Hmm. But if this is the case why are so many of the pundits treating it as if it is such a done deal? I suffered through ABC’s This Week on satellite radio on the way home from morning worship, and all of those on the panel had Obama in the 300 plus numbers in the electoral college on Tuesday. Given how many twists and turns there have been, and given all the media mistakes in this area in the last several Presidential races, one would think people would be a bit more tentative. In any event, read it all.
“Why are so many of the pundits treating it as if it is such a done deal?”
They feel obliged to pundate about something.
No, they’ve got it right this time. Obama will carry the electoral college by a fairly large margin, no matter what the popular vote is. And I think McCain has known this for some time; as a matter of fact, I think that about three weeks ago, McCain made a conscious decision that he did not want to be the President whose name would be forever associated with “the Depression of 2009-2010.” It was about that time that his campaign became very lackluster. Palin kept at it, but there is no reason to imagine that she would have been told. . . . but I think this election was McCain’s to lose, and he chose . . . to lose it. Obama can have the legacy; McCain doesn’t want it.
There’s really very little cahnce for McCain to win. I’d put his chances at less than 2%. I saw a listing of pundits (19 in all) and 1 did say McCain would win, but he was the editor of The Weekly Standard, so you gotta figure.
Perhaps the most telling evidence comes from the candidates themselves: both are campaigning in traditionally red states.
JKC [#2]: I don’t believe McCain wants to lose. It’s not in his nature.
Watching the political map over the past month, you see Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin turn dark blue; Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia turn light blue; and Indiana, Montana, Missouri, and North Dakota up for grabs. I believe McCain concluded that he could not win unless Obama made a huge mistake, which (as viewed by middle of the road voters) he has not.
I agree with Father Harmon. The bottom line is this: we don’t know who is going to actually vote. Yes, Obama has registered an historic amount of new voters. However, they still have to go and vote.
Let me be clear: The Republicans should lose this election. In fact, Obama should be up by 25 %. The reason why he is not is that he is still an unknown to many people who vote. His past associations (Rezko, Ayers, and Wright) are questionable, and his recent comments about spreading the wealth strike many as quasi- socialist. If one studies the electoral college map of 2004 it is still possible for McCain to win almost all the states that Bush won. He might lose Iowa and Colorado, but if he wins MO, FL, OH, and VA it doesn’t matter. He may even still be able to win PA–long a Democratic stronghold– but it is, admittedly, a stretch. I believe that there is a silent majority–to use Nixon’s term–out there that is not excited about an Obama presidency and that is very hesitant to say it in public. They don’t want to answer pollsters’ questions when they are at home, and quite frankly, aren’t that interested in two year long political campaigns.
Don’t be surprised if all of those college students and other new registrants don’t come out. In my opinion it would be very surprising if the Republican base and right leaning independents stay home. McCain could still win this thing, and Obama and all his supporters know it.
“Nate Silver notes the national polls that include cell phone users have Sen. Barack Obama ahead of Sen. John McCain by an average of 9.4 points while the landline-only polls have him ahead by just 5.1 points” —Political Wire http://politicalwire.com/archives/2008/11/02/the_cellphone_effect.html
This election is not over by a long shot. In many (if not all) of the toss up states, the difference between the two is less than the percentage of remaining undecided voters. And it remains to be seen who will actually be able to wait the six hours in line and vote.
[url=http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/new_rasmussen_reports_party_weighting_targets_38_7_democrat_33_6_republican]Rasmussen[/url] admits that they poll more democrats than Republicans in their polls:
[blockquote]Like all polling firms, Rasmussen Reports weights its data to reflect the population at large. Among other targets, Rasmussen Reports weights data by political party affiliation using a dynamic weighting process … For polling data released during the week of September 14-20, 2008, the new targets are 38.7% Democratic, 33.6% Republican, and 27.7% unaffiliated. For the first thirteen days of September, the targets were 39.7% Democrat, 32.1% Republican, and 28.2% unaffiliated. [/blockquote]
That could account for the large lead Obama has had all along. I wonder what the spread is for democrats vs republicans and others in other polls?
It feels eerily strange to head into a general election with the Democratic nominee the odds-on favorite to win. That’s happened only twice since 1944: with Johnson in 1964 and Clinton’s reelection in 1996.
Stranger still, this is the first time since 1932 (and only the second time since 1856) that a non-incumbent Democrat has been in that position.
We shall see.
Jim [#8]: More Americans identify themselves as Democrats than as Republicans. Aren’t Rasmussen’s weightings broadly consistent with with how voters peg themselves?
PS, The same might be said of the CNN polling that showed [url=http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/27/debate.poll/index.html]”Round 1 in debates goes to Obama, poll says”[/url]. But the article reveals the reason WHY:
[blockquote]Fifty-one percent of those polled thought Obama did the better job in Friday night’s debate, while 38 percent said John McCain did better. The results may be favoring Obama simply because more Democrats than Republicans tuned in to the debate. Of the debate-watchers questioned in this poll, 41 percent of the respondents identified themselves as Democrats, 27 percent as Republicans and 30 percent as independents.
“It can be reasonably concluded, especially after accounting for the slight Democratic bias in the survey, that we witnessed a tie in Mississippi tonight,†CNN Senior Political Researcher Alan Silverleib said. “But given the direction of the campaign over the last couple of weeks, a tie translates to a win for Obama.â€[/blockquote]
This puts a radically different slant on polls and the medias reporting of them, as their biased headline shows.
Peace
Jim Elliott
Can’t wait for Wednesday, get all this over with!
But #10, Republicans tend to vote in greater numbers than Democrats.
Ir:
maybe, but in that case, shouldn’t the media report that they polled more of one party than the other? If I were to poll 30 Republicans and 50 Democrats, the results are going to be skewed.
My prediction, FWIW: McCain wins all Bush 2004 states except Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, and Virginia, losing in the Electoral College 286 to 252. The state that could be a surprise for McCain is Pennsylvania, where Jack Murtha’s meltdown and 11th-hour comments by Obama on “bankrupting” coal producers could get enough voters to switch to McCain to carry the state for him, in which case he wins 273-265. Unlikely, but something to look for. Regardless, Obama edges McCain in the popular vote.
I agree. McCain will win the Electoral College by a slim majority. This will trigger the Democrats “Crisis Control” arm, insisting on recount after recount, and suits against Election Supervisors in all McCain states. 😉
Jim [#13]: Rasmussen doesn’t say it polled more Democrats, does it? As I read the article, Rasmussen says only that it gave the results from the Democrats it surveyed a 38.7% weight in arriving at national totals.
BTW, just 4 years ago, Rasmussen was working for the Republican National Committee and the Bush campaign. He’s unlikely to have joined in a plot to demoralize McCain supporters.
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“Republicans tend to vote in greater numbers than Democrats”
Scott [#12]: The relevant point is that Republicans have historically voted at a higher RATE than Democrats.
Pollsters seek to take account of that when identifying “likely voters.” One of the big unanswered questions this time is whether likely voters this year will have a different profile than they usually do.
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I don’t believe that independent professional pollsters are up to anything nefarious. They have their reputations and livelihood at stake. None of them wants to become an exhibit in the Dewey-Defeats-Truman Museum.
The ground is shifting in ways that make pollsters’ job more difficult.
— People who have only cell phones are somewhat more likely to favor Obama than people who have landlines [#6]. But how likely are cell-only folks to vote? We’ll have to see.
— Turnout among black voters has historically been much lower than average. What will the turnout rate this time? We’ll have to see.
— We see indications that Americans may show up to vote at the highest rate since 1960, reversing a half-century of declining turnout. To what extent will turnout favor one side over another?
that voter turnout. We’ll have to see.
I stand corrected. The Jets won their 5th game today. In every presidential election where the Jets have won 5 or more games by Election Day, the GOP candidate has always won. Looks like President McCain.
I won’t make an overall prediction. But I’ll note, in response to Steven [#14], that I believe Obama will probably win the states Kerry won in 2004 plus Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, and Virginia. But Obama leads in those states (except for Iowa) plus Pennsylvania only by some 6-8 percentage points, and undecided voters have been moving toward McCain. Who knows?
Pundits and pollsters keep few if any public records of how many times their predictions have turned out to be wrong but what I don’t understand is why we viewers (who have no reason to forget) still put so much faith in pollsters and pundits whose predictions have often been proven wrong.
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but as I remember it George W. Bush was not favored to win in 2004.
I have believed that Obama would be our next President since the day we all knew McCain would be the Republican nominee.
For me, that was sometime back in February.
The season of the functional sociopaths is over, and having had to wade through the vilest political campaigning, nationally and locally, in memory (I’ve been voting since 1964), I will endure a several hour wait to cast my ballot. Campaigning is a perpetual activity in the United States – it is certainly not an uplifting one. And after Election Day, I feel I have to confess and receive absolution for encouraging the process and the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars to wage campaigns based on xenophobia, racism, outright lies, and resurrecting the late inebriated Wisconsin demagogue. But I will vote nonetheless, hoping that someday, we may actually have a campaign which debates the great issues of politics. I guess we end up getting what we vote for. And all the talking heads who function like leeches on the body politics will continue to “earn” their living by prognosticating and punditry. Spare us, O Lord.
At this point, Obama does seem to have a much easier path to the White House. For McCain to win would require him to do much better in several states than virtually all the polls show. As Steven has suggested (#14), some comments by Obama regarding coal that were ignored for several months have now come to light, and Murtha’s idiotic statements might help McCain, too.
Political Wire has an excellent FAQ section about polling:
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Info/polling-faq.html
Here the Q&A;about cell phones:
Do pollsters call cell phones?
No. It is illegal for them to do so. This fact means that people who have only a cell phone and no land line will be systematically excluded from polls. Since these people tend to be mostly young people, the pollsters intentionally overweight the 18-30 year olds to compensate for this effect, but as more people drop their landlines, it is becoming a serious issue.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Images/cell-phone-only.jpg
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Political Wire also has a good synopsis of state-by-state polling data: http://www.electoral-vote.com/icon.html?
As for the accuracy and reliability of polls [#19-20], let’s remember that they attempt to gauge a moving target: the shifting preferences of likely voters, who number more than 125 million people.
I’m readier to defend pollsters than pundits, but those who question the legitimacy of either should consider this:
Why do we have sports polls and sports commentators?
Answer: Because people evidently want them.
We could, of course, tell sports fans that they should watch their favorite teams without commentary, perhaps with classical music playing in the background. We could tell college basketball fans to wait until the end of the NCAA tournament to find out where their team stands. But many people want sports commentary and poll results.
“The vilest political campaigning, nationally and locally, in memory”
—Dan Crawford [#24]
This is one of the cleanest presidential campaigns of the past four decades.
Believing my vote is a secret ballot I have had to tell more than one person, in a nice way of course, that how I voted is none of their business. I will admit that I have voted a split ticket for over fifty years!!
Harvey, congrats! the pollsters put you down in the ‘undecided’ category. Thus skewing the polls even further.
Good job. I do the same thing.
Jim E.
Bill McInturff, McCain’s chief pollster, explains here why exit poll results are skewed toward Democratic candidates:
http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/politicalinsider/2008/11/mccain-pollster-ignore-the-exi.html
Nothing sinister about it: Democratic voters are more willing to speak with exit pollsters.