The most epic night in politics in my generation (I’m mid-30’s ish) deserves some photo documentation. Thoughts from me on this election and Obama’s speech in an upcoming post. In the meantime, one pic of me and what I wore to an election night party in jest. The other of downtown Boulder, Colorado at midnight. This was Broadway and Pearl and the Boulder PD had to close down Broadway (the main street in Boulder).
v* with (Todd!!) Palin for prez sign
Boulder CO downtown midnight Nov 4
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.
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.]
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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?
Partly it’s the economy, mostly it’s just the fundamentals. Obama was always a stronger candidate in this election. The fundamentals favoring Barack and hindering McCain were the obvious things like
The R talking box machine got a few days of play out of McCain pulling essentially even with Obama in the national polling and even in the electoral college polling. The standard talking point then was, “Obama should be crushing McCain right now and he’s not. They are tied. Therefore Obama’s a much weaker candidate than people think.”
Those salad days for the R’s are gonzo. As I said before, McCain was going to get a good and temporary bounce from his youthful energy Palin pick. He did, but that bounce quickly fizzled and now the rout is on. Back on September 17 I wrote that McCain was peaking in Colorado and nationally. I said that his then 2-point polling edge in Colorado was soon over. It clearly is over now, with Obama pulling ahead strongly. But if Colorado is a bellwether state in this election, so are Pennsylvania, Florida and New Hampshire, and Obama is starting to pull away in all, even after recent leads by McCain.
Typical swing states are one thing, traditionally red states are another. Obama is polling ahead in Virgina, North Carolina and Ohio, and making Indiana and Missouri competitive. This all adds up to one thing: the rout is on and as I said weeks ago, Obama is going to crush McCain on November 4th. The 344-194 number fivethirtyeight has up right now wouldn’t surprise me (note that the number changes daily, so might be different when you’re reading this).
It’s not even going to be close, and that’s very good for the country. We need an election that’s not decided by a thread so the new prez can have some moral authority to claim the “uniter not divider” mantle that W abdicated on the day after his inauguration. How big does the spread have to be to get some semblance of unity? Bill Clinton won 370-168 in 1992 and that didn’t exactly lead to kisses and hugs all around. But Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton and might do more to force civility where Clinton was a strong partisan fighter. In any case, what we definitely do not need is another “effective tie” to stoke the political hate. Time for a change (I think) also means time for people to cool off. Hopefully a big win will help that along.
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.
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.
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.
