"Clear-Eyed Pragmatist": The Obama Brand Has Come Full-Circle

Perhaps the most striking feature of Joe Biden's speech in Springfield today was his description of Obama as a "clear-eyed pragmatist who will get the job done". This is certainly different from the rather more abstract meaning of the Obama "CHANGE" brand as it was applied during the primary campaign. In fact, it sounds more along the lines of how Hillary Clinton was trying to present herself.

It's also a description, of course, that could reasonably be applied to Joe Biden. The selection of Biden represented the inevitable terminus of a route that Obama had chosen in the days immediately following the conclusion of Democratic primaries, one which was signified by his choice to accept public financing, and his decision to side with Nancy Pelosi in supporting the FISA compromise bill. Along the way, there have been other milestones, ranging from Obama's tepid endorsement of the Gang of 10 compromise to his decision to pay out so-called 'street money' during the general election campaign in cities like Philadelphia and Detroit.

To certain progressives, all of this has come as something of a disappointment. Obama's brand during the primaries was essentially an anti-establishment one, and that allowed him to beat the establishment choice of Hillary Clinton. It would surely have been a lot of fun to see how everything played out had Obama not compromised on FISA, not accepted public funding, and then had picked someone like Kathleen Sebelius as his running mate.

But in other ways, "clear-eyed pragmatist" is a more accurate reflection of the 'real' Obama, and certainly of the ways that he made his way through the Chicago system, as Ryan Lizza's seminal piece in the New Yorker concluded:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago's churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. "You have the power to make a United States senator," he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

And in other ways, the primaries version of the CHANGE brand was a poor match for the mood of the country. The most acute problem with George W. Bush is not that he's corrupt, not that he's the inevitable consequence of a broken system, but rather simply that his mode of thinking led him into an series of exceptionally poor decisions that left the country worse off. The problems of the Bush administration are not abstract -- they are highly tangible, made more manifest still by the deterioration in the economy that occurred over the first quarter of this year. What CHANGE means now is this:

i) Not Bush, or someone who thinks like him;
ii) Working our way, by any means possible, out of the hole that Bush left us in.

This certainly isn't what CHANGE meant during the primaries. But it's a message that voters should have little trouble understanding. And now that the Obama campaign seems to understand it too, it should help them to provide a more focused and disciplined message.

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Today's Polls, 8/23

Saturdays are typically slow days for polling, and this one is no exception. In Mississippi, Rasmussen shows John McCain ahead by 13 points. That's essentially unchanged from Rasmussen's result in July, when McCain led by 12, but an improvement over polls in June and July, when Obama was in the single digits.

That's the only new data we have for you today, except for the national trackers, both of which show Obama ahead by 2 points.

Today's numbers are of some significance, though, as they represent the last real clean read that we'll get on the election before the conventions (even tomorrow's numbers may begin to be impacted by Obama's VP bounce, if he gets one). So for purposes of establishing a baseline, the RCP average shows Obama ahead by 1.6 points, Pollster.com by 1.4 points, and our numbers, which for whatever reason have usually been the most McCain-friendly, show Obama ahead by a mere 0.1 points.

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Can Biden Out-Hillary Hillary?

The principal rationale for selecting Hillary Clinton as Barack Obama's running mate is that she would have united Democrats behind their nominee at a time when they have a substantial advantage in party identification. John Kerry received 89 percent of the Democratic vote in 2004; if Barack Obama can get within a couple of points of that, even to 86 or 87 percent, he will be very difficult to defeat.

However, Joe Biden might do nearly as good a job as Clinton of uniting the party, while perhaps paying less of a price among independents.

Rasmussen has fresh approval numbers out for Biden, as well as several other Democratic short-listers. Here, borrowed from Rasmussen's invaluable subscriber service, are their approval scores by party:

Democrats

Candidate  Fav-Unfav
Clinton     77-22 (+55)
Biden       65-17 (+48)
Bayh        45-25 (+20)
Sebelius    35-19 (+16)
Kaine       35-29 (+6)

Clinton has the highest favorables and highest net score among Democrats; Biden has the fewest unfavorables. Generally speaking, Clinton and Biden blow the other three candidates out of the water.

Republicans

Candidate  Fav-Unfav
Kaine       29-30 (-1)
Bayh        23-43 (-20)
Sebelius    14-45 (-31)
Biden       22-63 (-39)
Clinton     21-75 (-54)

Amongst Republicans, the ratings are very nearly the reverse. Joe Biden will not have a terrific amount of crossover appeal. On the contrary, though the animus might not be as personal as in the case of Senator Clinton, Biden will be seen by many GOPers as a partisan blowhard. One can argue, however, about whether this really matters. The notion that Obama was going to win over some large number of "Obamacans" had not realistically been in play for a couple of months now, as the GOP base has begun to rally behind John McCain.

Indepedents

Candidate  Fav-Unfav
Biden       42-29 (+13)
Bayh        31-21 (+10)
Kaine       24-23 (+1)
Sebelius    18-21 (-3)
Clinton     39-57 (-18)

Where Biden might do some good is among independents, among whom he has the highest favorables and highest net rating, although a couple other candidates had lower unfavorables. But Biden certainly performs better amongst this critical group than Hillary Clinton. One can argue that Biden is very well positioned within the Democratic party, probably just slightly to the right of the average Democratic senator. Liberal Democrats certainly won't be pleased with his votes on the AUMF or the bankruptcy bill, but they still essentially trust him, which they wouldn't necessarily with a more identifiably centrist choice like Evan Bayh or Tim Kaine. But on the other hand, Biden cannot so easily be characterized as a liberal to turn off independent voters; in fact, independents and moderates like him pretty well.

Let's take one more, slightly different take on this. This time, we'll look at impressions of the candidates based not on party ID, but rather, based on who the voters had intended to vote for in November. Let's make the following assumptions:

- For each McCain voter that has a very favorable view of Biden, one-quarter of them will switch their vote to Obama.

- For each McCain voter that has a somewhat favorable view of Biden, one-eighth of them will switch their vote to Obama.

- For each Obama voter that has a somewhat unfavorable view of Biden, one-eighth of them will switch their vote to McCain.

- For each Obama voter that has a very unfavorable view of Biden, one-quarter of them will switch their vote to McCain.

Does that sound reasonable? It sounds reasonable to me, though I really have no idea. But let's run the numbers and see what we get:

VF = Very Favorable
SF = Somewhat Favorable
VU = Very Unfavorable
SU = Somewhat Unfavorable

...        McCain Voters    Obama Voters
Candidate   VF     SF        VU     SU     Net Margin
Biden        4     20         5     10      +2.00
Bayh         4     19         4     16      +0.75
Kaine        8     21         8     20      +0.25
Clinton     11     14        13     14      -0.50
Sebelius     3     13         5     13      -0.50

What's noteworthy is not so much that Biden will turn a lot of McCain voters on -- Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton would have done a better job of that -- but that he'll turn very few Obama voters off. As a result, this method projects a net swing of 2 points toward Obama, which is better than he'd do with any of the other candidates. Biden also performed quite well in these ratings among undecided (43-22 favorable) and third-party (45-36 favorable) voters, though the sample sizes are probably too small to be worth worrying about.

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It's Official: Obama Picks Biden

UPDATE: Text message received at 2:46 AM Central Time:

"Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3pm ET on www.BarackObama.com. Spread the word!"

____
So much for a head-fake. The writing had been on the wall for a couple of days now.

It's a good choice. The media will love Joe Biden. He passes the ready-on-day-one-test. Older voters like him, which means that Pennsylvania probably isn't a swing state anymore, but that Florida might be.


(official Senate photo)

Was he the best choice? I guess we'll never know. From among the five or so candidates who seemed plausible in the endgame, I think Hillary gives you the best chance of occupying the White House in 2009. But maybe she doesn't give you the best chance of governing effectively, maintaining a majority in the Congress in 2011, or getting re-elected in 2013. Maybe the Obama campaign had some oppo on her, and that's why she (allegedly) wasn't vetted. But I would hope that Chicago at least took her seriously.

Evan Bayh? I still think he got a raw deal from the left. But he wasn't going to generate much enthusiasm from the base, wasn't going to generate much enthusiasm from the press, and from what I'd heard, is not all that well liked in Washington circles. One wonders whether Steve Clemons' reporting is correct, that Bayh was at one point the leading choice, and that the Obama campaign had second thoughts.

Tim Kaine? Never quite understood what made him Veep material, but he'll be an effective surrogate for Obama and certainly raised his national profile. The fact that the Obama campaign may have made a late push to get Mark Warner into the game was a tip-off that he wasn't likely to be picked.

Kathleen Sebelius? I found her a persuasive choice personally. I have no idea how she'd have gone over to the other 304 million Americans. She would have required a careful and deliberate roll-out process, and with the choice apparently having been made fairly late in the day, that had probably become impossible.

Was Brain Schweitzer considered seriously? Was Wesley Clark? Bill Richardson? Were they interested in the position? Were they vetted and disqualified? We have no way to know, so we'll just have to take a pass.

At the end of the day, Joe Biden is that one choice that is in fact fairly safe but nevertheless feels fairly bold. I'd expect Democrats to wake up tomorrow morning feeling pretty good about him.

Note: Edited for clarity.

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Today's Polls, 8/22

A key poll in a key state has changed the character of the electoral math. That is Ann Selzer's poll for the Detroit Free Press in Michigan, which shows Barack Obama with a 7-point lead. This is the first Selzer poll in Michigan, and therefore we have no trendlines against which to compare. Nevertheless, Selzer polls are the gold standard -- the highest-rated polls in our database -- and so these numbers need to be taken seriously.

Again, the question is not whether Michigan is winnable for John McCain -- it most certainly is, and we have him taking the state about 30 percent of the time. But it's a matter of whether Michigan is close enough to be the tipping point in a close election, and with Obama leading in each of the last seven polls of the state from six different polling firms, that is increasingly uncertain.

If Michigan is off the table, then that gives Obama an advantageous position in terms of the electoral math: he essentially just needs to swing one of Colorado, Ohio, or Virginia to win the election.

Let's look briefly at what else we have today -- including a big, Joe Biden style dump of Zogby Interactive polls:



The other result worth picking out of this lineup is Rasmussen's first survey of Indiana, where John McCain is ahead by 6 points -- matching his margin in this week's SurveyUSA poll of the state. Although other polling had shown Indiana a bit tighter -- including a few polls that had shown Obama ahead -- the 6-point margin is about where our model had figured where the state was given the underlying realities of its demographics. On paper, Indiana is probably just outside of the range where it can be a tipping point state, but given the great disparity in ground game resources the respective campaigns have devoted to the state, it merits continued watching.

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Nuggets (and Open Veepwatch Thread)

If there's any upside to all this waiting, I think we can all agree that it's valuable getting this sneak preview of what it'll be like to live in an America under a potential administration obviously deep in the pockets of Big Text.

Hopefully we beat Stewart and Colbert to that joke.

Remember, the over-under on the convention bounce is six. McCain's group apparently has settled on a nine point inflation, to +15.

Fox News sez: Obama's no longer advertising in AK, FL, GA, MT, NC, ND, VA.

Obama’s decision to stop advertising in those states is raising eyebrows.

Well, he's probably giving up on those states, right? Fox also "accidentally" aired an Obama-Ayers ad they had condemned the day before. What a bad stroke of luck for them; people will claim they're biased. Those guys can't catch a break.

Ambinder says, hey, look at this flight plan. Taegan Goddard notes the Biden family is gathering in Delaware, including his son flying down from Maine.

Politico's Republican blogger Jonathan Martin brought Cindy McCain flowers. Ben Smith? Michelle's waiting.

Wolf Blitzer asked about our Ringtone Theory, and got a weird answer from the correspondent who suggested a potentially staggered announcement, as well as a potential dawn announcement. I just thought of two things that would annoy me out here in California far more than the middle-of-the-night text: (1) the Tape Delayed East Coast Bias Text and (2) the Dawn Text. If Robert Gibbs is indeed appearing on all the Saturday morning shows and folks like Matthews and Olbermann are gathering for special live coverage of the Obama speech in Springfield tomorrow morning, we may be at the Media Churlishness Tipping Point if we don't get it tonight.

Now, think of the good feelings people have leaving work on a Friday - people gather socially on Friday nights, especially younger and more single people who can create a buzz. Imagine some of the more politically active young people hanging out with less politically active friends and getting a news-breaking text and tipping point some gatherings into little cells of persuasion. And now I'm talking myself into an imminent announcement. Isn't MSNBC about to come online with the political shows?

Finally, a junkie anecdote: last night, I texted Nate about something, and he replied "*%^$, I thought that was Obama's text." And when he texted me back to say that, I stopped mid-pee to grab my phone.

Veepwatch: it burns.

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Road to 270: North Carolina

Note: Over the course of the next two months, we will be previewing the Presidential Election matchup in each of the 50 states. The previews are built around a key set of demographic variables in each state. We continue with the Tar Heel State, North Carolina.

A CONTRAST OF CORES, North Carolina is a proving ground for Barack Obama’s big bet on strategy. Based on recent history, North Carolina should be a Republican state in the presidential column again this year. However, polling data already projects a significantly closer race than during the two Bush elections, a reality that North Carolina Republicans openly acknowledge. Throughout the summer, we’ve projected an approximately five point John McCain win. However, if Obama can somehow take North Carolina and its 15 electoral votes, not only will he likely win the election, it will vindicate the grunt-work organizing approach to campaigning as opposed to the astroturf-ish select-a-veep electoral addition theory (see: John Edwards, 2004).

If McCain can keep his base fired up, North Carolina should remain Republican. Since LBJ famously lost the South for Dems by signing the Civil Rights Act, only once – the southern Dem Carter/Watergate year of 1976 – has North Carolina voted Democratic at the presidential level. However, a quickly growing population and burgeoning Research Triangle base continually teases Democratic hopes. It’s this Democratic strength among core groups of white liberals (that a state like Mississippi doesn’t have) that makes North Carolina seem more attainable. To win the state, Dems have to maximize all their edges and the Republicans have to be just unenthusiastic enough to allow Dems to catch them off-guard.

Key Demographics



Note: Factors colored in red can generally be thought to help McCain. Factors in blue can generally be thought to help Obama. Factors in purple have ambiguous effects. Except where otherwise apparent, the numbers next to each variable represent the proportion out of each 100 residents in each state who fall into that category. Fundraising numbers reflect dollars raised in the 2008 campaign cycle per eligible voter in each state. Figures for seniors and youth voters are proportions of all residents aged 18+, rather than all residents of any age. The figure for education reflects the average number of years of completed schooling for all adults aged 25+. The figure for same-sex households reflects the number of same-sex partner households as a proportion of all households in the state. The liberal-conservative index is scaled from 0 (conservative) to 100 (liberal), based on a Likert score of voter self-identification in 2004 exit polls. The turnout rates reflect eligible voters only. Unemployment rates are current as of June 2008.

What McCain Has Going For Him

Demographically, McCain’s success depends in some significant way on his ability to fire up religious conservatives, Appalachian voters and military-base-supporting towns. North Carolina is a top-20% white evangelical state and a very low-percentage Catholic state, two factors we notice track with better Republican performance. With its significant jutting into Appalachia, “American” ancestry also scores highly relative to other states. Those are the areas where Hillary Clinton dominated Obama in the primaries, the ridged-and-valleyed enclaves naturally resistant to new movement and openness to outsiders.

The comfortable Bush margin and conservativeness of even many Democrats will also help McCain here. North Carolina has some military towns that one would expect to see McCain use as a campaign-stop backdrop at least once or twice. Again, provided turnout is at least normal, this built-in ideological and partisan edge should be enough to hold off a furious charge by Obama.

What Obama Has Going For Him

High African-American population that Obama hopes to register and turn out at record numbers. If pollsters misjudge black turnout on the low end when they weight their likely voter models, Obama could surprise, and his organization suggests that's precisely what he's aiming for. (When FiveThirtyEight nailed the North Carolina primary result but pollsters missed it, one major factor in success or failure depended on demographic assumptions in AA turnout.) Per the NYT, Obama holds the same 150-to-12 paid staff edge reported in Missouri. North Carolina also has some heavily concentrated Hispanic towns that make for more efficient organizing efforts. As in most states, Obama leads McCain in per capita fundraising. Northern retirees settling along the coast and in the mountains are subtly moving the demographics in Obama’s direction, and the academic and high-tech job transplants in the Research Triangle are the big targets for new voter registration and persuasion. Obama’s affinity for basketball in this hoops-crazed state probably doesn’t hurt either.

Overall, the demographic game plan isn’t very complicated here. To win, Obama has to maximize turnout among his core voters. Massive registration effort has been underway for some time and the numbers were already rolling in during the primary season and early summer before most of the paid organizing boots were on the ground. Early voting will be a key feature of the plan to win, and a two-plus week window starting in mid-October will clearly help Obama’s better-organized group.

What To Watch For

Keep an eye on the excellent NC State Board of Elections site, which updates voter registration by party daily. Also keep an eye on late-October reports about early voting turnout. We’ve suggested that 5% is probably the outside edge of ground game bump measured against accurate polling of voter preference, and North Carolina has been straddling our Battleground/Penumbra States 5% line for the summer months.

There’s also a potentially very competitive Senate race here as Democrats try to reach the filibuster-proof 60, with Kay Hagan (D) challenging Elizabeth Dole (R) for the old Jesse Helms seat. While Dole still leads (and is projected by roughly the same margin as McCain), recent polls show her lead softening. Dole has had trouble keeping her popularity high, and the DSCC will certainly pour money into the race.

Also watch to see how much racial politics plays into local advertising and whether any further trial balloons are sent up here. This spring McCain had to reject and denounce a state Republican Party ad tying Obama to Jeremiah Wright as "degrad(ing) our civics." We'll see whether that stance holds, as McCain's campaign says Wright is now fair game. Though voter attitudes toward race in North Carolina have certainly shifted with time and the new demographic influx, this was the site of the infamous “Hands” ad that helped Jesse Helms scare voters that a would-be black Senator would make sure blacks got jobs over whites. The more dogwhistling you see, the closer the internal polls probably show the race.

Finally, check how often Obama visits the state. Having spent time there this week, he is certainly acting like a candidate making a significant play for those 15 EVs. However, this is pre-convention. Watch to see what happens after the convention in the closing days to get a feel for where those internal polls put the race in the Tarheel State.

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Brent Musburger Lives!

“You are looking live!” at Joe Biden’s house, Tim Kaine’s house… on CNN.

We will have more substantive content today, but let’s not kid any of you kidders – we’re all on standby. I can’t shake a personal like of Joe Biden. He's a smiling puncher. But I really hope it’s not someone whose house is being watched. Despite Nate’s persuasive timing argument, I’ve always suspected that Obama’s decision process doesn’t match with conventional wisdom. My surprise for the day? If it’s one of the “expected” choices.

Talk amongst yourselves. Here, I’ll give you a subject: the vice president is neither a “vice” nor a “president.” Discuss.

And, a challenge to entertain us and each other while we wait: see if you folks can be Bizarro versions of yourselves in the comments. Our normal Obama-bashers have to put up a post sounds utterly sincere for Obama, and our McCain-bashers have to sound pro-McCain. Sounding like you’re mocking what an Obama or McCain backer would say means you fail. Make us believe it.

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Senate Polling Weekly Update, 8/22

While we have been devoting most of our attention to the Presidential race, the Democrats may now have their clearest path yet to a chance of controlling 60 seats in the Senate.



The Democratic caucus is presently 51 seats, including independents Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders. That means they'd need flip 9 Republican seats to reach 60.

A victory for Mark Warner in Virginia appears all but certain, barring a last-minute effort to draft him as Barack Obama's running mate. Although a recent Rasmussen poll in New Mexico shows substantial tightening in that race, the state can still be considered Safe Democrat. Jeanne Shaheen continues to hold onto a safe-looking lead in New Hampshire. While we're not yet ready to call it a lock, a victory for Mark Begich over indicted incumbent Ted Stevens is highly probable in Alaska. And Colorado, after having tightened some in the last update, has moved slightly back to Mark Udall in this week's edition, perhaps in response his flip-flop on offshore drilling.

That's five seats. The other four are tougher, but the Democrats now have a better idea of which are the best targets. Three of the four have always been on the short list: those are Mississippi, which needs to be polled more but still appears to be their best chance, Minnesota, where the polling has been difficult to interpret but still indicates a competitive race for Al Franken, and Oregon, which has moved slightly toward Gordon Smith in recent weeks but where Jeff Merkley remains within striking distance. The new addition to the list is North Carolina, where three fresh polls from Civitas, SurveyUSA and InsiderAdvantage all show Liddy Dole's lead dwindling to between 0 and 5 points, perhaps in response to the surprisingly strong campaign run by Libertarian Chris Cole.

Other conceivable pickup opportunities have moved away from the Democrats. Tom Allen has yet to provide a rationale to convince Maine voters to dump Susan Collins, and there are arguments for abandoning the race. Texas and Kentucky remain marginally viable, but only if forbidding demographic obstacles can be overcome. Less conventional, but perhaps more intriguing opportunities exist in Idaho, a non-incumbent race, and Georgia, where Jim Martin has received a bounce following his primary victory. Partisan polling in Oklahoma also indicates a tightening race, but we have yet to see independent polls to confirm it.

The GOP, meanwhile, is having little luck in trying to make Democratic-held seats competitive. Louisiana, which had looked like their best opportunity, has moved to a 17-point lead for Mary Landrieu in a new Rasmussen poll. Our model is now characterizing Louisiana as "safe" Democrat, which is probably aggressive, but John N. Kennedy is a poorly-organized opponent.

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The One Tea Leaf Worth Reading

I wouldn't pay all that much attention to hints that people like Mark Halperin or Howard Fineman are dropping about the VP selection process.

Why not? Their sources are too good -- meaning too close to the process. There are differences between information brokers, which is what someone like Mark Halperin is, and information seekers, which is more like what someone like Marc Ambinder is. In a process as tightly-controlled as the Obama VP rollout, the brokers might have more information than the seekers -- but all of the information they'll have will be things that the Obama campaign wants them to know. The seekers are more likely to learn something that they aren't supposed to know.

With that out of the way, there is exactly one clue that I consider to be worth worrying about, and that is the timing of the announcement. It is now Friday morning at 1:12 AM Central Time. The Democratic convention kicks off in about 75 hours. The identity of the VP is not known. You can send up trial balloons, send out false information, bluff and posture and play-act as much as you like ... but you can't get that time back.

There is very little time left to roll-out and brand the candidate. As Stu Rothenberg notes, it is actually the norm rather than the exception to have the VP named relatively close to the convention. Still, there is cutting it close, and then there is leaving yourself no time at all. Geraldine Ferraro and Al Gore were named 4 days before the opening gavel at the convention, Lloyd Bentsen 6 days, Joe Lieberman 8 days, and John Edwards 20 days ... so this pick will set the modern record for the Democrats, although the Republicans have sometimes waited even longer.

And this year, the circumstances are especially poor for a late roll-out. The pre-convention coverage will have to compete with the Closing Ceremonies. The convention coverage will have to compete with The Clinton Show. There isn't really a post-convention period, since the Republicans will hold their convention the week after.

If you leave yourself with a candidate who hasn't been adequately branded, you give yourself two problems. One, the Obama-Who? Effect, i.e. underscoring the fact that Obama is inexperienced and unknown. And two, the fact that the candidate won't have the stature to draw large crowds on the campaign trail, or to maximize their exposure as a potential surrogate for you.

All of this points strongly to the known knowns: Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton. In the polling that Rasmussen conducted last month, these were the percentage of likely voters who knew enough about the respective candidates to have formed an opinion about them:

Clinton    98%
Biden      69%
Bayh       51%
Kaine      40%
Sebelius   39%

For comparison, here are some of the Republicans:

Romney     89%
Huckabee   85%
Lieberman  85%
Crist      53%
Jindal     43%
Pawlenty   42%
Palin      30%

Google Trends reveals similar numbers: Clinton and Biden are well ahead of the other candidates:



...and since Clinton was apparently fairly lukewarm in her support of Obama on the campaign trail in Florida today, that would tend to point toward Biden ... then again, it's not even clear that the candidates have been informed of their status yet.

BONUS: How the media will react to different choices:

Biden: Back-slapping approval. Media seems eager to play up Biden's Scranton roots, etc., rather than his long tenure in Washington. This is a nontrivial element in his favor.

Clinton: Shock and awe. Mostly awe. Some people who felt used in the whole Biden/Bayh/Kaine wild goose chase might be a little bitchy. Buzz might last straight through the Republican convention.

Bayh: Disappointed. Choice will be seen as safe, unadaptive. The whole late roll-out and text message process might be portrayed as a gimmick. Low expectations for his speech, which might actually be his best chance to turn things around.

Kaine: "Obama going with his gut/heart/etc." Obvious questions about experience, whether Kaine is too eager to please. Media may not know he's a strong speaker, which could give him a chance to impress.

Sebelius: Bemused, wait-and-see. Hardest to predict, highest degree of difficulty. A lot of attention will be paid to her speech, the baton-pass from the Clintons at the convention.

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Romney: Demographics Over Narrative

Mark Halperin says two sources "who know" say McCain is picking Romney. This is a pick that has long made sense demographically. If two of the four the toughest battlegrounds include Colorado and Michigan, Romney's Michigan roots and his strength in Western states with high LDS concentrations make him a demographically smart pick.

However, Al Giordano hits upon a great point given today's narrative - Romney owns a lot of homes too. You can hear the counter-line already rolling off Democratic tongues: "Those guys are tough to beat. They own homes in almost every state."

Thus, while Romney makes sense from a demographics sense, he probably hurts from a narrative one. While we're down on the idea that VPs should be chosen to swing a certain state (unless the candidate is from a small state typically ignored by national campaigns), the total package can further a narrative about the top candidate. "McCain warmed to Romney once he saw how many estates he had."

The narrative consequences aren't all bad. While many observers have noted that McCain's camp overreacted by throwing the kitchen sink in response to today's seven-houses attack, it seemed more that McCain's team has been waiting for this excuse to go as hard as possible with as much as possible.

So, Romney does present the Democrats' best opportunity to continue the narrative they've discovered today, but it also shows that it's not as much a narrative election as it is a demographic one. Once McCain started talking about how his polling data showed the base had been solidified, he didn't have to worry as much that Romney would frighten those Republicans to whom Romney's Mormonism is a big turn-off.

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Something Was The Matter With Kansas (Technical)

In today's polling thread, I referred to the new SurveyUSA poll of Kansas, which showed a rather strong result for John McCain -- he was 23 points ahead, roughly double the margin he'd held in previous SurveyUSA polling of the state.

Bob Erikson of Columbia University, who was largely responsible for the trendline adjustment that we now apply on a daily basis, wrote to inform me that SurveyUSA had changed its procedure, now using a likely voter model as opposed to a registered voter model. The change actually isn't all that recent -- SurveyUSA had begin using likely voter models in most of its polling at some point in June -- but it had largely escaped my attention.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with SurveyUSA doing this -- many pollsters who begin with registered voter models switch to likely voter models at some point before the election.

It does mean, however, that we should be careful about trying to make apples-to-apples comparisons when a pollster switches from a registered to likely voter model, which have tended to produce fairly different results thus far in this election cycle. Therefore, for purposes of calculating our trendline adjustment, we will consider likely and registered voter surveys from the same pollster to constitute two separate data series, e.g. "SurveyUSA-LV" and "SurveyUSA-RV".

As a result of making this fix, Barack Obama picks up about 0.4 points in his popular vote margin, although John McCain remains the nominal favorite to win the electoral college, taking 50.1 percent of the simulations to Obama's 49.9 percent.

n.b. Some people had also argued that this same rule should be applied in another circumstance -- when Rasmussen began breaking out its results with "leaners" included several weeks ago. It is a judgment call, but I consider pushing leaners to be sort of a relatively trivial, organic variant of the pollster's existing model, rather than the more fundamental difference in philosophy that likely and registered voter polls represent. Besdies that, whereas pollsters almost always disclose whether they are using a likely or registered voter model, they frequently will not disclose how they handle leaners, which would make this rule hard to apply even if we wanted to.

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Today's Polls, 8/21

Amidst a set of interesting (if not earth-shattering) polls, we see a very mild reversal from the trend we detected yesterday. John McCain has picked up slightly more ground in our popular estimate and now leads Obama by 0.3 points in our projection; however, Obama's numbers picked up slightly in our electoral college win projection.



The most relevant of these results from the standpoint of the electoral math is in Nevada, where Research 2000 shows Barack Obama with a 1-point lead. What's happened now is that Nevada and Colorado have converged, as Obama has lost ground in Colorado while holding steady or gaining slightly in Nevada; we presently show McCain as a 0.4-point favorite in Colorado and a 1.1-point favorite in the Silver State. The path of least resistance to 269 electoral votes for Obama may arguably now consist of Kerry States + Iowa + New Mexico (where a new poll from Rasmussen still shows Obama with a tiny bit of cushion) + Nevada.

Of course, 269 electoral votes is not 270 (though a tie would probably be resolved in Obama's favor), and Obama would still need to hold New Hampshire to activate that scenario, where ARG shows the race tightening to a single point. Alternatively, Nevada could break an electoral deadlock in Obama's favor if he won Kerry states, plus Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado, but lost New Hampshire.

Moving just slightly away from this interlocked series of contingencies, there is polling in several other swing states as well. Rasmussen has Pennsylvania tightening to 3 points in Obama's favor, though our model continues to insist that it is probably outside of the tipping point radius. An MPR poll in Minnesota shows Obama 10 points ahead -- though note that this poll was in the field as early as two weeks ago, and may not be entirely current.

ARG also polled Florida, where McCain has a 1-point lead, down a tick from two points last month, but a reversal from the 5-point lead they gave Obama in June. In general, Florida has resisted the national trend toward McCain and held its ground. It still does lean toward McCain, but is looking relatively better for Obama as other states begin to look relatively worse. If Obama were to pick a Florida-friendly running mate -- by which I mean Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton -- Florida again probably becomes an electoral ground zero.

Finally, we should not neglect the result in Kansas, where the 23-point lead that SurveyUSA attributes to John McCain is a significant improvement for him, with SurveyUSA's prior polling in Kansas having shown a McCain lead in the range of about 10 points. This Kansas poll is a big reason why Obama lost ground today in our popular vote estimate, and might give more credence to the recent PPP result that showed Obama 10 points behind in neighboring Missouri.

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Democrats Will Be Watching Denver (And We'll Be There)

Interest in the Democratic Convention will be far higher than four years ago, according to a Pew survey out today. Fully 59% of the American public reports interest in the Democratic convention, compared with 48% reporting interest in the Republican convention. From the Boston/New York conventions of 2004, reported interest in the Dem convention in 2008 has flipped from –10 to +11. Interestingly, this switch is entirely due to enthusiasm on the Democratic side, since interest in the Republican convention is fractionally higher than last time also. American interest for the Democratic convention is also higher now than in 1992.



Independents and a base enthusiasm edge are providing the difference. While 59% and 48% represent the percentage of all Americans interested in each convention, there is both an enthusiasm gap among the bases (79% of Dems compared with 70% of Reps) as well as a gap in enthusiasm among independents, who are more interested in the Democratic convention by 12 points.



Another key finding in Pew's survey, Clinton supporters are highly interested in her convention speech. What she says and how she handles the moment should have a significant impact on some of her supporters who have been slow to support Obama. As the findings show, her supporters still care more about what she has to say than what the party's nominee does.



Though Pew didn't ask this question, I'd suspect many of Hillary's supporters will be paying attention to Bill for "the real clues" as to how the Clintons feel. If Hillary gives a warm, embracing speech but Bill is tepid in his support, that's the kind of thing that her voters may well see as "she's being the consummate professional, he's signaling us about what they really feel about this guy."

FiveThirtyEight interest in the conventions will be higher this year too, since we’ll be covering them on location. I asked Nate what angles he thought we should pursue, and he said, “I dunno. Like, politics and stuff.” I’ll let him tell you more about that this weekend, but I will be looking specifically for firsthand information about the ground game for each side. We also seek free palatial accommodations with convenient access to the site, so if our loyal Colorado and Minnesota readers could make that happen for us, that'd be great.

Incidentally, and this isn't worth a whole separate post, Obama may be holding off on the VP announcement – even though he acknowledges he's decided – because right now he’s sitting in a sweet spot. The whole political press is hanging on every word and tea leaf while Obama hammers McCain for a gift-wrapped gaffe. From an Obama perspective, there's not much downside. Though Halperin implies Obama doesn't care about setting folks' ringtones off in the middle of the night.

One additional gift-wrapped line for Tim Kaine, were it to be him: he would get to call himself "one of McCain's many governors."

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Unabashed Media Whoring (and Open Thread)

FiveThirtyEight is featured today on Political Lunch.

I'll be a guest tomorrow on KCRW's (NPR's Los Angeles affiliate) To the Point, at about 1:10 PM Central Time.

Sports, not politics, but my annual piece on the top 50 players in baseball is up at SportsIllustrated.com. Dustin Pedroia is #40.

And look for 538-related material soon at New York Magazine and on bloggingheads.tv. (EDIT: Here is that nymag.com piece, the thrust of which is 538: The Cliff's Notes Version.)

An actual, value-added thought follows below the jump.

It's probably just a matter of the punditry all being bored and thinking out loud at once, but when you start to see stuff like this...



...is there not a little bit of danger to the Obama campaign? If I were a high-information Hillary loyalist, I'd be getting my hopes up right about now.

With that being the case, would it not be in the interest of the Obama campaign be moving to quash the "it could still be Hillary!" rumors -- assuming she is not the pick? And since the rumors haven't been quashed, does this therefore indicate that she might be the pick?

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Road to 270: Oklahoma

Note: Over the course of the next two months, we will be previewing the Presidential Election matchup in each of the 50 states. The previews are built around a key set of demographic variables in each state. We continue with the Sooner State, Oklahoma.

WHEN THE WIND comes sweeping down the Oklahoma plains, it sweeps Republican red. Only once since Truman – the LBJ landslide – has Oklahoma chosen a Democrat over the Republican for President. Ironically, Democrats hold nearly every statewide office (governor, AG, treasurer, education secretary, labor and insurance commissioners, etc.), but at the federal level the only Democrat is Representative Dan Boren in OK-2, and he has not endorsed Barack Obama. No wonder, then, that our projections show John McCain beating his rival by over 27% on election day.

Key Demographics



Note: Factors colored in red can generally be thought to help McCain. Factors in blue can generally be thought to help Obama. Factors in purple have ambiguous effects. Except where otherwise apparent, the numbers next to each variable represent the proportion out of each 100 residents in each state who fall into that category. Fundraising numbers reflect dollars raised in the 2008 campaign cycle per eligible voter in each state. Figures for seniors and youth voters are proportions of all residents aged 18+, rather than all residents of any age. The figure for education reflects the average number of years of completed schooling for all adults aged 25+. The figure for same-sex households reflects the number of same-sex partner households as a proportion of all households in the state. The liberal-conservative index is scaled from 0 (conservative) to 100 (liberal), based on a Likert score of voter self-identification in 2004 exit polls. The turnout rates reflect eligible voters only. Unemployment rates are current as of June 2008.

What McCain Has Going For Him

What’s not to like? Politically, this was a top-5 Bush state in 2004, and a top-5 conservative state on its Likert score. McCain out-fundraises Obama here, and 44% of the voting population are registered Republicans. There are lots of military veterans here, as well as the 2d highest percentage of white evangelicals, a group that strongly favors McCain over Obama. Social factors like same sex marriage and our vaunted Starbucks:Walmart ratio place Oklahoma in the most McCain-favorable 20%. Relative to the rest of the country, incomes are lower, the education rates are lower, but employment rates are higher. If high unemployment is thought to cut against the incumbent party and higher education rates track with Democratic voting, McCain has little to fear in those factors.

What Obama Has Going For Him

It’s a stretch to say Obama has anything going for him in Oklahoma beyond generalized wrong track dissatisfaction, which will be far from enough for him to be competitive here. Oklahoma has a relatively high (top 25%) youth population. Demographically, that’s about it. Obama has ignored Oklahoma, not visiting during the primaries or the general election so far. Despite the 50-state strategy, it would probably take a natural disaster like last year’s killer tornado that hit Greensburg, Kansas to get him to make a trip. His 31% share in the primaries foretells the eventual outcome in the general election.

What To Watch For

Watch the Senate race between Andrew Rice (D) and James Inhofe (R). While our projections show Inhofe winning comfortably and we still list the race as “Safe GOP,” recent polls have shown Rice becoming more competitive, and it’s a far closer race than the presidential blowout appears to be. Chris Cillizza focused on that race this week, noting that polls showing a tightening race (from 20 to 9 points) were not strongly disputed by Republicans. This is still a far cry from saying that Rice, a netroots favorite, will win his race. In fact, it’s a little bit reminiscent of the Brad Carson-Tom Coburn Oklahoma Senate race in 2004, which Coburn ultimately won by double digits.

In short, there's little drama in Oklahoma this year, and both campaigns have certainly chalked it up in McCain's column. It will be interesting to see whether Obama puts any organizing resources here; the campaign says it will put some staff in every state. Also, it will be curious to see whether Inhofe tries to tie Rice to Obama, and whether that strategy will finally work (it didn't in three special elections in the spring). If it were going to work somewhere, it probably would in a state that Obama has seemingly snubbed.

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The Case for Hillary

A (very smart) reader writes in:

There is another important strategic implication of choosing Hillary Clinton now. Three of the worries/concerns that people had about Clinton would be that she would fire up the Republican anti-Clinton machines, in times of both money and energy as well as do the thing that John McCain couldn't do--unite the Republican party.

Continuing:

Well, we can draw at least three conclusions.

1. Clearly McCain has been able--for the most part--to unify his party. Now that may change depending on his VP pick, but chances are the pick will be fairly conservative (in both senses of the word.)

2. Clearly much of the anti-Clinton machine has already turned their sights--predictably--on Obama. That machine has latched onto the Obama as other/celebrity/whatever attack and will be relentless about it, aided and abetted by a docile media.

3. Clinton's presence may be able to gin up Republican fundraising...except, because they are taking public financing, the McCain campaign will have precisely one week to both collect AND spend that money. In short, absent some increase in RNC money and possibly 527 money, for the most part McCain's advantage here would be completely neutralized by the clock. If Hillary had been the VP nominee all summer long the Republicans would be dining out on this--but now they simply would not have enough time to do it.

As for the turnout, I would have to imagine that any increases in Republican turnout would be matched or bested by older female voters turning out for their hero.

The case for picking Clinton doesn't have all that much to do with Obama's deteriorating poll numbers -- although you can certainly make a separate argument based on the electoral math. Rather, it's that the Republicans have shown their hand -- and made it clear that they aren't going to be running any sort of nice, safe campaign where Obama coasts to victory while the base stays asleep.

In fact, I'd go one step further than my reader. I think that if Obama picks Clinton, the Republicans are likely to overplay their hand. One thing that Obama has not really been able to do is to generate some organic level of backlash when he is attacked. This is separate and distinct from the notion of "fighting back"; it is voters stepping in and refereeing the match themselves. Voters recognize that McCain has gone negative but they aren't really punishing him for it -- his favorables haven't moved at all. Why not? I think it has to do with the nature of Obama: he is new, he is confident to the point of being arrogant, and up until recently, he has been leading. To the extent there is any genius in the "celebrity" line of attack, it's that nobody feels much sympathy when celebrities are made fun of (well, except for this guy); it is a sort of sport to try and pierce their bubble.

With Clinton, on the other hand, voters naturally want to come to her defense -- and overzealous attempts to whip the Republican base into a frenzy will be counteracted with outrage from significant numbers of older and working-class women.

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Today's Polls, 8/20

By any and all polling-based metrics, the race for the White House is extremely tight. However, we present three slightly different projections of the November outcome, and they each tell a slightly different story:



Our popular vote projection shows a literal tie, with each of Barack Obama and John McCain projected to earn 48.5 percent of the vote, and third-party candidates receiving a collective 3 percent.

Things get confusing, however, when looking at the electoral college. We project Obama to earn slightly more electoral votes on average. However, we also project John McCain to win the election slightly more often. What accounts for the discrepancy? Obama's wins tend to be larger, and McCain's tend to be smaller. If Obama wins this election by between 7 or 10 points, there are very few high-EV states that he won't be able to put into play; even something like Texas is probably winnable. If McCain were to win by that margin, on the other hand, he would still almost certainly lose New York, he would almost certainly lose Illinois, and he would almost certainly lose California. Those states represent 107 electoral votes that are essentially off-limits to McCain, even on his very best days.

But when the election is close -- and this is the case that we really care about -- McCain has appeared to develop a slight advantage in the electoral math. There are several states on our map that are colored light pink, meaning that they tip very slightly to the Republicans; these include Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Montana and Nevada, in each of which Obama has better than a 25 percent chance of winning, but less than a 50 percent chance. There are a fairly large number of scenarios, then, where Obama comes tantalizingly close to a victory, but loses several different battleground states by mere points or fractions thereof. This dynamic is fairly fluid, however, and if Obama were able to get a toehold somewhere like Colorado or Virginia, it could quickly reverse itself.

Does all of this mean that you should short Obama in the futures markets, which still show him as roughly a 60:40 favorite?

Not necessarily. Our model accounts for the topline results of the polls in as comprehensive a way as is possible, but it does not account for nonpolling factors such as turnout and ground game, macroeconomic conditions, or the probability of certain future events (like the conventions) tending to favor one or another candidate. The Obama campaign, I think, has good reasons not to panic; the facts and figures that we hear about their ground game in off-record conversations never fail to impress, and the campaign has a keen sense of how to play out the rest of the political calendar, in contrast to recent weeks where they had let McCain dictate the narrative. But the McCain campaign, just as surely, has reason to be pleased. Their candidate was never going to win a blowout election, but they are setting themselves up well to win a close one.

Finally, here are the state polling results, which we'll simply present today as a data dump.

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McCain Now Winning Small Majority of Simulations

Full update coming shortly.

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Obama-SebeliBus?

Just thinking out loud here...


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You could very easily do a bus tour that departs from Springfield, winds up in Denver, and does some very good bio-building for Kathleen Sebelius in between.

Start out in Springfield, and proceed to Sebelius' childhood home in Cincinnati by route of Indianapolis and Dayton. Big media appearances on Sunday AM in Cinncinati, and proceed to St. Louis by that evening, with a quick stop in Evansville or Bloomington, Indiana in between. Travel to Kansas City overnight, begin your Monday with an AM event there, and then cross the state line into Kansas and proceed to the state capital in Topeka. At that point, after one more presser, Sebelius leaves the trail, Obama takes a quick detour to his mother's home in El Dorado, and then proceeds on to Denver.

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I'm Hearing...

...that Obama staff were told to prepare for a VP announcement tomorrow or today, but the same source that passed this along to me expressed skepticism.

My guess? Thursday -- tomorrow -- PM. The event scheduled with Tim Kaine on Thursday is apparently invitation-only, and would not be all that well suited to a VP unveil. If it's going to be Kaine, in other words, Obama would probably need to announce today.

The dead zone in the media cycle is Friday afternoon through Saturday evening ... Friday mornings are relatively normal. An announcement on Thursday evening would allow Obama to get some coverage while people were still at their desks, while also building up anticipation toward his Saturday event in Springfield, which sounds more designed to be a mass media spectacle than for any kind of spontaneity.

And Friday seems to be pretty unscheduled for both Obama and most of the leading VP contenders, creating plenty of opportunities for a joint appearance. For that matter, Hillary Clinton will be in Florida on Thursday and Kathleen Sebelius in Iowa, neither of which are impossibly far away from Virginia for some kind of PM rendezvouses.

With large grain of salt.

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Biden: A New Trick for Old Fogeys

Yesterday, I argued that Joe Biden is not an especially popular politician, and would start out with an unusually high number of unfavorables for a VP selection, almost all of whom have been either relatively unknown at the time of their selection (allowing the campaign to build a favorable narrative around them), or almost universally well-liked to begin with.

However, Biden's case is probably stronger than I indicated, because he tends to be most popular among voting groups with a lot of undecided voters, which means a lot of persuadables. In particular, Biden's strength with senior citizens could be a real asset. How so? Because seniors are far more likely to be undecided in this election than their younger counterparts.

Below, I have averaged the Gallup national tracker crosstabs by age over the course of the last three weeks. The only thing I am interested in is the number of voters who are not committed to either Obama or McCain (either truly undecided or claiming that they'll vote third-party). This is how that vote breaks down by age group:

18-29     9% undecided/other
30-49     9% undecided/other
50-64    10% undecided/other
65+      16% undecided/other

Seniors are about 50 percent more likely than other voters to be uncommitted at this point in the race. Voters aged 65+ will eventually represent about 20 percent of the electorate, but they may represent more like 30 percent of the pool of persuadables.

Now, what did Joe Biden's favorables look like in that recent Rasumussen poll?

VF = Very Favorable
SF = Somewhat Favorable
SU = Somewhat Unfavorable
VU = Very Unfavorable

Age       VF  +  SF  =  Favorable    SU  +  VU  =  Unfavorable
18-29      3  +  26  =     29        14  +   8  =     22  (+7)
30-39      4  +  19  =     23        17  +  16  =     33  (-10)
40-49      8  +  19  =     27        22  +  18  =     30  (-3)
50-64     19  +  24  =     43        19  +  18  =     37  (+6)
65+       21  +  24  =     45        12  +  21  =     35  (+10)

That is a pretty strong age-based correlation. The only figure that breaks the pattern is Biden's relatively strong performance among 18-29 year olds, but that is probably because that cohort is so overwhelmingly Democratic at the moment that they are likely to support any Democrat.

Biden's net favorable score among seniors was the highest of any Democrat that Rasmussen tested, except for John Edwards, who has since disqualified himself:

Edwards    +21
Biden      +10
Clinton    +8
Kaine      +1
Webb       0
Sebelius   -1
Bayh       -6
Hagel      -9

What a Biden pick really would be is a redux of Gore-Lieberman. Al Gore got quite a large bounce in Florida when he selected Lieberman, and if Obama were to pick Biden, he is probably committed to playing Florida out to the end, or at least until the last 15 days of the campaign.

*-*

By the way -- I wouldn't read too much into Biden's "I'm not the guy" statement because his demeanor seemed to be pretty sarcastic and jocular. Then again, assuming it was an unplanned joke, his statement couldn't have gone over too well with the Obama campaign. Hell, if they were really evil, they could have told all the candidates they weren't the one and then saw who leaked or broke their game face.

In any event, based on my 99.99% uninformed aggregation of information and intuition, I'd probably place the candidates into something like the following tiers:

1. Biden, Kaine
2. Sebelius, Clinton
3. Bayh, Reed, Other

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Today's Polls, 8/19

It was another fairly bad polling day for Barack Obama, and we are getting to the point where it would be hard to describe the election as anything other than "too close to call". But most of that has been driven by the rapidly tightening national numbers. This set of state polling isn't quite as bad as it looks for Obama:



The most disappointing for result for Obama is probably in Indiana, where SurveyUSA has John McCain pulling into a 6-point lead after having trailed by a single point last month. Why so disappointing? Because Obama has been investing heavily in Indiana while McCain has not. A couple of caveats, though. Firstly, investments in the ground game may not show up in the polls in the first place. And secondly, the partisan leaning of the sample has shifted a fair bit more Republican than the last edition of this poll. It's possible that, as McCain enthusiasm grows (and Bush fatigue wanes), more Republican-leaning independents are now willing to identify themselves as Republican. It's also possible that we're just looking at some static.

It is officially time for Obama to be worried in Minnesota, where SurveyUSA marks the third consecutive poll to show him with a lead of only 2-4 points? Our model says ... maybe not qute yet. There has certainly been a pretty big shift in the raw numbers in the Gopher State, but there aren't really any demographic explanations for it -- Obama hasn't lost much ground in demographically similar states like Wisconsin and Iowa. So our model is going to need a little more coaxing before it considers Minnesota a toss-up. It might be close enough, however, that there is an electoral rationale for McCain to pick Tim Pawlenty.

Certain of these other results actually aren't that bad for Obama. In Pennsylvania, for instance, his 6-point margin over McCain in the new Susquehanna poll is meaningful precisely because he's not polling so fantastically elsewhere. What do I mean by that? I mean that even when the national race is about tied, as it is now, Obama still has a lead of 5-6 points in Pennsylvania. So Pennsylvania is unlikely to be a tipping point state; it's going to be pretty hard for McCain to make up 5-6 points in Pennsylvania without gaining that ground everywhere, especially given that Penna has been absolutely saturated in the Presidential campaign since late March.

Conversely, in Florida, Obama may be within tipping point range in a close election. McCain's 2-point edge is a reversal of the 2-point advantage that Obama held in the prior Rasmussen poll -- but on the other hand, versions of the Rasmussen poll in the spring had shown a couple leads in the double digits for McCain. Which way Florida goes next may depend on Obama's VP selection; it is one of those states where Joe Biden might help him, as undoubtedly could Hillary Clinton.

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Fox's Pro-Choice Poison Pill?

Fox News, citing RNC sources, now reports that John McCain will not pick a pro-choice running mate:

As speculation grows around who John McCain will select as his vice presidential running mate next week, Republican National Committee officials said Tuesday that McCain is no longer considering former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge.

Several sources at the RNC told FOX News that in the last 36 hours, senior McCain advisers and aides have told RNC officials that McCain “got the message” last week that choosing a running mate who supports abortion rights would not be helpful.

Note that all of Fox's sources are from the RNC -- nobody with the McCain campaign itself. Nevertheless, with this having come from the right's most trusted news source, the perception will certainly be out there that McCain has thumbed-down the idea of picking a pro-choicer -- which means that it would look doubly like a betrayal if he now did.

In other words, as difficult as it was for McCain to pick a pro-choice running mate before, it just became a whole lot more difficult now. That may have been precisely the purpose of the story; it's sort of the Xiang Yu strategy of burning part of your own fleet in order to achieve a desired end.

As such, it sure looks like Ridge is off the list, as are Lieberman and Meg Whitman.

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Context on Battleground Spending

Let me start here. Talking Points Memo is, hands down, as good as it gets in political blogging/reporting. They are the gold standard. But last night, Greg Sargent at TPM's Election Central reported that John McCain was outspending Barack Obama in battleground states under this headline:

McCain Outspending Obama By Hundreds of Thousands in Many Core Battleground States

Subsequently, Jonathan Martin at Politico picked up on the reporting, and given how many read TPM each day I'd expect to see more sources discuss the story today and tomorrow, at least to the extent VP talk does not crowd out everything else.

What's wrong with this story's framing?

What's wrong is that when I read those headlines, I get the impression that McCain is massively outspending Obama in the core battleground states. No context is presented. While at least Martin has "On TV" in his headline, there isn't a single mention on either TPM or in the Politico blurb contextualizing that spending in a state is not just advertising.

Readers here know that Barack Obama is dwarfing John McCain's ground operation; we've written about it repeatedly. Those thousands of paid organizers are not working for free. The field offices and the phone lines and the Blackberries and the reimbursed travel miles are not free. Moreover, Barack Obama pays his organizers out of the Campaign for Change, which is funded by Obama's own campaign; McCain's are mostly paid by the coordinated committees which in turn are funded by the RNC, RNSC and RNCC, further impacting the way spending numbers are attributed to each campaign.

While millions may be spent on advertising, so too is one campaign spending millions on ground game while the other is spending virtually nothing. Obama is investing more massively than any campaign in the history of American politics on the ground game. McCain is essentially not investing in ground. His early summer numbers of 20,000 phone calls nationwide for a whole month would be those of a single, low-budget House campaign. That's the equivalent of one person working ten hours a day for a month. For the entire nation. It's basically the equivalent of zero contacts. When Martin writes that McCain's ground campaign is revving up, it's essentially starting from nothing and is now in 1st gear.

Further, the idea that McCain's spending is disproportionately concentrated in television advertising in battleground states needs the context that he's simply not spending it anywhere else. While we don't have enough hard numbers to compose a fancy pie chart, rest assured that McCain's would show a much, much higher percentage of his pie on television ads whereas Obama's would show an unprecedentedly large slice on his thousands of paid organizers and hundreds of field offices.

As the story hits the discussion slipstream, hopefully it will not be framed as "hey, look at this surprising development, the guy with more money is being outspent because he's foolishly and riskily airing TV ads in lesser battlegrounds." Sure, Obama is spending plenty on ads, and he is spending advertising dollars more broadly (and thinly) than is McCain. But people are also failing to appreciate of dollars spent on the dramatic all-in move that Obama has made in organizing and neighbor-to-neighbor persuasion.

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Online Chat at 1 PM Eastern / 12 PM Central

As a quick FYI, I will be participating in an online chat at WashingtonTimes.com beginning in 20 or 30 minutes.

Please save any questions for over there -- not here.

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Do Voters Like Joe Biden?

I think I've written extensively about just about all of the leading Democratic Vice Presidential contenders at some point, except Joe Biden, who at this point seems to be the favorite for the position. I like Joe Biden reasonably well personally; if I were trying to choose from among the VP candidates to support in a Democratic primary, he would be fairly high on the list. But I think the Democrats may be overstating his electoral appeal.

Rasmussen has conducted polling on Joe Biden at various times; I have included a recent poll where they took voters' temperatures on some of the potential VP contenders, as well as a poll toward the end of Biden's primary campaign, and then a baseline reading from 2006. In each case, Biden's favorables/unfavorables were pretty close to even:

VF = Very Favorable
SF = Somewhat Favorable
SU = Somewhat Unfavorable
VU = Very Unfavorable

Date       VF  +  SF  =  Favorable    SU  +  VU  =  Unfavorable
7/27/08    12  +  23  =     35        17  +  17  =     34
12/9/07    10  +  28  =     38        21  +  16  =     37
11/11/06   10  +  23  =     33        21  +  15  =     36

These are not terrific ratings, and they get a little bit worse when you look at the depth of the sentiments, as Biden's strong unfavorables exceed his strong favorables by 5-7 points. Basically, I think he is identified enough with the (unpopular) institution of the Congress that he will be viewed by a lot of people as a partisan, but doesn't compensate for that by generating enthusiastic responses from the base, the way some other candidates might. Biden is fairly well-known -- by far the best know candidate of the Bayh/Biden/Kaine/Sebelius group -- so perceptions of him are liable to be fairly entrenched, and may not be enhanced by the fluffy sort of treatment that the VP candidate usually tends to get from the press.

There are some positives, though. Biden's numbers are quite strong among seniors, a group with whom Obama is underperforming, and fairly strong among moderates. He would probably lock up Pennsylvania for Obama -- both because he is well-known in the Philly burbs and because Pennsylvania has an older electorate -- and might play well somewhere like Florida. (I don't think he'd perform as strongly in states like Colorado and Wisconsin, which are a bit younger and tend not to like the Washington establishment).

I understand that there is more to picking a VP than favorable/unfavorable ratings -- elections aren't won by out-nicing the other ticket. There is no doubt that Biden would perform well on the talk show circuit, and that he'd assuage the concerns of a certain number of older, foreign-policy-focused voters. That might be enough to make him a worthy choice. But I don't think he'd quite as appealing to the electorate as the conventional wisdom seems to hold.

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Yet Another Conegate Thread

I caught Rick Warren on the re-broadcast of his Larry King Live interview right now. When pressed by King on the fact that John McCain had not in fact been in the so-called "cone of silence" during the first half-hour of Barack Obama's interview, Warren raised the point that McCain had been in the company of the Secret Service, and implied that the Secret Service would have informed him if McCain had done anything untoward.

Um, what?

Saying that John McCain was in the company of the Secret Service is no more informative than saying that John McCain was breathing air.

And when did the Secret Service become the Secret Police? The Secret Service personnel assigned to McCain have exactly one duty: to protect John McCain. It is not their duty to rat on John McCain; in fact, you can argue that it is explicitly their duty not to rat on John McCain.

...Looks like CNN just put the transcript up; here is the exact quote:

KING: From Lake Forest, California, we welcome -- it's always great to see him, a frequent visitor to this show. Not frequent enough, by the way. Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church, best-selling author of "The Purpose Driven Life." and on Saturday, he conducted those interviews with Senators Obama and McCain at the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency.

Let's take care of one thing right away. You introduced Obama and said that Senator McCain and said he was in a cone of silence.

WARREN: Yes.

KING: Now, obviously, Rick Warren would never tell a mistruth.

Did you not know that he was in an automobile?

WARREN: I didn't know they had put -- hadn't put him into the Green Room yet. No, I didn't. When we walked in, I knew he hadn't been in about 10 minutes earlier. And I figured within the 10 minutes we got there, they had put him in.

The whole thing is really kind of bogus, Larry. The Supreme -- I mean, the Secret Service were with him the whole time. Then our facility's staff -- our security staff were with him. And he was put in a building completely separate from everybody else. And there's no way he could hear. I've been talking about this all day. There was a rumor going around that he watched the program on a monitor in the Green Room that we had him in.

Well, there's only one problem with it. My staff, Chuck Taylor, disconnected that thing two days before it happened. So if he -- if they had happened to turn it on, it would have been all just static.

And both Barack and John agreed to the terms that said we will not listen to the other's, we will not get the questions in advance.

Actually, what happened is I did give Obama one in advance that I didn't get to Senator McCain because he wasn't there. Right before we started, I wanted to tell them there's going to be one question that I'm going to ask you for a commitment on. And I didn't think that was fair to ask for a commitment publicly without setting them up. And it had to do with orphans.

And so I did get to tell Senator Obama about that question. But because Senator McCain wasn't there, he hadn't -- he didn't have that question yet.

KING: All right.

Well, could he have heard it in the car, though, if he was still arriving at the event?

WARREN: You know what, if -- not a chance. The Secret Service would have reported it. When he showed up, there were -- and he says he didn't. You know, I...

KING: All right.

WARREN: ...I just have to accept his integrity on that.

Warren finally gives the right response at the end: "I just have to accept his integrity on that". That's all any of us really can do, I suppose.

But why, then, all this crap about the Secret Service? Why all the bluster from McCain? Why not a simple denial?

The assertion that McCain had the opportunity to cheat is undeniable; the suggestion that he actually did cheat is probably unprovable. But paradoxically, the McCain campaign have focused all their attention on addressing the former question, while not really bothering to refute the latter.

It is a dishonorable and shifty little thing to do.

But you know what? Politically speaking, it was probably wise. Two of the generally feistier Democratic surrogates that I saw on MSNBC today, Claire McCaskill and Steve McMahon, wouldn't touch the issue with a ten-foot pole, lest they be accused of being whiners. This attests to the strength of McCain's brand -- they weren't about to point out the dishonorable actions of an Honorable™ man.

Now, fundamentally, you can really only swim upstream if you know that you're going to have the wherewithal to complete the journey. It may already be too late in the election -- after months of disclaiming at every possible opportunity that they honor and respect Senator McCain's service -- for the Democrats to try and impeach certain elements of his brand. In which case, McCaskill and McMahon were right to punt on the question.

But it's worth remembering that McCain won the Republican primaries in large part because the other candidates were so deferential to him. Rudy Giuliani praised McCain incessantly during the debates of last summer, at which point McCain's campaign was in tatters and didn't seem like much of a threat. But guess where Rudy's supporters went once McCain won New Hampshire?

The Republicans, of course, have no such inhibitions when it comes to Democrats, which is why they went right at Al Gore's strengths, and right at John Kerry's strengths, and are going right at Barack Obama's strengths -- and, importantly, did so early in those respective campaigns. It's one of the big reasons that they win elections.

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Yet Another Veep Thread: Nobody Knows Anything

Notice the exceptional similarity between Nedra Pickler's story on the Obama veep selection process in the Associated Press, and the Nagourney/Zeleny story in the New York Times.

NYT (Nagourney/Zeleny):

Mr. Obama had not notified his choice — or any of those not selected — of his decision as of late Monday, advisers said. Going into the final days, Mr. Obama was said to be focused mainly on three candidates: Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware.

Some Democrats said they still hoped that he would choose Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, or Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, who has been under steady consideration by Mr. Obama’s campaign.

AP (Pickler):

Obama was believed to have narrowed his list to Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. While it seemed increasingly unlikely that he would choose his vanquished rival, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, some Democrats speculated Monday that he could pull a surprise and pick her.

The stories are identical nearly down to the word, the only difference being that Sebelius is mentioned in the first tier of the AP story but sort of relegated to the second tier in the Times story. If these were college papers, one would be disqualified for plagiarizing the other.

Why does this matter? It means that nobody is talking -- nobody has any proprietary info. Pickler and Nagourney were probably fed this info by the same source -- my money is on Robert Gibbs -- and the message went out exactly as the Obama campaign wanted it to.

As such, I would not dismiss the possibility of a surprise choice, precisely because the Obama campaign has the discipline to pull it off. Still, I have to agree with Sean that the more build-up there is, the more pressure there is on the Obama campaign to deliver on a big name. Would a head-fake make sense if the Obama campaign were going to deliver us a Chet Edwards or -- bless his political heart -- a Brian Schweitzer -- someone who had all those iPhone-carrying Obama supporters furiously checking Wikipeida after they received Team O's text message?

Not much. Either they're playing it straight-up -- meaining Biden, Bayh, Kaine, or Sebelius -- or it's some kind of A-lister, someone for whom the elaborate staging of it all doesn't produce an anti-climax. That list is probably limited to Hillary, Gore, Kerry and Colin Powell, though I have real trouble imagining the latter two. Somebody who had officially disqualified themselves -- Mark Warner or Jim Webb -- would presumably also produce a lot of shock value. But I think we need to start discounting some of these second-tier picks that don't have strong brands, like the Jack Reeds and the Chris Dodds.

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Today's Polls, 8/18

If you're jumping out of your seat with every vibration and high-pitched noise, waiting for Barack Obama's VP announcement to hit your cellphone, there is not really a whole lot to entertain and distract you in today's polls.

In Illinois, home of the 2008 World Champion Chicago Cubs, Barack Obama leads by 15 in the latest poll from Rasmussen. The only other time that Rasmussen had polled Illinois was in early July, at which point Obama led by 11. This, then, is a nominal improvement for Obama -- but since an 11-point margin seemed implausibly small before, this may be more reversion to the mean than any real sort of trendline.

Rasmussen also surveyed Georgia, where John McCain leads by 9. This is slightly better than Obama has fared in any prior Rasmussen poll of Georgia. But the more noteworthy characteristic is that polling in what we call the South Coast region -- states like Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia -- has trended within a remarkably narrow range. With the exception of a couple of oddball InsiderAdvantage polls, and Zogby Interactive's exercise in dart-throwing, all nine polls of Georgia in our database have shown McCain's lead in the range of 8 to 14 points. As we have expressed before, there may simply not be all that many swing voters in this region. Once you count white evangelicals, the overwhelming majority of whom will vote for McCain, and African-American voters, the overwhelming majority of whom will vote for Obama, there isn't all that much of the electorate left to divvy up.

Lastly, in New York, Siena has Barack Obama ahead by 8, a decline from 13 points last month. I would not read too much to this one, but it may indicate that the polling continues to be volatile in states with a large number of Hillary Clinton voters.

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VP Announcement Timing

It's acknowledged that these next two-and-a-half weeks are the most exciting time for political junkies (and indeed FiveThirtyEight hopes to see many of you at each convention), but what about the precise timing of VP announcements? There are some interesting game theory ideas as well as some constraints around Obama's unusual text message approach to his announcement.

Let's throw out a few assumptions.

Assumption: the longer the wait, the higher the buildup. Delay picking will lead to a vigil-like frenzy among the media, but it also builds up anticipation about the quality of the candidate. The more of a big deal the pick seems, the more the need "to deliver" a big name or the Wow Effect.

Assumption: all things being equal, Fridays are the worst day to announce given that Saturday coverage is at its low ebb. If there are other options available, Friday won't be picked.

Competing Assumptions: Days with nothing scheduled are ripe for a big announcement type event, but also Obama's campaign delights in running a leak-free ship, leading to a more stylistic pleasure in catching the media somewhat off-guard.

Assumption: when you send a giant, millions-of-people text message, you set off a bunch of text message ringtones that make noise. That means you ought to wait as long as possible during a day so that people are awake. While most people texting VP to 62262 are self-selected Obama partisans who won't hold a ringtone with breaking news against Obama, nobody likes to be woken up prematurely. It's a tiny, but definite negative freeroll. In terms of battleground states, only Nevada in the Pacific Time Zone and Alaska in the Alaska Time Zone pose any kind of early ringtone risk here.

Assumption: you also want to announce in time to maximize evening news coverage on local and national nightly newscasts on the East Coast, which begin at 6pm eastern. You could announce right as coverage is beginning so as to give the "Breaking News" effect that would dominate particularly the national news half-hours, or you could announce a little beforehand so that the news outfits have a little more time and are a little less peevish at being given short notice.

Assumption: the longer Obama waits, the more names and numbers he can collect in his voter contacts/volunteer contacts database. Al Giordano has a clever post up today speculating that if Obama were to wait until the Wednesday of the convention, he could maximize the number of collected names who want to be in on the breaking announcement. For a campaign obsessed with building its ground operation, this upside has to be attractive. Of course, this cuts against the assumption that the longer the wait, the more pressure to deliver a Wow Factor. Then again, given that Obama speaks the next night, it gives a minimized window of VP focus. While the Wow Factor could disappoint, in the grand scope this one day would be a blip and almost immediately attention would be focused elsewhere: Obama's speech, McCain's pick, the Republican convention.

Assumption: McCain is better off having the most information when he makes his final choice, so waiting at least until Obama has picked is the logical move. Since Obama must pick no later than August 27 (the night the VP speaks) or August 26 (the traditional night for placing names in nomination), McCain can wait to pick. However, Labor Day weekend begins immediately after the Democratic convention ends. That Friday will be a low tide for attention. Would McCain similarly wait until his convention has started to announce?

Have we fully considered the possibility of McCain stepping on the Democratic Convention by announcing during the week in Denver? It's unorthodox, it cuts against "unwritten rules" about allowing the other party its own convention, but are those unwritten rules open for question? If McCain announces, the media would have to cover it. They would have to talk about it in real time, no matter what was going on in Denver. Is it a function of McCain wanting specific reporters (all the A-listers will be in Denver before they head to St. Paul) to be on the scene when he announces that would inhibit him from breaking tradition and announcing during Denver Week? Or is it that personal between the candidates that McCain would want to stick it to Obama in this way? The sneeringly negative commercials seem to show a very personal umbrage/jealousy taken by the McCain camp at Obama's "celebrity," a niche formerly occupied exclusively by McCain. Would forcing the talking heads to spend time devoted to McCain during the Democrats' week be just the blunting effect McCain would like to insert against runaway focus on the Democrat? Is it within the realm of possibility that for separate tactical reasons each candidate would consider announcing on Wednesday, August 27?

In the end it's unlikely McCain would allow Obama the first clear rhetorical shot at framing McCain's VP pick, which he would surely do in his Thursday speech if given the opportunity. Friday is a bad press day, but if the VP pick were announced bright and early it would immediately shift the discussion off of "Wasn't Obama wonderful last night?" and onto the birthday boy's running mate. ABC suggests that McCain's planned 10,000 person rally in Dayton on Friday would be an optimal VP announcement time, and it's hard to disagree.

Assumption: With FiveThirtyEight covering both conventions, travel demands, and Labor Day weekend, participating in our annual fantasy football draft is going to be a giant logistical pain this year. At least this one we can be certain of.

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