On the Road: Durango/Cortez, Colorado

“In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped and led you to the Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land.”

– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

Al Gore and John Kerry did not have field operations in Durango, Colorado. Barack Obama is here -- in force. It's a buoyant, bubbling crowd of enthusiastic volunteers. We ran into waves of Saturday canvassers, including family groups going out with their kids to knock on doors in the shadow of the stunning San Juan Mountains. We followed a few of these volunteers as they knocked on doors, registered voters, and signed them up to request a mail-in ballot.

Voter registration deadline in Colorado is October 6. Registered voters may request mail-in ballots up until October 28, and Democrats are definitely placing a large emphasis on mail-in voting because it continually reduces the universe of remaining voters who need to be turned out on Election Day. A reduced universe allows for more efficient and targeted use of resources. It also allows the campaigns to see which precincts (Democratic-leaning or Republican-leaning) are getting their ballots in early. That also permits an efficient, as-necessary shifting of ground game resources as Election Day closes in.

We spoke with Alex Max, a 15-year old Durango High student and Obama's Southwest Colorado Youth Outreach Coordinator. It turns out that Alex had logged onto Barack Obama's website more than any other person in La Plata County, and one day he got a call from the Obama field organizer here who asked whether he'd be willing to help coordinate high school seniors in youth turnout. There are approximately 300 students in the DHS senior class, and of those only some have birthdays before November 4. Alex has registered 30-50 students to vote, so you do the math on how effective Alex' work has been. They've been reaching out to other high school students to set up similar groups.

We left the Obama HQ at 1021 Main St. and walked over to the Republican County field office in the Prudential building at 700 Main St. It was closed. We spoke with the woman who works at the front desk for Prudential and she described lots and lots of folks shuttling in and out for bumper stickers and yard signs -- the tyrannical yard signs of organizers' nightmares -- but not staying for phone banking, as she almost always notices them leaving quickly.

It may be that Republicans see La Plata County as a lost cause -- it has been getting bluer and bluer. We may find a massive Republican effort in Colorado Springs, and we'll check Obama's operation there too. In La Plata in 2004, John Kerry beat George Bush won by 1,695 votes, a slightly less than 7% margin. But in 2000, Bush beat Gore by 2,121 votes, or more than 10% (Nader got nearly 12% of the vote, and less than 1% in 2004). Dole beat Clinton by over 1,500 votes (Perot got 8.1%), after Clinton eked out a 391-vote win over the elder Bush in 1992 (helped by 26.2% of the vote going to Perot). But the county is growing -- 15,613 votes in 1992, 17,321 in 1996, 20,490 in 2000, and 25,513 in 2004.

Over in neighboring much redder Montezuma County (home of Mesa Verde National Park) we looked in on the ground game. Bush beat Kerry by over 3,100 (6,988 to 3,867) more than doubled up Gore, 6,158 to 2,556 (Nader took 5.7%). Dole cruised over Clinton by 1,597 out of 7,831 total cast, even with Perot taking 10.6% of the vote.

There was more success with the Republican field operation in Cortez. The Republican Party office was open until about 4pm today, and several volunteers operated the office. They expressed pride in their all-volunteer status, and insisted that Obama needed paid staff because nobody would have volunteered full time for him here. A rotating group of approximately 10 volunteers manage the office 1-3 at a time throughout the week. While we were there, one man came in to find McCain pins.

The Obama group in Cortez did not exactly strike us as lacking in the volunteer effort or in grassroots energy. In terms of numbers, there was more going on at the Obama office, which is open 9 to 9 every day of the week. In the twenty minutes we spent at the office, we saw a local woman come in to register and take a form for her daughter. Another 70-something woman returned with her completed phone sheet and took another one home. Two phone bankers made dials. Another man, who volunteers twice a week, had taken upon himself the task of blind-knocking his trailer park and was getting a high contact and success rate.

We tagged along with a canvasser on each side here in town. We got into town around 4, which was too late to spend much time with the McCain canvasser (they were closing shop but made a kind extra effort for us). While we were with the Obama canvasser, he knocked on a door where the voter wasn't home -- and was apparently a Republican -- but by chance the daughter and her husband were home, were both Obama supporters, registered to vote and requested mail-in ballots. She was a teacher, and she took a handful of forms to register her students. That teacher may not have taken the initiative to register to vote, or she might have. The point is that by fanning out into the field and putting in the work, campaigns find voters who wouldn't have otherwise voted.

But it takes real work. It takes showing up. And it takes a volunteer sacrifice of time and energy. It takes wanting it. That work is heroic.

Tonight we're headed up to Grand Junction in deep-red Mesa County, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. (Well, Brett anyway.)

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Senate Polling Update, 9/20

Although the Democrats have gained ground in a handful of key races, their chances of picking up a working, 60-seat majority in the 111th Congress have diminished.



The principal states for Democratic gains are in Minnesota, where Al Franken now rates as having a 42% chance to upend Norm Coleman, up from 29% in our last update, and in Oregon, where Jeff Merkley now has a 38% chance of beating Gordon Smith, considerably up from 22%. The Democrats have also picked up a little bit of ground in North Carolina, where the polls tightened significantly as of about a month ago and have remained that way ever since.

The good news for Democrats, however, ends there. Sarah Palin's candidacy has resurrected Ted Stevens' prospects in Alaska, who now has a 25% chance of retaining his seat, up from 12% in the last update. There is no small irony in the fact that Palin, who has branded herself as a reformer, is carrying coattails for one of the most corrupt members of Congress. Nevertheless, having turned our collective gaze toward Alaska politics, I think we can perhaps better understand how Stevens' success in bringing pork to Alaska -- though it makes him an object of ridicule elsewhere -- is fairly popular with the natives. Democratic challenger Mark Begich remains ahead in all polling and is still the favorite, but with the Obama campaign in the process of pulling its resources out of the state, the situation there is much more tenuous.

Palin -- or the renewed enthusiasm among GOP base voters that she is associated with -- has also pushed some second- and third-tier races in red states back toward the Republicans. These include Idaho, Kentucky, and Georgia, where Republican leads have expanded, perhaps to the point where the races are out of reach. Nor have the Democrats been able to gain any traction in Maine, where Susan Collins' approval ratings remain sky-high.

The Democrats still retain one fairly clear path to 60 seats, assuming that Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders are counted with the majority. (I think, by the way, that there has been too much attention given to the party label that Joe Lieberman will choose to affix himself with. He is likely to stand with the Democrats on cloture votes related to domestic policy, which is why the 60 seat number is salient in the first place). This path would involve flipping Virginia, New Mexico and New Hampshire -- all of which remain near locks for the Democrats -- along with Colorado, Alaska, Minnesota, Oregon, North Carolina, and Mississippi/B.

It's that Mississippi special election race that has yet to really come together for the Democrats, as Republican Roger Wicker has inched upward in the polling since the summer, when the race was closer to a dead heat. But it remains by far the best opportunity the Democrats have to acquire a 60th seat, a fact which will make some coastal Democrats unhappy, since Ronnie Musgrove would probably be more conservative than several Republican members of Congress.

The Democrats could also try and put another race into play. The Scott Kleeb people insist that Nebraska will tighten as their candidate's name recognition improves, and the Democrats also field a compelling candidate in the form of Andrew Rice in Oklahoma. But time is running fairly short, and either race -- as well as something like Kentucky or Texas -- will probably require at least one fairly significant gaffe from the Republican opponent. On the flip side, the Republicans have yet to make a good race of Louisiana. New Jersey, where an array of recent polling has Dick Zimmer down in the high single digits, might make for the more interesting sleeper race.

Polls follow below.

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On Race-Based Voting

The commentariat's topic du jour is this AP story which cites a study conducted in conjunction with Yahoo!, Knowledge Networks and Stanford University and which reports that "Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice." Here are some thoughts I have on the matter:

1. It is irresponsible to cite this study without fully disclosing its methods or making it subject to peer review, particularly as it appears to use a rather convoluted soup of statistical and inferential techniques.

2. The study appears to be one of all adults, rather than registered or likely voters. Expressions of racial prejudice have a strong inverse correlation with education levels, and so do turnout rates. Therefore, even if it is true that Barack Obama's race puts him at something like a 6-point disadvantage with the population as a whole, the margin is probably more like 4-5 points among likely voters.

3. A related and unresolved question is how many persons will vote for Barack Obama because he is black. Such behavior would probably be more implicit and harder to ascertain than voting against a candidate because of racial prejudice. For instance, Obama's biography is significantly more compelling because he is black (actually, bi-racial), and his change message is probably somewhat easier to sell because he looks different than other (e.g. white) politicians. If he were white, in other words, Barack Obama would not be Barack Obama. Moreover, there may be some people who explicitly vote for Obama because they think it will advance a goal of racial equality, present a different face to the world, and so forth. In the absence of sufficient detail on the study's methodology, it is impossible to know whether these things have been accounted for.

4. One should be very careful not to confuse a study like this with the Bradley Effect. Of course some people are racist, and will vote against Obama because he is black -- I have met some of them. But the Bradley Effect concerns something different -- whether such people are likely to lie about their behavior to pollsters. There is simply no empirical evidence that the Bradley Effect exists any longer. It did not exist in the primaries, and it did not exist in the 2006 Senate race in Tennessee, which was perhaps the most racially-tinged contest of the past decade (in fact, Harold Ford slightly outperformed the late polls).

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Today's Polls, 9/20

Barack Obama continues to move upward slightly in our electoral projections on the strength of strong national tracking polls. Rasmussen attributes him with a lead -- though it's just one point -- for the first time in ten days, while Gallup has him hitting the 50-percent barrier for just the second time all year, and expanding his lead over John McCain to 6 points overall. Our model has now more or less fully caught up with Obama's "Lehman Leap", and so he cannot expect too many more gains from inertia alone.

The state polling out today, however, presents a more complicated picture, including some decent results for John McCain:



Let's start in Missouri, where a Research 2000 poll for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gives McCain a 4 point lead. Research 2000 had been just about the only poll to show a lead for Obama in Missouri before, and with that evaporating, the state would seem to be pretty unlikely to change colors. Although Obama has a robust field operation in Missouri, he has not visited the state since July. Indiana -- where the McCain campaign is gambling by not fielding a ground organization and which is partly in Chicago's backyard -- may present the more interesting opportunity.

Two new polls in Michigan, from ARG and EPIC-MRA (for the Detroit News) also show a tight race, with Obama leads of 2 points and 1, respectively. Each of these polls have had a slight Republican lean so far, and so they are not necessarily inconsistent with other polling that gives Obama a slightly more comfortable margin. Still, for the reasons I outlined at TNR last week, I think Michigan comes attached with more X-factors than, say, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, and remains Obama's most difficult defensive state.

The rest of these numbers are relatively inconsequential, although the Research 2000 poll in Maine, which I had completely missed when it came out last week, somewhat contradicts the Rasmussen polling suggesting that the race has tightened there.

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Estimating the Cellphone Effect: 2.8 2.2 Points

Mark Blumenthal has a rundown of the pollsters that are including cellphone numbers in their samples. Apparently, Pew, Gallup, USA Today/Gallup (which I consider a separate survey), CBS/NYT and Time/SRBI have been polling cellphones all year. NBC/WSJ, ABC/Washington Post and the AP/GfK poll have also recently initiated the practice. So too does the Field Poll in California, PPIC, also based in California, and Ann Selzer. There may be some others too but those are the ones that I am aware of. (EDIT: A representative of the PPIC survey in California has kindly written to let me know that, while they use a cellphone supplement for some of their public policy surveys, they have not done so thus far this year for most of their Presidential trial heats (they did do so in July). The remainder of this article has been corrected accordingly.

Let's look at the house effects for these polls -- that is, how much the polls have tended to lean toward one candidate or another. These are fairly straightforward to calculate, via the process described here. Essentially, we take the average result from the poll and compare it to other polls of that state (treating the US as a 'state') after adjusting the result based on the national trendline.

Since ABC, NBC/WSJ and AP/GfK all just recently began using cellphones, we will ignore their data for now. We will also throw out the data from three Internet-based pollsters, Zogby Interactive, Economist/YouGov, and Harris Interactive. This leaves us with a control group of 36 37 pollsters that have conducted at least three general election polls this year, either at the state or national level.

Pollster                 n   Lean
=========                    ====
Selzer                   5   D +7.8
CBS/NYT                 14   D +3.7
Pew                      7   D +3.4
Field Poll               4   D +2.8
Time/SRBI                3   D +2.4
USA Today/Gallup        11   D +0.4

Gallup                 184   R +0.6
PPIC                     4   R +1.3

AVERAGE                      D +2.8 +2.3

CONTROL GROUP (37 Pollsters) D +0.0 +0.1

Six of the seven eight cellphone-friendly pollsters have had a Democratic (Obama) lean, and in several cases it has been substantial. On average, they had a house effect of Obama +2.8 +2.3. By comparison, the control group had essentially zero house effect a house effect of Obama +0.1 (**), so this would imply that including a cellphone sample improves Obama's numbers by 2.8 points. (Or, framed more properly, failing to include cellphones hurts Obama's numbers by approximately 2 2-3 points).

The difference is statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gallup, Pew and ABC/WaPo have each found a cellphone effect of between 1-3 points when they have conducted experiments involving polling with and without a cellphone supplement.

A difference of 2-3 points may not be a big deal in certain survey applications such as market research, but in polling a tight presidential race it makes a big difference. If I re-run today's numbers but add 2.2 points to Obama's margin in each non-cellphone poll, his win percentage shoots up from 71.5 percent to 78.5 percent, and he goes from 303.1 electoral votes to 318.5 (EDIT: I have not changed this part of the analysis in reflection of the new numbers, as it should still get the general point across). The difference would be more pronounced still if Obama hadn't already moved ahead of McCain by a decent margin on our projections.



So this is my plea to pollsters: let's get it right. Perhaps the cellphone effect will prove to be a mirage after all, but that's something for the data to determine on its own, rather than the pollster.



(**) Keen observers will wonder why the average house effect is greater than zero. This is because in determining our house effect coefficients, we weight based on how many polls each pollster has conducted. A couple of pollsters that account for a large proportion of our data, like Rasmussen and ARG, have had slight (very slight, but enough to skew the numbers) GOP leans.

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On the Road: Albuquerque/Santa Fe, New Mexico

“… I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico…”

– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

John McCain and the Republicans are running a workmanlike ground game here. They now have ten offices open, up from five a week ago. Their volunteers often begin calling showing up at 8:30 am to make phone calls. Some call all day. In larger offices they'll fill the twenty-ish seats for a full phone bank.

But it really doesn't feel close to the Obama ground game. While Republicans are relying heavily on direct mail, the Democrats have a 4-1 office edge, and those offices are being worked. If you notice in our pictures a few more Obama volunteers, it's not purposeful, but also not an accident. There are vastly more volunteers and the field edge is much, much bigger.

The New Mexico Obama field operation is top notch. From the state field director down through the RFDs and FOs (regional field directors and field organizers), this is a motivated, deeply talented bench. Without going into specifics, this is an A-team.

What we tend to do is get into town and try to go back and forth – Obama office, McCain office, Obama office, McCain office – so as to get the atmospheric feel and contrast. "Firewall" was the word Brett suggested for Obama's operation in New Mexico, and it's just right. If Obama wins Kerry states and Iowa (Michigan and New Hampshire seem most at risk), then adding New Mexico puts Obama at 264 EVs. Just one more state gives him the Presidency. Colorado, our next destination, seems the likeliest add. But Obama could add Nevada (and win under the 269-269 messy scenario, though some Dems would feel a bit of 2000 satisfaction from that). Or Virginia, or Ohio, or Indiana, or North Carolina, or Florida. To use a poker term, Obama has far more outs.

In New Mexico, there is a focus on the Obama side to get a 30/30 push - 30,000 voters registered in 30 days before the deadline closes October 7. Early voting starts October 18. As of just a few days ago, Dems had gained roughly 13,000 registrations, which is off the pace of Nevada, but still on pace for new registrations proportional to margin of 2004 loss (3-1).

The reality is that New Mexico is a complex state - its Hispanic population has been here for hundreds of years and is not the same immigration model in other southwestern states. Republicans have successfully wooed Hispanic small business owners and veterans. It's not anywhere near as simple as majority-minority = automatic Dem win, as we've seen.

Still, there's a reason Barack Obama urged Hispanic voters, who are nearly 40% of the population in this majority-minority state, to "vote your numbers." What we've been seeing on the ground is organic outreach from community member to community member. By contrast, John Kerry came into the state and didn't do much outside Albuquerque. This time, Barack Obama seems to have learned that lesson. His outreach to Native groups and Hispanic communities is clearly better than Kerry's, though we're still hearing that in some areas that outreach can be improved.

Obama's Campaign for Change has 36 offices open in the state, probably too many to post in separate google map links. If you live in New Mexico, there's probably one near you. John McCain's campaign has these ten offices open, and in the counties (for example, the Grants, NM office we visited the other day) there are Republican Party offices open, often staffed by a county chair volunteer. There are 10 Republican paid field organizers.

The bottom line in New Mexico is that if an accurate poll has New Mexico tied on election day, Obama would probably win due to ground game. The Land of Enchantment is lopsided.

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Today's Polls, 9/19

Let's not equivocate too much here. Over the course of the past several days, there has been a rather dramatic shift in this election toward Barack Obama. Our trendline estimate, which is engineered to be fairly conservative, registers the swing as equaling roughly 4 points over the course of the past week.

Changes of this velocity are unusual outside of the convention periods and the debates, especially in close elections. It took John McCain about 60 days and tens of millions of advertising dollars to whittle Obama's lead down from roughly 5 points at its peak in early June, to the 1-point lead that Obama held heading into the conventions. Obama has swing the numbers that much in barely a week.

Of course, we never really were entirely outside of gravitational field of the conventions, and probably at least half of this bounceback for Obama is merely the more-or-less inevitable consequence of McCain's convention bounce ending. But the fact is that Obama is in a stronger position now than he was immediately before the conventions. We now have him winning the election 71.5 percent of the time, which is about as high as that number has been all year.

There are two reasons why that number is as high as it is. Firstly, we are more than halfway through the penultimate month of the campaign, so even relatively small leads are fairly meaningful. But secondly, Obama has developed a structural advantage in the Electoral College that is understated by the popular vote margin. If we break the election down into its four fundamental scenarios, it looks like this:

62.5% Obama wins Popular Vote and Electoral College
0.7% Obama wins Popular Vote, loses Electoral College
27.8% McCain wins Popular Vote and Electoral College
9.0% McCain wins Popular Vote, loses Electoral College

Obama is roughly a 63/37 favorite to win the popular vote -- numbers that ought intuitively to look pretty reasonable for a candidate who holds a 2-point national lead fortysome days before the election. It's that 9 percent of the time he wins the Electoral College while losing the popular vote that make his 2-point lead much more robust. If the states maintain their positioning relative to one another -- and they may well not -- Obama probably has about a 1-point cushion in which he'll remain the favorite to win the Electoral College even while losing the popular vote.

Transitioning to the state-level picture:



The set of Marist polls out today are certainly good ones for Barack Obama, particularly as both the Ohio and Pennsylvania numbers are several days old, taken before Obama's Lehman Leap had really taken hold. However, they need to be caveatted. The Marist polls do not have any particular partisan lean; somewhat infamously, they at one point gave McCain a 2-point lead over Obama in New York. But they simply are not very reliable, placing toward the bottom of our pollster ratings, and employing relatively small sample sizes. Still, we can probably conclude that the situation in Michigan looks quite good for Obama, and that Pennsylvania now represents McCain's most important offensive state.

Iowa, where SurveyUSA gives Obama an 11-point lead, no longer appears to be in play. Three of the last four polls have shown a double-digit Obama lead, making yesterday's Big Ten poll, which showed a tie there, appear to be the odd poll out. If the McCain campaign wants to continue to spend resources in Iowa, a state where they have never led a single public poll against Obama, they do so at their own peril.

Indiana, where both Rasmussen and ARG show a tight race, is one place where Obama appears to have gained ground in the post-convention period, somewhat contradicting the trend observed in other, traditionally red states. Although Obama can win Indiana, I still doubt that it's going to be close enough to the tipping point to warrant treatment as a first-tier swing state. (Could he win Indiana while losing Ohio? Probably not. And if he wins Ohio, he shouldn't need Indiana). With that said, no state in the country has a greater disparity in ground game resources, the effects of which are hard to measure. Obama will probably not win the election because of Indiana, but on the off-chance that he does, McCain's decision to blow off the state will instantly enter the Rudy Giuliani Memorial Electoral Hall of Shame.

The fly in Obama's ointment is in Maine, where Ramsussen has Obama ahead by just 4 points. ARG's poll earlier this week, which had his margin at 10, also showed a tightening race there. Maine is an unusual state with a fair number of Perot Independents. In terms of its political culture, it probably has more in common with the Pacific Northwest -- another region where McCain's numbers have improved slightly -- than with the rest of New England.

There is room for additional concern because Maine splits its electoral votes by Congressional District, and there is some thought that rural ME-2 may take well to Sarah Palin. However, ME-1 and ME-2 usually vote very similarly, and ME-2 is not entirely unlike Vermont, where Obama's polling has been quite strong. Also, Obama's campaign isn't about to be taken by surprise, boasting 12 field offices in Maine. For the time being, that one electoral vote in ME-2 is more one for Obama to monitor than one for him to lose sleep over.

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On the Road: Española, New Mexico

We'll have a post later about the Albuquerque/Santa Fe-specific ground game, but yesterday we sweltered in Española, New Mexico for Barack Obama's rally and got an orgy of photos. Then we got food poisoning. (Show a little pride in your caesar salad, Albertson's.)

Be sure to check out Brett's Española slideshow below. Just under 10,000 people saw Obama go both on the attack (John McCain doesn't know whether he's Barry Goldwater of Dennis Kucinich!") and into the meat and potatoes of economic issues. "I don't want him stealing my lines, I want him stealing some of my ideas!" He also bluntly told Hispanic voters "it's time to vote your numbers." 170,000 registered Hispanic voters didn't vote in the 2004 election, and Hispanics are roughly 40% of the state population here.

But here is the most important ground game story of the day. Bloomberg published a scoop on Catalist, Barack Obama's answer to VoterVault, the Republican database that has allowed for such specialized and efficient voter targeting.

... by using Catalist the Obama campaign is able to generate data as detailed as lists of swing voters who are home in the afternoon in a six-block neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. The list can even suggest which voters would be receptive to a pitch based on Obama's "change'' theme, and which may be more interested in his health-care or energy policies.

The RNC owns VoterVault; ironically Obama has to buy his access from Harold Ickes.

That distinction allows Catalist to work directly with like- minded third-party groups such as the League of Conservation Voters or Planned Parenthood. VoterVault is barred by campaign- finance laws from working directly with Republican-leaning groups such as the National Rifle Association.

This is a Big Deal. Republicans argue that VoterVault is still better:

Amber Wilkerson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said VoterVault has an advantage over Catalist: "We've been doing it a lot longer.'' She also said the database can update information on millions of supporters through state Republican groups.

We encountered this Republican confidence in Nevada as well. We've done it longer; we're the champ. We have the belts. We do the parades. And it's true. Republicans have dominated in terms of ground game technology. But the fact remains: if you are now using relatively equal tools which allow greater precision in voter contact, whoever has more organizers, volunteers, dials and knocks is going to do better getting out its vote.

Check back later today for an update on the state's ground action in Albuquerque/Santa Fe. We're off to the Four Corners area – where both campaigns have a presence in Farmington and Obama has an office in Shiprock, and then up to Durango, Colorado tonight.

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The Dow Rebounds

One of the nice things about being a Democrat with a stock portfolio is that your risks are fairly well hedged. If the market goes up, then you make money, and if the market goes down, then you're more likely to see a Democrat elected President.

But seriously, folks.

Does the stock market rally of the past two days benefit McCain? Maybe a little, but I doubt all that much. For one thing, as I said yesterday, I'm not sure that Obama's bounce over the past couple of days has all that much to do with the economy. I think it also has to do with the electorate looking for an "excuse" to move past McCain's convention bounce, and the faltering perceptions of Sarah Palin.

Moreover, equity prices are just one small component of the economic picture. So too are relatively high unemployment, relatively high commodities prices (particularly for food and fuel), declining home prices (which won't be going back up any time soon), foreclosures, and difficulties in borrowing (which have still yet to fully penetrate into the retail sector). Investors who put money into the Dow a year or so ago have still lost a lot of money. And I would guess that consumer confidence is what economists would call "sticky upward" -- it tends to fall in big chunks when it falls, but recovers more slowly. And all of this is assuming, of course, that we are through the worst of the financial crisis, which is very much not a foregone conclusion.

Besides, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and AIG was not so important unto itself. These are Wall Street companies, not Main Street Companies, and unless Americans hold their stock or have friends or family who work for them, their troubles probably did not hit home. But they gave Obama a reason, an excuse, to talk about the economy, which given the sluggish performance of other economic fundamentals, may have been all that he needed.

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Bad Math and the Bradley Effect

Theorem: The amount of time conservatives spend talking about the Bradley Effect is inversely proportional to the fortunes of their candidate.

Sean Oxendine at The Next Right purports to find evidence of a Bradley Effect in the Democratic primaries, something which I also looked for and did not find. The difference between my study and his is that I include all the states, whereas he excludes those which do not fit his argument.

Oxendine initially posts data from a large group of states, but then excludes those from what he calls the "Old Confederacy". The concept, however, is inconsistently applied. Texas (where Obama underperformed slightly) remains in his dataset. But also, the particular geographics of the Confederacy are not especially relevant electorally. Kentucky (where Obama underperformed) does not meet Oxendine's definition whereas Tennessee (where Obama overperformed) does, although the states are two peas in a pod demographically. Oxendine also excludes Iowa, where Obama significantly overperformed. True, Iowa was a caucus, and there is a reasonable argument for exlcuding it (likewise with Nevada, which he also excludes), but if you're trying to hypothesis-test, you ought to go with the more roubst and inclusive standard if you're hoping to affirm a positive finding.

In the 20 states that he does choose to include, Oxendine reports that Obama underperformed his polling margin by 2 points. This, by the way, is not a statistically signficant figure at either the 90th or the 95th percentile thresholds. Also, I actually get a different result when looking at that same set of states ... using the Pollster.com estimates rather than the RCP averages, as I did for my study, I found that Obama underperformed by 0.2 points rather than 2.0. Whether the Pollster.com or the RCP averages are superior is something we can take up at another time, but Oxendine's is not a very robust fidning if simply switching up the averaging mechanism that we use removes the positive finding entirely.

The other, more important question is why we should simply dismiss the results in the South, where Obama significantly overperformed his numbers, by 7.2 points on average, according to my definition of the region and by 9.9 points according to his -- numbers of a far greater magnitude than the Bradley Effect that he purports to find. Suppose that we conclude from this dataset that there was some sort of Bradley Effect outside of the South. We would also have to conclude, that within the South, there may be some sort of reverse Bradley Effect, perhaps resulting from black voters telling interviewers they are undecided when they really aren't. If Obama underperforms by, say, a point in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but overperforms by 2-3 points in Virginia, Florida and North Carolina, it's not clear that this is a harmful trade for him.

So to summarize, Oxendine:

1. Cherry-picks states for his analysis;
2. Touts a finding that is not remotely statistically significant anyway;
3. Touts a finding that would entirely disappear if you used a different poll averaging mechanism, and,
4. Ignores, even if you excuse all of the above and take his claims at face value, the presence of an apparent reverse Bradley Effect that would benefit Obama in three highly electorally significant states.

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12th Amendment Update: Tie Probability Continues to Increase

The latest in our occasional series informing you about the country's worst nightmare: a 269-269 Electoral College tie...

As you may have noticed from our scenario chart, the probability of a tie has increased dramatically in recent days and now stands at 3.2 percent. This is partly because, as we draw closer to election day with the race remaining tight, the probability of any one candidate running away with the election diminishes -- meaning that all "close" electoral permutations, including ties, become more likely.

However, there is one specific scenario that is driving this outcome. That is the scenario wherein Barack Obama wins the Kerry states plus Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado, but loses New Hampshire. Of the 320 times that our simulation ended in a tie, this particular scenario was responsible 294 times. Indeed, we presently have Obama winning precisely the Kerry states plus Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado, so all that would be needed to make a tie occur is to flip New Hampshire back to McCain, and entirely reasonable possibility.

Four other 269-269 tie permutations came up with less frequency:

20 times: Obama wins Kerry States + IA + NM + NV. This once had seemed like the most plausible tie scenario, but it requires Obama to win Nevada while losing Colorado, and increasingly unlikely parlay.

3 Times: Obama wins Kerry States + IA + NM + WV. Functionally equivalent to the scenario above since West Virginia and Nevada each have 5 electoral votes.

2 Times: Obama wins Kerry States + IA + NM + CO + VA - MI. Michigan has moved slightly toward Obama in the post-convention polling while Virginia has remained stuck in place, making it less likely that the states would invert positions as this scenario requires.

1 Time: Obama Wins Kerry States + IA + NV + CO - NH. Obama winning Nevada while losing New Mexico now seems very unlikely.

By the way -- the way that the tipping point math works out, about 80 percent of the tie outcomes involve McCain winning the popular vote. This is by far the messier of the two scenarios. Since the Democrats will almost certainly control a plurality or a majority of House delegations in the incoming Congress, a tie accompanied by an Obama win in the popular vote will lead to a lot of fanfare but ultimately little drama -- Obama will become the next President. But if McCain wins the popular vote, there will be far more pressure on Democratic Representatives to vote against their party. I still tend to think that this scenario favors Obama (formally, our model splits them 50:50) but a whole number of factors come into play, including:

(i) The size of the Democratic edge in House delegations;
(ii) The magnitude of McCain's popular vote margin;
(iii) Whether any states have their outcome determined by recounts. For instance, if Obama loses a controversial recount in Virginia by a few thousand votes and this produces a 269-269 tie, Representatives will have a far easier time finding it "fair" to vote for him than if the reverse were to occur.
(iv) The overall tenor of the campaign from here forward.

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The Dow Rebounds

One of the nice things about being a Democrat with a stock portfolio is that your risks are fairly well hedged. If the market goes up, then you make money, and if the market goes down, then you're more likely to see a Democrat elected President.

But seriously, folks.

Does the stock market rally of the past two days benefit McCain? Maybe a little, but I doubt all that much. For one thing, As I said yesterday, I'm not sure that Obama's bounce over the past couple of days has all that much to do with the economy. I think it also has to do with the electorate looking for an "excuse" to move past McCain's convention bounce, and also has to do with the faltering perceptions of Sarah Palin.

Moreover, equity prices are just one small component of the economic picture. So too is relatively high unemployment, relatively high commodities prices (particularly for food and fuel), declining home prices (which won't be going back up any time soon), foreclosures, and difficulties in borrowing, which has still yet to fully penetrate into the retail sector. Investors who put money into the Dow a year or so ago have still lost a lot of money. And I would guess that consumer confidence is what economists would call "sticky upward" -- it tends to fall in big chunks when it falls, but recovers more slowly. And all of this is assuming, of course, that we are through the worst of the financial crisis, which is very much not a foregone conclusion.

Besides, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and AIG was not so important unto itself. These are Wall Street companies, not Main Street Companies, and unless Americans hold their stock or have friends or family who work for them, their troubles probably did not hit home. But they gave Obama a reason, an excuse, to talk about the economy, which given the sluggish performance of other economic fundamentals, may have been all that he needed.

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Outside-the-Box Ad Moves Voter Sentiment

One of the advantages of 527 groups is that they tend to be less subject to the sort of groupthink that permeates most every political campaign. Would the Bush campaign, on its own, ever have come up with something like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? And would they have wanted their branding on it? My guess is definitely not to the latter question, and probably not to the former.

Likewise, this unorthodox ad put together by a group called the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund is something we almost certainly wouldn't have seen from the Obama campaign, which has improved its advertising in recent days, but which still operates within a relatively narrow range of messaging:



Why is this significant? Because according to a MediaCurves analysis, this is "the first ad in over a month that seems to have broken through", scoring extremely strongly according to their metrics and shifting a net of 6 points to Obama-Biden among a focus group who viewed the ad (just barely statistically significant given the sample size).

By comparison, the '1982' ad put together by the Obama campaign itself (technically entitled 'Still') -- their seeming attempt to operate outside the box -- scored rather terribly. Although, the send-up below is mildly amusing: (EDIT -- This ad is a SATIRE, in case that wasn't abundantly clear. The original ad is here.)

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Today's Polls, 9/18: Obama Regains the Lead

On the strength of an abundance of state and national polling, Barack Obama has retaken the lead in our Electoral College projection. Our model now forecasts him to win the election 61.2 percent of the time; it also gives him a slight, half-point advantage in the popular vote. Yesterday, Obama was projected to win the Electoral College just 45 percent of the time, so this is a rather dramatic move upward.

How can the numbers move so sharply in just 24 hours? I have tweaked the model slightly at a couple of points recently in order to make it more sensitive to new information. But these adjustments are very minor, and their effects are fairly trivial. The principal reasons these numbers have become more volatile are twofold. Firstly, we're finally getting into crunch time. The closer we get to the election, the smaller the true margins of error in the polls, so relatively small advantages can become more meaningful. But secondly, we have a lot more data to look at. If Barack Obama looks like he's moved up a point or two between two or three polls, that may not be particularly meaningful, and our model will tend to treat it as noise. If, on the other hand, Obama appears to have gained a point or two between 20 or 30 polls, which is what we're getting on a daily basis nowadays, we can say with more certainty that a real shift in the electorate has occurred.

This is not to say, of course, that every single poll contains good news for Obama. At least two current national polls (GWU/Battleground and Economist/YouGov) still have McCain ahead, and a couple more have the candidates tied. And there are nuggets of good news for McCain in some of the state polling:



Which of these numbers will McCain partisans like? The +3 from ARG in New Hampshire. The +7 in Virginia from National Journal. The virtual ties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Iowa in the Big Ten poll. The +6 in Florida from SuvreyUSA.

And which will Obama partisans like? The +10 in Colorado from InsiderAdvantage (very probably an outlier, but outliers are OK when we're able to average them in with other polls). The +3 in Indiana from Ann Selzer (although remember that Selzer polls have had a rather strong Democratic lean so far this cycle). Two polls showing Ohio drawing to a tie, and the same in Florida. The Michigan number from the Big Ten survey. The Oregon number from the Portland Tribune. Both of the New Mexico numbers. Maybe the Rasmussen number in New Jersey.

That is, by my count, 10 or 11 or "good" state polls for Obama and 5 or 6 for McCain. The job of our model is to see the signal through the noise. There is quite a bit of noise, with so many pollsters in the field in so many different states, and so many different factors affecting voter preferences. Everything from national news events to advertising blasts in individual states will impact these numbers -- a really heavy ad buy in a particular state can sometimes move the numbers there by a couple of points, often only for no more than 24 hours.

But there is also some signal, and today it points toward Obama gaining a tangible amount of ground.

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A lot of people have asked me to comment on the series of new polling put out by a consortium of Big Ten professors, and by the National Journal, respectively. Neither of these polls have any track record, and so there is no completely objective way to evaluate them; our model assigns any "unknown" pollsters a slightly-below-average rating. Neither has a statistically significant Democratic or Republican lean, from what we can tell so far.

I like the level of disclosure provided by the Big Ten polls, which have a complete set of cross-tabular results available. If you want to gain stature as a "new" polling outlet, that is the way to do it. The National Journal polls also provide a fair amount of supporting detail, although it is a bit more cumbersome to navigate through. Nobody takes politics more seriously than the boys at the National Journal, so you can assume that there was a lot of thought given to their methodology. I do wish, however, that they had elected to go with sample sizes larger than 400 persons, which will produce erratic results even if you're doing everything else right.

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Obama Pulls Ahead in Electoral College Projection

Charts and graphs are updated. Full polling report coming within the hour.

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Colorado Rates as Most Important State

Today's polling update will likely show Obama moving back into the lead in the Electoral College, although not yet the popular vote. In advance of that, let's take a look at where the model has key states projected relative to the national trend. These figures include a number of polls from today that don't yet appear on the site.

First, the states where Obama is playing offense:

Obama Offense States
Iowa           +5.8
New Mexico     +5.4
Colorado       +0.8
Ohio           -0.9
Virginia       -0.9
Nevada         -1.6
Florida        -2.9
Indiana        -4.9
Missouri       -5.0

These are all the Bush ('04) states where our projections presently have Obama finishing within at least 5 points of his national popular vote total. The margin indicated in each state is the difference between the projected finish in that state and the national popular vote projection.

Iowa and New Mexico still appear to be outside the range where they can really be considered to be swing states (although the new Big Ten poll shows a tie in the former). Obama could still lose one or both of these states -- but he is unlikely to lose the election because of them. Those states alone, however, are not enough to get Obama to 270 (or 269) Electoral Votes. He needs at least one more state, even if he holds all the Kerry states.

Colorado remains the best bet; it's projecting eight-tenths of a point better than Obama's national numbers. What that means is that, theoretically at least, Obama would still be expected to have a winning elecotral map if he lost the popular vote by 0.8 points. That is why Colorado is so essential; it is the state most likely to be involved in a split result between the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Ohio and Virginia constitute the next tier, but both are projected slightly behind Obama's national numbers. After that are Nevada and Florida, which are a bit further behind. Then the long-shots: Indiana, Missouri and -- just missing this list -- West Virginia and perhaps Montana.

Now, performing the same exercise for McCain:

McCain Offense States
New Hampshire  -1.6
Michigan       -3.1
Pennsylvania   -3.5
Wisconsin      -4.5
Minnesota      -4.9

Although Obama's lead has bent in a couple of these states -- particularly Pennsylvania and New Hampshire -- it has not really broken, as all Kerry states are polling at least 1.6 points ahead of Obama's national average. However, we may be on the verge of seeing Michigan and Pennsylvania flip places, as Obama's polling has generally held up pretty well in Michigan while faltering in Pennsylvania. Wisconsin and Minnesota have also drawn closer, but with 4-5 points of difference still separating them from the national numbers, it is not clear that they are that are likely to form the tipping point in the election.

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State of the Race: Is McCain In Trouble?

One of the unpleasant things you discover when you sit in major league baseball press boxes from time to time is that the press -- or at least the print media -- actually do not like close baseball games. A walk-off home run or a blown save means that they have to re-write their lead paragraph and perhaps their entire game story, leading to angry phone calls from their editors, and forcing them to work later than they might otherwise like to.

I was reminded of this when seeing this headline from Mark Halperin today:



A tight race? It certainly is a tight race, and has been all year. But this, of course, is not really the lead story. The story is that there has been a rather dramatic shift in the national polling toward Barack Obama in the past 2-4 days, coinciding with the Wall Street financial crisis. Some pundits will love this, since it gives them something fresh to talk about. But others, like those cynical beat writers in the Wrigley Field press box, will be annoyed, because it means that the the story they were telling us just a few days ago -- that the Obama campaign was in trouble, that Sarah Palin was the greatest thing since sliced bread -- has now been more or less invalidated.

Is this shift really a result of the economic crisis? I believe that's part of it, but I believe there are at least two other factors at work as well.

The first is that McCain's performance in the polls in the 7-10 days following the Republican convention did likely reflect a bounce of some kind, rather than a permanent shift in the state of the race. As I wrote just after the Republican convention concluded:

[We] should evaluate the robustness of the Republican bounce by how well it holds up to the currents of political time, rather than any specific date on the calendar. Specifically, I would want to see how the bounce holds up to the next major development of the campaign, particularly if it is a pro-Obama development. For example, let's say that Colin Powell endorses Obama tomorrow morning. I might expect a fairly strong reaction to this in the polls, not because the endorsement is all that important unto itself (most endorsements aren't), but because it displaces the GOP Convention as the most recent event of the campaign -- it pushes political time forward. And if the polls didn't move in reaction to such an endorsement, I'd think Democrats would have reason to worry.

The Wall Street crisis was the first major event of the post-convention news cycle -- the first thing that really tested the robustness of the Republican bounce. And what happened? The bounce proved to be about a mile wide but an inch deep. McCain consolidated elements of his base (evangelical conservatives) during the Republican convention; Obama did likewise with many Clinton Democrats during his convention.

But the two campaigns also had a tug-of-war over independent voters, with first Obama and then McCain winning them over. Independents, however, are notoriously fickle in their Presidential choices, and as the afterglow of the Republican convention wore off and was replaced by news about the economy, they reverted back to the equilibrium point they've been at all year, roughly splitting their votes between the two candidates (Quinnipaic has independents dividing their vote 46-45 as of this morning).

McCain's other problem is that Sarah Palin may no longer be an asset to the ticket; in fact, she may be a liability. Averaging the candidates' favorability scores across four recent polls -- as one should always try and do when looking at favorability numbers since they can vary greatly depending on question wording -- Palin now has the worst net scores among the four principals in the race:



Palin's average favorability score is now a +7 -- about 10 points behind Joe Biden's numbers. Perhaps more importantly, these numbers are 10-15 points behind where Palin's numbers were just a week or so ago. If voters come in not knowing very much about a candidate -- and the more they see of the candidate, the less they like of the candidate -- this is a major concern.

The McCain campaign may be in some trouble. We should learn over the next several days, as further polling results roll in, whether they are in a little trouble or a lot of trouble. I would certainly not rule out the latter possibility. There are now 46 days left until the election. The Obama campaign must feel like, if they can spend 35-40 of those days talking about the economy, they are in a very strong position. Excepting the three or four days surrounding the foreign policy debate in Mississippi next week, and the residual possibility of an unanticipated foreign policy crisis, the inertia of the campaign probably means that they will have the opportunity to do so.

Unless, of course, the McCain campaign can throw up some roadblocks and distractions. McCain's is a creative campaign -- more creative in many ways than the Obama campaign. As such, we should not discount the possibility of their finding an effective way to alter the momentum, perhaps one -- like their 'celebrity' critique of Obama -- that was difficult to envision in advance.

At the same time, the campaign cost itself a lot of credibility -- certainly with the media, and to a lesser extent with voters -- with some of their shenanigans of the past week, most notably Lipstickgate, "Thanks, but no thanks", and the Obama kindergarten commercial. To use a crude metaphor, the McCain campaign may have blown its wad too early. Organic shifts in the momentum of the race can and probably will still occur, but they may find it more difficult now to synthesize one.

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On the Road: Gallup, New Mexico

John Kerry beat George Bush by 5,700 votes and a little better than 63%-36% in McKinley County, New Mexico. That's a mirror image of the 5,988 votes by which Bush won statewide. McKinley represented 2.7% of the overall New Mexico vote. Parts of the Navajo nation and Zuni reservation spill into McKinley.

In our personal Gallup poll, it seems clear Barack Obama will exceed the Kerry margin in McKinley, simply because Democrats are working with an unprecedented presence here. Having an office open 2-3 months before a general election versus sweeping in for the final 10 days makes all the difference, especially in a state where early voting by mail needs to be organized well ahead of time. The Obama Gallup office is a block north of I-40, here.

During our midday stop, one man stopped into register to vote, and other voters dropped in for information about Thursday's Obama rally in Española, NM. One of the two native Navajo field organizers deftly and successfully turned it into a volunteer recruitment opportunity. Other volunteers were out canvassing. Because these rural New Mexico counties are so far-flung and gas is so expensive, it's hard to doorknock and subsequently return to the office the same day. Volunteers (85 at the office opening a month ago) have autonomously adapted to this challenge, often picking up walk packets on a weekly basis and reporting voter file information back via phone each night.

That underscores the basic theme of the Obama ground effort: "Respect. Empower. Include." It's similar to the corporate model of giving employees an ownership stake in the company. Allowing grassroots volunteers to feel ownership in the campaign as opposed to being dictated instructions by organizers is a principle the Obama campaign has worked hard to actualize. In Gallup it seems to be working.

In Grants, New Mexico, we stopped into both the newly-opened Obama office – one of 36 with four more impending – and found the Republican Party office. McCain has 10 offices open statewide with more set to be announced on Friday, but the state Republican Party has smaller volunteer offices open in every county, and this was one of those. Grants went for Kerry also, but by a much closer margin (436 votes) and for only 1% of the statewide vote total.

This, too, is a county with heavy minority population. 44% are native, 33% Latino, and the rest Anglo. Much of the county is canvassable by drive-honk only rather than the compressed housing that allows for walking. Most of the latter is in Grants itself.

Betty Hill, a volunteer for McCain's campaign and not a paid organizer, staffs the Republican branch office approximately 40 hours a week. She has a full phone list for the entire county of Republican-registered voters that she calls through looking for volunteers and reminding to vote by mail. When we crossed her path, another woman had stopped in the office for a McCain-Palin yard sign that she wanted to place on her rock-ribbed Republican mother's grave site.

Which reminds me of something Betty did not express but that McCain organizers have done - give me "the look" whenever the subject of yard signs has come up. We can assure you that the McCain organizers and the Obama organizers have at least one thing in common – hatred of yard signs. There is not a red America, or a blue America, there is the united organizer-hating-of-yard-signs America.

Tonight we also stopped in for an appearance on Jim Villanucci's KKOB 770 AM drive time radio show to talk electoral politics. Thanks to fbihop for setting it up. Tomorrow, we cross paths with Barack Obama's rally in Española as well as the opening of a new John McCain field office ironically across the park from the rally. We'll get you photos (look for a bunch more tomorrow) and the official comments from both campaigns about their statewide efforts.

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Today's Polls, 9/17

There is a veritable orgy of polling out today, so let's give you the numbers first, and then take a gaze from 30,000 feet.



There are certainly some hints that Barack Obama has gained back a couple of points' worth of ground in the past 24-96 hours, although so far this remains more apparent in the national trackers than in state polling. Our model is designed to react somewhat conservatively to new information, lest it mistake noise for signal. I know that a lot of Democrats out there -- including myself, frankly -- believe that the movement is real, as the country reacts to the Wall Street crisis and other news from the campaign trail. But there have been other points -- such as following Obama's Berlin speech -- in which the polls changed sharply for a couple of days and then settled back down.

One of the disadvantages of the method we use to model our trendline curve (LOESS regression) is that there is no a priori answer as to just how sensitive the curve should be in terms of reacting to new information. My attempts to come up with an empirical answer were mostly fruitless, although there is some evidence that the curve should become more sensitive as we get closer to the election. A week or so ago, as the model was slow to recognize the McCain bounce; I tuned the sensitivity up slightly then, and I tuned it up very slightly again today. I will also make the curve quite sensitive in the week or so before the election, such that we can adequately capture any late movement. But for the time being, Obama is either going to have to sustain his relatively strong tracking poll results for a couple more days, or get some slightly more consistent results from the state polling, before we are again ready to call the race a tie or an Obama lead.

The other thing that's happening is that, even as the popular vote gap has narrowed, the gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College -- which had been working to Obama's benefit -- has also diminished. We now show about a 7 percent chance that Obama would win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote; a couple of days ago, that figure had been as high as 12 percent. This is mostly because the state-by-state polling has been frankly very difficult to interpret in the post-convention period. There are four key states in which Obama is hoping to play offense: Colorado, Virginia, Ohio and Florida. Winning any one of those states will probably win him the election. But in each of these states he has had a mix of good and bad polling. In Colorado in particular, which is probably the most favorable to him of these states, the two polls out this week (ARG and Rasmussen) have shown him slightly behind.

***

Much of today's polling is from American Research Group, which has numbers out in 25 states and the District of Columbia. ARG, as regular readers of this site should know, is not the most terrific pollster, but with that said most of these results look pretty reasonable. The results that have caught people's attention are McCain's relatively strong performance in Illinois and Obama's relatively strong performance in Montana and West Virginia. Some of these -- particularly the Illinois number -- are probably outliers (ARG also had some very weird results in Illinois during the Democratic primaries). But if a pollster puts out 20 or 30 polls, mathematically outliers are bound to happen in at least a couple of states. Fortunately, our model has numerous ways to hedge against the results of outlier polls, and so this isn't something you should spend a great deal of time worrying about.

CNN/Time also has some very favorable looking results for Obama, particularly in Florida and Ohio, where he leads by 4 and 2 points respectively with third-party candidates included. (This is the version of the polls that we prefer; other sites will use the version without third-party candidates). These CNN polls are very recent, so it's possible that they're detecting some kind of very current shift toward Obama. On the other hand, our model also identifies the CNN/Time polls as having as having a Democratic lean of a point or two, and hedges slightly against these numbers as a result.

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Morning Musings

So I've spent the past couple of days at meetings of various kinds in New York, and there was certainly a sense of impeding doom among many Democrats here. The cute analogy that I've come up with are that Democrats are like Cubs fans -- they assume that something will go wrong until proven otherwise.

With that said, people have become decidely more optimistic in the past 24-48 hours as the economy has returned to the center of the national debate. Obama's never going to be a Clintonesque natural out there on the stump in responding to the economy -- he might have to repeat a message three times where with Clinton it would have sunken in the first one.

But McCain seems to be struggling to come up with anything coherent to say about the issue, and his "fundamentals of our economy are strong" statement was a capital-G gaffe. When I saw McCain and Palin give successive speeches on MSNBC on Monday morning, and McCain repeated his "fundmentals" line and then Palin repeated her "thanks, but no thanks" line on the Bridge to Nowhere, I got the sense that maybe Steve Schmidt isn't quite the messaging genius that he's been made out to be.

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Couple of quick notes:

ARG is supposed to release a big series of 25+ state polls at some point within the next 24 hours.
And for those of you in Chicago, I may try to make it to Scott Kleeb's fundraiser at the Billygoat Tavern tonight, though it depends on when the Cubs game finishes up.

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On the Road: Las Vegas, Nevada

“He balled right across the desert in this manner, demonstrating various ways of how not to drive, how his father used to drive jalopies, how great drivers made curves, how bad drivers hove over too far in the beginning and had to scramble at the curve’s end, and so on. It was a hot, sunny afternoon. Reno, Battle Mountain, Elko, all the towns along the Nevada road shot by one after another…”

– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

This town is hopping. Clark County was always going to be where Democrats hoped to run up their edge enough to win the state. How do both sides feel about their ground game here? Kirstin Searer, Barack Obama's Communications Director, said that Democrats "feel extremely good about our ground game." Indeed, Democrats have gained over 100,000 registrations in Clark County, which helped net roughly 70,000 statewide in the last year. 30,000 new Democrats registered on caucus day alone. Democrats have 5 field offices in Clark County, 14 offices open in the state as a whole, with 3-5 more planned, 90 paid staff and 75 field organizers. Obama is on his way to this critical battleground tomorrow, with visits in Elko and Las Vegas.

Nevada Republican Party Executive Director Zach Moyle also feels strongly confident. Nevada Republicans have been winning on the ground for decades, and they expect it to continue. Until Democrats prove that they can turn out young voters in a non-caucus, Republicans like their chances. Moyle predicted that if Republicans were within three points in the polls here, their superior ground game would make the difference. Republicans have 12 statewide offices open now, with another office set to open in North Las Vegas in the immediate future. McCain's Henderson HQ was busy during our afternoon visit, with young and old, male and female, English and Spanish-speaking volunteers.

We came away impressed by both efforts. We visited all three McCain field offices open in Clark County, and three of Obama's five offices. We also stopped in over in Nye County at each side's Pahrump office. Obama's Pahrump office is here, his current Vegas offices are in the west here, southeast here, central here, and North Las Vegas here and here. McCain/Republican offices are here in Pahrump, here and here in western Vegas, and the HQ in Henderson is here.

Seven weeks out, this is anyone's game. Moyle noted that Republicans had long invested in the technologies necessary to run a strong ground campaign. There's no doubt the VoIP phones are more sophisticated, with the voter file instantly updated with the voter's responses, and Republicans have 200 lines statewide at the moment. Ground game-wise, the champ is still the champ until you knock him out.

Obama's campaign thinks it has a hell of a left hook here in Nevada. More than 3,500 volunteers have gone through specific precinct captain training, and each of these captains has specific contact and voter registration targets. The volunteer and organizer energy at the Obama offices here in Clark was humming. Searer pointed out that it's unprecedented for a Democratic presidential campaign to open offices in places like Elko, Lyon County and Douglas County. Republicans know they've always held off Democratic Clark County by running up lopsided margins in the smaller rural areas around the state. John Kerry won Clark by 36,430 votes in 2004, and Clark was 66% of the statewide vote. But Bush won Nevada by 21,500 because of the rural county edge.

Barack Obama won the delegate count despite losing the popular vote in Nevada's caucuses precisely because he ran so much stronger than Hillary Clinton in the rural counties. He's making a trip to Elko tomorrow, the place John McCain officially announced for President in 2007. In addition, volunteers from California, where a lot of Democrats live, have set up a sister district program, whereby Nevada organizers and volunteers are set up to receive and house volunteers from their neighboring state. Silicon Valley maps to Carson City, for example (I met volunteers in the Carson office after the Palin rally from the Peninsula). Los Angeles/Southern California maps to Vegas. Barack Obama's campaign just put out an email to its California volunteers asking them, "Will you take a short trip to Nevada to make a big difference for Barack?"

Republicans take in out-of-staters too. Busloads of BYU students as well as volunteers from Oregon and Phoenix will come pouring into the state for the final early voting push. Both sides, and the Nevada Secretary of State, expect to see 50% of the eventual vote turn out during the early voting period. We got the sense from Moyle that Republicans are going to know several days before Election Day whether they're going to win, because they already know who their voters are and they know they'll do their usual strong job. They'll be able to see turnout and where it's happening, in which precincts, and they'll know, even if the general public won't. It seemed like the Republican effort is on a set of train tracks: it's strong, organized and focused, but it's really up to the Democrats to prove that their voter registration will translate to a sea change.

Finally, you've undoubtedly noticed our upgraded photography department. Let me introduce you to Brett Marty, a 25-year old documentarian and professional photographer who's co-piloting our On the Road coverage. Brett once drove his '95 Buick from California to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, the end of the road. Apparently it's somewhere in Paraguay now. When we got in touch, he pointed out I might need another "wheel man." That – and the Argentina thing – pretty much did it. If you ever need to get your car through the Darién Gap, he knows a guy. Here's some of his other work, and you can email him at brett538@gmail.com.

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Today's Polls, 9/16

Although the national tracking polls are trending upward for Obama, this set of state polling is a strong one for John McCain:



Ohio, certainly, is a Lean McCain state now. It has been polled extensively over the past week, and all polls but Quinnipiac show McCain with a lead in the neighborhood of 3-4 points. As we're getting into electoral crunch time, the key dynamic to watch is the performance of the three or four tipping point states like Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado, both relative to one another and relative to the national popular vote estimate. Presently, Ohio is polling slightly behind Obama's national numbers, whereas Colorado is polling a point or so ahead. If this dynamic continues, then Ohio will gradually become less important, placing more emphasis on either Obama's IA/NM/CO parlay, or perhaps Virginia, which is one state where he's had some favorable polling of late.

Looking quickly through the rest of the numbers, this set of Rasmussen polling is fairly poor for Obama, although some of that is caused by the fact that Rasmussen just re-weighted its party ID targets, producing a shift of a point or so toward John McCain. (Rasmussen's re-weightings may well be perfectly valid -- my goal is merely to provide context here).

Meanwhile, polling in the New York/New Jersey region has shown some bounce for John McCain. It's probably too late for the McCain campaign to devote serious resources to New Jersey, but it might make fo an interesting target if they did. Then again, most of these polls overlapped with 9/11, and it's possible that there's some sort of 9/11 effect in the region.

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538's Battlegrounds as of Mid-September

Due to McCain's bounce in the polls post-convention, our new list of battleground states has changed. According to our current projections, John McCain would win 274-264.

This is different from the pie chart you see in the top left of the site, which averages the electoral vote based on simulation runs. This mid-month update simply gives each state's EVs in full to our projected winner, and we add the totals. It's essentially the same split as the Bush-Kerry race, with Iowa flipped from the Republican column to the penumbra zone for Obama, and a narrow win for Obama in New Mexico.

With Colorado sitting at McCain by 0.3%, any tiny movement and a 9-EV flip would change the winner of the 2008 presidential race. As we leave Las Vegas today for Gallup, New Mexico, we're going from the frying pan into the fire of the ground game battle.



One of the notable aspects of our Penumbra tables below is that the national tracking polls are having a large undue influence on states that aren't getting polled as much. Notice that California, Illinois and Massachusetts have entered our Obama Penumbra chart, but also notice on the righthand column of our individual state polling that it's not because Obama's getting poor polling in these states. For example, our projection model shows Obama winning California by 6.9% but that no individual poll has ever been that low, and that nearly all CA polls show double digits.



For McCain's Penumbra states, you'll notice a lot of "former" battleground states in this column, some of which we believe could still be battlegrounds and will re-tighten after McCain's post-convention bounce fades and the debates begin.



Overall, the national tracking polls have had a more distorted effect on states that don't get polled as often. Colorado, by contrast, has barely moved because it does. In fact, Colorado and Ohio were the states which flipped since our last update in Mid-August. Each moved fewer than three points, but that changes our winner-take-all projection.

Thanks for being patient with us as Nate and I are each on the road (albeit in different places). We'll be checking in with our Las Vegas update later today and of course Today's Polls.

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Palin's Favorability Numbers Eroding

As voters have taken a second look at Sarah Palin in venues like the Charlie Gibson interview and even Tina Fey's SNL sketch, they may not be as enamored of what they're seeing.

The Research 2000 poll for Daily Kos now has Palin's favorability-unfavorability scores at 45-44 -- just a +1. Six days ago, when the poll, launched, she was at a 52-35, a +17.

And I know that some of you don't like or don't trust this poll -- for reasons that I think are a little silly -- but there is a similar decline in her numbers in the Diageo/Hotline poll. Her favorability numbers in yesterday's Hotline poll -- today's isn't out yet -- were a 48-36, or a +12. But a week ago, on September 8, she had been at a 48-24, a +24.

Whether this ultimately has any effect on the Presidential race remains to be seen; Obama's position has improved in the national trackers, but not so much in the state polls. But it seems possible to me that John McCain's recent bounce has had more to do with John McCain -- whose speech at the convention was as underrated as Palin's was overrated -- and less to do with Palin than is generally acknowledged. And if people are voting based on the bottom of the ticket, it seems furthermore that she may yet wind up being a net liability for him.

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Today's Polls, 9/15

I'm not going to be able to do today's update justice, but let's touch upon a couple of themes quickly:



Firstly, Obama has been polling a couple of points ahead of our trendline for the past couple days. That could be noise, or it could be a sign that the race is turning a bit. Our model inherently behaves conservatively, and assumes the former until "proven" otherwise.

Secondly, Obama obviously got a very good number in Virginia today. That is not enough to turn the state into a toss-up all by itself; we still have Virginia as lean McCain. However, Virginia may well be a better path to 270 electoral votes for Obama than Ohio, where he got a not-so-good number from Suffolk.

Thirdly, someone polled Delaware! Our model (which knew nothing about Joe Biden) had previously seen Delaware as being about a 7-point race, so a +12 for Obama there suggests about a 5-point Biden bump. That's actually not bad as far as a VP candidate goes, but nothing compared to Sarah Palin.

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On the Road: Reno, Nevada

During the summer, John McCain’s Reno office was struggling to attract volunteers. After he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate, there was a line of volunteers waiting outside the campaign office the following morning. Since then, they’ve gotten a solid 20 volunteers a night, though only four were there the night I stopped into the office. I was willing to believe the 20 figure, given the re-energized party since Palin entered the race.



By contrast, Barack Obama’s Reno office has been humming for months. Though John Kerry won the city of Reno in 2004, he lost neighboring Sparks and Washoe County as a whole by 4.21%, or 6,704 votes. That represents just over 31% of his total losing margin (21,500), despite the fact that Washoe contributes only about 19% of Nevada’s statewide voting total.

In just the last year, Washoe County’s R-D voter registration gap has dropped from R +16,000 to R +5,000. The several months on the ground leading up to the January 19 caucus helped. That shift represents a lot of grinding, day-by-day work by organizers and volunteers to canvass and recanvass neighborhoods that can't be crammed at the last minute. Here are the McCain and Obama Reno field offices.

Republicans, of course, have long built up grassroots and neighbor-to-neighbor infrastructure, so there is much less startup time when someone like Sarah Palin comes along to light the fuse. Republican volunteers told me that it’s simply part of the culture – doing your part during election cycles is just what folks do. I noticed organized tables lined with phones in the Reno office ready to accommodate a couple dozen volunteers. The Palin enthusiasm will undoubtedly help base turnout, but with Clark County looming as a given Democratic win, will the 11,000 gap-closing voter registration be too much a statistical factor to overcome?

Local Washoe Democratic grassroots activists really got underway here beginning in 2004. Effectively trained by the DNC 50-state program, they have been building party infrastructure by cleaning up voter files, identifying and staying in contact with Democrats to build for the long haul. While campaign organizers despise yard signs and other chum for the massive headachey hassle they represent (longer post to come on this topic sooner or later), the best argument I’ve ever heard for yard signs came from two local Washoe County grassroots-ers, who explained that a yard sign was an opportunity to easily identify another supporter who they could approach and who could then be kept active in between cycles. See a yard sign, meet a neighbor, fold them into the active grassroots ranks.

The analogy they offered about the presidential campaign was that it was like a freight train rolling through. The paid campaign organizers are younger and have an aggressive plan of action for the given organizing area. They hit the ground running. The grassroots folks are older, settled into their communities, and so both sides must work hard at communication so that everyone’s on the same page and everyone knows their roles. Ultimately, it’s a challenge that comes down to personalities, and organizers have the responsibility for making sure the existing groups feel both in the loop and listened to.

The more long-term developed the grassroots, the easier this is, and the less organized and the worse the state the voter file is in, the more control the campaign has to exert. In the end, it’s always dependent on the meshing of individual personalities. Happily for Obama supporters, it seems clear upon careful questioning that Washoe County grassroots and the Obama campaign are on the same page – though we might not find that everywhere we go. There are minor issues, for example grassroots folks wanting a little more lead time to organize for an event or a canvass; organizers of course often simply don’t get the lead time or are so overwhelmed with work that things don’t operate with perfect precision. In organizing, it’s never a perfect world, so the willingness of volunteers to compromise and roll with the punches is key to a successful ground campaign.

Housekeeping notes: We’ll be in Pahrump and Vegas later today, and then on to New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment. As a teaser, there are a couple new features we’re pretty excited about adding to this series, and they will debut over the coming days.

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