Indiana exits: early night shocker? November 4, 2008

My shocker so far is this: the Indiana exit polls (with 2336 respondants) show 9% of voters decided whom to vote for TODAY.  Today.  Really.  Ok, that’s — well, maybe not shocking, but close to it.  But more suprising is that people who decided for whom to vote today or within the past week are going strong for Obama.  I expected McCain to shore up in the waning days, not Obama.  I see it as very good news for O.  In addition, independents are also going very strong for Obama.  If the Indiana exit polls are prescient Obama will “upset” McCain there on his way to a major national victory.

tallying the pollsters November 3, 2008

Assuming not much changes between today and tomorrow, here are the “predicted” outcomes in the key states by poll averager.  I’ll update on Wednesday what the actual outcome was in that state.  “538″ is fivethirtyeight.com, “RCP” is realclearpolitics.com, and “Pollster” is pollster.com. You’ll see each has its own number for every state. That’s because each does its own blend of averaging or other statistical massaging.

Here’s one guess from me: the traditionally red non-midwestern states will go closer for McCain than the poll averages suggest.  My guess is that Obama will win Colorado by 2-3 and that McCain will win North Dakota by 5-8.  The midwestern states are harder to see.  McCain probably pulls out Ohio but Obama’s machine there may be way underappreciated, McCain probably pulls Indiana by 5-ish and Missouri will be too close to call into Wednesday morning.  I have no idea how to handicap NC, but it is another state where Obama’s ground game may be underestimated and if it is, he could win by 2-3.  Florida is setting itself up for another fiasco with how close it is.  All in all I see the poll averages overpredicting for Obama by a tad, but in all he should still be able to get into the 300+ EV realm.

[UPDATE: prelim results by state below and will be updated with new results.  I was wrong about CO and right about ND.  I was right about Missouri and wrong about IN and OH, probably right about NC.  The states that were furthest off in poll averages were North Dakota and Nevada, with Pennsylvania also a few points off.]

• Arizona
  • 538: McCain +6.1
  • RCP: McCain +3.5
  • Pollster: McCain +5.2
  • ELECTION: McCain +8.6 (99% in)
    
• Colorado
  • 538: Obama +5.4
  • RCP: Obama +5.5
  • Pollster: Obama +6.9
  • ELECTION: Obama +8.7 (100% in)
    
• Florida
  • 538: Obama +1.0
  • RCP: Obama +2.5
  • Pollster: Obama +2.6
  • ELECTION: Obama +2.4 (99% in)
• Georgia
  • 538: McCain +5.2
  • RCP: McCain +3.0
  • Pollster: McCain +2.2
  • ELECTION: McCain +5.5 (99% in)
• Indiana
  • 538: McCain +1.8
  • RCP: McCain +1.4
  • Pollster: McCain +0.9
  • ELECTION: Obama +0.8 (99% in)
• Missouri
  • 538: McCain +0.8
  • RCP: McCain +0.4
  • Pollster: Obama +2.0
  • ELECTION: TCTC, McCain up +0.21 (100% in)
• Montana
  • 538: McCain +2.7
  • RCP: McCain +3.8
  • Pollster: McCain +1.9
  • ELECTION: McCain +3.4 (99% in)
• North Carolina
  • 538: Obama +0.2
  • RCP: TIE
  • Pollster: Obama +0.5
  • Obama +0.30 (100% in)
• North Dakota
  • 538: McCain +2.8
  • RCP: [no average given]
  • Pollster: Obama +3.1
  • ELECTION: McCain +8.7 (100% in)
• New Hampshire
  • 538: Obama +7.9
  • RCP: Obama +10.6
  • Pollster: Obama +11.9
  • ELECTION: Obama +9.6 (100% in)
• Nevada
  • 538: Obama +3.2
  • RCP: Obama +6.2
  • Pollster: Obama +6.2
  • ELECTION: Obama +12.4 (100% in)
• Ohio
  • 538: Obama +2.5
  • RCP: Obama +4.3
  • Pollster: Obama +5.6
  • ELECTION: Obama +3.9 (100% in)
• Pennsylvania
  • 538: Obama +6.9
  • RCP: Obama +7.6
  • Pollster: Obama +7.7
  • ELECTION: Obama +10.3 (99% in)
• Virginia
  • 538: Obama +4.7
  • RCP: Obama +4.2
  • Pollster: Obama +6.1
  • ELECTION: Obama +4.5 (99% in)

Down to the wire, what’s in play? October 30, 2008

With hundreds of polls spread throughout almost every state in the U.S., the POTUS08 landscape can seem a daunting challenge to keep up on.  Here’s how I’m looking at things.

As I’ve said from the very first issue of this (well, it started as an emailed newsletter to a few contacts), individual polls at best give minor guidance and at worst are horribly misleading.  When you catch a news story you are almost always hearing the results of a single poll, and that often a national tracking poll.  But we don’t elect the POTUS by national voting, we elect by state.  And when each poll in each state  hits at most 0.01% of the electorate, you need to keep a very skeptical eye on what you see.  So what’s a poor politco to do?

You could average the polls.  This is essentially what pollster.com does and while I think straight poll averaging is a recipe for statistical disaster, it is a decent guideline for what’s going on in a race.  A better analysis takes past performance of individual pollsters along with other factors to create a weighted average, which is what fivethirtyeight.com does a very good job of.  Even that analysis, though, can be misleading.

The best method right now, in my opinion, is to step back and look at the polls in “scan” mode.  Not to trust single-number averages or regressions, but to take in all available information to see the most obvious patterns.  Do this on all of the “close” states and this is what you see:

• In Colorado, it has been over a month since John McCain has led a poll (I told you he’d peak at 2% in Colorado in that poll and he has).  Obama has led every single poll taken here in the month of October with a range of 0.3% to 12%.  That span is over ten different pollsters, which is a critically important consideration, as each has its own sampling methods and extrapolation methodologies.  Is Colorado close?  Maybe, but the fact that Obama is leading every single recent poll taken here, over many polls, is telling of his strength here.
• Arizona seems shockingly close, with McCain only up by 2 points in two recent polls and 4-5 in some others, but there is not a single poll that has him losing.   Arizona is in play if you consider the poll spreads, but not in play if you consider the fact that there is no poll showing a tie or Obama winning.
• Ditto states like Georgia and Mississippi.  Some Obamaites recently noticed that poll numbers are tightening in Mississippi.  How can red-as-red-can-be Mississippi be in play?  It’s not.  Trends might be down for McCain, but the closest Obama comes to McCain in any poll there is 8 points.  Not a single poll has Obama anything closer than that.  Mississippi is not in play.  In Georgia the polls are tighter, but again, only one poll out of dozens has Obama winning.  Every other poll has McCain winning Georgia.  And he will.
• Montana is another intriguing state.  A state that McCain should have no problem whatsoever wrapping up (Bush beat Kerry there 65-35).  The polling is uncomfortably close there, but again, McCain is winning all of them.  Small margins, yes, but he’s winning every poll save one (by a very inexperienced pollster).
• McCain has been spending time in New Hampshire, begging for votes there, but he hasn’t led a poll there in over a month.  Same with Pennsylvania.  Many are wondering why McCain has been wasting his time in PA.  You might think it’s a close state, but there has been a ridiculous amount of polling there and not a single one of them has McCain winning and at least half give Obama a double-digit lead.

So, all that noted, where are the candidates competitive?  In quite a few states, actually.  The problem for McCain is that they are all red states that he should have locked up.  Those true “toss-up” states that have thoroughly mixed poll results, with both candidates winning different polls (with some ties thrown in for good measure), are:

• Florida
• Indiana
• Missouri
• North Carolina
• North Dakota (seriously!)
• Ohio
• Virgina (maybe)

The last state, Virgina, really should be in the upper list, as McCain hasn’t led a poll there since Sept. 28th. But McCain led many of the September polls, so isn’t necessarily dead there.

The upshot?  The early returns will tell you all you need to know.  The east cost returns will come in first, and you should key in on VA and NC.  North Carolina is really the bellwether state.  If both VA and NC go Obama, the rout is on and he’ll get an Electoral College number in the mid-300’s.  If ND and MT go Obama, he could approach 400 EV’s.

(McCain) wishing this was over…. October 29, 2008

Well, a week of elk hunting proved frustrating.  Fun as hell, but ultimately unsuccessful.  I love being at 11,500 feet on an open pass in a 40mph blizzard at 25F and hiking 10 miles and 5000 vertical feet in a day with a .308 on my back just as much as the next sportsman for Obama, but it would have been nice to be looking toward a long winter with 100 lbs of elk in my freezer.  Oh well.

While I was gone the race played out its predictable patterns:  Obama opening a bigger lead and the McCain campaign responding by running harder and faster to the substanceless.  McCain realizes that despite his well-delivered “I am not George Bush” line at the final debate, he is not offering a clear path to change here, and he will lose because of it.  The Robert Draper cover article in the NY Times Sunday Mag did a good job of laying out what has been the McCain campaign’s meanderings of message as they’ve tried tack after tack just groping for something to stick.

The fact that Obama is running on his own ideas while McCain (and more so, Palin) is running on Barack Obama makes it very clear that McCain has little of substance to offer here.  So the only thing left is to try to tear down the opponent with repeated salacious gossip or just outright lies (as if Bill Ayers, repeated often enough, is an actual story).  No problem, this is just politics in America and if the shoe was on the other foot, the Obama campaign would likely be doing the same thing.  But I think that McCain is secretly disgusted by it.  We see glimpses of McCain’s dignity when he occasionally corrects people at his rallies or back away from strong statement by others in his team, but unfortunately for McCain he is now tied himself to the worst elements of his party.  And the further problem for McCain and the Republican party in general is that while McCain would clearly repudiate the morons in his rally line, Sarah Palin probably wouldn’t.  (Well, she clearly wouldn’t, as all she has left is to try things like this.)  She very likely agrees with them, even if on a more subtle level.

McCain wants out.  He probably genuinely does not like Obama, but he hates being caught up in the nastiness.  Both men have oodles of dignity, the dignity that so many smaller party operatives (both sides) will never have.  In some way McCain might have run to try to rid his party of the small-minded sleaze that brought him down in 2000.  It’s not going away, at least for now, John.  But in the last five days you could go a long way to taming the wild dogs on your side of the fence.

McCain and InTrade October 17, 2008

I’m off to go do my Sportsmen For Obama thing and hunt for elk and deer on the west side of Colorado’s Continental Divide, but before I go I just picked up this story on InTrade and market manipulation.  I was highlighting InTrade results frequently back in the primaries and in general they did a fairly good job of prediction.  However, the market is clearly too small to be completely insulated from large-volume manipulation, as shown by InTrade’s internal investigation.  I already had my doubts based solely on the fact that the barrier to entry into the market is very high — no credit card transactions allowed (thanks to Bill Frist), and so a burdersome process to get actual skin in the game.  This means a much smaller market and thus much less likely to have “honest” trading outweigh intended or unintended manipulation.

CNN and Politco catch on October 15, 2008

I guess if you’re a blogger you can tell the world in late August/early September that Barack Obama is still going to win in a landslide even when John McCain seems to have a small lead in national polling.  (Especially if you’re an anonymous blogger?)  I suppose if you’re a big media machine you have to be more circumspect, so it has taken this long for CNN and Politico to realize that in three weeks Obama-Biden is going to make McCain-Palin look silly.  But obvious it has become.  So obvious that Richard Lugar just endorsed Obama.

Here is what has seemed obvious to me since the conventions:

• Obama has a message where McCain has appeals to history. Those appeals to history are dead in this election and McCain has not/cannot replace them with substance.  This has become all the more obvious in the aftermath of McCain’s failed white-horse ride into D.C. just before the Paulson Power Grab hit Congress.
• Palin-love was going to fade hard and fast. She was a great pick at the time, but it became clear that she had no substance to back up the smile.  Now she’s a huge liability as independents (the key to any POTUS election) realize that the prospect of having her a heartbeat away is truly frightening and the Christian Conservative base realizes that it is McCain that they will be voting for, after all, and he’ll give Ms. Palin no portfolio in his White House.  Palin has given the campaign nothing except redundant attacks on Obama, and now a Troopergate report slamming her for abusing the powers of her office (i.e. corruption). The turn-out rate for the R base is going to be abysmal in three weeks.
• I was writing back in January that D registrations were 15-20 points higher than R registrations this year, giving Obama an automatic handicap.  Clearly that tide has no physical basis on which to turn.  The economy is on the R’s and the news out of Iraq isn’t good enough to help the R’s (and for those Americans who care, Afghanistan and Pakistan are quickly turning into a dangerously mismanaged fiasco).
• With Bush at 30% approvals and worse, it wasn’t going to be hard to tie McCain to Bush enough to make a major impact on McCain’s negatives.

Fact is, McCain started in a big hole and doesn’t have a shovel to get himself out.

In other news, I love to see that the Bush Administration is practicing socialism and fascism at the same time.  Is it January 2009 yet?

what’s up now October 13, 2008

To be honest I’ve let slip coverage of the POTUS race over the past week because I’m getting bored of it.  McCain is being drilled into a hole by the 

economy and his running mate, Obama is pulling away into landslide territory, and the only thing left for a bored media is for Fox to run salacious stories that they know are false, and for the rest to hype up any insignificant bit of news they can into a “story.”  The story this morning?  Bill Kristol is writing that McCain should throw a grenade into his campaign.  This is clearly yawn

 material, but what’s behind it?  Probably a preview of McCain gimmick to come.  Read Nate Silver’s insightful analysis of this and related issues here.

As the POTUS race gets less interesting to me, the market situation and the Administration’s neo-socialistic response to it gets more so.  At one time the Republian party could frame itself as the party of holding strong values and sticking to them.  All pretense of that is now gone with Hank Paulson’s schemes and Dick Cheney’s back-room support of them.  As history very obviously repeats itself repeatedly, I’ve been searching for some analysis to explain what’s going on now.  So currently, this is what I’ve latched on to:

A book that Jim Goulding wrote in 2003 and other material on his site

The fact that Robert McHugh called the Sept 29th crash and today’s (Oct 13) major rally weeks in advance

The Black Swan and watching people who don’t really get it try to use it to explain the mob rule we are currently seeing in the markets

The fact that if you believe the Black Swan then you believe that McHugh is getting lucky

the veep play October 2, 2008

Wow, did Sarah Palin really pull that off?  Well, sorta.

As most figured she could, Palin “won” by not losing.  Every D in the land was hoping for a performance along the lines of her horrid interview series with Katie Couric.  Palin not only did not bomb, she held her composure throughout the spate.  Many commenters figured that anything but a clear bomb would have the R’s shouting victory.

Not quite.  Palin reinforced her greatest strength: her folksy likability.  She also reinforced her lack of command of complicated issues and of political history.  If you’re watching the debate for the attention to detail, for how the candidates handled the actual issues, then Biden cleaned her clock.  But Palin not only didn’t wither, she shined throughout the debate as confident, sincere and spirited, and I’m sure many people picked up on her general confidence more than on her actual words.

The only “gotcha” I’ll take from the affair is the exchange on climate change.  As she did throughout the debate, Palin dodged the real question: “is climate change natural or man-made?”  Her answer was that climate change is real but I don’t really want to debate what caused it, it doesn’t really matter.  Biden nailed her to the wall with his answer: if you can’t agree on the cause of the problem then you can’t agree on the solution.  And he’s absolutely right.  It makes no sense for Palin to agree that we should cap emissions (while also drilling baby drilling to depletion?) while thinking that climate change is due to natural causes.  I wish Biden would have gone further than his strong acknowledgement of his own view that climate change is human-caused by bringing up the IPCC and really delving into it.  Biden could have made Palin look silly on the topic but let her off easy and I don’t expect many picked up on the exchange.

In all, Palin did well enough to staunch the bleeding from the Couric interviews.  She wasn’t technically good, but she was confident in her presence, made the points she wanted to make and probably gave most R’s a sigh of relief.  Biden won the debate without a doubt, but again, perhaps Palin won by not losing.

bad and worse September 30, 2008

The Palin bounce (down the stairs) effect is now confirmed.  After seeing acts like this, Dems no long need to point out Palin’s total lack of qualification to be veep, because the R’s are doing it for them.  Palin is now an anchor on John McCain’s boat, no longer the helium helping him rise.  The McCain/Palin numbers will only drop from here, and the downtrend will be due both to McCain’s economy-managing fiasco as much as from Palin’s stunning unsuitability for the job.  The McCain campaign is clearly shielding her from further public interviews and contact with the press as they can’t afford more Couric-type interviews.

As far as the markets, the left/right divide on the $700B Paulson power grab has been fascinating to watch.  In Colorado the voting outcome was mixed.  Those on the left and right in safe seats voted Y (Degette, Perlmutter and Tancredo) and neither of these players are necessarily considered moderates.  The Nay votes were both from contested races (Udall and Musgrave) and from a D (Salazar) and R (Lamborn) in safe seats.   In other words, there’s no real pattern here.  The media has made much of the fact that rank-and-file R’s voted against the plan across the country (and they did by 2-1) just as 40% of rank-and-file D’s did, showing (supposedly) that conservatives and liberals both are in agreement on hating the compromise Paulson Power Grab, just for different reasons.

Are the reasons really that different?  R’s, D’s and moderates all around see the same things here: just two weeks ago Paulson, Bernanke, Bush, McCain, etc. were all spouting that the fundamentals of the economy were strong and that everything was roses.  Now they are asking for $700 billion in taxpayer money in a panic rush, telling us that if they don’t get it the economy is gonzo.  Voters are very rationally asking the WTF question while their reps are squirming around, ready to push the nuclear button after about two days of debate.  Again, it’s times like this I am thankful we have a slow Congress designed to make sure we don’t make panic decisions.

Finally, speaking of the Paulson Power Grab, if you thought the weekend compromise bill ameliorated the No Longer Invisible Hand provisions, think again: 

What attracted far less notice in the bill was a set of provisions that would have given Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson virtually unfettered authority to set up and run the new organization designed to stabilize the financial system — bypassing federal acquisition rules and competitive hiring procedures in the process.

The 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act would have allowed Paulson and his eventual successor to waive provisions of the Federal Acquisition Regulation “upon a determination that urgent and compelling circumstances make compliance with such provisions contrary to the public interest.”

“It’s unprecedented in American history and American government,” said Donald F. Kettl, a political analyst and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “The blank check is blanker still given that we don’t know who will be signing dollar bills on Jan. 21.”

The department would have had to notify the House Financial Services and Oversight and Government Reform committees, as well as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committees of any waiver within seven days. But the bill would not have granted the panels explicit power to block any such contract.

And it goes on and on….

Sportsmen for Obama September 22, 2008

Anybody who has spent more than 2 minutes in politics in America knows that real political power lies in knowing, understanding and managing the myriad distinct constituencies we have in this land.  For instance, Sarah Palin as a proud “Hockey mom?”  As easy as it appears to be to draw well-defined distinctions, clearly there is no single constituency that can be labeled “Hockey Moms.”  Instead you have 40-something hockey moms who lean left and have right-voting husbands, 30-something hockey moms who just bought the new Metallica album but usually vote Republican, 42-yr old Hispanic hockey moms who have 3 dogs, etc.   

And so it is with people who own and use guns.  To those who do not, especially those of the metro East Coast political analysis cadre, there probably isn’t much perceived nuance: if you own a gun, especially if you own one for hunting, you’re voting with the NRA and therefore with the Republicans. This, of course, is absurd, but strange as it may seem, the NRA loves this perceived distinction.  It gives them a strong wedge issue with which to stoke their funding base, so the NRA does nothing to disabuse the public of the perception.  

Fortunately for America, while the NRA does dominate gun politics here, it does not represent all (or probably even a majority) of gun owners.  Yes, the NRA has an impressively huge membership and ostensibly represents all American gun owners.  But like hockey moms and soccer moms and NASCAR dads and west coast elites and coal miner’s daughters and single black men in their 30’s and elementary school librarians, the “gun owner constituency” is not a single-minded, single-issue, black-and-white politics constituency.  Far from it.   And while the NRA is proudly and staunchly protecting the interests of gun owners for whom the biggest priority is to be able to own any and every gun ever manufactured, it is not doing nearly as well for the silent majority of gun owners.  Amongst others, those are gun owners for whom the biggest priority is to be able to hunt in pristine lands.  

I am in the latter category.  I am an avid big game hunter, a bird hunter and a fly fisherman.  I own — well, let’s say more than a couple — guns, mostly for hunting.  But more importantly, I am a gun owner who doesn’t feel threatened by gun control laws.  I am a gun owner who doesn’t want any friggin crazy to have the right to own an assault rifle or a semi-automatic pistol.  I am an avid gun owner who feels sick when yet another massacre comes down from a kid or kids who should never have had access to a gun.  I am a gun owner who becomes incensed when gun rights groups don’t even wait until the smoke clears to declare that the massacre occurred because of gun control laws, not in spite of them.  I’m a gun owner that thinks nobody in America needs to own an MP-5 or an HK416.  And because of all this and more, I am a firearm owner who feels totally alienated by the National Rifle Association.  

Colorado’s swing status September 19, 2008

Was covered marginally well by Stuart Rothenberg in RCP today.  Rothenberg calls Colorado the single swing state if there is a single swing state.  And he might even be right.  He boils down his list of the top-5 most important states (Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia) to Colorado, thinking that as Colorado goes so goes the race.  It’s a point I made a long time ago on another blog I took down, so I’m not going to call him wrong, but his understanding of Colorado’s electorate is a bit suspect:

Still, the state looks to be made for a tight contest. With upscale white voters who would seem likely to prefer Obama, Hispanics, Boulder liberals and plenty of swing suburbanites, Colorado looks like a one-time Republican state where Obama should have appeal.

As those states will likely go VA, MI and NV to Obama and OH to McCain, Colorado will be pivotal.  Expect to see all four candidates here a lot over the next few weeks.

Meanwhile the cracks continue to open up for Ms. Palin.  The latest was (Republican) Senator Hagel ripping her for knowing nothing about the world outside of Alaska.  The rest of this election season will witness the slow and inexorable decline of Ms. Palin as a force for increased Republican votes, especially as Troopergate and her earmark hypocrisy continue to grab lines and lines of ink.

peaking? September 17, 2008

The economy being the headline is not good news for the McCain campaign.  You can see McCain reaching, groping for something, anything.  And you can see Palin flailing with no answer.  McCain’s “fundamentals are strong” comment was probably one of his biggest stumbles of late and unfortunately for him, his long Senate record on addressing these issues does not support his recently tougher talk. 

My guess is that the carnage is not over on Wall Street, and that there will be a direct correlation between McCain’s polling numbers and the financial sheet news.  ARG has a slew of new numbers out today.  Unfortunately they are delayed, so while the post date is Sept 17th the sample date is generally in the Sept 10-13 window.  This means that McCain’s 2-point lead in Colorado, for instance, is suspect because it samples before the recent visits by Obama and Palin.

Interestingly, the ARG numbers have a tighter race in Montana than I would have expected.  McCain has only a 2-point lead in MT and the survey questions ignore the fact that both Ron Paul and Bob Barr will be on the ballot there, and that there are a slew of good statewide D candidates running, including the popular D governor Brian Schweitzer.  MT is not a pivotal state in terms of Electoral College votes by itself, but it could add with another smaller state to become so for Obama (because McCain is expected to win there).  That state could be West Virginia, where McCain’s lead is also surprisingly small in the ARG survey.

As far as Colorado, if McCain’s 2-point edge was accurate as of Sept 10-13, that’s where he will peak.  I think McCain will not open a bigger lead on Obama here and I expect that if Obama can come to CO a few more times, especially to the western slope, he will win this state.  Of course, Obama must talk about western issues.  He must come out strongly pro-hunting and recreation without looking like John Kerry pandering.  He must press on clean energy issues without alienating those that make their money on oil and gas development here.  And he must realize that westerners want to be given a reason to vote for him.

home stretch of potus08 September 16, 2008

Swimming amid the on-again/off-again currents, for the rest of this political season I’ll try to ramp back up to the steady stream of analysis I had going during the Dem and Rep primary season.  I’ll be totally upfront about my biases: I have every desire to see Barack Obama win this election and no desire whatsoever to see Sarah Palin be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office chair.  Despite that, my point in creating this blog was to go for analysis not partisanship.  You can find the partisanship in a million other blogs.  You can only find real analysis in a few of them (see the blogroll to the right for those).

So let’s start here: the second I heard about the Palin pick I was impressed.  I guess I had the same intuitive reaction that John McCain had: Palin was going to be good energy to add to the ticket and was going to give him very good buzz.  And has it not?  Palin gave McCain immediate buzz, a new look from the religious right (without whom John McCain can absolutely not win this election), and a great rise in the polls.  

But let’s face it: for all the buzz, Palin is completely lacking in substance and it is bound to catch up to the McCain campaign.  I’m already seeing signs of that inevitable truth coming to bear, and over the next two weeks you will see the Palin effect erode further until it fades nearly into the background noise.  

The fact is, the R’s are facing a real problem now: Barack Obama has already been through the buzz wringer and came out looking better than ever.  Why?  Because behind the flash is substance.  Obama’s appeal is based on the fact that people believe in him in a way that they never will believe in Sarah Palin.  People actually believe: a- that Obama wants to do what he says he wants to do; b- has the resolve and intelligence to actually do it; c- will do it if elected.  Aside from judging Palin as a person, nobody can believe any of that about a Republican right now, and while that’s not Palin’s fault, it is reality.  Palin’s party’s actions over the past few years, including the two major politicans from her own state, have ensured that nobody can trust an R to do what they say they want to do.  Inevitiably it is a condition that will come back to inflict the Dems, probably sooner than later, but for now it is squarely an R problem.  

Obama has passed the smell test by getting through the very difficult D primary season.  Palin has no such luxury (if it could be called that).  Palin has a few more weeks of the D’s making her look like a lying, incompetent (and ultimately irrelevant) a-hole and the R’s trying like hell to dislodge those attacks.  And the more time the D’s have to strip away the initial sheen, the more Palin’s buzz will wear into the background noise.  Obama faced the same challenges and came looking as good as ever.  Palin will not.

The layers peeling away May 9, 2008

I first used the word “inevitable” on February 10.  Nothing along the way, through the ups and downs in momentum for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, has made me alter my perception.  Barack’s nomination  became inevitable after SuperTuesday and became a near mathematical certainty by the end of February.  No amount of HillarySpin or wins in coal mining states was going to change that.

Now that Obama has yet again soundly won a big primary day in popular votes and delegates, the layers on HRC’s campaign that had slowly, slowby been peeling away are starting to come faster and faster.  The SuperDelegates are turning and the hole in the dam grows daily.  Bill Richardson’s endorsement started the flow and by this past Tuesday BO had just about caught up to HRC in spoken-for SuperDelegates.  Not only had Obama been gaining SD’s far faster than HRC, many SD’s were switching to Obama after having declared for Clinton.  After this Tuesday’s results the hole in that dam has gone from pea-sized to baseball-sized.  In the next two weeks the flow will continue and Barack Obama will have overtaken HRC in the SuperDelegate column.   Hillary may stick it out through early June (the last primary is Puerto Rico on June 7 — this post has the list of remaining primaries) but the race’s results are as inevitable now as they were two months ago.

it’s time for (Obama to) change April 24, 2008

[On the back of some urging that I track my predictions and tell you how I've done throughout this campaign (thus saving you from having to track back through all these weeds and figure it out), within the next few I'll look back through the very first v-- political report and do some tallying. For now the most immediate: I thought HRC would win PA by at least ten and she did; I thought the polls would undersample for her, not for Barack, and they did. Poll averages just before the primary gave her a ~5 point lead but as I said in an earlier post, unlike in most other states, undersampling in PA was likely to break for HRC. I also told you to believe only SurveyUSA and ARG while ignoring Rasmussen, Quinnipiac and Zogby. That didn't turn out to be good advice this time. InsiderAdvantage was the best pollster in the PA race and Zogby did well. Unbelievably, PPP had Obama winning in two different polls. Crack smokers.]

So where do we stand in our post-Pennsylvania world? The easy answer is this: in a cesspool. The harder answer is better: in a Manchurian politics kind of world where every day it becomes more clear that Ms. Clinton is not playing this game solely because she wants to be president of the United States. What else if not president? This: I think Ms. Clinton honestly loves the fight and the mess. She may desperately want to be POTUS but she also is taking perverse pleasure is tearing at her opponent with bloodied fingernails, simply because he is her opponent. Most long-time Democrats honestly care whether John McCain wins in November. I doubt Ms. Clinton does. Right now she is focused on only one opponent, Mr. Obama, and whether her battle against him means he loses to Mr. McCain is irrelevant.

So what’s a poor Barack-thing to do? The political reality is this: Barack has not closed out Hillary. He’s suddenly looking like the Pistons in the playoffs, running down the floor with loads of talent and resources, playing an inferior opponent, but playing down to the opposition. That seemed to be the case in the PA debate last week and in his events across the state for the past two weeks. With a huge lead in cash and leads in the three categories that really matter to this race (delegates, states and total votes), it’s now post-Pennsylvania and we’re back to the same old slog. Unfortunately the fact that we are back in the same old slog gives daylight to Hillaryland spin: ‘Why can’t he close me out? It must mean he’s not tough enough and that doesn’t bode well for November.’

Say it long enough and anything becomes the truth. Many scoffed months ago when Hillaryland trotted this out, but months later, repeated 4,560,328 times, it’s starting to sound to pundits (and voters?) like The Truth.

D prez race poll check April 9, 2008

Thirteen days to the Pennsylvania primary. The race has mellowed a bit. Both campaigns have continued to campaign hard, with HRC being very aggressive but BO stepping it up as well, but their attacks on each other have abated a bit. Continual movement in the polls, combined with continual selective coverage of polls in the media, mean that unless you’re keeping a close eye on all of the polls you’ve either heard that HRC is still winning big or that BO has closed the gap.

The reality of the PA polls is that most of the bad polls have BO and HRC pulling closer. Some have them within ~5 and one has the race tied. SurveyUSA, however, is now a strong outlier, giving HRC an 18-point lead. Maddeningly, SurveyUSA and ARG, the only two pollsters I think have been well vetted by this campaign season, have completely diverged. ARG’s last poll, in fact, has the two candidates tied. That makes trends in PA much harder to assess. I don’t much care what Rasmussen and Quinnipiac are saying, but if SurveyUSA is showing a strong up trend for HRC (12 points to 18 points in a week) while ARC is showing an up trend for BO (12 point deficit to tied), then confusion reigns. Keeping in mind the usual caveat about averaging polls, Pollster.com’s poll average has HRC with a 7-point lead, much smaller than it was a week ago.