If the Election WERE Held Today...

One of the fun things we can do with our model is to change the election date to anything we like and see how it might impact the results. So what would the model project if the election were scheduled for tomorrow?


Notice how the red states turn redder and the blue states turn bluer. This is something you'll see happen very gradually over the course of the next four months. As we near the election, smaller leads will become more meaningful, and more states will be taken out of play.

Overall, our model thinks that Obama would have an 88.6 percent chance of winning an election held tomorrow. The most competitive states would be as follows:

1. Virginia. Obama 58% to win, McCain 42%
2. Florida. McCain 62% to win, Obama 38%
3. Indiana. McCain 63% to win, Obama 37%
4. Nevada. McCain 63% to win, Obama 37%
5. Missouri. McCain 65% to win, Obama 35%
6. North Dakota. McCain 79% to win, Obama 21%
7. North Carolina. McCain 81% to win, Obama 19%
8. Colorado. Obama 83% to win, McCain 17%
9. Louisiana. McCain 85% to win, Obama 15%
10. Ohio. Obama 88% to win, McCain 12%
11. New Mexico. Obama 88% to win, McCain 12%
12. South Dakota. McCain 89% to win, Obama 11%
13. Michigan. Obama 90% to win, McCain 10%
14. West Virginia. McCain 90% to win, Obama 10%
15. Montana. McCain 91% to win, Obama 9%
16. Alaska. McCain 92% to win, Obama 8%
17. South Carolina. McCain 94% to win, Obama 6%

All other states are at 95% or better for the leading candidate.

McCain's electoral prospects, unsurprisingly, would be very much tied to his chances of pulling out an upset in Ohio or Michigan. One thing that's going on here, by the way, is that the amount of polling data in a particular state is a factor. For example, our model thinks that McCain would win by 4.4 points in North Dakota in an election held tomorrow, but still assigns Obama a 21 percent chance of winning there because the polling data is so sparse that we can't quite be certain what's going on. In Ohio, meanwhile, the model projects an Obama win of 4.2 points -- less than McCain's projected margin in North Dakota -- but gives him an 88 percent chance of winning because that small lead is backed up by much more polling volume.

And there is still an outside chance that something totally wacky could happen, with the polling data off in the same direction in many states. As recently as 2000, there was about a 3-point miss in the final national polling averages ... Bush was expected to win that election by about 2.5 points but Gore actually won the popular vote by a half-point. In 1996, Bill Clinton was 12 points ahead in the final polling averages but won by "only" 8.5 points ... in 1980, Ronald Reagan led by just 3 points in Gallup's last poll but actually won by almost 10 points. Sometimes, there is movement that comes too late for the polls to detect, or everyone is off in the same direction with their turnout assumptions.

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Construction Season Over (Technical)

This afternoon, I completed a series of refinements to both the trendline adjustment that was implemented two weeks ago, and the mean-reversion adjustment that was implemented earlier this week. I am hopeful that these will be the last significant changes to our methodology. The refinements are described in more detail below.

Changes to Trendline Adjustment

The most noticeable change is that the trendline curve has been retooled to be considerably more sensitive to changes in the polling data. For example, compare the curve we're using now (this is the top graph) to the one we had in place a couple of days ago (the bottom graph):




The more sensitive curve does a much more intuitive job of pinpointing Obama's post-primary bounce. Rather than showing a leisurely jaunt upward for Obama in the polls over the course of the past month, it instead has his numbers improving much more steeply right as the primaries end, but then leveling off. In fact, the new curve thinks that Obama's numbers peaked shortly after Hillary Clinton's concession speech and that he's lost perhaps half a point in the polls since then.

The other problem with the curve we had been using before is that, by being so slow to respond to changes in the polling data, it was causing us to adjust some of the previous polling results incorrectly. For example, it might have been taking a poll conducted 14 days ago and actually giving Obama a bonus point or two from it, when the more sensitive version of the trendline reveals that Obama's numbers have been flat since then. In other words, the more slow-moving trendline, which was intended to be more conservative, was actually being too liberal about adjusting upward polls taken after most of Obama's post-primary bounce had been realized.

A second, more technical adjustment to the trendline is that it now weights the daily datapoints based on the number of polls that were conducted that day. Before, a day on which just one poll came out had just as much influence on the curve as a day like 2/27, when SurveyUSA released polling in all 50 states. This idiosyncrasy has now been resolved.

The third adjustment is in the way that the trendline adjustment is attributed to particular states. The formula that we were using before was causing problems because the value of the dummy variables used to calculate our terndline adjustment are arbitrary except when taken relative to one another. The new procedure for calculating the state-by-state trendline adjustment is as follows:

1. For each state in which at least 5 polls have been conducted, we perform a regression of the polling results in that state relative to the LOESS trendline curve. Recent polls are weighted more heavily to place the emphasis on the current movement in the numbers. The coefficient produced by each state's regression tells us how sensitive that state is relative to changes in the national numbers. For example, in New Hampshire the polls have been about three times as sensitive to national trendline changes as has the nation as a whole, whereas in Iowa there has been essentially no relationship between the polling in that state and the overall national trend.

2. We then take the coefficients produced in each state and regress those against a series of demographic and political variables to determine what exactly is triggering the changes. For example, right now the changes are mostly related to (1) states in which Hillary Clinton had a lot of support in the primaries; (2) states that have a lot of independent voters; (3) states with a high number of voters who identify their ancestry as 'American', which means states in Appalachia and parts of the South.

The results of this regression give us our 'm' parameter that tells us how to scale the trendline adjustment in each state. As before, m is capped at values of 0.0 and 2.0.

The spirit of the adjustment is exactly the same as it was before, but the results of the calculation appear to be more robust and intuitive than they were before. Obama's numbers are adjusted upward sharply in states like Connecticut and West Virginia, which have not been polled since the primaries ended, because he has seen big movement toward him in similar states like New Jersey and Kentucky, respectively. But he isn't assigned much of a bounce in, say, the Dakotas, because his polling in the Upper Midwest has been much flatter.

One implication of being able to do this calculation more precisely is that the model now sees Obama as having a slight excess of popular votes relative to electoral votes. He has gotten a big bounce in large, Clinton-leaning Democratic states like California and New York; perhaps he'll now win these states by 20 points rather than 15. While that will help with his nationwide popular vote total, it will do little for him in terms of the electoral math.

Change to Mean-Reversion Adjustment

The mean-reversion adjustment, which takes points away from whichever candidate is leading in the national polls because there is a strong historical tendency for the polls to tighten before Election Day, had previously been taking an equal number of points away in each state. If it had calculated that Obama is likely to lose 2 points between now and November, for instance, is was simply lopping 2 points off his margin in each state.

The mean reversion is now state-specific, based on a variant of the procedure used to assign the trendline adjustment to individual states. In other words, we see which types of states and demographics have been most sensitive to movement in the national polling thus far, and use that to infer which states might be most sensitive going forward. In fact, the procedure used to calculate the state-by-state mean-reversion adjustment is identical to the one used to calculate the state-by-state trendline adjustment, with the exceptions that (i) the mean-reversion model does not weight recent movement more heavily, instead looking at the overall sensitivity of each state's polling since February; (ii) because it does not necessarily follow that those states that have been most sensitive to national polling momentum in the past will continue to be so in the future, we hedge our bets by assigning only half of the mean-reversion adjustment on a state-by-state basis, with the other half being assigned equally to all 50 states.

Lastly, I have slightly tuned down the vote share assigned to third-party candidates by rerunning the regression used to determine this figure while excluding the 1992 and 1980 elections, the two years in which a third-party candidate was invited to participate in a nationally-televised debate. We are now assigning about 3.8 percent of the nationwide popular vote to third-party candidates rather than the almost 5 percent that we had assigned before.

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Bob Barr Not Going Viral

The New York Times ran a feature today on Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr being a spoiler. But there is little evidence so far that Barr is gaining much traction in this election.

Consider, for instance, the rather modest fundraising goal established on Barr's webpage. He seeks to raise $88,000 by July 4, of which $27,000 has been raised so far. Candidates generally do not set fundraising goals that they do not expect to meet, so let's say that Barr succeeds and raises another $61,000 over the course of the next week to beat his goal. In fact, let's say that Barr beats that goal by 50 percent and raises $90,000.

A candidate who is raising $90,000 per week will raise approximately $1.7 million dollars between now and Election Day in November. How would this compare to the amount of funds raised by other recent third-party candidates? The amounts below reflect the total amount of individual contributions to third-party candidates in 2000 and 2004, ignoring PAC money, self-loans, etc.:

2004
Nader        Independent     $2.5 million
Badnarik     Libertarian     $1.0 million
Cobb         Green           $0.5 million
Peroutka     Constitution    $0.3 million

2000
Buchanan     Reform          $15.3 million
Nader        Green           $10.8 million
Brown        Libertarian     $2.1 million

There was a huge reduction in the amount of funds available to third-party candidates between 2000 and 2004, perhaps because Ralph Nader's impact on the 2000 election led voters to realize that third party candidacies weren't such a cute little idea. But a fundraising haul of $1.7 million would be relatively modest, even by the standards of your typical third-party candidate. Of course, this is just the roughest guesstimate of what sort of money Barr is bringing in, and fundraising may be a relatively small part of the story for a third-party candidate -- Pat Buchanan got more than $15 million from individual contributors in 2000, and had all of 0.43 percent of the vote to show for it. But so far, the Ron Paul money has not been flowing in.

In fact, Ron Paul's website is still getting two or three times as much traffic as Barr's, and appeared to be getting something like 30-40 times as much traffic at its peak in January versus what Barr's is getting now.

It's still early in this election, but perhaps less so for a third-party candidate than for a major party one. There's really very little going on right now on the campaign trail, making it a good time for a third-party candidate to get some free media impressions from a bored press corps. But once the Beijing Olympics begin on August 8th, the country will be distracted for two weeks by those and then we begin the mad dash to the finish, with the conventions and the debates and both sides ramping up their advertising and their opposition research. So Barr has about five or six weeks left to do something newsworthy, or he's going to find it hard to get media oxygen later on.

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Today's Polls, 6/27

We seem to have gotten past some point of no return where we have a half-dozen polls or so to look at almost every day:



A lot of these polls are good news/bad news for both candidates. In Rasmussen's poll of Mississippi, for instance, Barack Obama hasn't improved his numbers from the May edition of the poll, which had also showed him trailing by a 50-44 margin. On the other hand, that result had looked to me like an outlier before, and now can probably be taken more credibly. While Mississippi remains a longshot for Obama, keep an eye on Louisiana, which has similar demographics but much bluer party identification figures.

The two polls of Texas show the race tightening, but probably not enough to make the race interesting. There's a good rundown here of the pros and cons of Obama investing resources in Texas. The only thing I'd add is that there is far more room at the margins for the Democrats to make up ground with registration among Latino voters than among African-Americans. If Tejanos vote in anything resembling the same proportion that they constitute of Texas's citizenry, the state could be quite competitive.

But it's the SurveyUSA result in Ohio that I want to focus on. Obama leads by 2 here, but had been ahead by 9 in SurveyUSA's may poll of the state. That previous poll had shown a heavily Democratic sample -- 52 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican, 18 percent independent -- and had triggered a lot of discussion about whether pollsters should be weighting their results by party ID. SurveyUSA does not do so -- although if it had applied the May distribution of party IDs to this poll, it would have shown Obama ahead by 10-11 points rather than by 2. Conversely, if SurveyUSA had applied the June party ID distribution to its May poll, that poll would have shown a dead heat rather than Obama ahead by 9.

I do not mean to be a fair-weather fan on the idea of weighting by party ID. As I implied the other day, I suspect that pollsters are facing something of a trade-off between volatility and potentially introducing bias. Weighting by party ID will almost certainly reduce noise, and perhaps make it easier to perceive trendlines -- but if the pollster's guesses about party ID are wrong, they may be reducing the turbulence but landing at the wrong airport. I'll say this: if a pollster doesn't know what it's doing, I think it should be letting the numbers speak for themselves. On the other hand, if the pollster has a robust and thoughtful method for weighting by party ID, it might be worth the trade-off. It is interesting that, taking two of our three highest-rated pollsters, Scott Rasmussen is a firm believer that you ought to weight by party ID, and Jay Leve at SurveyUSA is a firm believer that you ought not.

Finally, there have been some further refinements to the simulation model based on everyone's feedback, which I'll get around to explaining in a bit.

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Right Track

But here's the other side of the finding that asking national mood questions can skew survey results in Obama's favor. If the mere suggestion that the country might be on the wrong track is enough to send scores of independents into the Obama column, imagine what a concerted effort to frame the discourse that way might do. This is something that Hillary Clinton had started to tap into toward the end of the primary process. Screw hope -- things are bad right now -- and we need solutions.

Obama's "change" message, by contrast, has oftentimes been a little bit too abstract. Here's the messaging that Mssrs. Axelrod and Plouffe need to work on: Iraq's fucked up, the economy's fucked up, health care's fucked up, the environment's fucked up, and all John McCain can say is to "stay the course". If that's the mindset that voters take into the ballot booth with them in November, Obama will win quite convincingly.

It isn't simply a matter of trying to frame McCain as the next Bush. That allows voters to let McCain off the hook if they conclude that McCain isn't the next Bush, and McCain's favorables are strong enough that many voters won't bite on that one. Rather, it's a matter of trying to portray McCain as being out of touch because he doesn't recognize that these things like health care are problems when 70 or 80 percent of the country does.

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Wrong Track

If Frank Newport at Gallup is right, than that LA Times/Bloomberg poll that showed Barack Obama with a 12-point lead may have had a flaw after all.

As is always the case, there are some slight differences in the way the polls are conducted. The Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll asks a "right direction/wrong direction" question before the ballot. Our Gallup Poll Daily tracking asks a registered voter screen before the ballot. The Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll includes the phrase "or would you vote for a candidate from some other party?" Our Gallup poll does not include this phrase. It is unclear how the order of these questions may affect the polling results.

That's a pretty big no-no in my book. Question order definitely matters -- the later you ask a question, the more it's going to be influenced by the implicit messaging triggered by previous questions. In this case, an overwhelming majority of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, and most of them also associate that with the incumbent Republican administration. So it isn't surprising that a Republican presidential candidate performs worse if you ask about presidential preference immediately afterward, or that Republican party ID was lower in this survey.

In fact, there happens to be some direct evidence of this. In its new New Jersey poll, Fairleigh Dickinson split its panel into halves. The first half received a battery of national questions -- including a "wrong track" question -- before being asked their presidential preference. The second half got the Presidential questions first.

Among those respondents who got the presidential question first, Obama had a 47-34 lead. But among who got the wrong track question and then were asked for their presidential pick, Obama's lead expanded to 51-33. The difference was particularly large among independent voters, who split 24-24 with huge numbers of undecideds when asked the presidential question first, but went 41-14 for Obama if they had been prompted by the national mood questions.

One shouldn't read that much into this -- when we're looking at subsamples, and particularly subsamples of subsamples -- the margins of error are very high. Nevertheless, those splits would fall into line with generally accepted theory. I understand that folks like LA Times/Bloomberg take a lot of pride in their national mood questions, which in some cases they have asked for years on end. But it's the horse race questions that generate the earned media for your polling organization and convey prestige upon it. That's why most of the media-savvy pollsters that we tend to reference frequently understand that you need to give horse race questions the top billing.

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Ebb and Flow

Remember what I said the other day about how the McCain campaign should have embraced the results in the Newsweek and LA Times polls so that everything else would look good by comparison?

McCain never really did that, but some on the right side of the blogosphere have gotten the memo. This is Ed Morrissey, whom I usually find pretty fair-minded and reasonable:

Those Newsweek and LA Times polls look more and more like outliers or worse. With both Gallup and Rasmussen showing either outright or virtual ties in their presidential tracking polls, Time offers even more evidence that Barack Obama has failed to pull away from John McCain after clinching the nomination.

[...]

The results should raise eyebrows anyway. Obama has actually lost ground since February, which dovetails with his collapse in the final months of the Democratic primary. This tends to underscore the shakiness of the Obama phenomenon; it hasn’t translated into general-election enthusiasm, and the trends are going in the wrong direction. Among the wider and less-predictive sample of registered voters, that has to cause a great deal of concern among Democrats who thought Obama would sail to victory on the puffery of “hope and change”.

Well, I don't know how you define "pull away", but Obama's lead is roughly 5 points larger than it was before the primaries ended. We have dozens and dozens of points of evidence to back that up.

Has there been a bounce since February -- the last time that Time conducted a national poll? You shouldn't really expect one. If you look at our Super Tracker graph, you'll find that February was the other time in this election that Obama was polling extremely well. If you held the election on February 12th, Obama would probably have won about 33 states. Same thing if you held the election today.

Some will say that the voters haven’t paid much attention to the race, and that Obama has plenty of time to put distance between himself and McCain. However, that ignores the attention Obama has received all throughout this campaign, especially in 2008. He has graced magazine covers across a wide spectrum of interests and the significance of his candidac has been widely discussed for months, while McCain has had relatively little time in the spotlight. Obama will receive more scrutiny and less celebration in the coming four months, while McCain’s profile will rise rapidly. Obama needed to have a big lead before then, a head start to ride out the coming storm.

The more people see of Obama, the less they seem to like him.

Well, I'd agree that Obama has been the focal point for media attention ever since he won the Iowa caucus. But it isn't as though the attention has universally been positive. On the contrary, Obama's media narrative was pretty brutal for substantial periods of March, April and May.

His polling did suffer during this time frame, and he'll have other cycles like this too; in fact, I sense one starting fairly soon. But with the exception of the couple of weeks surrounding Jeremiah Wright's debut onto the scene, McCain wasn't really able to overtake him. And including the Jeremiah Wright thing, Obama has been a very resilient and media-savvy politician. It's not clear which point on the Brooks-o-Meter represents the steady state.

That's been the ebb and flow of the race in a nutshell. At his high tide -- when his media narrative is good -- Obama should win a relatively convincing victory, which might be more impressive in the Electoral College than in the popular vote because of the way the states are aligned this year. At Obama's low tide, we'll have another 2000, where we're all staying up late on Election Night -- or maybe even until Alaska's results are counted the next morning.

But McCain has never been in control of this election. Even now, one has the sense that he's playing for a tie.

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Should we be discounting Obama's lead? The next and hopefully last Big Change.

Thus far, the trendline adjustment that we implemented last week has been quite successful. It has correctly anticipated bounces for Obama in states ranging from Florida to Ohio to Tennessee. It has allowed the model to fall more intuitively into line with changes in the momentum of the race, and to correct some of the timing bias associated with different states being polled at different times.

The model believes that if the election were held today, Obama would win by approximately 6 points. That's very close to his current lead in the national polling. Intuitively, it feels just about right to me.

However, our goal is not to predict what would happen if the election were held today. Our goal is to predict what will happen in November. In an earlier article on this subject, I framed the question thusly: Suppose we are correct that Obama would win an election held today by 6 points. Is a 6-point Obama win therefore the best prediction of the outcome in November? Up until now, our model has always assumed that it was.

However, this assumption is not correct. Rather, there is a fairly strong tendency for national polling to tighten as one approaches election day. National polls are not equally likely to move upward or downward at any given time. Rather, they are more likely to move in the direction of the candidate who is trailing in the race.

This tendency is actually fairly easy to eyeball if you look at some historical polling data. Below is a table containing the largest lead held by each candidate in any public poll in my database released within 200 days of that year's election. For 1952-1984 and 1996, the database consists of Gallup polling only; for the other years, it consists of a variety of national polls.

Largest leads for each candidate in public poll
released within 200 days of general election.

....  Biggest         Biggest        ......
Year  GOP Lead        DEM Lead       Result
---------------------------------------------------
1952  Eisenhower +28  None*          Eisenhower +11
1956  Eisenhower +27  None*          Eisenhower +15
1960  Nixon +6        Kennedy +4     Kennedy +0.2
1964  None*           Johnson +59    Johnson +23
1968  Nixon +16       Humphrey +6    Nixon +0.7
1972  Nixon +34       None*          Nixon +23
1976  Ford +1         Carter +33     Carter +2
1980  Reagan +16      Carter +8      Reagan +10
1984  Reagan +21      None*          Reagan +18
1988  Bush +17        Dukakis +18    Bush +8
1992  Bush +16        Clinton +30    Clinton +6
1996  None*           Clinton +23    Clinton +9
2000  Bush +14        Gore +17       Gore +0.5
2004  Bush +13        Kerry +11      Bush +2

* In 1952, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1984 and 1996, one candidate
led in all public polls in my database taken within 200
days of the election.  The *closest* that the trailing
candidate came in those years was as follows: Stevenson
(1952), 2 points; Stevenson (1956), 10 points; Goldwater
(1964), 28 points; McGovern (1972), 16 points; Mondale
(1984), 1 point; Dole (1996), 11 points.

Look at some of those numbers! LBJ at one point had a 59-point lead over Barry Goldwater. Bill Clinton once polled 30 points ahead of George Bush (and Bush once polled 16 points ahead of Clinton). Jimmy Carter once held a 33-point lead on Gerald Ford.

Of course, if you go about looking for the largest leads you can find, you are naturally going to expect to see some regression to the mean. But even if we look at this data more systematically, we still find a fairly robust tendency for a lead in the national polling to diminish by election day. The extent to which it diminishes is a function of two things: the magnitude of the lead -- the larger the lead, the more it needs to be discounted -- and the number of days until the election. We can specify a regression equation to project the November outcome based on a candidate's present polling lead as follows:

PROJECTION
= MARGIN*.909
+ MARGIN*ROOTDAYS*-.0475
+ SQRT(MARGIN)*ROOTDAYS*.0604

ROOTDAYS = Square root of the number of days until election.
MARGIN =  Size of lead for leading candidate.

Visually, that looks about like this:



This chart is perhaps a little confusing, but it's exhibiting the two essential features that I talked about before: the larger the lead, the more it needs to be discounted (both proportionately and absolutely), and the closer we get to election day, the less it needs to be discounted. Particularly, a lead starts to become significantly more meaningful once we get within about 30 days of the election, although it's also the case that presidential elections have tended to tighten within the last 30 days.

So, for instance, a 20-point lead in a poll 300 days before the election projects to only a 6-7 point victory in November. A 15-point lead in a poll taken 100 days before the election projects to a 9-point victory. And so forth. These are very significant corrections; big leads held a long ways before the election must be discounted quite heavily.

As for Barack Obama's lead right now, the correction required is not quite as dramatic. The regression equation specifies that a 5.9-point lead held 130 days before the election should be discounted by about one-third -- to 3.8 points to be exact. That is our new projection for Obama's margin of victory.

Specifically, what the model now does is to calibrate the trend adjustment to a candidate's discounted lead in the polls. What this process involves is to run the numbers once through without the discount (just as we had run them before), and then figure out the difference between the candidate's current lead and his projected winning margin based on our discount formula, and then subtract that number of points from the candidate's margin in each state. Put less fancily, we are subtracting 2.1 points from Obama's present trend-adjusted estimate in every state, because all else being equal, we expect McCain to gain 2.1 points between now and November. This lowers Obama's win percentage from 76 percent to 69 percent, a figure that squares a lot better with my intuition about this election.

*-*

I'm sure that people are sick and tired of all these changes, but this really ought to be the last missing piece of the puzzle, and it's something that we absolutely must do if our goal is to predict the November outcome rather than merely give a snapshot of the current polling. This is something, frankly, that I should have looked at before, although since the election had been so close until recently, it would not have mattered very much.

You'll also notice one other, less important change. Our projection now allocates the undecideds in each state 50:50 to the two major candidates, after making an allocation for third-party votes. The third-party allocation differs slightly from state to state depending on the other + undecided vote in that state's polling. The model had implicitly been allocating the undecideds this way before, but now I'm doing it explicitly, as I want to make it absolutely clear that our projection in each state is in fact a projection of the final outcome rather than some kind of supercharged polling average.

Acknowledgments: I again want to thank Robert Erikson of Columbia University, who has performed similar calculations in the past and gave me the idea for this one, and Andrew Gelman, also of Columbia, who lent me use of his historical polling database.

EDIT: Per some early feedback in the comments, I have changed the way I present the polling detail chart. What we formerly called our projection is now presented as before and described as the "Snapshot". The Snapshot is our best estimate of what the election would look like if it were held today.

In contrast to the Snapshot is the Projection, which discounts current national polling leads through the process described herein, and also allocates out the undecided vote. This is our best guess at what the election will look like in November.

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Today's Polls, 6/26

Maybe the GOP can rebook its convention for Cleveland.

Quinnipiac is out with a series of polls in four swing states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Colorado. Obama holds the lead in each one. In Minnesota, that lead is 17 points; in Wisconsin, 13 points; in Michigan, 6 points, and in Colorado 5.

Obviously, these are not the numbers that John McCain wants to see. But there's bad news and there's not-so-bad news for him here. The bad news in Wisconsin and particularly Minnesota, where Obama has shown a double-digit lead in multiple recent polls. Wisconsin has been extremely competitive in the past couple cycles, as has Minnesota to a lesser degree. But Barack Obama might not be the right Democrat against whom to put those states into play. For one thing, he's from the region, and for another, he tends to do well with white voters of mainline Protestant stock like the Lutherans found commonly in the Upper Midwest. As Sean pointed out last week, the Republicans have somewhat frequently held their convention in non-competitive states -- New York City in 2004 being the most obvious example -- but Minnesota was clearly intended to be symbolic of an expanded red map, and one now has to wonder whether John McCain will waste resources there to make a good show when his opportunities lie elsewhere.

The not-so-bad news is in Colorado and Michigan. Yes, McCain trails there, but by the same 5-6 point margin that Obama leads in national polls. That means if the national race goes back to being a near-tie, so most likely do Michigan and Colorado. This is how the McCain people have to read the polls nowadays: willingly suspend their disbelief, and ask what the map looks like if Obama gives back three, five, seven points across the board.

Incidentally, it is great news that Quinnipiac, by way of a partnership with the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, seems to be expanding the scope of its polling, as it had traditionally limited itself to a core of about five or six states. While Quinnipiac is not quite as strong as Rasmussen or SurveyUSA, it nevertheless has a considerably above-average track record, and it has made a determination to use huge sample sizes this year, which helps both with accuracy and in being able to break out the demographics.

Today's other result is in Tennessee, where Rasmussen has John McCain leading by 15 points. This is actually a pretty big improvement for Obama, who had trailed by 27 in Rasmussen's April poll of the Volunteer State. While Tennessee will not be competitive this year, the fact that Obama's numbers are bouncing in the Appalachian region -- we saw similar results recently in Kentucky -- does have a bearing in some other states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania. West Virginia, which should be something like 5-10 points better for Obama than Tennessee based on its political demographics, also warrants monitoring.

Finally, you might notice that Obama's overall win percentage has barely changed from yesterday. That is because our trend adjustment had already "priced in" this information; the actual results were quite close to its educated guesses in most of these states.

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Which Candidate has a Base Problem?

That title is not meant to be read rhetorically or sarcastically. But the correct answer is "both of them". The thing, however, is that they are somewhat opposite problems.

The below is data compiled from Rasmussen Reports, consisting of over 7,000 likely voter interviews conducted within the past week. What I'm looking at is solely perceptions of the candidate among voters within his own party.



The topline numbers are not very different from one another. Obama's favorables among Democrats are 82:17, and McCain's among Republicans are 84:15. However, that conceals a lot of information about the strength of those perceptions.

A greater number of Democrats' -- about 8 percent -- have a very unfavorable view of Obama. These 8 percent are your PUMAs -- people that will probably not vote for Obama under any circumstances. Only 4 percent of Republicans feel that way about John McCain.

Obama would be thrilled, of course, if he could actually get his defection rate down to 8 percent: John Kerry lost 11 percent of Democrats to George W. Bush; Al Gore lost 11 percent to Bush and 2 to Nader; Bill Clinton lost 10 percent to Bob Dole and 5 percent to Ross Perot. In reality, Obama will probably lose almost all of the "very unfavorables" and perhaps half of the "somewhat unfavorables", which would produce a defection rate of 12-13 percent (not all of those necessarily to McCain). McCain's defection rate, by that calculus, would be 9-10 percent (not all of those necessarily to Obama).

But look, by contrast, at the enthusiasm gap between the two candidates. 56 percent of Democrats have a very favorable view of Barack Obama, while just 34 percent of Republicans have a very favorable view of John McCain. The thing that's a little bit scary for McCain is that this is after a likely voter screen has been applied, and so even after you get done filtering out those Republicans around the margins who weren't planning to vote in the first place, many of the remaining ones are still doing so for McCain somewhat grudgingly.

The good news for McCain is that if the election is close, the vast majority of these people should still wind up voting for him. That's what turnout operations are all about, and the GOP generally runs a pretty good one. Besides, 52 percent of Republicans have a very unfavorable view of Obama, as compared to 33 percent of Democrats who feel that way about McCain.

But if the election doesn't look like it's going to be close, there could be a snowball effect in which Republican turnout is quite low. If that is the case, the map could turn out to be very, very blue, and Republicans might lose a couple more Senate seats than are generally thought to be in play -- somewhere like Idaho, for instance, could be interesting -- and perhaps an extra dozen or half-dozen House seats on top of that.

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The Obama Eighteen

Courtesy of the Politico, Barack Obama’s campaign has telegraphed the electoral focus of its fall campaign. Three are its highest profile defenses (PA, WI, MI), one is a Kerry state in which McCain runs particularly well (NH), and 14 are Bush 2004 states where Obama thinks he has an opportunity to gain on the previous map (IA, NM, OH, CO, VA, FL, MO, NV, IN, ND, NC, MT, GA, AK).

Let's take a look at how FiveThirtyEight breaks down each of these states in terms of polling average, trend adjustment, 538 regression, and 538 prediction.



This map shows a baseline of Obama 200, McCain 139.

John McCain's best slicing and dicing of the public polling data within the 18 states is the polling average. Obama leads in Iowa (+6.2%), Wisconsin (+6.0%), New Hampshire (+6.0%), Pennsylvania (+5.5%), New Mexico (+4.3%), Ohio (+4.0%), Colorado (+2.5%), and Michigan (+1.9%) for a total of 93 EVs. McCain's states are North Dakota (+0.6%), Florida (+1.4%), Indiana (+1.8%), Missouri (+2.2%), Nevada (+2.8%), North Carolina (+4.7%), Alaska (+5.7%), Montana (+7.3%), and Georgia (+8.6%) for 93 EVs. Virginia is dead even, so after adding in the base EVs, the tally would be Obama 293, McCain 232, Unallocated 13.

When we adjust for trends in the polling data, we find ourselves in landslide territory. Obama leads in Iowa (+9.3%), New Hampshire (+9.0%), Wisconsin (+8.8%), Pennsylvania (+8.5%), Ohio (+7.1%), New Mexico (+6.1%), Colorado (+5.2%), Michigan (+4.6%), North Dakota (+4.4%), Virginia (+3.7%), Missouri (+3.3%), Indiana (+2.1%), and Florida (+1.0%), for a total of 158 EVs. McCain holds North Carolina (+0.5%), Nevada (+0.8%), Alaska (+2.8%), Montana (+3.1%), and Georgia (+5.4%), for 41 EVs. Under trend adjustment, the tally adding to our base would be Obama 358, McCain 180.

Under the 538 regression model, Obama leads in Iowa and New Hampshire (both +10.0%), Wisconsin (+8.7%), Pennsylvania (+8.6%), Michigan (+8.0%), Colorado (+7.1%), Ohio (+7.0%), Nevada (+5.4%), New Mexico (+5.2%), Virginia (+3.0%), Florida (+1.6%), and Missouri (+0.5%) for 149 EVs. McCain holds Montana (+0.3%), North Dakota (+2.0%), North Carolina (+2.5%), Alaska and Georgia (both +3.6%), and Indiana (+3.7%) for 50 EVs. Added to our base, the regression tally would be Obama 349, McCain 189.

Finally, the 538 projections as of June 25 show Obama winning Iowa (+9.4%), New Hampshire (+9.3%), Wisconsin (+8.8%), Pennsylvania (+8.5%), Ohio (+7.1%), New Mexico (+6.1%), Colorado (+5.8%), Michigan (+5.2%), Virginia (+3.6%), Missouri (+2.7%), Florida and Indiana (+1.1%) and Nevada (+0.7%) for 160 EVs. McCain projects to hold North Carolina (+0.8%), North Dakota (+0.9%), Montana (+1.8%), Alaska (+3.0%), and Georgia (+5.0%) for 39 EVs. With the baseline, Obama 360, McCain 178.

Under these numbers, McCain needs to gain 2.5% on the polling averages to win (adding Virginia, Michigan and Colorado). He needs to gain 5.2% on the trend analysis to win (to flip Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Virginia, North Dakota, Michigan and Colorado). Percentage-wise, McCain's toughest task is the regression model, since to win he has to gain 7.0% all the way up Obama's list to claim Ohio (Michigan, Florida, Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada and Ohio). Under our projection figures, McCain needs to reclaim Nevada, Indiana, Florida, Missouri, Virginia, Michigan and Colorado to win the presidency. That's a polling gain of up to 5.8%, again with Colorado being the final clinching state (working back up Obama's list) for the third of our four models.

The bad news for McCain in these numbers that among the "safe" Obama base states, Obama holds double-digit projection leads in every one of those states, with the lone exception of Oregon (+9.4%), discussed yesterday. Minnesota is next closest, projected at Obama +10.9%. The rest are just not remotely in play without a huge game-changing event in the race. Moreover, 538 currently projects a number of McCain's "safe" base states in single digits (alphabetically Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia - see sidebar). While Obama isn't likely to win these states, our models show Obama coming closer to winning them as we sit here in late June than McCain is to winning safe Obama states like Delaware, Maine, Washington, etc.

Finally, there is the matter of the one EV in Nebraska's 2d congressional district, which Obama's camp explicitly added to the list of eighteen. Eventually, we will add broken-out data for this district and refer to the Obama-defined battlegrounds as "the 18.2."

If John McCain's camp identifies a similar roster of states it sees as battlegrounds, we will analyze that list as well.

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Should McCain just embrace the bad polls?

I don't have a big problem with the details of the McCain campaign's pushback on yesterday's LA Times / Bloomberg poll, which had shown Barack Obama ahead by 12 points. In contrast to some of the memos that the press was treated to from the desk of Mark Penn, the McCain team's argument is relatively even-tempered and even-handed, fully acknowledging that their candidate does have a deficit to make up in the polls, if not the double digit margin implied by the LAT.

At the end of the day, what this really boils down to is an academic argument about whether one should weight polls by party identification, which is perhaps the most controversial subject in polling and one without any wrong answers. My take, for what it's worth, is that weighting by party ID may increase the precision of any one individual poll, but reduce the accuracy, particularly if you are able to look at several different polls at once.



My question, however, is just who is the audience is for this critique? It's June, and the election is in November. While the overall volume of polling data does give us some hints about what is more or less likely to occur in November, who the hell cares if McCain is down in any one particular poll? If he's down by 3, it's because he's down by 3, and if he's down by 11, it's because he's down by 11. The polling is simply a manifestation of that reality and not its cause.

Moreover, it is not clear to me that this is a spin war worth winning. If the media believes that Barack Obama is ahead by 5 points, then if a new poll comes out next week showing him ahead by 3, it will not get any attention. But if the media believes that Obama is ahead by 12 points, that same poll would create the perception of McCain momentum, and perhaps trigger a couple of days' worth of bad press for Obama as whatever had been going on over the past couple of days of the campaign would be taken as the cause for his polling decline. It might lead to harsher treatment of Obama's decision (flip-flop?) on campaign finance, for instance, or if Iran had been the subject of the week, as evidence that Obama wasn't resonating with voters on foreign policy.

McCain's campaign is absolutely right that the media ought not to focus too much on any one particular poll. But there are times later on when it's going to want them to do just that.

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Today's Polls, 6/25

If yesterday was among Barack Obama's best polling days of the year, today's numbers have moved in the direction of John McCain. In addition to his drawing into a tie in the Gallup Tracking poll, the big number today is out of Missouri, where SurveyUSA shows McCain rebounding to a 7-point lead. SurveyUSA had conducted two Missouri surveys essentially simultaneously last month; they had shown Obama leading by 1 point and trailing by 2, respectively.

I don't have any cute explanation on hand for you. Obama hadn't seemed to have gotten much of a bounce in what we call the North Central part of the country -- essentially, the Midwest west of Lake Michigan -- but he had gotten quite a bit of one in Near South states like Kentucky and Arkansas, and Missouri is literally and figuratively half-way between those two regions. Almost all of the give in his numbers appears to have occurred in St. Louis, where Obama had been leading 59-31 before but in the new survey led just 52-45. Did Obama insult Albert Pujols or something? Critique the city's strange fixation with crab rangoon?

Obama also lost some ground in Nebraska, where Rasmussen has him trailing John McCain by 16 points; Obama had been within 11 a month ago. Rasmussen has not broken out Nebraska's results by congressional district, but the state probably has to be within about 10 points overall for either NE-1 or NE-2 to come into play and put two electoral votes on the table.

In California, however, Rasmussen has Obama opening up a gargantuan 28-point lead, which is double his margin from a month ago. Rasmussen attributes this result to McCain's right turn on offshore drilling, which is a reasonable enough explanation -- but again, the cognitive dissonance starts to kick in. If Obama gained so much ground in California, why did he seem to lose ground in Oregon, which is probably even greener?

Lastly, in Arizona, we have another weird poll to round out our afternoon. John McCain leads by 10 points in a new Cronkite/Eight poll. But the percentage numbers are very weird: McCain 38, Obama 28, and Undecided 34. That's a huge number of undecideds, which is not something that the Cronkite poll had really shown before. But with a sample size of just 175 persons, I'm not sure if it's worth reading that much into.

Sometimes, it's nice to just press a button, hope that your simulations are doing something sensible, and wait for more data. I continue to see this race as pretty flat right now -- Obama having achieved a bump of about four points which is neither growing nor abating, dramatic individual results to the contrary.

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Moving Beyond the Seat Count

If you're the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and you've got a few extra dollars to throw around, where do you put them? Into the Louisiana race, where John N. Kennedy is challenging your incumbent Mary Landrieu? Or somewhere like Kentucky, where Bruce Lunsford is trying to knock off Mitch McConnell?

The obvious answer would seem to be: "whichever race is closer". But I'm not sure if it's that simple. The reason is that there is a much bigger difference ideologically between McConnell and Lunsford (who is actually fairly progressive and would become a reliable Democratic vote on issues like health care) than there is between Kennedy and Landrieu (who is not a reliable vote on much of anything). So in terms of the actual, long-run mechanics of getting the legislation you want passed, the stakes could easily be twice as high in Kentucky as they are in Louisiana.

The equation would be a little different, of course, if control of the chamber were in doubt. But since it probably isn't in this cycle, Democrats have to move beyond being obsessed with the seat count and treating all wins as being equal. Some really do count more than others.

The Republicans, by contrast, seem naturally to grasp this. Who are their top three fundraisers so far in the Senate? John Cornyn in Texas is first ($14.7 million), followed by Norm Coleman in Minnesota ($13.1 million) and then McConnell in Kentucky ($12.9 million). Coleman was expected to have a close race; McConnell and Cornyn probably weren't. But what is the commonality between the three of them? In each case, there is a huge ideological gulf between the incumbent and his opponent. The Republicans aren't going to hold on to as many seats as they might like in this election, but they're doing what they can to keep the most important ones.

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Oregon: Foreshadowing?

Sunday, Nate noted that, perhaps counterintuitively, Oregon's polls show the race between McCain and Obama tightening to the point where it had become our 10th-most competitive state. SurveyUSA released a poll showing the race tightening to 3 points. Given that Oregon's contested Democratic primary occurred later in the race, it stood to reason that Obama's post-nomination-clinching "bump" there wouldn't be as big as in other places.

Still, Obama can only take this as a good sign. Gordon Smith, Oregon's incumbent Republican Senator, is running an ad wholeheartedly embracing Barack Obama. Looks like Smith, who will defend against Democrat Jeff Merkley in what promises to be an expensive contest, isn't waiting for SurveyUSA to show Oregon as "Safe Obama." Given that Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has consistently pledged not to criticize him, Smith's opportunity to solidify his bipartisan bona fides may well hold up, even if this turns out to be a landslide year.

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Today's Polls, 6/24

Why haven't the Democrats thought about nominating a Midwestern candidate before? States like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Missouri have all traditionally been swing states, giving the region the most fertile electoral soil on the map, winnable by either party in any given cycle. Two new polls today suggest that having a Midwestern candidate in Barack Obama may be paying dividends to the Democrats.

In Indiana, SurveyUSA has Obama with a 1-point lead on John McCain. A couple of other polls, including one conducted by SurveyUSA in April, had also shown a lead for Obama. But that polling had been done in the run-up to the state's primary, and the results frankly seemed aberrant. For Obama to continue to be battling Indiana to a draw is fairly impressive, and puts a state in play that the Republicans probably never expected they'd have to defend.

Apart from Obama being a Midwesterner, the explanation for his results in Indiana may be as simple as this: the Democrats had never really bothered to compete in the state before, until the presence of an important primary there forced them to. Certainly, Indiana has been reliably Republican for a long time -- in 1992, Bill Clinton won every state bordering Indiana, but did not win Indiana itself. But that should also have provided a hint that there is nothing about Indiana that makes it demographically impossible for the Democrats; Democrats have found success in each of its neighbors. If Obama can hold his deficit in Southern Indiana to 10-12 points, tie in the small, industrial towns of Northern Indiana, and rack up 20+ point margins in Indianapolis and the Gary/Hammond region bordering Chicago, he can win the state.

Just to Indiana's north, Public Policy Polling shows Obama with a 9-point edge in Michigan. Although Obama's numbers in our Michigan polling averages still lag just a little bit behind those in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the state seems to be making up for lost time, breaking out of its state of self-imposed exile from the primary process. Michigan was by far John McCain's best opportunity to play offense in a Kerry state, and while it may tighten again if the national polls do, it might also eventually revert to its traditional position of polling about 3-5 points better for the Democrats than their numbers nationwide.

Finally, in New Mexico, SurveyUSA has Obama ahead by 3. While Rasmussen has usually shown New Mexico as an Obama state, SurveyUSA's last poll had shown the state tied. Obama is leading 63-34 among Hispanic voters in this poll, who make up about 30 percent of New Mexico's electorate.

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Liberal-Conservative Scores for Senate Candidates

Another element of our forthcoming Senate race ratings involves assigning a liberal-conservative score to each candidate. Although there are resources like the National Journal -- and a whole host of interest groups -- that provide such ratings for sitting senators, there is nothing in so far as I am aware that provides them for prospective ones.

So I built my own from scratch. The process was to assign each candidate a number from 1 (conservative) to 5 (liberal) on six critical issues: Iraq/national security, health care, taxation, immigration, environment/energy, and values (e.g. abortion and gay rights). The scores were then averaged and translated to a 0 to 100 scale, with 0 indicating conservative and 100 liberal.

A whole series of sources were consulted, including the candidates' voting records, the policy positions set forth on his or her website, and liberal-conservative ratings provided by third parties. So, these ratings were not done without thought. But I'm sure there are a few that can be improved. Which of these strike you as wrong?

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Keep an eye on SC-Sen

It's still an extreme longshot, but I'm just about ready to go with our first version of Senate polling averages, and one state that comes out surprisingly close in my regression model is South Carolina. The Republican incumbent, Lindsey Graham, remains relatively unpopular, and the Democratic candidate, Bob Conley, is sort of a Ron Paul-esque neopaleoconservative masquerading in Democratic clothing. The problem with a candidate like Conley is that he'll get neither the support of the Democratic establishment nor the progressive netroots, but the Ron Paul people are starting to notice him, and we know that their wallets are stuffed.

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Is Charlie Black Right?

The television in my office is broken, which means that I can't gauge the pundit insta-reaction to Charlie Black's comments to Fortune magazine about a terrorist attack being a "big advantage" for John McCain. Frankly, I am probably a better analyst without television than with it, but that is a discussion for another day.

When Americans are thinking about of acts of terror, they naturally think back to 9/11. Although it's hard to be absolutely sure, it would certainly seem that another 9/11-scale on America would (quite understandably) scare the living bejebus out of the electorate, and an electorate that has the living bejebus scared out of it will probably not be inclined to vote for a "change" candidate, especially one with limited national security experience.

But what if instead there were something more analogous to the bombing of the USS Cole: an attack on US interests on foreign soil? Or some kind of incident on domestic soil that goes off half-cocked? Say, for instance, a Muslim exchange student with vague connections to Al-Qaeda attempts to detonate a parking garage in Seattle, Washington. There is a complete failure of intelligence in envisioning the attack, but the bombs are poorly constructed and most do not detonate; five people are injured but none are killed. Or, there is some kind of incident at the Beijing Olympics comparable to the Centennial Park bombing in Atlanta, but this time with more connection to international terrorist organizations? Or, a fairly serious incident on U.S. soil, but one perpetuated by a domestic terror group?

Attacks like these are more likely, perhaps by several orders of magnitude, than another 9/11. The electoral implications would depend heavily on the particular facts and circumstances, as well as the timing the incident and the reaction of the candidates.

It seems to me, however, that there is perhaps some margin where the attack is significant enough to represent a serious failure of the Bush Administration's intelligence policy, but not serious enough to really scare people. If that is the case, the electoral implications are vaguer, and could possibly -- possibly -- even work against John McCain, particularly if the incident occurs at some point over the summer where there is still plenty of breathing space for each candidate to frame the narrative. In that eventuality, Black's comments would surely be played on continuous loop, which might make things more difficult for his candidate.

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Today's Polls, 6/23

We have three Rasmussen Reports polls to kick off the week, the most intriguing of which is in Pennsylvania, where Barack Obama leads John McCain by 4 points. That's a slight improvement for Obama from Rasmussen's May poll, when he had led by 2. Nevertheless, Rasmussen shows Pennsylvania tighter than some other polling of the state.

The operative question about Pennsylvania is whether John McCain should make a serious effort to compete there. The way to evaluate this is not by looking at the Pennsylvania numbers in the abstract, but by comparing them to the national averages. Presently, we project Barack Obama to win Pennsylvania by 8.3 points, but we also show him winning the entire election by 5.2 points. That means that if the race tightens to a draw -- and it's only when the popular vote is very close that electoral math matters -- we'd expect Pennsylvania to be in the range of Obama +3. That's close enough such that it's too early for McCain to write Pennsylvania off entirely. A lot of things will have to go right for McCain to win Pennsylvania, but then again, a lot of things will have to go right for him to win this election.

The New Mexico result is Obama +8; he had been ahead by 9 in Rasmussen's May poll. One thing to keep in mind is that, while we focus a lot on trendlines within any one given agency's polling, the comparison to other pollsters does matter too. Thus, while Obama lost a point in New Mexico relative to Rasmussen's previous poll, our win percentage for him went up there, since an 8-point lead is still much comfier than other pollsters have seen the state. Conversely, even though Obama gained in Pennsylvania relative to Rasmussen's previous poll, his win percentage went down there, since Rasmussen continues to see the state much tighter than agencies like Quinnipiac.

Finally, in Utah, Rasmussen has John McCain ahead by 19 points. Utah is probably interesting only insofar as trivia questions go. When Bill Clinton won the election in 1992, Nebraska was his worst state, which he lost by "only" 17.2 points. That was the best worst state for a winning candidate since FDR, assuming that you count the District of Columbia as a state. The modern record, however, appears to be held by Woodrow Wilson, who lost no state by more than 11.6 points in the three-way election of 1912. If Obama has an exceptionally good election night, it is conceivable that he could threaten some of those records, but Utah will almost assuredly be his limiting factor.

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The Win Percentage Tracker Returns

The win percentage tracker, which was temporarily discontinued when we made some significant changes to our methodology a couple of weeks ago, has returned. I went back and ran simulations in weekly intervals using our current methodology, beginning with Sunday, March 2 and continuing through yesterday. From here forward, the win percentage tracker will be updated daily, just like the other charts and graphs.


If we had been using our present methodology at the time, which is significantly more sensitive to momentum and trends, we might have had a different impression of exactly how vulnerable Barack Obama's candidacy was to Jeremiah Wright, whose emergence was responsible for the dip into the low 30s you see in the chart in March. Whereas our original methodology had seen Obama's low point coming around the 23rd of April, this makes it clear that it came somewhat earlier and was instead tied to Wright more specifically. Around this time, Obama had two polls come out showing him at least 6 points down in Ohio, two others come out showing him 9 or more points down in Florida, two more showing him 14-15 points down in Missouri, and he hit as low as -10 in the Rasmussen tracker. Obama was still getting some good results here and there in places like Wisconsin and the Pacific Northweset -- and he recovered quite quickly after his "A More Perfect Union" speech -- but it was rough sledding there for awhile.

By contrast, Obama's present movement upward in the polls may have come somewhat sooner than we'd recognized. Although it has involved some fits and starts, by early May Obama had passed McCain and essentially hasn't looked back.

EDIT: I also generated maps for each week using the new methodology, which are a lot of fun to look at -- but I haven't yet figured out a good way to present them. The various slideshow applications around the internet seem to have been designed for preteens with MySpace pages, and my functional knowledge of Javascript is basically nonexistent. If anybody has any good advice on how to set up some kind of interactive image viewer with a scrollbar or something similar, I'm all ears.

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Today's Polls, 6/22

Utah pollster Dan Jones has a pretty strong reputation -- but being a pollster in Utah would seem to be the equivalent of being the Maytag Repairman. With the exception of the UT-2 congressional district, which Democrat Jim Matheson has somehow managed to win four times, rarely are federal elections in Utah close, and this year would appear to be no exception. According to Jones' latest poll for the Deseret News, John McCain has a commanding 28-point lead in Utah, leading Barack Obama 57-29. This is actually a slight improvement for Obama from last month, when he had trailed McCain by 35 points.

The more serious concern for Obama is in Oregon, where SurveyUSA is out with new data showing his lead slipping to 3 points. This is the second consecutive Oregon poll to show Obama's numbers in decline; he had fallen from a 14-point lead in Rasmussen's May poll to an 8-point lead in their survey released last week. As I speculated at that time, we may be seeing the erosion of a mini-bounce for Obama that had coincided with the height of the primary campaign in Oregon. While Oregon still looks relatively safe for Obama, it has made its way into our swing state lists, ranking as the 10th most important state in this election.

In national tracking poll news, Obama has opened up a 7-point lead in the Rasmussen tracker, while Gallup has held at Obama +2.

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Why Obama isn't like Dukakis

As several observers have noted recently, including yours truly, June polling has not been a particularly good predictor of November results. In four out of the last five elections, the candidate leading in the polls in June went on to lose the popular vote. The largest discrepancy was in 1988, when Michael Dukakis, 8.2 points ahead in June, would eventually lose the election by 7.8 points -- a catastrophic 16-point swing against the Massachusetts governor.

This election too could move in any number of different directions. While Obama can presently be regarded as the healthy favorite, think of what a 16-point swing would mean in this year's election. If that swing were in Obama's direction (giving him a 21-point victory when added to his current lead of about 5 points) we would project Obama to win all states except Alabama, Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah. If it were in John McCain's direction instead, giving him an 11-point win nationwide, we would have him winning 42 out of 50 states.

The way that the Republicans achieved that big swing in 1988, assisted by a couple of significant gaffes from the Dukakis campaign, was to portray Dukakis as too liberal for the American mainstream. The same basic strategic template was employed against John Kerry in 2004. However, this strategy is unlikely to work in 2008. How come? Barack Obama is already perceived as being very liberal.

In a Rasmussen Reports poll conducted last week, 67 percent of likely voters described Obama as liberal, including 36 percent who described him as very liberal. By contrast, only 45 percent of voters described John Kerry as liberal in May of 2004, and 53 percent by November, 2004.

This shouldn't be terribly surprising. Obama is best known not so much as a candidate for the Presidency, but as one for the Democratic nomination. In contrast to Dukakis, who had both Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart flanking him to the left, and Kerry, who was perceived as the more centrist, electable alternative to Howard Dean, Obama had emerged by the end of the primary campaign as running to Hillary Clinton's left (Clinton being no conservative herself). Indeed, Obama is already perceived as substantially more liberal than Kerry was even after the Swift Boat ads, months' worth of framing the narrative, and tens of millions of dollars in attack advertising had gotten done with him.

But Obama is winning.

It may be that the primary fault line in this election is not liberal versus conservative, but change versus experience. Voters might think that Barack Obama is slightly further from them ideologically than is John McCain -- but they might also think that the country has been governed for eight years by a conservative, and that this governance has failed.

It may also be that voters are more conservative in theory than in practice. According to Rasmussen, 36 percent of voters describe themselves as conservative as opposed to 25 percent who say that they are liberal. This figure is not all that different from 2004, when 34 percent of voters said they were conservative and 21 percent liberal in exit polling. But if you look at the specific issues that loom largest in this campaign, the liberal position on things like pulling out from Iraq, implementing some kind of national health care policy, and increasing environmental regulation each poll at roughly 70/30 majorities.

There is also a school of thought that voters in Presidential elections tend to base their decisions less on the ideological attributes of a candidate and more on the personal ones. Obama's favorability rating presently stands at a +25. By contrast, John Kerry rarely did much better than even on this metric, depending on the specific wording of the question.

Either way, this is a significant problem for the Republicans. If their strategy is to say "Hey! Hey! Barack Obama is a liberal!", the American public's reaction is likely to be "Well, no shit! We're voting for him anyway."

This is not to say that McCain can gain no traction at all by trying to seize the political center. In fact, in an election in which the Democrats have something like a 4:3 edge in party identification, McCain absolutely has to find some way to win a majority of independent voters, and perhaps a fairly substantial one. Moreover, while the voters appear to be ready to elect a President they perceive as liberal, they surely won't be ready to elect one they perceive as radical, and so we can expect the Republicans to continue to play up Obama's associations with figures like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers. This remains relatively dangerous territory for Obama.

However, if the Republicans attempt to recycle the 1988 or 2004 playbooks, they will probably not find the results to their liking. And if McCain at any point refers to Obama as a "Card-carrying member of the ACLU", you can be pretty sure that this election is over.

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