The other major change to our methodology (which I am surprised nobody guessed in the teaser thread) is that we are now making adjustments to the results of all states based on a time trend.
One of the problems with our previous way of doing things is that polling data tends to roll in at different times in different states. Both state and national polls conducted since the conclusion of the Democratic nomination process have reflected a bounce of a few points for Barack Obama. For example, we know that Barack Obama has experienced a bounce in his polling results in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and New Jersey, as well as in both the Rasmussen and Gallup national tracking polls. It would be naive to assume that Obama won't also experience a bounce in other states like Pennsylvania and Ohio where new polling data has yet to come out. However, we've had no way to account for these changes in states where the polling data is not fresh.
Our objective, then, is to infer what is likely to happen in states where we don't have fresh polling data based on those states where we do. In order to make such an inference, I apply a four-step process. A version of this process was suggested to be by Professor Robert Erikson of Columbia University, who has spent his lifetime studying polling and public opinion, and who is also a family friend.
Step 1: All polls are placed into groups based on (i) the week of the election; and (ii) the state-pollster unit. A state-pollster unit is a combination of a particular state and a particular pollster; for example "Alabama-SurveyUSA" or "New York-Quinnipiac". The current week is defined as having begun seven days before the current date, with weeks progressing backward from there to the start of the calendar year 2008. One very important note: we treat national polls as a "state". For example, there are units for "USA-Rasmussen Tracker" and "USA-Gallup Tracker". One of the most useful elements of national polls, and particularly national tracking polls, is that they provide a robust baseline for measuring changes in candidate support. We do not include national polls directly in our averages. We do use them, however, to help infer trends, which in turn can inform our state-by-state projections.
Step 2: We run a linear regression with a large number of dummy variables. Specifically, we include one dummy variable for each week, and one dummy variable for each state-pollster unit. The coefficients of the weekly dummy variables give us an inkling of a time trend. Specifically, the time trend looks like this:
Let me explain exactly what is going on here. Suppose that in that in Week 15, Rasmussen shows Barack Obama 6 points ahead in Minnesota. Then, in Week 22, it shows him 9 points ahead in Minnesota. This is a piece of information implying that Obama's standing was 3 points better in Week 22 than in Week 15. If we apply this process to all state-pollster units, we get quite a lot of information about in which way the polls are changing. That's all that this process is doing. It's taking the changes that we see in each poll where we have a baseline for comparison, and inferring an overall time trend based on those changes.
Step 3: The time trend is smoothed by means of a LOESS regression. You probably don't think you know what a LOESS regression is, but if you've ever been over to Pollster.com, you have seen one. A LOESS regression is way to create smooth curves through time series data. In our case, that curve looks like this:
When running a LOESS regression, one may choose a "smoothing parameter" that determines how sensitive the regression line is to changes in the data. I use a fairly conservative smoothing parameter, tending toward a smoother rather than a jerkier curve. Nevertheless, we can make out a few fairly clear trends. Obama's numbers surged in February, when he was winning one primary after another. They slumped in March and early April, as stories like bittergate and Jeremiah Wright dominated the landscape. They have since been gradually improving, but particularly so in the last two weeks since he wrapped up the nomination.
Step 4: Polls from previous weeks are adjusted to match the LOESS estimate from the current week. For example, our LOESS regression line tells us that an average poll in the current week has been about 2.5 points stronger for Barack Obama than a poll in the week ending 5/17. Thus, the Quinnipiac poll of Florida taken on 5/17, which showed John McCain ahead by 4 points, is treated as though it had shown McCain ahead by 1.5 points (i.e. 2.5 points better for Obama). The idea, simply put, is to make all old data match the current polling landscape.
* * *
From there, everything proceeds as it always has. We still run a demographic regression, although it is based on the trend-adjusted polls rather than the original ones. (Also, I am now referring to our result in each state as a "projection" rather than an "average", as that nomenclature is more consistent with our process.
This adjustment presently results in an increase of about 2 points in Barack Obama's projected popular vote margin. Because a large number of states in this election are very close, this results in a somewhat dramatic-seeming change in Obama's win percentage and electoral vote projection. Interestingly, Obama's current win percentage of 64.7 percent almost exactly matches the price of Democratic contracts on Intrade, which also has the Democrats with a 64 percent chance of winning the election.
There are two major changes to my methodology, which you already see reflected in the new charts and graphics that are presently on the site. This is the easier of the two to explain, so let's handle it first.
Andrew Gelman of Columbia University was kind enough to share some of his old national polling data with me. His dataset runs from 1952 through 1992. I took his data from 1988 and 1992 (before 1988, there are only a limited number of polls available), then combined it with the data I already had for 2000 and 2004, and tracked down some 1996 data in a magical place on the internet.
If you had looked back at the polls in June in the five previous election cycles, what would you have found?
In 1988, Michael Dukakis was ahead by an average of 8.2 points in 5 June polls. In November, George Bush won by 7.8 points.
In 1992, George Bush was ahead by an average of 4.9 points in 14 June polls. In November, Bill Clinton won by 5.6 points.
I don't actually have any June polls for 1996 (if anybody's sitting on a big stash of Clinton-Dole data, you know where to find me). But in Gallup's July poll, Bill Clinton led by 17 points. In November, Clinton won by 8.5 points.
In 2000, George W. Bush was ahead by an average of 4.7 points in 14 June polls. In November, Al Gore won the popular vote by 0.5 points.
In 2004, John Kerry was ahead by an average of 0.9 points in 16 June polls (this was pretty much his high-water mark all year). In November, George W. Bush won by 2.4 points.
So in four out of the last five elections, an average of June polls would have incorrectly picked the winner of the popular vote. That's kind of a problem for anybody who is overly confident about how this election is going to turn out.
Previously, I had modeled the error in our polling averages based on 2004 data (simply because that's the data I had access to). The issue with that is that the polls were unusually stable in 2004. From April onward, John Kerry never held a lead of more than about 2 points in the Real Clear Politics national average, and George W. Bush never held a lead of more than 6 or 7 points. Those numbers pretty well framed the actual result of Bush +2.4. But as the Gelman data reveals, there was much more fluidity in previous years, and so modeling the error based on 2004 data alone would lead one to underestimate the degree of uncertainty inherent in a general election.
My error estimates are now modeled instead on the 1988-2004 dataset. I do give somewhat more weight to more recent cycles, as in general, the polls have tended to get closer to the actual margin more quickly in recent years. There are a few reasons to think this might not be an accident. For example, (i) the country has tended to get more partisan over time, meaning that there may be fewer true undecided voters than there used to be; (ii) with the proliferation of the Internet and cable news, voters now have more information about the candidates sooner than they used to, and (iii) the science of polling has probably improved over time. Nevertheless, we are accounting for quite a bit more error than we had been before.
If I look at the total miss for each poll based on the number of days until the election, I get the following, very pretty graph:
There is quite a lot of noise there, but the error can be modeled reasonably well as a function of the square root of the number of days until the election. Specifically, the curve I use looks like this:
Presently, with about 145 days to go until Election Day, we would anticipate that a typical national poll will be off my around 6-7 points. We do not know, unfortunately, which direction that miss is likely to be in. But there is reason to believe that the range of possible outcomes -- including scenarios where the election doesn't turn out to be especially close -- is wider than we had been assuming before.
According to Gallup, John McCain trails Barack Obama by 25 points among voters for whom religion is not "an important part of [their] daily life". McCain leads by 5 points among those who answer that question in the affirmative.
These sorts of numbers are generally described as a problem for the Democratic candidate. However, as Ruy Teixeira pointed out four years ago, if you had to pick a sign of this divide to be on, it might be on the side of the secular. That is because by almost all indicators, religious participation in the United States is decreasing. According to a Pew poll, 45 percent of Americans now completely agree with the statement that "prayer is an important part of my daily life", down from a peak of 55 percent in 1999. (There does appear to have a bit of a "God Bounce"/mini-revival in the mid-late 1990s -- not so much in the number of religious Americans, but in the activity and enthusiasm of those that do practice).
Moreover, the younger generation is less religious than the older generation. 19 percent of those born after 1977 say they are atheist or agnostic, as compared with 11 percent of Boomers (born 1946-1964), and 5 perecnt of pre-Boomers (born before 1946).
Barack Obama, of course, does need to at least hold his own among actively religious voters, who constitute 65 percent of the electorate according to Gallup. He is able to do so thanks to substantial support from African-American and Latino voters, while trailing McCain by 25 points among actively religious, non-Hispanic whites. Nevertheless, if these generational trends hold, then each year a coalition based on actively religious voters will become marginally less successful.
It's better to ask one question too many than one question too few.
(Added 4:19 PM) I'm still trying to collect my thoughts about this. Everyone knew, I think, that Russert was a big deal. But this might also be one of those cases where people didn't realize quite how big a deal until after his passing. In particular, the institution of Meet The Press -- precisely because it asked such tough questions and presented such real risks for candidates -- also gave them the opportunity to shift the national media narrative in a way no other news program could.
I've done sports radio fairly regularly over the past several years, and a small handful of television appearances on regional cable. But this CNN gig was a different thing entirely. One thing I didn't fully appreciate is how labor-intensive all of this is. Morning shows are intended to give the appearance of spontaneity -- and to some extent, because of the fast, almost caffeinated pace, they are. But there is also an enormous amount of due diligence involved. Between the anchors and the guest and especially the producers, there are probably 100 minutes of preparation for every minute of live television that you see.
The Republicans have given every signal of wanting to make a play for Minnesota. Their convention will be held in St. Paul, and Tim Pawlenty is perhaps the odds-on favorite to become John McCain's Vice Presidential nominee. There just isn't much indication, however, that the state is liable to be competitive.
Rasmussen's newest poll in Minnesota has Barack Obama leading John McCain by 13 points. This is technically not a bounce: Obama led by 12 and 13 points in Rasmussen's April and May polls, respectively. But Minnesota also does not appear to be close enough where little things like the selection of Pawlenty as McCain's running mate would matter (I'm sitting on some research about this, but the home state advantage of a VP selection is not all that it's cracked up to be). Indeed, the entire Northwest quadrant of the country -- draw a line from the southern tip of Illinois everywhere northward and westward -- has polled extremely well for Barack Obama, both absolutely and relative to John Kerry.
Rasmussen also has polling out in North Carolina, where John McCain holds on to a slim 2-point advantage. This result is not entirely surprising, as several polling firms have shown North Carolina within the margin of error at some point in the cycle. Barack Obama has every reason to give North Carolina a try -- the Research Triangle portion of the state might go for him 3:2 or even 2:1. But at some point, he's going to want to show an actual lead in the polling there, lest it become a tease state like the Republicans have had with New Jersey.
In Oklahoma, a Research 2000 / DailyKos poll has John McCain leading by 14 points. This might actually be Obama's best result of the day, as other Oklahoma polling had shown McCain ahead by as many as 40 points. Obama won't win Oklahoma, but the internals of the survey -- which show a bare plurality of Oklahomans identifying their party ID as Democrat -- are a reminder of just how difficult the partisan landscape is for John McCain.
Finally, I wanted to announce that FiveThirtyEight will be partnering with Rasmussen Reports and providing them with our state-by-state averages for inclusion in their Balance of Power Calculations. Between that and my appearance on CNN a bit earlier (video if and when it becomes available), I'm starting out my day pretty wired.
I not a big fan of catch-all threads, but a few items of note:
1. There is a Kansas poll out showing John McCain with just a 4-point lead over Barack Obama in the Sunflower State. But we're not going to be listing it as it was an internal poll conducted for Jim Slattery, the Democratic candidate for US Senate. The problem with internal polls is not necessarily that they're bad polls, but that they only become public knowledge under certain circumstances. Slattery is trying to raise money and to build enthusiasm for his campaign -- to some extent, he is competing against other Democrats in order to do so. I'm sure that this poll was conducted honestly and fairly, but would a (strongly-worded) press release have been put out if Slattery had been trailing Pat Roberts by 30 points instead of 12? Probably not. For this reason, we do not list internal polls conducted on behalf of a candidate.
2. I had a longer item posted previously about one of the controversies described at Barack Obama's Fight the Smears. After about five minutes, I decided the issue was old news and took it down. So for the couple dozen of you who might have remembered seeing the post, rest assured that you aren't going crazy.
I did, however, want to encourage people to read Jane Hamsher at firedoglake about the matter of Larry Sinclair and to sign her petition. I am not much of a viral action kind of guy by default, but some things are so ridiculous as to merit an exception.
3. It does look like the CNN interview is going to go off tomorrow, barring further breaking news or natural disasters. My time slot is approximately 8:20 AM Eastern.
My latest ZohoSheet project. This will give you a simple popular vote projection for November based on (i) a candidate's support from each party and (ii) turnout rates.
A couple of notes: the party ID values you see here are based on a combination of three recent surveys: Gallup, Rasmussen , and Pew. All three show the Democrats with between a 9 and 10 point partisan edge on the Republicans, although the surveys differ somewhat in how many independents they identify.
I recommend that you not play with the party ID numbers, since those numbers move glacially and are at least somewhat exogenous to the political contest in any given year. Instead, you can manipulate the turnout rates. I have Democrats and Republicans each turning out at 62 percent, with independent turnout being slightly lower. I believe this is roughly what the turnout rates looked like in 2004, although I can't find any hard evidence on that.
The other numbers you see in the worksheet, while not coming from anywhere in particular, are not entirely arbitrary either. Fundamentally, it is very challenging for McCain to be working from this deficit in partisan ID.
That is a picture of the signage at an extremely popular (and very good) taqueria in my neighborhood in Chicago. They have a conspicuously large sign which is visible from a major intersection and is probably worth a couple thousand bucks a month in advertising impressions, and have decided to devote roughly the bottom third of it to a homemade testament to Barack Obama.
Not that this anecdote should mean very much in the larger scheme of things. Obama barely carried my home district, the ridiculously gerrymanderd, Hispanic-majority IL-4, in the Illinois primary in February.
The Latino experience in America is primarily still an immigrant experience, and immigration boomed in the 1990s when the Clintons were in office. A lot of Hispanics who are now becoming citizens, or who are now registering to vote for the first time, came to America then, or had friends and family who did.
But I've been saying for a long time that one should not confuse the outpouring of support among Latinos for Hillary Clinton in the primaries with a lack of support for Barack Obama in the general election. Voting is intrinsically relativistic. I've made this comparison before, but would Hillary Clinton be regarded as running strong among Catholics if her opponent were John F. Kennedy?
I mention this because a couple of national polls -- the new NBC-WSJ survey as well as Gallup's extensive May tracking data -- now show Obama with roughly a 2:1 lead among Hispanic voters. Exit polls had John Kerry winning Hispanics by only about 55-45 in 2004 (although that figure is disputed), so this is a gain the Democrats are making right at the same time that Latinos begin to vote in much greater numbers.
One saving grace for McCain: Hispanics do not vote monolithically. Mexican Americans vote differently from Puerto Rican Americans from Cuban Americans. And so we should not necessarily assume that Obama's numbers are going to improve among Cuban voters in Florida.
Beginning today, I will be cross-posting the daily polling thread at The Plank. For those of you who don't know me, I am the proprietor of FiveThirtyEight.com, which is sort of a self-help group for polling junkies. Most all of the rest of my blogging will remain exclusive to FiveThirtyEight, except when I feel like making fun of Jonathan Chait. We are, however, also contemplating a weekly, graphics-intensive feature in TNR's print edition.
It's a good day to get started, because the pollsters are up bright and early. Yesterday, we noted that Obama had experienced about a 5-point bounce in his state-by-state polls since Hillary Clinton's withdraw from her campaign, and today we are continuing to see some favorable results for him in other states.
In Wisconsin, Obama leads John McCain by 13 points in a University of Wisconsin / WisPolitics.com poll. Strictly speaking, this is the debut edition of this poll, and so we have no trendlines against which to compare. But the poll is conducted by Charles Franklin of pollster.com and his colleague Ken Goldstein, and so should be pretty solid. The continuum of Midwestern states goes something like Michigan- Ohio- Pennsylvania- Wisconsin- Iowa- Minnesota in order of most competitive to least competitive (one can argue that the order of Michigan and Ohio should be inverted). In each of these states, the Democrats have a pretty strong advantage in terms of party identification, and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are the two that might come off John McCain's board if Obama's bounce has some legs.
Meanwhile, Rasmussen shows Obama with an 18-point lead in Washington. We have gotten used to seeing double-digit leads for Obama on the West Coast, but this is nevertheless an improvement from his 11-point lead in Rasmussen's May poll. We now show Obama as having a 98 percent chance of winning Washington. For the sake of comparison, Obama is roughly as likely to win Mississippi or Wyoming as he is to lose Washington.
In Massachusetts, a Suffolk University poll shows Obama with a 23-point lead. While it's not intrinsically surprising to see a Democrat with a large lead in Massachusetts, the state had not been polled that much, and one of the two pollsters who had polled it (SurveyUSA) was showing a relatively close race. Massachusetts has a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters, so it should not be surprising to see Obama's numbers improve there as he consolidates their support.
The modest exception to all of this is in New Jersey, where Quinnipiac shows Obama with a relatively tepid 6-point lead; Obama had led by 7 points in Quinnipiac's February poll of the Garden State. Other New Jersey polling has shown Obama with a somewhat larger lead. Whether the state becomes a fall battleground may depend as much on the Senate race, where some polling has shown Frank Lautenberg surprisingly vulnerable, as anything that takes place at the Presidential level.
Overall, our simulations give Obama a 54.9 percent chance of winning the election; this is his highest figure since March 18. As new polling begins to roll in from states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, that lead is likely to get larger before it gets smaller.
UPDATE: More late-bouncing developments in Iowa, where Rasmussen has Obama ahead 45-38. That 7-point lead is an improvement from a 2-point lead that Obama held in Rasmussen's prior Iowa poll.
Well, it worked. Ever since the McCain campaign put Arizona in a festive pink on its electoral map, Democratic blogs are starting to pick up and run with the notion that Arizona is a swing state. The warrant for the claim is pretty thin -- an internal poll leaked by a Democratic congressional candidate showed McCain ahead by just 5 points in an R+6 district. Against that, we have a relative abundance of statewide polling showing Obama no closer than 9 points (and often down by more than that) and the fact that it's McCain's home state.
The home state effect seems generally to be on the order of 6-7 points, but can vary a lot from candidate to candidate and state to state. It might be weaker for McCain than for some other candidates, as he tends more to be a United States Senator than someone who porkbarrels for his home state.
Still, even without that home state effect, Arizona would lag a few points behind pickup opportunities like Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, largely because of its large retiree population. Is it possible that Obama could win Arizona? Sure (although our model assigns him only a 4 percent chance). Is Arizona likely to make the difference between winning and losing the election? Probably not.
Just for our collective edification, however, you can construct some pure Western strategies for Obama that come up with winning electoral margins. Let's say that Obama loses Ohio and Michigan, but wins Iowa, and everything East of the Mississippi goes as it did in 2004. If Obama sweeps the small "sorta, kinda, maybe" Western states that are polling in the single-digits -- these are Montana, Alaska, and North Dakota -- plus the more talked-about Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, that would get him to 271 EV. So would Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona. But we're a long way from being able to declare the state competitive.
Congratulations to Isabel Lugo, a third-year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, who was the first person to come up with a solution to the number of unique winning scenarios in the electoral college, as well all the people who helped Isabel to get there and confirm the result. To my surprise, this became the most commented-upon thread ever at FiveThirtyEight.com, and is quite possibly my favorite.
...
In unrelated news that probably isn't quite worth a thread unto itself, I will be a guest tomorrow morning on CNN's American Morning with John Roberts. The segment will air live at roughly 8:15 AM Eastern. Postponed because of CNN's tornado coverage. This is why one should always be very cautious about touting a live TV gig. But we're trying to get rescheduled for tomorrow.
In Michigan, Rasmussen shows Barack Obama with a 45-42 lead over John McCain. In Rasmussen's Michigan poll from last month, Obama had trailed by one point. In New York, Quinnipiac has Barack Obama ahead by 14 points. While this result is not inherently all that surprising, it does represent a 6-point improvement from Quinnipiac's prior poll of the state.
There have now been six polls that were in the field since the Democratic primaries were concluded, and for which we have a previous trendline against which to compare. Barack Obama has gained ground in all six of those polls; his average bounce has been about 5 points.
GA Rasmussen 5/6 -14 Rasmussen 6/4 -10 NJ Rasmussen 3/27 -1 Rasmussen 6/4 +9 WI Rasmussen 5/5 -4 Rasmussen 6/5 +2 NY Quinnipiac 4/15 +8 Quinnipiac 6/6 +14 WA SurveyUSA 5/17 +16 SurveyUSA 6/8 +17 MI Rasmussen 5/7 -1 Rasmussen 6/9 +3 ----------------------------------------------------- AVG +0.7 +5.8
I wish pollsters were a little more consistent in when they released their data. Otherwise, there is no particularly good time of day for the polling thread. Among the more prolific pollsters, SurveyUSA and ARG tend to release their polls in the afternoon; Mason-Dixon and Quinnipiac in the early AM; Zogby in the middle of the night, and Rasmussen is all over the board. But since I don't keep a particularly consistent schedule either, I suppose that's neither here nor there.
Two polls out tonight. In Georgia, Rasmuseen shows John McCain with a 51-41 lead over Barack Obama. All of the Georgia polling has been pretty consistent, showing a lead of somewhere between 10 and 14 points for McCain. This may be because opinion of Barack Obama is pretty well polarized in Georgia (and elsewhere in the South). 34 percent have a very favorable impression of Obama -- presumably this includes the usual mix of African-Americans, college kids, and urban professionals in Georgia's burgeoning tech sector. But 36 percent have a very unfavorable view of Obama. With those goalposts set up, the polls are likely to be fairly stubborn in Georgia unless Bob Barr's candidacy gains traction (he was not included in this poll).
In Washington, SurveyUSA shows Obama with an impressive 17-point lead over John McCain. Obama is now a 97 percent favorite to win Washington. The Washington poll is noteworthy as being the first statewide survey completed in its entirety following Hillary Clinton's endorsement of Obama. Obama had an 89-7 lead among Democrats in this poll.
Will Carroll is my colleague at Baseball Prospectus and analyzes baseball player's medical histories for a living. So naturally, when he heard about FiveThirtyEight.com, he wanted to do the same thing for John McCain. Here, then, is Will's take on McCain, which presents an essentially optimistic picture.
Let's get right past the age issue. Simple chronological age isn't a good gauge for what we're trying to look at here. McCain has kept up a normal, active Senate calendar and held his own on the campaign trail, a grueling march that never seemed to get to McCain.
Unlike Bob Dole, a comparable that many have brought up due to war injuries and an advancing age at the time of their campaign, McCain never seems to wear down. Given his workload recently, made up of mostly fundraisers and media opportunities, he's had a chance to rest that his opponent has not. Sure, Obama's relative youth and athleticism should give him some recovery advantage, but the fall campaign is not going to be the same kind of long-term grind that could wear on McCain. Focused on a few big performances and keyed to his electoral needs, McCain will be able to pick his spots.
McCain's two most significant injuries are to his shoulders and his history of melanoma. The shoulders are a visible sign of his captivity in Viet Nam, leaving the Senator unable to raise either arm significantly above his head. While it prevents a vigorous Nixonian wave of victory, it isn't noticeable and without prompting, most voters don't notice a deficit. The signs of melanoma, a puffy cheek and a long, five-inch scar on his left cheek, are far more noticeable. His appearance on "Saturday Night Live" highlighted his need for careful control of the media environment. McCain needs to be seated head-on to his audience, lit from his right and does not like to turn his head to stage right, exposing his scar. While the signs of melanoma have not recurred, the data does raise some concerns.
There was, buried in his extensive medical records, one glaring warning sign. In an article in the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller found that McCain's physicians had noted not one, but two melanomas and suggested some spread. Doctors aggressively removed lymph nodes - hence the large scar - and halted the spread. McCain himself knows well that melanoma can recur. He's had two other instances of melanomas being removed, once from his shoulder in the early 1990s and another on his nose in 2002, two years after the more noted melanoma removal. McCain's health and vigor eight years after the most significant melanoma is a good sign. Patients with this type of cancer have a 65% survival rate, but this is more a curve than a line, trending back up after a period of time.
Finally, McCain claims a genetic advantage and does appear to have it. His mother is 96 years old but notably vigorous and mentally sharp. The rest of his family history is less notable. His father, a Navy Admiral, lived to age 70 while his grandfather died at 61, worn down by the stress of combat during World War II.
Overall, McCain is in good shape for a 71-year-old who has been through harrowing torture and multiple bouts with cancer. McCain's most obvious comparables, Bob Dole and Dick Cheney, offer interesting lessons. Both would have had far more negative Health Reports during their campaigns, but both are alive and well at the end of their terms (in Dole's case, the hypothetical). History is not destiny, but neither is destiny predictable. Age will surely be an issue, though health it appears, should not be.
I was asked this question by a highly-respected political writer and couldn't come up with any convenient way to provide him with an answer. Nor does there appear to be any guidance on Google. So let me pose it to the collective:
How many unique ways are there to acquire at least 270 electoral votes without any excess?
For example, one combination would be to win California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin. That would be equal to 272 electoral votes (not coincidentally, these are the John Kerry states plus Ohio).
Note that there are no excess electoral votes in this combination: if you remove one of the states with three electoral votes, the number falls to 269, which is below the 270-EV cut-off. So winning all of these states plus North Dakota would not qualify, since the candidate has superfluous electoral votes. On the other hand, replacing Vermont with North Dakota would make for a unique combination.
Nothing of monetary value to be provided to the winner, but I will give you a big thank you and shout-out on the front page, and your name will be immortalized in Google and possibly in a national column. I'm hoping that there's some genius out there who can solve this problem in 15 minutes.
p.s. To keep things at least somewhat simple, we probably should not worry about the split electoral votes in Maine and Nebraska.
I think I'm a pretty smart guy, but every now and then I come across something and say to myself "man, that shit is deep".
This morning, in doing a little bit of remote-term planning for features that we might add to the site in the distant future, I was doing some background research on liberal-conservative scores and other methods of vote classification and stumbled across a website called voteview.com, created by a University of California at San Diego professor named Keith Poole. Voteview uses an extremely rigorous methodology for ordering Senators from most liberal to most conservative which to my mind produces some fairly intuitive results. (Five most liberal senators thus far this year? Russ Feingold, Chris Dodd, Bernie Sanders, Sheldon Whitehose, and Ted Kennedy).
This is how Voteview classifies Senators McCain and Obama over the last four Congresses; for good measure we'll also throw in Senator Clinton:
Congress Obama McCain Clinton 107th -- 57/102 22/102 108th -- 96.5/100 21.5/100 109th 21/101 100/101 25/101 110th 10.5/101 94/101 20/101
By this method, Obama is liberal, but not that liberal. He was the 21st most liberal senator in the 109th Congress and has been the 10th or 11th most liberal thus far in the 110th. The surprising result is John McCain, who rates as the 8th most conservative senator in the 110th Congress, the 2nd most conservative in the 109th, and the 5th or 6th most conservative in the 108th.
In the 107th Congress, however, McCain was quite moderate. Voteview doesn't have rankings before the 107th, so I'm not sure whether there was some permanent change in McCain's political philosophy on or around 2003 (perhaps coinciding with the start of the Iraq War) or whether it was his behavior in the 107th that was unusual (perhaps he took some pleasure in being a thorn in President Bush's side after having lost the primary to him). But this is more evidence for the notion that the 2008 version of John McCain is a very different politician than the 2000-2002 version of John McCain.
Barack Obama is recruiting senior staff to a new unit which will combat virulent rumor campaigns on the internet that threaten to cost him votes in the presidential election against John McCain.
The unit is part of a huge expansion of Obama's campaign team as he shifts from the Democratic nomination race to the campaign for November's election.
It's become hackneyed to say this, but the underlying dynamics of the election do favor Obama. We'll see if he begins to get a bounce in his state-by-state polling over the coming weeks. I think he very well might, and we may wind up talking about an endgame in which in order to win McCain will either have to (i) wait for a mistake; (ii) play perfect Election Night poker and sweep the swing states, or (iii) go negative.
But as McCain himself does not seem inclined to go negative, he'll have to rely (knowingly or not) on off-label elements on the Internet. Hence, Obama's SWAT Team (you'll have to excuse me for being a little Giordanoesque in my prose). We do not know exactly what the SWAT Team will consist of (the Obama campaign probably does not want us to know), but a safe guess is some combination of: public relations staff, law-enforcement officers, hackers, Internet security experts (i.e. more hackers), bloggers, and lawyers.
One wonders if this is a response to the recent plagiarisms and fabrications from the well-trafficked anti-Obama site NoQuarter, which gained enough traction to provoke a question from (and a repudiation of) a McClatchy reporter. If I were a proprietor of such a site, I would be thinking about retaining an attorney.
Three new polls out this afternoon from Rasmussen. In Wisconsin, Barack Obama holds a 45-43 lead over John McCain. Rasmussen's March and May polls had shown McCain with a lead in Wisconsin, so this brings them into line with other polling in the state, all of which shows a small lead for Obama. The McCain team may need to decide relatively early on whether they want to make a serious play in Wisconsin, or concentrate more exclusively on Michigan and Ohio, each of which look somewhat more favorable to them. Both candidates get pretty good favorability scores in Wisconsin, but Obama's support is firmer, so McCain may be playing for a smaller-than-usual number of swing voters.
In New Jersey, Obama leads by 9 points. New Jersey has not been polled as much as it probably should be, but this is another case of the polls coalescing a little bit, as Rasmussen's prior polling in New Jersey had shown the state to be a toss-up. If there's bad news here, it's for Frank Lautenberg, since the poll seems to indicate that many Dems are thinking about splitting their ticket.
Lastly, in Texas, McCain holds a 52-39 lead. This is a "pre-bounce" poll, as the field work was conducted last Monday. Nevertheless, this is yet another case of Rasmussen's numbers gravitating back toward what other pollsters like Research 2000 and Baselice have found in the state. Obama may make some pretense of competing in Texas, but it will be pretense only.
I'm not any sort of expert on the Senate, but I've pulled together a bunch of metrics and researched many of the candidates as I consider adding Senate polling to our tracking. Some early conclusions? Incumbency is only an advantage of the incumbent is reasonably popular, and ideology matters a lot in Senate races. Although there are exceptions here and there (such as Rick Noriega in Texas), you can usually tell whether the opposition party is serious or not based on whether or not they nominate a candidate who is a good fit for that state's political environment.
Without further ado, here are the first and possibly last FiveThirtyEight.com Senate Race Rankings.
Likely Pickup
1. New Mexico (Open, was R-Domenici). I list this race above Virginia for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Tom Udall's lead is actually larger in the polling than Mark Warner's. Secondly, the GOP picked a candidate in Steve Pearce who is too conservative for his state, particularly on the Iraq war. And thirdly, there is no chance (at least I don't think) that Udall will get tabbed for the Vice Presidential nomination, whereas Warner still could. Pearce may pick up a handful of points as his name recognition improves but it should be a double-digit victory for Udall.
2. Virginia (Open, was R-Warner). Simply put, people like Mark Warner and don't like Jim Gilmore. Warner also has about a 5:1 edge in fundraising so far. But we're still talking about flipping a long-held GOP seat in a red (albeit purpling) state. A 90 percent+ plus chance of a Democratic pickup so long as Warner remains on the ballot, but I think it will tighten a bit.
Lean Pickup
3. Colorado (Open, was R-Allard). I'm ranking this ahead of New Hampshire based on gut-feel. Mark Udall's politics are very much in line with Colorado's: quite liberal on issues like the environment, the war, and civil liberties, but relatively conservative on immigration, taxation, and entitlement programs. Also, if we work from sort of the transitive property, Bob Schaeffer lost the Republican primary in 2004 to Pete Coors, who lost his Senate bid to Ken Salazar. Udall ought to be roughly as appealing a candidate as Salazar, but Schaeffer is not as appealing as Coors, and Colorado is turning blue pretty rapidly.
4. New Hampshire (R-Sununu). Leans pickup, but Sununu can make a race of it, particularly as he has about a 2:1 advantage in fundraising so far. John McCain's also liable to spend a lot of time on the ground in New Hampshire as he has relatively few places he can play offense.
5. Alaska (R-Stevens). Ted Stevens has the worst favorability/approval scores of any incumbent running for re-election -- he's polling at about a -5. In a change election, incumbency is only an advantage if the incumbent is reasonably well-liked; it can easily turn into a detriment if there is a 'throw the bums out' mentality. Alaska has a very young population that should turn out in large numbers for Barack Obama; if most of them vote for Mark Begich too, the state leans his way. Stevens has a huge, 11:1 advantage in fundraising so far, but how much money does it really take to compete in Alaska?
Toss-Up
6. Mississippi-B (R-Wicker). This really almost ought to be considered an open seat, since Roger Wicker, though reasonably well-liked, is pretty far from having achieved 100 percent name recognition. Ronnie Musgrove is running as a very conservative Democrat -- if elected, he would probably be the most conservative Democrat in the Senate -- and is actually closer to the median point of Mississippi's electorate than the predictably right-wing Wicker. Musgrove doesn't even have to advertise the fact that he's a Democrat since there are no party names on the ballot in a special election.
7. Minnesota (R-Coleman). Although Norm Coleman's approval ratings aren't terrible, at the end of the day he is a little too conservative, and Minnesota a little too liberal, for this race not to tighten some. But we've passed the point where the chances of a takeover are better than 50:50.
Lean Retention
8. Oregon (R-Smith). Gordon Smith is in the odd position of being a moderate in a state in which the electorate tends either to be very liberal or very conservative. Still, his approval ratings are passable, and Jeff Merkley is enough of a true liberal/progressive that Smith shouldn't have to worry about turning out the Republican base.
9. North Carolina (R-Dole). Elizabeth Dole is still reasonably well liked, but her voting record is conservative enough that Kay Hagan ought to be able to seize the political center if she runs a reasonably effective campaign. Dole has raised more funds than any other Senate candidate, however, so whether Hagan can win may largely depend on whether the Democrats decide to go for the jugular here.
10. Kentucky (R-McConnell). Mitch McConnell approval ratings are hovering around the 50:50 mark, which makes him quite vulnerable in a state where Democrats still have a substantial advantage in voter registration. Bruce Lunsford, his opponent, might prove to be slightly too far left for a state like Kentucky, and isn't likely to get many coattails from Obama, but he's run a well organized campaign and stands to pick up a couple points as his name recognition increases to 100 percent. 11. Louisiana (D-Landrieu). Louisiana is routinely listed as a potential pick-up opportunity, perhaps out of politeness to the Republicans who have few other targets. But Mary Landrieu is actually quite popular -- she had a 70:25 favorable/unfavorable score in an April poll from Southern Media & Opinion Research -- and the Republican John N. Kennedy is extremely poorly organized, with almost no funds raised to date. Just try searching for his website, for instance, you'll come across this before anything from the campaign. Kennedy is also not especially conservative, having recently changed his party affiliation, whereas Landrieu is one of the more conservative Democrats in the Senate. Where there is little difference in the ideology of the two candidates, the incumbent is usually going to win.
Likely Retention
12. New Jersey (D-Lautenberg). This is a "BREAKING!" result based on the new Rasmussen poll that was released just moments ago, which shows Frank Lautenberg with a trivial one-point lead over Dick Zimmer. There may be a little bit of a "Hillary Effect" here as Lautenberg just survived a relatively vigorous primary challenge whereas Zimmer has not really been defined. New Jersey is notorious for teasing Republicans early in the election cycle and this may just be the latest example of that, but at the very least Lautenberg may need to spend from his Uncle Scrooge-like pile of money.
13. Texas (R-Cornyn). Rick Noriega is a fascinating candidate and may be able to make it competitive based on his charisma if he is able to turn out the Latino vote in greater numbers. But at the end of the day, it is probably too much to be asking for an authentic progressive to win a statewide race in Texas.
14. Maine (R-Collins). Susan Collins has shown a robust lead in the polls that has surprised some observers. But ultimately this one shouldn't be too hard to figure: she's a popular and effective Senator whose centrism, particularly on values issues, is a good fit for independent-minded Mainers. Tom Allen might be able to make a little bit of a push based on the war in Iraq, as Collins has not really distanced herself from the President on that issue, but his name recognition is already near 100 percent so the race is relatively far advanced.
Long Shots
15. Idaho (Open, was R-Craig). Certainly starts out in the Republican column, but it's very early as neither Jim Risch nor Larry LaRocco are all that well known.
16. Nebraska (Open, was R-Hagel). Scott Kleeb is an appealing candidate who is trying to make up for a big fundraising deficit with help from the netroots, but Nebraska is a red state and the prudent Mike Johanns might need some kind of Macaca moment to open Kleeb's door.
Snowball's-Chance-in-Hell
17. Kansas (R-Roberts). This race may tighten by a couple of points as Jim Slattery's name identification improves, but Pat Roberts is reasonably popular. A reach, even in a Democratic year. 18. Georgia (R-Chambliss). Could have been interesting, but the Democrats are taking too long to settle on a candidate.
19. South Dakota (D-Johnson). Could have been interesting, but the Republicans took too long to settle on a candidate.
20. Oklahoma (R-Inhofe). Democrat Andrew Rice would be an interesting candidate in a different state.
21. Wyoming-A (R-Barrasso). Democrats didn't mount serious opposition in what was effectively an open seat. Live Boy, Dead Girl
22. Massachusetts (D-Kerry). John Kerry's approval ratings are surprisingly tepid, but Jeff Beatty is too conservative for Massachusetts.
23. Alabama (R-Sessions). Democrat Vivian Figures is too liberal for the state.
24. Mississippi-A (R-Cochran). Not the race to pay attention to in Mississippi. 25. Michigan (D-Levin). No polling yet, but Jack Hoogendyk is too conservative to get more than 40 percent of the vote against a well-liked incumbent. 26. Tennessee (R-Alexander). Democrats will have some kind of candidate but not a compelling one. 27. South Carolina (R-Graham). Democratic opposition never organized. 28. Montana (D-Baucus). Baucus is popular and opposition is poorly organized.
29. Iowa (D-Harkin). Christopher Reed is not a serious opponent.
30. West Virginia (D-Rockefeller). Rockefeller is popular and Democrats retain overwhelming party ID advantage in West Virginia.
31. Illinois (D-Durbin). Not in Barack Obama's year.
Rasmussen breaks up a poll-free weekend with some fresh results in South Carolina: John McCain leads Barack Obama by 9 points.
The only other South Carolina poll was conducted by SurveyUSA in late February and showed McCain with a scant 3-point lead. However, our regression model had figured that South Carolina should be polling at more like a 12-point lead for McCain. On the one hand, then, it might be argued that this result slightly beats expectations for Obama. On the other hand, South Carolina's demographics are more or less an extension of North Carolina's, but about 4-5 points worse for Obama overall. So it's hard to imagine Obama winning South Carolina without winning North Carolina -- and if he wins North Carolina, South Carolina is probably superfluous. Something like Georgia, on the other hand, which is younger than the Carolinas and might have more of a third party vote, could potentially behave somewhat more independently.
(Also, this gives me an excuse to point to the nice little feature I got at Newsweek.)
CNN's new national poll ran versions both with and without third-party candidates. Obama performs one point better in the version with third-party candidates than without, leading McCain by 4 points rather than 3.
This would not be surprising if most of the third party vote were going to Bob Barr. But in fact, it's Ralph Nader who is picking up most of those votes. He polls at 6 percent in this survey to Barr's 2 percent.
Obama McCain Nader Barr D/K No Third Party 49 46 -- -- 5 w/Third Party 47 43 6 2 2 Change -2 -3 +6 +2 -3
The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Nader takes votes away from the Democrat. Indeed, I suspect that most of his 6 percent comes from Democratic voters. But I suspect that it's coming from a particular kind of Democratic voter: disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters. Some of those folks are not yet ready to "endorse" Barack Obama. But they might also have significant reservations about voting for John McCain. Ralph Nader (and Bob Barr) provide for something of a soft landing. Even Larry C. Johnson, the seemingly chemically imbalanced former CIA agent behind the anti-Obama conspiracist website No Quarter, yesterday told his truthers that he would be voting for Bob Barr.
By the time the Obama campaign has finished saturating the airwaves in November, it will probably have succeeded in convincing almost all of its base that John McCain is an unacceptable alternative. As some of those voters might still not be ready to vote for Obama, the presence of Nader's name on the ballot might be as helpful to Obama as it is harmful.
This is pretty interesting viewing. What's tricky about it is that it at once seems to be an exercise in expectations-setting (i.e. lowering them) and an effort to reassure potential donors about McCain's electability (i.e. raising expectations). This produces a map that isn't particularly internally consistent. Arizona is described as a "Lean GOP" state while Virginia is described as "Solid GOP". Florida is described as a "Toss-Up" -- and so is Connecticut.
However, I don't know that this can entirely be dismissed as an exercise in spin, because so far McCain's travel schedule has pretty closely matched this map. For example, McCain made four campaign appearances in Florida over the past month, but none in Virginia or Indiana. He's visited both Kentucky and Tennessee in the past month, two states that might be competitive against another Democrat, but are gimmes against Barack Obama. McCain has made four appearances in California, two in Washington, and one in Oregon, none of which look like they'll be especially close.
Of course, choosing to campaign in a particular state is not purely about getting the locals to vote for you. Early in the campaign, it can also be an exercise in branding. McCain wants to set some low hurdles for himself in states like Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana where he should continue to maintain strong leads in the polling. He's supposed to be strong in the Western states and strong among independents, so he makes pretenses about competing in California, which is Western and has a lot of independents. But he seems to think it dangerous to concede, for instance, that Virginia is a swing state, since Virginia is a state that Republicans are supposed to win, and McCain is supposed to be an above-average Republican.
