More from Horserace. This first blog I go to now.
News of the Day for 10-26
1. I'd like to lead with a note on the polls. People are worried about some of the closing polls. LA Times and ABC News seem to be the primary concerns for most of you out there. For those of you whom I have not convinced about Rasmussen, you are probably fretting about that poll, too. For you Rasmussen nervous nellies, I can do nothing except repeat that the poll is crap (one wonders how many times this must be repeated before they stop mentioning it on Fox).
For the rest of you, here is the bottom line: as of this writing, Bush is averaging 49.0% of the vote in an unweighted reconciliation of the polls. That's right, folks. He's at 49% nationwide. We can be 95% confident that he is between 48% and 50%.
Kerry, meanwhile, is averaging 45.9%. We can be 95% confident that he is between 44.9% and 46.8%. With Nader averaging a little less than 1%, that leaves a little more than 4% of registered voters.
Thus, for Kerry to win the popular vote, he would basically have to win each and every undecided voter out there. This has never been done before in American history.
I know a lot of people are nervous and anxious about this election. Polls which show surprising results make you jittery. Please try to remember the following. In a 3 way race that is separated by 3% and with 10 current polls, it is a statistical inevitability that you will find a pro-Kerry poll out there. A rough poll (e.g. ABC News) does not mean that all hope is lost. It does not even mean that any hope is lost. It is to be expected. My sincere advice to you is to wait until the evening for my rolling average.
Note that The LA Times poll also has issues with partisan identification. They look like they are undersampling Republicans...specifically Republican men. Any poll where Bush is winning women but is losing men indicates that this is the case. This might have been a consequence of the fact that they did their poll over the weekend (though Gallup, which also does its poll over the weekened, rarely has this problem). Note that averaging this poll out with the rest of them diminishes this skew, but not entirely. Here is a good site for more information.
The actual skew of The LA Times poll is impossible to quantify. However, please bear in mind that the changes in The LA Times poll's partisan political preferences are entirely within the margin of error for each statistic. Since The Times does not hold partisanship constant, as Zogby does, it can fluctuate. Now, The LA Times has had some radical fluctuations, and these fluctuations have "ripple effects" on their horserace numbers, as partisanship is the #1 predictor of one's vote, but this does not mean The LA Times is doing anything wrong here. All it means is that there are a whole series of problems with polling that extend beyond the realm of statistical variation. They reach deep into the heart of methodology. Specifically, the key problem with all presidential polling is that it seeks to sample a population (11-2 voters) that does not yet exist. That reduces polling to guesswork...and, until after the fact, it is all unfalsifiable guesswork.
2. Most of the election coverage this morning focuses on Clinton. Does this benefit Kerry? Well, as I said, most of the election coverage this morning focuses on Clinton. It seems more than just the media is openly wishing 42 could run for a third term. The Washington Post reports:
Kerry's campaign regards Clinton as a potent tool for sparking enthusiasm and encouraging voter turnout among Democratic base voters. In recent days, Kerry strategists have been trying to balance multiple requests from battleground state operatives for his presence, against the limitation that Clinton's still-frail physical condition cannot accommodate a hectic schedule with several stops in a day.
Do you think that Kedwards is having base problems? I sure do! It sounds like people on the ground are desperate to get some Clintonian sugar sent their way.
3. The NY Times has a mostly condescending piece about Dubya's faith, but there is an interesting insight into the multi-faceted strategy of Bush/Cheney '04 in wooing Evangelicals:
Last May, the president sat down in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with a group of journalists and editors from the Christian media for the kind of lengthy, wide-ranging interview he has not granted reporters with the secular media. "The job of president," he told them, "is to help cultures change."
Twice during the interview, he praised one of the men interviewing him, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest who edits First Things, a conservative journal on religion and public policy. "Father Richard helped me craft what is still the integral part of my position on abortion, which is: every child welcomed to life and protected by law," the president said.
Bush/Cheney has used this tactic time and again -- that is, appealing to media outlets outside the mainstream. This is one of the reasons we can expect a higher turnout among evangelicals for BC04. Has it worked? Well, note how incredulous The Times is when it writes:
In interviews with more than two dozen religious leaders who have met with the president, the startling thing that emerges is that Mr. Bush has managed to convince the most traditionalist believers of almost every stripe - Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and even Sikhs - that his beliefs are just like theirs.
Their shock cannot be contained. They may as well have said, "How...how...can anybody except the most blind, knee-jeck, Bible thumpers be buying what this guy is selling?" Well...it is selling. It seems to me like it is working.
Maybe this is why Kerry is making such explicit faith-based appeals this week, as The Chicago Tribune notes:
Trying to reveal a more personal side to the voters who have yet to make a decision in the presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry on Sunday described the faith and the values that would inform his decisions should he occupy the Oval Office.
Bush's strategy, and Kerry's lame responses, indicate to me that both candidates smell potential with religious voters. Pro-Bush potential, that is. It seems like Kerry is trying to blunt its overall effect.
4. Are the Democrats losing the Jewish vote? The Chicago Tribune speculates:
...a poll taken last summer for the American Jewish Committee shows Bush with about 24 percent of the Jewish vote nationally. In recent weeks, the percentage is likely to have grown incrementally, political observers say, especially in the swing states.
...in an appearance at a retiree community in West Palm Beach last Monday, Kerry hammered home his support for Israel. It came after aides in Florida signaled alarm over Jewish voter defections.
This is undoubtedly why Clinton headed to Boca yesterday after his jaunt to Ft. Lauderdale. South Florida alone has 500,000 Jewish voters. If Bush does 5% better with Jewish voters, that could be a net 17,500 votes in South Florida.
5. The LA Times notes that all this hullabahoo about newly registered voters could be over nothing:
The political significance of the new registrations remains unclear, however, because some of the biggest growth has been in independent voters and because party loyalties remain unknown in two critical Midwest swing states -- Ohio and Wisconsin.
Nationwide, at least two polls in the last week showed that newly registered voters favored Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry by double-digit margins. The Massachusetts senator holds an even greater lead, the polls found, among voters 29 and younger, many of whom will be voting for the first time.
This is an excellent point. Voter registration organizations with a horse in the race have been registering people to one party or another, not to "no party." In every state, registration of independents is what is driving the increase in voting rolls. These people are much less likely to vote than partisans. A big reason for this is that these people exist outside the GOTV efforts of partisan organizations. Furthermore, young voters are much less likely to vote than older voters. Neither P Diddy nor Kurt Loder will likely change that.
All of this indicates to me that we might actually see voter turnout, measured as a percentage of all registered voters, decline this time around. I remain supremely skeptical of national turnout increasing, given that the race is down to about six states. What is a new voter's motiviation to vote in CA, NY, MA, AL, MS, MO, etc? Further, many of these swing states -- IA, MN, WI, FL -- had incredible turnout rates in 2000 to begin with. 70% would be hard to top -- with so many independent voters existing outside GOTV organizations, it would even be hard to sustain. With so many newly registered independents, it could even decline. Surprisingly enough, James Carville of all people sums up the point nicely:
Asked about the chances that newly registered voters would prove key to winning an election, Democratic political strategist James Carville once said: "You know what they call a candidate who's counting on a lot of new voters? A loser."
Note that the article goes on to note that Kedwards is expecting lots and lots of new voters for them! They also perfunctorily note how enthsused young voters are by the rock-show elements of this election -- I would ask if that will turn them to the polls, then why did Nader, who explicitly created such an attitude in 2000, underperform drastically that year?
6. The St. Petersburg Times becomes the latest media outlet to note the problems that Kerry has among black voters:
Anything but strong turnout and overwhelming African-American support for Kerry could doom his chances. In 2000, record black turnout in Florida helped turn Florida into a virtual tie that took Republicans by surprise. This year, the mobilization effort is far greater, with a major focus on getting people to vote early.
But for all the anecdotal evidence of heavy African-American turnout, there are hints that Kerry might not be doing as strongly as he needs to be. At a John Edwards rally in St. Petersburg on Saturday, white people held "African-Americans for Kerry-Edwards" placards.
A St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald poll released Sunday showed Bush more than doubling his support from black voters since 2000, with 19 percent support. That estimate is imprecise because the pollsters surveyed fewer than 100 likely black voters in Florida, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign says its internal polling never shows Bush in double digits. But it mirrors a national poll released last week showing 18 percent of African-Americans backing Bush.
Good point about the margin of error on the poll -- but that national poll (whose name I cannot remember) is indubitably trouble for Kedwards. What's more Kedwards' actions among black voters definitely belie their confident rhetoric.
Actually, that poll out last week puts the lie to their claim about "internal polling." The chances that you could do an internal poll that shows things unchanged from FL 2000 while a public poll shows a net change of 14% is less than 1%.
Generally, Kerry faces two major problems: reaching the level of turnout Gore enjoyed in 2000, reaching the level of support Gore enjoyed in 2000. Gore came so close to winning FL only because of these two factors. If Bush does as well as past GOPers have done among black voters (12%), that will net him 75,000 and put FL out of reach for Kerry. This is all I am expecting. The Democratic Party is very good at consolidating its base voters, and thus much of Bush's 18% of the black vote will disappear. However, it took an ad like the NAACP's James Byrd ad to drop Dubya below the usual black level of support for the GOP.
Kerry, meanwhile, continues to trudge along on his embarassingly awkward quest to "appeal" to black voters. One wonders at this point whether he knows any other Bible versus besides James 2:17. Kerry reminds us that faith without works is dead. B yron York, meanwhile, reminds us:
In 1995, Kerry reportedly had a taxable income of $126,179, and made charitable contributions of $0. In 1994, he gave $2,039 to charity. In 1993, the figure was $175. In 1992, it was $820, and in 1991, it was $0.
Note that these were the years in which Kerry was not married to indepndently wealthy women.
7. The Cleveland Plain Dealer notes that the GOP has challenged some 17,000 ballots in Cuyahoga County. They also point out a surprisingly funny bit of irony in the situation:
The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections must find more than 17,000 registered voters by Friday to tell them they may be culled from the rolls by Republican challengers.
One problem: the very reason these voters are being challenged is because the elections board can't seem to reach them.
On Friday, the Ohio Republican Party filed papers questioning the validity of the registrations because the voters' addresses appeared to be wrong and the mail from the elections board was being returned.
The voters must be allowed to show that their registrations are valid before Sunday. So today, election officials will begin mailing out urgent notices to these voters to the same flawed addresses on their registration forms.
"It's almost a flaw in the law," said Michael Vu, director of the county's elections board.
Unfortunately, the paper fails to indicate how the BOE will resolve this dispute. At the least, Ohio nervous nellies should take solace in this. If the Democrats are trying to commit fraud, the GOP is not sitting idly by.
8. Finally, in case any of you did not know, Thomas Oliphant is a blockhead. Note his ridiculous attempt to explain Bush's absence in OH under the rubric of "OH and the country actually hates his guts!" It doesn't nearly pass the smell test:
...in several of the most closely contested states he is being kept away because his appearances tend to gin up the local Democrats as much as they do Republicans. In the so-called Red states Bush carried in 2000 that he is most in danger of losing to Kerry -- New Hampshire, Ohio, and Nevada most prominently -- Bush's absences since the debates have been noteworthy. There are exceptions (Florida, above all), but the pattern has been clear, as witness recent forays into longshot and Kerry-leaning territories like New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Where to begin with this? How about this:
A. How does this explain Bush's frequent trips to blue states? Would we not expect blue states to have a Democratic base more easily angered about Dubya?
B. How does this explain Bush's frequent trips to Florida? As Florida is the scene of Bush's greatest crime, would we not expect the Democratic base to get especially bothered by Dubya's recent visits?
C. How is this Democratic base important? Are they not already "hotted up" enough to vote? And if so, what difference does it make that Bush hots them up some more? They can only vote once (insert your favorite fraud joke here).
D. How does this explain Cheney's frequent trips to OH. Since he is the mastermind of the evil Bush presidency, would not his presence hot up the base as much as Dubya's presence?
E. Bush was in Nevada for a whole day after the third debate.
F. Ohio is majority Republican -- so would not we expect the President to conclude that a hotted up GOP base trounces a hotted up Democratic base? Ditto for NH, where there are more registered Republicans than Democrats?
I actually feel bad for him, though. This is the "logic" that the Kerry campaign is spouting to "explain" Bush's travel schedule. They are clearly spinning, i.e. putting an interpretation on events that they personally do not believe and doing so solely for the sake of public consumption. Thomas Oliphant is the kind of guy who buys the spin. There are lots of people like that on the right, but Oliphant is one of those guys on the left...and I think that is just sad. To paraphrase my brother, he is gonna be one surprised little monkey on 11-3-04.
9. Programming note: later today I will post an analytical piece on the GOP GOTV efforts. It shall be done as a way to answer the question, "Does Bush know something we don't know about OH?" in the affirmative.
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