It's déjà vu all over again. We're in August of a presidential election year, and all of a sudden progressives are freaking out by saying: "I think [insert Republican candidate here] is going to win." But it's important to keep things in perspective, and stop the same usual panicking that is only self-defeating. John McCain may have inched up in the polls, but Barack Obama still has a lead. And this movement (which has only been a few points) is the product of a string of McCain attacks that the Obama campaign did not respond to until now. More importantly, McCain cannot keep this going because he's outspending Obama in the "swing states" - despite raising less money. Meanwhile, Obama is waging a 50-State strategy that gives him a far superior ground game - giving him more than one pathway to victory, and also more room for error. If anything, the Obama campaign is brilliant to let McCain do this now while most voters are still not paying attention. After the Democratic Convention next week, McCain will have run out of options.
The only good news for the Republicans is Florida, which only shows a relatively slight gain for Democrats. With the Jewish vote going overwhelmingly for Obama, but not as Overwhelmingly as it did for Gore or Kerry, Florida is a tough nut to crack. That said, Nevada, Iowa, Colorado, and New Hampshire are becoming very winnable for Obama, while Pennsylvania, and Oregon are moving out of swing state territory into solid blue status.
These numbers are a direct result of George Bush and a massively competitive Democratic primary. The consequence is not only a Democratic President and larger majorities in the House and Senate, but a shift in the makeup of districts for incumbents. Right now, members are judged according to what percentage in their district went for Bush in 2004. If a Democrat is in a district that went for Bush by 15 points in 2004, it is understandable why they have a conservative voting record. They have to. That is the 2004 map, and it pushes the caucus to the right.
A whole lot of members now in 'swing districts' according to the 2004 map may soon be in solid blue territory according to the 2008 map, and conservatives will move into 'swing district' territory. All of a sudden, a conservative Congressman according to the 2004 map suddenly must change his behavior to suit his new 'moderate' district, and a moderate is now representing a safe Blue district. The Democratic base will have a lot to work with in terms of moderates and conservatives, unless they change their behavior. The 2008 map could profoundly move all members of Congress to the left.
I was looking at two maps yesterday which purport to represent battleground states in the 2008 campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain. First is this one by Kos:
Kos has employed a rather liberal "anything within 10 points" is a battleground state (in yellow). It's early and this is reasonable. Then there's this map from the McCain campaign:
Not sure what definition they're using to define battleground states but it might be "states we want you to think we're targeting."
Anyway, one of the states that appears as a "battleground state" in both maps is Wisconsin. I'm afraid to disappoint the McCain campaign and I think Kos is going to need to change that one to blue according to this new (first of it's kind) poll:
In the inaugural UW Dept. of Political Science/WisPolitics.com survey taken immediately after Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign, Barack Obama leads John McCain by a 13-percentage point margin in the Badger state. The survey of 506 randomly selected probable voters was conducted by phone from June 8- June 10 under the direction of Charles Franklin and Ken Goldstein from the University of Wisconsin Department of Political Science... It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.
The pollsters also note that party ID, recently a tie in the state, now favors Democrats by 12 (!) points.
If Wisconsin really is a battleground state then this is going to be a fun battle.
Often during the primary season the Gallup tracking poll and the Rasmussen poll were at odds. But not now. Here is the Rasmussen picture:
The margin of error on Gallup and Rasmussen is +/-2 so Obama is ahead outside the margin. But, when you have two polls with differences in methodology and each shows Obama with 48 and one has McCain at 40 and the other 41, you can drop that margin of error even further.
Kevin Drum is predicting a near permanent lead of this size for Obama. One can hope for that. It could also be a bounce from the June 3rd speech night where Obama did his thing and McCain did his lime-green thing. And Hillary Clinton's recent endorsement is obviously another likely factor.
At any rate, this is a faster poll improvement than I expected and I'm an optimist. Contrarily, I've heard some pessimists say in comments that these national polls mean nothing and that Obama could finish with a 5-point lead over McCain and lose in the electoral college. While there are reasons to believe that Obama could get "Gore"d with an even higher popular vote margin than Al, there is virtually no way he'll lose in the electoral college with a 5% margin in the popular vote (Gore's margin was only 0.5%). While you can carefully construct a scenario where he loses each and every close state and wins California and New York with 75% of the vote, it won't happen that way.
As we get closer to election day and there are more and more state polls to look at, we can turn our attention to those. For now, the national polls remain a useful yardstick on the state of the race.
Hi folks--
Over at Loaded Orygun, we got pretty excited about the early start on defining John McCain. We took Bowers' analysis and research to heart, and are helping to push negative stories about McCain up the search engines as we speak.
But we wanted to do more. Specifically, my new web ace/editor petrichor did. We think it's a great idea, but even for a lot of bloggers the whole notion of pasting links by hand probably takes some of the steam out of the initiative for a lot of folks. What if there were some really, REALLY easy ways to do the job?
Announcing the latest weapon to educate people on the REAL John McCain: optimization widgets!
{read more, below, or click the links above to get your widget code}
In a recent Presidential forecast, Chris named eight states: Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin as being key to Obama winning the Electoral college.
So I've put together a picture of the situation in those states to foster better analysis on them:
I was planning to update my earlier "Obama VP Rundown" analysis diary, where I assessed and ranked 20 top vice presidential candidates against a variety of metrics, but my brain wandered off on another train of thought:
A lot of folks on the blogs are declaring this or that person a 'likely,' 'mainstream,' 'conventional,' or 'shortlist' vice presidential pick, and/or discrediting other candidates on the basis that they aren't 'realistic,' or even 'plausible.'
I'm not one to rely on conventional wisdom - so I decided to perform a crude analysis of who "the mainstream" considers a plausible vice presidential pick for Obama, by executing a set of Google News searches and tabulating the results.
Join me for total "buzz volumes" for 30 candidates - plus analysis - on the flipside!
There are lots of great posts concerning state polling for the upcoming General Election such as Chris' just begun Presidential Forecast. A topic I have been thinking about is how much better Clinton seems to do against McCain than Obama in some state polls. A recent example is the NC SUSA poll, and people like Jerome at MyDD like to cite such polls as evidence that the Dems are picking the wrong (weaker) candidate. Jerome's point is largely irrelevant - Obama is the nominee and whining that your candidate would be doing better in General Election polls only serves to weaken the Dem cause. But the NC SUSA poll raises some other interesting questions.
The first question that comes to mind, which is about as irrelevant as Jerome's whining: Does anyone think Clinton would be polling so well in places like NC if she were the nominee? Looking at the internals of the NC SUSA poll, it is clear that women are the primary difference. They support Clinton 56-37 over McCain, yet they support McCain 47-46 over Obama. That is a 20-point swing towards McCain. From my perspective, as an Obama supporter, this seems like sour grapes. The differences between Obama and Clinton are minor compared to the difference between either Dem and McCain and I cannot for the life of me explain why some one who supports Clinton would vote for McCain against Obama. Thus, I believe that if these women truly bought into Clinton's message, then they will also buy into Obama's message. Back to the question: would Clinton would be polling so well in places like NC if she were the nominee, or do people think there would be Obama supporters telling pollsters that they will vote McCain rather than Clinton. The most talked about constituency of Obama's base is African Americans and they break 89-7 Obama/McCain and 74-9 Clinton/McCain in SUSA's NC poll. While this does represent a 17-point difference in favor of Obama in a match up with McCain, I wouldn't call it a swing to McCain like the female vote. For the women, there is 7% other/undecided in both Obama/McCain and Clinton/McCain matchups. Ten percent of NC women are truly telling SUSA that they would vote for Clinton in a Clinton/McCain contest, but they would vote for McCain in a Obama/McCain contest (note there is a statistically insignificant 1-point difference for men: 41% for Clinton and 40% for Obama). For African Americans there is 4% other/undecided in the Obama/McCain match-up, but 17% other/undecided in the Clinton/McCain match-up. The subgroup of African Americans who support Obama, but not Clinton, largely fall into the other/undecided category. If Clinton were the nominee I am sure these African Americans would support her. However, if she were the current presumptive nominee, after all of the racist rhetoric that has come out of her camp, do people think African Americans would still be telling pollsters that they wouldn't vote for McCain, or would we see something like a 15-20 point support for McCain among African Americans? I think it would be the latter and thus Clinton's impressive 8-point lead over McCain in NC would shrink substantially.
While thinking about the first question, a second, and I think much more relevant question came to mind: Who are the 10% of women who are telling SUSA that they would vote for Clinton over McCain but McCain over Obama? This is a question that could be looked at from two ends of the political spectrum. We could view these women as conservatives who generally vote Republican in federal elections, and they simply refuse to vote for a black man for President. On the other end of the spectrum we could view these women as Clinton's most diehard supporters, currently very depressed and frustrated at losing a close contest, believing that the Obama campaign has belittled Clinton, possibly believing the Obama campaign has been sexist, and as a result of all of this telling SUSA they will vote McCain over Obama. The optimist in me believes the latter. Since, as I said earlier, the differences between Obama and Clinton are minor compared to the difference between either Dem and McCain, to believe the former is to believe that 10% of NC women are racists (while apparently none of the NC men are), and I cannot be persuaded to believe that. Thus, I believe that a large portion of these women who are currently telling SUSA they will vote for Clinton over McCain but McCain over Obama will ultimately vote for Obama. It will be interesting to see if future polls show this to be true.
I did this as a quick hit earlier, but wanted to do a diary to bring up on note of caution with regard to today's decision.
While I think that today's decision is absolutely the right outcome, this may cause some difficulty
in Nov. that makes me think that CA GOTV will be especially important.
Obviously, the decision gives right wing nuts a new talking point.
However, keep in mind that there will be a constitutional initiative on the Nov. ballot to overturn the decision. It is exceptionally easy to submit constitutional amendments to the voters in California. The only real difference between a standard initiative and a constitutional amendment is the number of signatures required to place it on the ballot.
The Secretary of State has a page on her site that provides an update on all of the pending initiatives.
The proponents of the anti-gay marriage initiative submitted over 1.1 million signatures. They only need about 695K valid signatures to make it on the ballot. The local jurisdictions are doing a random sample in which they verify 500 signatures from each county to get a valid signature rate and they extrapolate that out to the total to see if they made it. If the extrapolation shows that they have at least 764K valid signatures, then it goes to the ballot without checking them all. This would be a rate of 68% of those submitted. Currently, they are coming up about 84% valid. Thus, it will qualify.
This reminds me of past right wing initiatives that dramatically drove up their vote turn out and had effects down ballot. Many people think that proposition 187 in 1994 lead directly to Pete Wilson winning a second term (though it ultimately lead to significant in state Democratic party building). Voters that are motivated to come out to vote in support of this initiative will not vote for Obama in the General Election.
While I hope that this does not put CA in play for McCain, this could have been the biggest gift of this election cycle for him.
The last 4 months have been exciting and rewarding to travel around the 5th district campaigning. I've learned a lot about the district, the people and myself in the process. It all came to a climax on Tuesday, April 22nd as the voters in the 5th district went to the polls to select who would be the 2 remaining candidates to continue on to the November 4th general election.
From a personal standpoint, I learned that in politics, the best thing you can do is plan your strategy and stay the course. You have to be honest with the people, explain where you stand on the issues important to the people you want to represent and trust their instincts when they go to the polls.
Via Mike Pridmore, Rhodes Cook notes that primary turnout is a terrible indicator for general election results.
The sample size of Presidential races is way too small to draw any real conclusions. Here's Cook.
The Democrats in particular have had a number of "negative" high turnouts, where friction between various wings of the party produced substantial voter interest but a badly scarred nominee with little chance of winning the general election.
It happened in 1972, when the controversial anti-Vietnam War campaign of George McGovern barely prevailed over more moderate elements in the party. It happened again in 1984, when former Vice President Walter Mondale could not shake off primary challenges from Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson. And to a degree, it happened a third time in 1988 when Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and Jackson kept fighting weeks beyond that year's large Super Tuesday vote before Dukakis finally nailed down the Democratic nomination.
In contrast, the 2000 Republican contest between Bush and McCain arguably produced a positive turnout surge. The two candidates battled across the February calendar that year and into March, setting GOP primary turnout records in far-flung contests from New York to California. Yet in spite of the intensity of that campaign, it ended amicably enough on Super Tuesday. McCain abandoned his candidacy in favor of Bush, and the Republicans marched united into a fall campaign which they ultimately won.
Given that base Democratic voters (as opposed to activists and elites) like both Clinton and Obama, and Republicans are not especially fond of John McCain, it seems like a united Democratic Party and a depressed and damaged GOP will be the outcomes. Obama is kicking the crap out of McCain on the money side in a way that is probably unprecedented; Obama will have a billion dollars to spend, and McCain will have much less than that.
I wonder if fundraising - either number of donors or total amount - is a proxy for general election strength. Bush outraised Gore substantially in 2000, and the conservative movement was much more energized at that time than the progressive base. I think Clinton beat Dole in 1996 by total amount, but I'm not sure about the number of donors. And in 1980, Reagan's direct mail base was substantially larger than Carter, though this may not have been true in 1972, when McGovern's campaign pioneered direct mail fundraising.
Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain. The most hated, partisan Democrat versus one of the most independent, well liked Republicans. A race we can win?
I'm not talking about the reality of either candidate here. I'm talking public perception. And I'm not talking about ridiculous General Election polls. But we face a real choice soon, so who we want Representing out party this fall, and who can win in the fall. Right now, the two most likely nominees look to be John McCain versus Hillary Clinton. And I see some real problematic issues for Democrats is this is the race this fall, and I will elaborate below.
I believe that Hillary Clinton facing John McCain is a potential electoral disaster for Democrats this fall. And this is why, no GE polls included, just cold, hard facts and projections.
STATE BLOGS
