|
|
 Posted October 29th, 2010 at 12:57PM
Paladino is one tea bagger that no one seems to be talking much about these days, go figure, although Cuomo certainly doesn’t send any thrills up my leg, for better or worse. Both New York Senators are also in clear sailing. Unfortunately, the latest polling shows a tightening race in my congressional district. The Siena Research Institute poll released this Tuesday gives challenger Chris GIbson a 9 point lead, and shows Gibson shoring support with Republicans, gaining a plurality of independents, and leading in favorability ratings.
We’re swamped with television advertisements from candidate campaigns and outside interest groups. Karl Rove’s attack dogs American Crossroads have been pounding Smurphy, along with 60 Plus, Americans for Prosperity, and Citizens United.
Murphy seems to have represented the district fine over the past year and a half, and I’m not seeing any evidence that Gibson would have done a better job, or, any job at all should I say given the Republicans’ obstructionism.
We’ll see what comes along next Tuesday. I’m also following the Vermont races with some interest.
In other news, I washed both of my cars, and snapped some photos which I’ll upload soon. I should write something about my WRX along the way. It can still clean up… dents, scratches, peeling clear coat and all!
Posted October 29th, 2008 at 1:17PM
Will undecided voters move toward McCain come election day? Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight doesn’t think so -
The Undecideds
…
A somewhat higher proportion of whites (and Latinos) are uncommitted, but the differences are not overwhelming.
…
Another problem is that we haven’t been distinguishing undecided voters from third-party voters. There is an argument that third-party voters should be treated as quasi-undecided voters, since third party support tends to collapse at the voting booth. Nevertheless, Bob Barr and Ralph Nader will probably pick up a collective 1-2 percent of the electorate, and third party support tends to be overwhelmingly concentrated among white voters.
…
Long story short … given optimistic assumptions (McCain wins 2/3 of white undecideds, 100 percent of third-party support collapses), the undecided vote is worth a net of about a point for McCain. Given what I’d consider to be more neutral assumptions, there’s no particular reason to think that the undecided vote favors him.
My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between and that this is worth, say, half a point for McCain. Even give him the full point if you like. This effect is probably smaller than that of the cellphone problem, from which there may be 1-2 points of cushion in Obama’s direction. If on top of that the polls are being overly conservative with their likely voter modeling, the numbers are more likely to be underestimating Obama’s standing than overestimating it.
It also should be noted that people still undecided at this point are more likely to simply skip voting altogether, further reducing any advantage for McCain. A sudden upset is looking less and less likely.
Posted September 2nd, 2008 at 11:21AM
Has anyone noticed that Sarah Palin’s central claim to political fame is a fraud? She represents herself as a fiscal conservative who abhors pork-barrel projects and said no thanks to the “bridge to nowhere” — a $398 million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska, to its airport across the Tongass Narrows. But as mayor of Wasilla (pop. 9,780), she hired a Washington lobbyist to bring home the bacon. And just two years ago as a candidate for governor, she supported both the Ketchikan bridge and the congressional earmark that would have paid most of its cost.
I know, we’re not supposed to pay attention to such inconvenient details. We’re supposed to be dazzled by how unaffected she is, how plain-spoken, how “genuine.”
Indeed, if you don’t get hung up on her actual record, Palin simply is who she is. It’s not her fault that she’s a former Miss Wasilla with a campy “Northern Exposure” vibe, doctrinaire social-conservative views and no discernible qualifications for being vice president. It’s undeniable that people in Alaska apparently like her well enough, though they seem to have been even more shocked than the rest of us when she was named to the Republican ticket. In any event, she’s not the one who created this farcical situation.
I’m pretty sure I watched this columnist appear as a talking head this weekend on one of the news shows. He makes for a better columnist than five second blurb automaton.
McCain’s veep choice just seems to get worse each day, even as the GOP establishment attempts to paint a more glowing picture. The interweb is abuzz now with revelations that Palin wasn’t even in the running until late in the game, as conservative pundits shot down any notion of a pro-choice vice president. (I’m going to puke the next time someone gushes about McCain being a maverick.) Apparently the team assigned to vet Palin arrived in Alaska the day before McCain made his announcement.
With time running out – and as Senator McCain discarded two safer choices, Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, as too predictable – he turned to Mrs Palin, meeting her on Thursday for an interview and offering her the job moments later. Advisers to two of the finalists on McCain’s list described an intensive vetting process for those candidates that lasted one to two months.
…
Aides to Senator McCain said they now had a team in Alaska to examine Mrs Palin’s background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet her in Alaska had not arrived there until last Thursday.
And of course there’s the 17-year-old pregnant daughter and the husband’s (ancient) drunk driving charge… These will have an affect on the campaign, for better or worse. But I’m more interested in Eugene Robinson’s point revolving around Palin’s support o’ pork and her support of some goofball Alaskan successionist political party. Oh, and the possibility of McCain, 72, not being able to serve his full term and Palin stepping up to the plate. Didn’t we just have eight years of an unqualified presidential puppet?
All of this as hurricane Gustav deflects attention from the RNC convention and as polling results begin to trickle in post-DNC convention – particularly among former Hillary supporters. Obama seems to have received a healthy bump, with all of the major polls putting him between 6% and 9% ahead of McCain (with the CNN poll a bit of an anomaly at only 1%). That’s a healthy 3-5% bump from the week before. With Gustav putting a damper on the start of the RNC convention, it’ll be an interesting few weeks to watch the polls.
If there’s a silver lining for McCain, he raised about $47m during the month of August. This is close to the $50m Obama raised in July, but more than likely a lot less than the Democrat will have raised in August (not revealed as of this post).
Posted August 26th, 2008 at 2:09PM
The first poll with McCain ahead by 5% last week got a lot of press, but here’s one with more interesting results…
One intriguing result from Sunday’s Washington Post/ABC poll (which showed Barack Obama maintaining a narrow, 4 percent lead among likely voters) was the Democratic candidate’s vault over John McCain on the question of leadership.
For the first time all spring and summer, when voters answered the question “Who is the stronger leader?” Obama beat his Republican foe.
The reversal is pretty dramatic. In March, those surveyed chose McCain as the stronger leader by a 53-40 margin. In June, McCain had a 47-44 lead. But in the August poll, Obama beats McCain by five points, 49-44. That is an 18-point switch in four months.
And later on (I just need to point this out)…
According to the Post/ABC poll, 64 percent of those surveyed think Obama is addressing the issues, and 29 percent believe he is intent on attacking McCain. The voters had a quite different picture of McCain, however, with 48 percent saying the Republican was primarily interested in attacking Obama and just 45 percent saying that McCain was addressing their concerns.
The Post/ABC survey ratified the results of the Battleground Poll, a survey taken by a bipartisan team of pollsters, which was released earlier this month. When asked who was waging the more negative campaign, respondents in the Battleground survey chose McCain over Obama by 50 to 21 percent. Today’s CNN-Gallup poll had a similar result, with nearly half of those polled saying McCain had attacked Obama unfairly.
…
As McCain said after surviving Romney’s televised assaults in the Republican primary season, “Negative campaigns don’t work.”
We’ll have to wait for additional polls that reinforce these results, but there certainly are drawbacks to running a negative campaign, and McCain may be beginning to feel them. In the meantime, the Democratic (and later, Republican) National Convention(s) will throw all of the polling for a loop.
A little over two months to go. Oh boy!  
Posted July 28th, 2008 at 4:47PM
The Myth of a Toss-Up Election
Except for a few days when the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls showed a tie, Barack Obama has led John McCain in every national poll in the past two months. Obama’s average margin has consistently been in the 4-6 point range during this time. By contrast, the polls in 2000 and 2004 showed much more variation over time. State polling results have also consistently given Obama the advantage. According to realclearpolitics.com, Obama is currently leading in 26 states and the District of Columbia with a total of 322 electoral votes; McCain is currently leading in 24 states with a total of 216 electoral votes. Obama is leading in every state carried by John Kerry in 2004 along with six states carried by George Bush: Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio, Indiana, Nevada and Colorado. A seventh Bush state, Virginia, is tied.
Obama is leading in 11 of the 12 swing states that were decided by a margin of five points or less in 2004 including five of the six that were carried by George Bush. And while Obama has a comfortable lead in every state that John Kerry won by a margin of more than five points in 2004, McCain is in a difficult battle in a number of states that Bush carried by a margin of more than five points including such solidly red states as Indiana, Montana, North Dakota, Virginia, and North Carolina.
And remember these June and July polls may well understate Obama’s eventual margin. Ronald Reagan did not capitalize on the huge structural advantage Republicans enjoyed in 1980 until after the party conventions and presidential debate. It took a while and a sufficient level of comfort with the challenger for anti-Carter votes to translate into support for Reagan. If Obama’s performance over the last eighteen months is any guide, a similar pattern could unfold in 2008.
A hopeful analysis in the face of media coverage that paints a precarious Obama lead, and today’s USA TODAY/Gallup poll with McCain actually ahead by 4%. Note, however, that with such a small sample size, the difference is within the margin of error, and the first article’s authors have a credible claim that McCain still faces a huge uphill battle despite any tightening of the polls. The inequity in fundraising alone would make a McCain win a huge historical upset. I think the big worry now is Obama support melting away come late September or October, as voters realign with the comfortable “old white dude” candidate. Barring any huge unforecastable political revelations / events, of course.
|
Tags: 
