Fit to be Tied

It must make you nervous that you have chosen to back an un-vetted candidate. Very nervous.

 

So, how does it feel to support the "gas tax holiday" candidate?

 

O for 2?!?!? More like 0 for 20.

 

Not as nervous as you, since you don't seem to be willing to take Sam Fisher up on his bet.

 

Makes you proud to be a Republican, right?

 

Why? If McCain has gained on all the issues and hasn't gained any votes, then that's a bad sign for McCain. It means that people are still not voting for him even though they agree more with him.

I really wonder about this "analysis" of polls that people do. It's some really shoddy work. What you want is, along with the gains on issues, to show traction in the polls - which haven't really changed at all in the past month or two outside of statistical noise. If I have 45% of the vote, I'd much rather have it with everyone hating me / disagreeing with me on the issues than vice versa - because it means I have much more upside available.

 

Right now all polls are pretty meaningless. Undecideds are high - and attention to the election is weak. I haven't seen anything eye-opening so far, and you probably won't until september roles around.

Polls now are infamously inaccurate and meaningless.

What's more important is how much the media is presenting John McCain and attacking Obama. It's almost as if.....

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Right now, I think the logical assumption is the race will be very close unless the McCain campaign collapses late. There is no landslide in sight (and there never was).

 

I don't think it will be a landslide in popular vote - mainly because the country is so divided and neither candidate appeals to the other's base that strongly. So each candidate will pull at least 40-some percent.

But you never know which way it will go. We've never had two senators run against each other for an open presidency and this will be the first senator since JFK to be elected. Also, we've never had a black man as the nominee - and that throws out all the polls because there's no historical precedent on how that will impact voter turnout amongst minorities - who traditionally are terrible at voting.

Throw in a failing economy which is traditional democratic, with a terrible enrgy crisis and two wars going on - traditionally republican....and who knows what's going to turn the election.

Right now, Repubs are trying to win on a character basis, and Dems on an issue basis - that makes total sense since the issues are not looking good for the Repubs - also people seem to make their decision more on character than issues anyway.

But no one knows how this race will turn. Obama has been consistenly ahead by a narrow margin - and that's probably the most disturbing thing for mccain - is that no poll shows him ahead by a signifant margin yet.

But it's all meaningless until sept rolls around.

 

I think we will see an electoral landslide. Not a landslide with the popular vote, unless things change drastically (not impossible), but a landslide in the electoral college... in favor of Barack Obama.




Impeach Bush/Cheney.

 

That could be true, but I don't remember anyone saying "electoral" landslide when the discussion first started. It was like this wasn't even going to be a competitive election and Obama was going to have some serious coattails. Right now, the Dem party coattails are carrying Obama more than vice versa and he is coming across as a weak candidate instead of a strong one. But that could change by November.

 

A_3PO not trying to rag on you but can you site some examples of this weakness?

 

Here's a good article on why to take the individual polls with a grain of salt right now:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/08/on-likely-voters-and-long-tail.html

On Likely Voters and the Long Tail



Mark Blumenthal has a good article up at the National Journal about that controversial USA/Today Gallup poll released last week that showed John McCain with a 4-point lead in its likely voter sample. In turns out that only 10 percent of the likely voter sample consisted of voters between ages 18-29. By contrast, teens and twentysomethings represented somewhere between 16 and 18 percent of the electorate in 2004. And that number is likely to go up rather than down this time around, as youth turnout in the primaries increased by 52 percent as a share of the Democratic electorate.

Now, I appreciate that Gallup is willing to disclose so much about their methodology -- it certainly opens them up to more criticism. Having said that, winding up with a sample that understates the youth vote by perhaps 30-50 percent is pretty much prima facie evidence that something has gone awry. Indeed, I'm really not a fan of the Gallup likely voter model at all.

What Gallup does is essentially as follows. Suppose that the entire electorate consists of five voters. Gallup has an algorithm by which they estimate each voter's likelihood of participating. So what you might get is something like this:

Voter A - 70% chance of voting
Voter B - 50% chance of voting
Voter C - 90% chance of voting
Voter D - 60% chance of voting
Voter E - 80% chance of voting

For my money, the most logical way to handle this -- if you're going to apply some sort of likely voter model at all -- would be to multiply each voter's response by their likelihood of participating. So voter A would be counted at 70 percent weight, voter B at 50 percent weight, and so forth.

What Gallup does instead is to rank the voters in order, and to set an arbitrary cutoff point for how many voters they want to have in their sample. Assuming, for instance, they're targeting 60 percent turnout, that might look something like this:

Voter C - 90% chance of voting
Voter E - 80% chance of voting
Voter A - 70% chance of voting
---------------------------------
Voter D - 60% chance of voting
Voter B - 50% chance of voting

Voters A, C and E would be included in the likely voter sample (and counted at full weight); voters B an D are dropped.

I think that this winds up throwing away good information. We know that Voter A isn't that much more likely to participate than Voter D, but Voter A is counted at full weight, and Voter D isn't included at all.

A larger problem arises however if there is some kind of systematic pattern in which voters tend to wind up in which buckets. For example, suppose that Gallup's scoring is such that you wind up with something like this:

Voter M1 -- Mature Voter -- 65% chance of voting
Voter M2 -- Mature Voter -- 65% chance of voting
Voter M3 -- Mature Voter -- 65% chance of voting
Voter Y1 -- Young Voter -- 55% chance of voting
Voter Y2 -- Young Voter -- 55% chance of voting

In this case, the three mature voters would all be included in the model, while the two young voters would be dropped -- even though there is a rather small difference in their respective likelihood of voting.

That was just a contrived example -- but Gallup's methodology could prove to be very problematic if there is any sort of Long Tail effect in voting patterns.



That is, suppose you have a small group of core voters who are nearly certain to vote, coupled with a larger group of non-core voters, any one of whom might not be all that likely to participate, but who collectively will make up a fairly large fraction of the electorate. If the voters toward the head of the curve tend toward one party (say, the Republicans), and the voters toward the tail of the curve tend toward another (say, the Democrats), you're going to wind up with a skewed sample if you set an arbitrary cutoff point somewhere in between.

 

Quit ragging on me!

Seriously though, the fact that Obama and McCain are almost even while in party identification, Dems are trouncing Republicans handily. McCain seems to be pulling his party while the GOP is a drag on him. At the same time, Obama is being helped by his party identification. Unfamiliarity with Obama (and McCain's negative attacks the last couple of weeks) have made people uncomfortable with him.

Obama needs to do something to close the sale. Presidential elections have an ebb and flow. Maybe after the conventions Obama will go to another level. Maybe not. But his newness, his youth and obviously his race are barriers for some voters.

My earlier script for this election was Obama holding a strong lead most of the way with it evaporating as November 4th approached. Looking at things right now, I can definitely see a scenario of McCain winning by 5-6 points. Before you laugh, remember Bush vs. Kerry (and I know Obama isn't Kerry).

 

I think he just missed the good ol' days of slavery. I have a hunch he also hates medicine and sanitation, but don't quote me on that.

 

Ever heard the term "slope of hope"?

Obama is leading by 27% among early voters, who are turning out in record numbers (> 3 million already). You hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.