A few days ago, I proclaimed that I expected the national polling margin to drop to 4-5%, and then stabilize. So far, my prediction is a little off, as the now eight tracking polls show a slightly larger, and growing, margin for Obama:
Complete Tracking poll average
Org
Obama
McCain
ABC
53%
44%
Gallup*
51%
44%
GWU
49%
45%
Hotline
47%
42%
Rasmussen
50%
46%
R2000
50%
42%
TIPP
46.7%
41.4%
Zogby
49.8%
44.5%
Mean
49.6%
43.6%
* = Gallup is an average of their expanded and traditional likely voter models
So, right now Obama's margin appears to be about 6.0%, a number with which every polling aggregation site comes with a couple tenths of a percent. So, at least for now, it turns out I was wrong about how much Obama's lead would drop. That's cool.
However, I still think that there is a good reason to expect the final polling margin to be 4%. The theory goes like this: in presidential elections, the average poll margin during the campaign equals the final poll margin at the end of the campaign. So far in this campaign, the all-time average has been Obama by 4%. As such, I predict it as the final margin.
An ACORN community organizer received a death threat and the liberal activist group's Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized Thursday, reflecting mounting tensions over its role in registering 1.3 million mostly poor and minority Americans to vote next month.
Attorneys for ACORN - short for the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now - were notifying the FBI and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division of the incidents, said Brian Kettenring, a Florida-based spokesman for the group.
Joe was working with me on a package for tomorrow's newspaper covering Gov. Sarah Palin's visit to Elon and Greensboro.
"Dude," he says when I called to check on him. "Some guy just kicked me in the back of the leg."
Last night, I was thinking about how, if back in 2000 the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Gore, then the Florida state legislature would have just handed bush the election via fiat. At that point, we might have engaged in an armed standoff between federal and state security offices over the election. That is way beyond a constitutional crisis.
Right now, with the mounting violence surrounding the McCain-Palin campaign, it seems pretty clear that if we have a repeat of the 2000 recount, the nation will experience massive civil unrest equaling, and probably surpassing, the 1960's. If it moves to the step beyond the Supreme Court, in the scenario I presented above, this country is probably going to devolve into something close to civil war. At the very least, expect the threats of martial law will probably become a reality.
If there is another recount situation, things could get really scary in this country.
Charles Franklin has a new graph up that shows the national polling trends during the entire 2000, 2004, and 2008 campaigns. It is definitely worth a look:
The graph shows Kerry's, Gore's and Obama's national polling margin against the Republican nominee during the final year of each campaign. There are some very important lessons from this graph:
As of today, August 4th, Obama's current position (+3.3%) is superior to the best polling either Gore or Kerry ever enjoyed.
As of today, August 4th, Obama's current position is superior to any position he was in during the nomination campaign.
For all the talk of a polarized electorate, there has actually been substantial movement in the polls during the final three months of each of the last two campaigns. This could very well happen again, and it could happen in either direction. So, the campaign is nowhere near decided.
If there is a broader lesson to learn from this, I think it is that each campaign is different. We latch onto analogies from past elections, but 2000 and 2004 were completely different from each other in terms of their broad trends, even though they had similar results. And 2008 has started completely differently from either of those campaigns.
To get a bit tautological, the 2008 election is like the 2008 election. Obama is ahead by more than other Democratic nominees from this decade, but he is slipping. The situation would be better if he had 527s to attack McCain, but it is too late for that now. The Obama campaign probably does have an attack strategy on McCain prepared, but they might want to hurry up the timetable on that one, and ratchet up the rhetoric a bit. Otherwise, it is a little late for strategizing, and it is time to start executing plans that were developed months ago.
Imagine if, the day after the 2000 election, the national media simply didn't care about what happened in Florida, and instead acted as though Al Gore had won the election because he won the popular vote. Imagine if all cries from the Bush campaign about something called "The Electoral College" fell on deaf ears, and everyone just acted like Gore won and the popular vote was the only thing that mattered. States? Who cares about the results of individual states? Only the popular vote matters, dummies!
While that would have been perfectly fine with me, since I think the Electoral College is an anti-democratic institution that favors the will of geographic areas over the will of American citizens, it isn't what happened. The reason it isn't what happened is that everyone knows Presidency in America is determined by electoral votes, not popular votes. As such, electoral votes, not popular votes, are the main focus during any Presidential general election.
However, today the media decided that the Electoral College doesn't matter, and because Al Gore won the popular vote he won the election. Or, more accurately, the media decided that because more delegates to the Nevada state Democratic Party convention in April indicated they would support Clinton than Obama, it doesn't matter that the way the state delegates are arranged by geography actually projects to Barack Obama sending more pledged delegates from Nevada to the Democratic National Convention. Just as the Constitution indicates that the Electoral College, not the popular vote, determines the winner of the Presidency, Democratic Party by-laws make it quite clear that delegates to the national convention, not the popular vote and not delegates to the state convention, determine the winner of the presidential nomination campaign. Strangely, however, even though Obama is projected to win the most delegates to the national convention, Clinton is projected as the winner.
Comparing the major players of the 2000 and 2008 election, there appears to be a pattern where everyone who was active in both elections either benefited from a national, personal or institutional move to the left, or were left behind because they did not move to the left themselves. In the extended entry, I show one way of looking at how the political figures were major players in both elections were impacted by a leftward turn in the country:
Obama is surging to victory in New Hampshire, currently holding a 7.6% lead across a remarkable eleven polls taken since Iowa. That makes his post-Iowa bounce anywhere from 10.6%--16.2%, depending on how one calculates polling averages. At this rate, he should be able to surge into a national lead by Friday, at the latest. While there is no guarantee that such a lead will last, and no guarantee that Obama will go on to win the nomination, clearly he is the frontrunner right now. An Obama nomination appears to be the most likely outcome of the Democratic primaries right now.
In some ways, an Obama victory would be a very, very good thing. The truth is that, as a nation, we failed from 1994 to 2007. We failed to expand health care coverage. We failed to stop the increasing corporatization of our lives and vicious exploitation of the Third World. We failed to close the income gap, either nationally or internationally. We failed to stop global warming. We have failed to respond to the threat of peak oil. We failed to stop a Presidential election from being stolen. We failed to stop the war in Iraq. The end result of these failures is that the Apollo Program of this era in American history is the war in Iraq. That's right--instead of doing something like, say, going to the Moon or stopping global warming, we invaded Iraq. In every political aspect, America has failed its generational role as a world leader in the post-Cold War era. While I refer to this as a generational failure, it is not limited to Americans of any age group. It isn't a failure of Boomers or Gen X or the Silent generation, or any of that. It is a generational failure in the lifespan of our country where we failed to live up to the promise of our nation. All adult Americans alive during that time period share a role in our failure.
Apart from Bradley's and McCain's 2000 numbers, which I can't absolutely verify, these numbers are accurate. Here are some thoughts on these numbers:
Bush's large small donor base in 2000 and 2004 demonstrates that there is a large pool of small donors for conservatives that the current field of Republican candidates clearly is not activating. The conservative grassroots are not donating at anywhere near their recent rates.
As large as Obama's current small donor base is, there is no guarantee he will surpass Dean's totals. Right now, he is about half way there. He will probably pass Dean, but with the earlier primary calendar, he also might not have enough time to do so.
If Bradley really did raise over nearly $35,000,000 from small donors, then the role his campaign played in the new small donor explosion for Democrats is woefully unexplored. Also, it shows that Gore probably would have been able to surpass Bush in 2000 donations had he turned down public financing for the primaries.
Third-party candidacies thrived on small donations in 2000, as both Buchanan and Nader put up large totals. Again, along with McCain and Bradley campaigns that year, both showed the potential for the huge small donor totals in the 2004 campaign. In fact, it was more than just potential, as the small donations were already being made in large amounts. Small donors contributed nearly $100,000,000 to the 2000 presidential campaign, fully half of the totals in 2004! "Revolutions" seem to happen before they are recognized.
It is tempting to think that the latest small donor craze is the signal of a major paradigm shift. However, I think these numbers show that the recent increase in small donors is by no means a major shift, but rather simply an increase in an already extent trend. Right now, one of the defining aspects of this trend is that Democrats continue to expand their small donor base, with Republicans are seeing their small donor base dry up. That is a very healthy sign, and once again points to the tremendous potential of the Democratic nominee in 2008.
