes it harder for the “liberal” charge to stick.

As for McCain, the debate didn’t seem to change voters’ perceptions, for good or for bad.

To pick up on yesterday’s note, below: it’s over. The remaining uncertainty is now about whether Obama takes all the Kerry states plus 2-3 others (e.g. Iowa, Colorado, New Hampshire), or whether he takes all the Kerry states plus 6-7 others and this turns into a 1980-style blow out.

I’m knocking on wood when as I write this, but short of assassination or a 9/11-magnitude disruptive event that cuts against the Democrats, Obama is the next president

Pre-debate thoughts

I have another, longer set of thoughts in my head about the Presidential race which I might type up tonight while watching the debates. The gist of them is this: the race is all but over.

There is no longer anything McCain can do to win the race; he needs Obama to lose it. It is possible that if you went back several months you could roll out a campaign strategy that would have put McCain over the top despite the largely uneven playing field and all the impressive things Obama’s campaign has done. That window has pretty much closed, however. McCain can talk about Bill Ayers, and Reverend Wright, and race-bait and terrorist-bait to his heart’s content. If he were behind 49-47 and he needed to move one or two percentage points in a few states to put him over the top, it might work. But he’s down 49-43 in an environment of great hostility to the GOP and concern about issues (e.g. the economy) where voters (by a large margin) favor Dems.

To win, McCain needs Obama and his campaign to commit one or more likely a series of very large, very public unforced errors. The debate tonight might be the last chance for this to happen early enough to shift the race as far as McCain needs it to shift to pull things out. If Obama accidentally lets slip tonight that he’s repeatedly molested little girls in exchange for allowing Al Qaeda operatives to smuggle explosives into the country for their next big strike, McCain has a chance to change the dynamics of the race and close some ground. If Obama turns in another cool, collected, presidential-looking performance in a debate in which both candidates do fine and nothing much momentous happens, McCain is toast.

An analogy to which I’ll probably return: It’s the middle of the 4th quarter of a football game. The superior team has dominated both sides of the ball all game, and now leads 27-10. The inferior team has been unable to move the ball much on offense or stop the ball on defense. They have gone to their best plays over and over again, and all of them have failed. The superior team has the ball and is slowing moving down the field on a long, clock-killing extended drive that (regardless of the outcome) leaves no room for the other team to score points. The announcers are struggling to come up with new, interesting things to say.

Short of something earth-shattering tonight, it’s over

Something earth-shattering happens tonight, it might not be over until next week

Fun with flowcharts

I'm apparently not the only one

Who heard that McCain was ‘suspending his campaign’ and then that Bush had asked Obama to come to DC today for some kind of summit on the financial markets and assumed that both were stunts to try and keep the VP debate next week from happening.

Hilzoy lays it out

I’m guessing that once the VP debate was ‘postponed’ from next Thursday, and the campaigns began negotiating a new date, the McCain campaign would be happy to re-schedule for any time starting, oh, in May of 2017

Checking in on the polls

Back during the fever swamp of the Republican National convention and the Palin announcement I said we should wait several weeks before looking at any polls and trying to asses what was happening. Classically, each party gets a short-term bounce from their convention, these events happen close enough together to jumble things for a while, previously ‘undecided’ voters change their minds a lot during a relatively short period of time, and a result is tons of variance from one poll to the next.

The conventional wisdom is that it takes 2-3 weeks after the last of the party conventions to see how they dynamics of the race have changed, if at all. We’re three weeks post-MN this week. Go to this poll-aggregator... ...and click on the chart to get a larger version in a pop-up. No extra points for spotting the dates of the Democratic convention, the dates of the Republican convention, and where things have gone since then.

A few thoughts:

1) For months we’ve been saying McCain is in a tough spot because his poll numbers were stuck between 40 and 45, while Obama’s numbers drifted between 45 and 50. Palin’s galvanizing affect on the Republican base seems (as of this week) to have gotten McCain up to around 45%. He needs much more then this.

2) Conventional wisdom holds that after the conventions are over the debates are the last predictable event that has the potential to move these numbers significantly. That said, it’s the rare presidential race where the debates move these numbers more then a few percentage points. Most often all the in-debate stumbles and zingers of each candidate net out to very little change in the polls

3) A few years ago Nissam Taleb came out with a very good, interesting/provocative book called The Black Swan. The core argument was that you cannot accurately predict the incidence or impact of highly improbable, high-impact events on any endeavor. While not primarily about politics, it’s easy to apply this to US elections. When highly-improbably events happen, we grope for historical references (Palin = Spiro Agnew) because we have nothing else to go on. Part of what this groping should tell us is that we really don’t know how things are going to play out. Or what or when the next highly-unlikely, high-impact event is going to be. Just looking at recent political history:
- Elian Gonazlez lives, his mother dies; tens of thousands of Cuban-Americans shift their votes before the 2000 election
- The White House has interns and Bill Clinton notices one
- Obama gives a great convention speech
- McCain chooses an unknown evangelical woman to be his VP
- Paulsen worries about moral hazard, makes the decision not to bail out Lehman and let it fall into bankruptcy, and financial markets panic
- What’s next? Will it happen before November?

4) Much has been written about the Bradley/Wilder effect, and the speculation that significantly fewer voters will actually vote for a black men then are saying in polls that they’ll support Obama. All the research I’ve seen on the primaries indicates that no Bradley/Wilder effect showed up in the contests between Clinton and Obama; which is to say that all the pre-caucus/primary errors in polling were more convincingly explained after the fact by other variables. This week the Pew center released research on the fact that people who own cells phones but have no land-line are consistently under-represented in telephone polls, which overwhelmingly don’t call cells phones. These people are largely under 30, urban, and pro-Obama. Pew estimates that Obama is actually running 2-3% better nationally then polls indicate because of this effect. Ironically, this 2-3% range is exactly the same as the estimates I’ve seen for the size of the Bradley/Wilder effect, should one exist. So perhaps all this nets out to zero, and Obama is running exactly where he appears to be. Perhaps not.

5) The fundamentals are still very strong for the Democrats. In addition, it’s easy to construct an explanation for how national attention on the economy and Wall Street helps Obama and hurts McCain. The Clintons, RCC and the McCain campaign have now spent ~7 months and (last time I saw numbers) over $100M on negative attacks designed to tear down Obama’s favorability ratings. The net results of all this has been to move Obama from ~60% favorability in February to ~58% favorability today. If Kerry, Gore or Dukakis had been so resilient to negative attacks they would have won the presidency in a landslide. With six weeks left one could argue that McCain is running out of time to move these numbers, a task made harder if people are obsessing about Wall Street and their 401(k)s and paying less attention to character attacks. The media and the McCain campaign have spent the last month falling into an all-out war, sparked by a number of disputes, which is going to make it much harder for McCain to get positive press coverage or control the news cycle during the home stretch.

Peggy Noonan, Regan’s former speech-writer and conservative matriarch of the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, apparently doesn’t need to see any more. Two weeks ago she was captured on CNN explaining to a few other talking heads—none of whom knew their mikes were on—that “it’s over”.

A great piece of writing

God bless the brits

The false nobility of victimhood

Ta-Nehisi Coates has only been blogging for about a year, but he’s been a rock star since the beginning. Atlantic Magazine has just picked him up and subsumed his personal site into their standard collection of bloggers.

Background on the link below: An Atlantic reporter, Josh Green, has been able to get thousands of internal emails and memos from the Clinton campaign dating back to the months before Iowa. The picture they paint is a campaign even more chaotic, disorganized and internally dysfunctional then people were speculating on at the time.

Ta-Nehisi provides the killer reaction and post of the day here

Lies, damn lies and statistics (latest in a series)

With the caveat that polls this early are like 1st quarter scores in basketball—not very predictive—this is still encouraging

12 points up in Pennsylvania? If we’re looking at that kind of margin in ~4 months we’ll have to stop thinking of it as a swing state.

Other possible ramification: Since Obama and his team supposedly have no use for Hillary and everything that comes with her, her only shot at the VP position is if he fails to unify Democrats over the next several weeks. I would think that her only route to the VP slot is if her supporters don’t come over and the calculus becomes that he only gets the remaining X% of the party by putting her on the ticket. I’ve been wondering if this didn’t explain part of her ‘run to the very end’ strategy over the last month of her campaign.

I’m guessing that the segmentation detail in the polls linked above suggest that the number of Hillary hold outs in these states is small and declining. I would think if Obama becomes stronger in these head-to-head matchups during the coming weeks the odds of Hillary joining the ticket becomes vanishingly small.