Today's Polls, 9/27

Barack Obama had another strong day in the national tracking polls, increasing his advantage in the Rasmussen Tracker to +6, and in the Gallup Tracker to +5. Indeed, four of the five tracking polls are now in agreement that Barack Obama's lead is in the 5-6 point range, with Battleground dissenting and putting the race at McCain +2.

You should bear in mind, however, that these polls reflect the pre-debate state of the race, as the overwhelming majority of the interviews for the these tracking polls took place before last night's debate was completed. A variety of reactions to the debate seem possible to me, including (in rough order of probability): i) a small gain for Obama; ii) no effective change; iii) a larger gain for Obama; (iv) a small gain for McCain. The reaction in the horse race polls in the days following the debate do not always match the overnight flash polls, as opinions about the debate may change once filtered through the lens of the media. However, since Obama won or tied essentially all objective evaluations of public opinion about the debate, material gains for McCain appear unlikely.

At the state level, we have a relatively uneventful day:



The only poll that really stands out is ARG's McCain +3 in Colorado. Since (i) a lot of good pollsters were in the field last week in Colorado and showed Obama with a decent-sized lead, and (ii) ARG is not a good pollster, this does not really affect our model's opinion that Colorado leans fairly strongly toward Obama. Otherwise, Iowa looks good for Obama ... Missouri is going to be tough for him, even if he has a good night overall ... these are things that we knew already.

Obama, however, did tick upward a couple of points in our win percentage estimate, and is now given a 78.5 percent chance of winning the election. Our more eagle-eyed observers may notice that this improvement occurred even as our popular vote projection barely changed. There are two reasons to explain the discrepancy: (1) Obama got a comparatively "bad" polling result in California (+10 from SurveyUSA), and California has a fairly substantial effect on the popular vote but almost none on the electoral college, and (2) We are now close enough to the election where every day that goes by without McCain making gains in the polls makes him marginally less likely to win. So Obama's win percentage will be ticking up by perhaps half a point a day based on inertia alone.

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How You Know It's Crunch Time

We have our first state-level tracking poll, this one from the Morning Call in Pennsylvania. The first edition showed Obama leading John McCain by 4 points.

Technically speaking, the model treats a tracking poll the same as any other poll, except that for purposes of calculating its weighting, we divide the sample by the number of days in the tracker. For instance, a 900-person tracking poll that spans a 3-day period is treated as having a 300-person sample size ... that is, the number of new interviews that the tracking poll conducts each day. (If a tracking poll breaks out its daily samples, as the Research 2000 national tracker does, then we'll simply use those results directly.)

As with other polls, we do not completely throw out the old results when the tracking poll publishes a new result; instead, have we have a formula for discounting the weighting for past polling from the same firm.

This does lead to a question about how you guys want me to list tracking polls in our data table. Do you want all the individual results listed -- which is more comprehensive but will create more clutter? Or do you want me to combine all the results from the tracking poll into one line in the data table?

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Why Voters Thought Obama Won

TPM has the internals of the CNN poll of debate-watchers, which had Obama winning overall by a margin of 51-38. The poll suggests that Obama is opening up a gap on connectedness, while closing a gap on readiness.

Specifically, by a 62-32 margin, voters thought that Obama was “more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you”. This is a gap that has no doubt grown because of the financial crisis of recent days. But it also grew because Obama was actually speaking to middle class voters. Per the transcript, McCain never once mentioned the phrase “middle class” (Obama did so three times). And Obama’s eye contact was directly with the camera, i.e. the voters at home. McCain seemed to be speaking literally to the people in the room in Mississippi, but figuratively to the punditry. It is no surprise that a small majority of pundits seemed to have thought that McCain won, even when the polls indicated otherwise; the pundits were his target audience.

Something as simple as Obama mentioning that he’ll cut taxes for “95 percent of working families” is worth, I would guess, a point or so in the national polls. Obama had not been speaking enough about his middle class tax cut; there was some untapped potential there, and Obama may have gotten the message to sink in tonight

By contrast, I don’t think McCain’s pressing Obama on earmarks was time well spent for him. One, it simply is not something that voters care all that much about, given the other pressures the economy faces. But also, it is not something that voters particularly associate with Obama, as the McCain campaign had not really pressed this line of attack. If you’re going to introduce a new line of attack late in a campaign, it has better be a more effective one that earmarks. And then there was McCain's technocratic line about the virtues of lowering corporate taxes, one which might represent perfectly valid economic policy, but which was exactly the sort of patrician argument that lost George H.W. Bush the election in 1992.

Meanwhile, voters thought that Obama “seemed to be the stronger leader” by a 49-43 margin, reversing a traditional area of McCain strength. And voters thought that the candidates were equally likely to be able to handle the job of president if elected.

These internals are worse for McCain than the topline results, because they suggest not only that McCain missed one of his few remaining opportunities to close the gap with Barack Obama, but also that he has few places to go. The only category in which McCain rated significantly higher than Obama was on “spent more time attacking his opponent”. McCain won that one by 37 points.

My other annoyance with the punditry is that they seem to weight all segments of the debate equally. There were eight segments in this debate: bailout, economy, spending, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, terrorism. The pundit consensus seems to be that Obama won the segments on the bailout, the economy, and Iraq, drew the segment on Afghanistan, and lost the other four. So, McCain wins 4-3, right? Except that, voters don’t weight these issues anywhere near evenly. In Peter Hart’s recent poll for NBC, 43 percent of voters listed the economy or the financial crisis as their top priority, 12 percent Iraq, and 13 percent terrorism or other foreign policy issues. What happens if we give Obama two out of three economic voters (corresponding to the fact that he won two out of the three segments on the economy), and the Iraq voters, but give McCain all the “other foreign policy” voters?

Issue        Priority      Obama     McCain
Economy         43    -->    29        14
Iraq            12    -->    12         0
Foreign Policy  13    -->     0        13
==========================================
Total                        41        27

By this measure, Obama “won” by 14 points, which almost exactly his margin in the CNN poll.

McCain’s essential problem is that his fundamental strength – his experience -- is specifically not viewed by voters as carrying over to the economy. And the economy is pretty much all that voters care about these days.

EDIT: The CBS poll of undecideds has more confirmatory detail. Obama went from a +18 on "understanding your needs and problems" before the debate to a +56 (!) afterward. And he went from a -9 on "prepared to be president" to a +21.

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Presidential Debate Post-Mortem: Live From Oxford

1:49 CDT: [Sean] Late update from the road... Chris Matthews doesn't like noogies.

11:21 CDT: More instapolling: SurveyUSA has Californians giving the debate to Obama 53-30, Washingtonians to McCain 40-38. McCain won indies in Washington, lost them in Cali. From the internals: in both states, voters thought Jim Lehrer was exceptionally fair, wanted more discussion about the economy, thought McCain looked tired, thought Obama looked Presidential.

11:16 CDT: [Sean] Well, Brett and I haven't gotten in the car and driven hundreds of miles in, what, at least half a day? So we're headed out. What to expect in the next week for On the Road... a bit of a slowdown. We'll cover Missouri with a few posts, and we'll liveblog from Washington University in my hometown of St. Louis next week. Then a frenzied month in the midwest and east covering battlegrounds from the road. We're gonna give Chris Matthews a noogie on the way out. Thanks for sharing the night with us, I'll let Nate wrap up with any final comments.

10:53 CDT: [Sean] Nate's right about that, and I'd only add that if people were especially tuned into the content they were tuned into the economic content in the first half of the debate given that we're in a big crisis.

10:49 CDT: [Nate] Really, I think a lot of pundits go about watching the debate in the wrong way. Namely, they're paying too much attention to it. That's not how most people watch the debate. They're talking with friends, taking care of their kids, drinking a beer, flipping channels, surfing the Internet. I think what those people saw is that Obama looked good, he sounded good and forceful, he spoke directly to the middle class in the first 20 minutes, and he probably had the best individual moment of the night on Iraq. And by the time that McCain woke up, they had fallen asleep or had flipped over to the White Sox game.

10:47 CDT: [Sean] Did anyone see the Pat Buchanan comments just now? As he spoke, they showed McCain replying to a question in a large window box next to Buchanan. McCain was silent, and so you could only get body language. He looked angry as hell. That's my dead horse. Folks should watch this thing again, silently, and just observe the body language of these two candidates. That's the big takeaway for me. The always-smart Eugene Robinson agrees.

10:36 CDT: [Sean] The two debates in my memory bank that one candidate just destroyed the other were the first Mondale-Reagan debate and the Gore-Kemp debate. But Reagan won the election, huge. Another big win was the first Kerry-Bush debate, but Kerry didn't win the election either. So I agree that Obama won, I think the "you were wrong" moment was the most memorable moment, but I'm not sure anything really happened tonight. It was more of what didn't happen.

10:31 CDT: [Nate] CNN/Opinion Research telephone poll went to Obama. Hearing that Luntz and GQR focus groups went to Obama. Yes, I'm beating this horse to death.

10:28 CDT: [Sean] This campus seems pretty nice. Wish we could stay and see it a little more. Oh well.

10:24 CDT: [Sean] Another thing about Biden is he can come on TV after these presidential debates and be a surrogate, and the various networks have to cover it -- he's the VP nominee. You will not see Sarah Palin doing the same thing once.

10:14 CDT: [Nate] OK, here's that link to that CBS news poll. And it wasn't 500 independents -- it was 500 uncommitted voters. I would say, just from my own point of view, that Obama didn't win by anything like a 2:1 margin, but that's partly because I was so pleased with his first 45 minuets that he raised my expectations for the last 45, when McCain seemed almost literally to wake up.

10:13 CDT: [Sean] Richard Wolffe made a strong point. McCain made a series of declarative statements "you don't understand" and then Obama came back with fluency in foreign policy. If you consider that "You Don't Understand"/demonstration-of-understanding-in-reply template lifted up and placed onto next week's Biden-Palin debate, where if you imagine Biden saying it to Palin and Palin trying to respond, it's clear it works less well when a guy is more than holding his own.

10:10 CDT: [Nate] It doesn't appear to be on the web yet, but several commentators point to a CBS News poll of 500 independents gave the debate to Obama 40-22, with 38 percent declaring it a tie. Beware, however, because the reaction in these instant polls doesn't always match the movmenet in the horse race polls in the proceeding days.

10:01 CDT: [Nate] Independents in the MediaCurves focus group gave the debate to Obama 61-39. They also think he won every individual segment. Republicans gave the debate to McCain 90-10, Democrats to Obama 93-7.

9:55 CDT: [Nate] Obama moved up 3 points in the Iowa Electronic Markets, but lost 3 points on Intrade. Given the funny business we've seen on Intrade lately, you'll know which of those two indicators I'd tend to trust.

9:52 CDT: [Sean] When you think back about the debate and the big moments, I think the "You were wrong" moment and the McCain getting angry about negotiating with dictators are the two that stand out.

9:50 CDT: [Nate] Alex Castellanos says it was a tie, and that a tie goes to the candidate who is town in the polls. I don't see how that makes any sense. Besides, I think Begala is right that Obama's confrontation of McCain on Iraq was the moment of the night -- and the one that likely breaks the tie.

9:45 CDT: [Sean] First reaction. On the "looking presidential" front, Obama clearly seemed calm, poised, knowledgeable. McCain had a couple of angry moments. Obama looked at McCain and seemed comfortable engaging with McCain. Obama looked into the camera. McCain looked into the camera but his body language was worse, and him not looking at Obama definitely didn't make him come across as confident.

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Presidential Debate Liveblog #4: Live From Oxford

9:34 CDT: [Nate] The media who wants to cop out from picking a winner will probably just say "Obama wins first half, McCain wins second half". But the first half is likely to matter more because (i) it was about the economy and (ii) this was a boring debate that will have a lot of people zoning out by the end.

9:30 CDT: [Sean] On CNN's tracker McCain is having trouble with independents in some of these answers as the dial goes under the median.

9:26 CDT: [Nate] Odd that McCain paused on answering Lehrer's 9/11 question. Was that for dramatic effect, or did he not prep that question in advance?

9:25 CDT: [Nate] Maybe, Sean. McCain chuckles = Gore sighs?

9:17 CDT: [Sean] But McCain looked angry and unpresidential. His temper was clearly triggered. That matters more than the substance of the argument. How you sound, how you look...

9:16 CDT: [Nate] That Ahmadinejad sequence was the first one I think McCain has won all night.

9:12 CDT: [Sean] Obama: "I mean, Spain!" That went under McCain's skin, comes back with "Obama seal" card. Obama is doing more initiating of these barbs.

9:10 CDT: [Sean] It is striking how much Obama is looking at McCain confidently and how McCain will not look at Obama.

9:05 CDT: [Nate] There's almost a reversal of roles tonight: McCain's answers are contemplative and long-winded, Obama's are much more direct.

9:02 CDT: [Sean] McCain plays "subcommittee meetings" card again.

9:00 CDT: [Sean] They both wear bracelet memorials, McCain gets there first.

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Presidential Debate Liveblog #3: Live From Oxford

8:56 CDT. [Nate] The gap in prep time is showing ... you can tell the moments when Obama is going off script (hint: more 'ums' and 'uhs'), but those moments aren't occurring very often.

8:56 CDT: [Sean] Obama plays "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" card.

8:48 CDT. [Nate] The true wedge issue of 2008: tactics versus strategy.

8:45 CDT. [Nate] That clip of Obama telling McCain he was wrong will probably lead Morning Joe on Monday.

8:45 CDT: [Sean] Wow. And just as they started to bore Nate, Obama lays the smackdown. "You were wrong." That'll be played over and over after this is over.

8:40 CDT. [Nate] This affair has been a little anticlimactic so far.

8:39 CDT: [Sean] Whoever had "Miss Congeniality" in the buzzword drinking contest, take another swig.

8:37 CDT: [Nate] Both candidates' ties are doing funny things on television, or at least the TV that I'm watching. Maybe that's one of the things the candidates didn't get to double-check given the curtailed prep time.

8:30 CDT: [Sean] Thirty minutes in and we're not on foreign policy.

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Presidential Debate Liveblog #2: Live From Oxford

8:29 CDT: [Nate] McCain, calling out ethanol subsidies as a bad thing, would seem (correctly) to have recognized that he's lost Iowa.

8:28 CDT: [Sean] Nate's right -- it's hard to do this objectively. But it seems Obama is in control and crisp.

8:24 CDT: [Nate] Everything about McCain says "old". Anecdotes about things he accomplished a long time ago. References to Dwight Eisenhower. Old jokes about bears in Montana. Old Reagan-Bush style economic talk.

8:22 CDT: [Sean] Has McCain looked at Obama yet?

8:16 CDT: [Nate] I don't quite understand this MediaCurves thing, but it looks like independents are breaking about 60:40 for Obama on this economic stuff so far.

8:11 CDT: [Sean] What was that "write two letters" story in one of those Cold War movies? The first letter was to blame it on your predecessor, the second letter was to his successor telling him to write two letters.

8:09 CDT: [Sean] Obama beats McCain to the "I was trying to fix this problem before it got to this point" punch.

8:08 CDT: [Nate] As a Democrat, I felt very good about those first five minutes. Tying this whole mess to Bush was exactly what he needed to do. And McCain looks tired; the visual difference is pretty striking.

8:05 CDT: [Sean] Welcome, Nate.

8:03 CDT: [Nate] Have to say: the debates are probably the most difficult element of the entire campaign to evaluate objectively. But we'll give it the old college try.

8:02 CDT: [Sean] Here we go. The Superbowl of politics.

8:00 CDT: [Sean] So, I'm hearing CNN is talking about FiveThirtyEight. Toobin mentioned us, and then Begala referred to "90210 dot com." But I haven't heard what they were saying. Was it about Nate's scary giant brain?

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Presidential Debate Liveblog #1: Live From Oxford

7:53 CDT: [Sean] However, the GOP is in a bind. If Palin is removed from the ticket somehow, as was suggested on NRO today, here endeth the groundgame. I don't think they could survive that, and it would make McCain look like he was admitting he picked her for political reasons -- which he obviously did -- but that would make it hard for him to explain while introducing a second pick. Not to mention the logistics of removing her name now that she's been nominated, and early voting has started with her name on the ballot.

7:50 CDT: [Sean] The crisis also plays terribly with the Palin pick, because it's increasingly clear that regardless of the way she connects or doesn't connect with someone on the personality level, she doesn't pass the laugh test for qualification. I don't mean that in as partisan way as you might think. Analytically, she's obviously not qualified. It's inarguable. But prior to the crisis it was much easier to imagine a world where she could skate by for 60 days not facing questions and having an American Idol election. Now, I think people are honestly scared by the economic circumstances, and it may shock independents into refusing to take that risk of a McCain-Palin ticket.

7:39 CDT: [Sean] I think Obama's thoughtful style will play very well in this moment. People have been shocked into seriousness with the financial crisis. They really, really care about the substance of what these guys say during the debate. There's a meta communication that Obama gives off of being calm and nuanced, that he can explain something in depth. It's reassuring The simpleton "What do we do with evil, negotiate with it or defeat it? Defeat it!" Q-and-A that McCain is better at than Obama won't fly during this crisis. That's my take.

7:33 CDT: [Sean] If I ever get cited in an Obama memo (yard signs, anyone?), Ben Smith will still attribute it to Nate.

7:31 CDT: [Sean] Also, in case you missed it, the Obama campaign is citing "Nate Silver" in its obligatory lower-expectations memo.

7:27 CDT: [Sean] When we chatted this afternoon, Nate made the incisive point about tragedy versus crisis. We've had a flurry of posting activity today, so in case you missed it and it got buried below, check it out. It's exactly right.

7:24 CDT: [Sean] Hey, there's T. Boone Pickens. It's official. 2008 is the year of the wind turbine image in political ads.

7:22 CDT: [Sean] Our only outlet has been installing satellite radio when we were in Vegas, so we get the CNN feed. When the catastrophically insufferable Lou Dobbs comes on in the afternoon, Brett likes the "Coffeehouse" station. He's one of them liberals. I like "Classic Vinyl."

7:15 CDT: [Sean] Nate's on NYC radio for a little bit and will be joining us soon (see preceding post) so I'll be getting this party started from Oxford, Mississippi.

We've somehow driven over 4,500 miles in the past two weeks. Between Denver, St. Paul, and the On the Road series, it's been exhilarating nonstop travel through this election landscape. Still, we're in a bit of a bubble away from blogs and most of the news coverage, and it seems that as we were visiting field offices and talking to volunteers and communications directors and precinct captains, the economy is entering an apocalypse. So, that's bad. Look for that subject to come up tonight.

Every place you go there's a different flavor, and no less so here. Brett has some great pictures of the crowds we'll be filtering out during the night. Thanks for spending the night watching the debate here at FiveThirtyEight.

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Debate Goals

Obama's Goals

1. Appear to be the adult in the room. Cool-headedness may play well tonight.

2. Explain the economic crisis in terms even a 10-year-old could understand.

3. Force McCain to commit to a particular position on the bailout.

4. Tie the foreign policy debate to the economy.

5. Deflect accusations that he is too aloof by showing some humor.

6. Acknowledge the success of the surge, but ask whether the war has made us better off than we were six years ago.

7. Combat the perception that he would be too slow to send us into a good war.

8. Recognize that, while a tie goes to him because he's ahead in the polls, he has sometimes done poorly when he's tried to play it too safe.

McCain's Goals

1. Avoid appearing too impulsive, and explain what in the hell he's been up to for the past 48 hours.

2. Explain the economic crisis in terms even a 10-year-old could understand.

3. Force Obama to commit to a specific position on the bailout.

4. Tie the foreign policy debate to gas prices and the energy crsis.

5. Deflect accusations that he is too hot-tempered by showing some humility.

6. Recognize that public opinion has improved significantly on Iraq; tout the success of the surge.

7. Combat the perception that he would be too quick to send us into a bad war.

8. Recognize that, while he needs to make up siginficant ground, he is probably too far behind to turn the election around in one night, and that gimmickry may not sell.



*** Also, Ross Smith, the head coach of Wake Forest University's outstanding debate team, has an outstanding preview up of what to watch for tonight.

...and for our New York area readers, I'll be on WNYC at the top of some point during the hour. EDIT: Actually, anybody should be able to listen here.

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On the Road: Des Moines, Iowa

“So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.”

– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

What's a precinct captain? A year ago, Jane Brower didn't know. Now she captains her West Des Moines precinct like an veteran. She's built her own pyramid.

As both Republican and Democratic field organizers know, effective precinct captains are the single-most important volunteers a campaign can have. They are responsible for maintaining their own stable of volunteers that they participate in recruiting.

But when Jane first walked into an Obama field office during the pre-caucus period last September, she came to help address envelopes or generally help in what way she could. Slowly but surely, a skilled organizer named Caroline turned her into a precinct captain. Jane now manages 10 "block captains" who are responsible for their own slice of the precinct.

"I didn't know what a precinct captain was," said Jane. The first step was hosting a Barack Obama house party with her Republican husband Steve. Twenty of her neighbors, only about five of whom she'd met before, showed up. No donations were solicited, and the group met for an hour or so, asking questions of Jane, Steve, and a couple staff organizers. Though she was nervous at first and skeptical that such a party would have any effect, her organizer convinced her to give it a whirl.

The biggest impact was made, Jane said, by having each Obama supporter explain to the undecided but curious voters why they personally felt attracted to Obama's candidacy. Because Steve had been a longtime Republican and several Republicans were in the house, Jane talked about her excitement for a candidate willing to be fiscally responsible. There were no requests at the end of the party for commitments to vote for Obama, but Jane reported that when those houseguests attended an Obama foreign policy Q-and-A a week later, they came away completely sold.

After that, Jane began signing up for bigger and bigger volunteer commitments, and now she works a minimum of 40 weeks on the campaign out of her house. Her block captains, including her neighbor David Basler, another former Republican (and huge Baseball Prospectus fan), each have specific responsibilities and deadlines to accomplish a certain number of voter contacts. Most of the time, Jane says, is spent either helping voters with logistics like making sure far-flung college kids can be registered and get ballots in the correct precinct, or beating back heavily financed coordinated smear efforts such as this one, reported on the front page of the Des Moines Register Wednesday.

Two or three times a day, Jane pipelines her newly-collected voter file info back to Obama's paid organizers in the West Des Moines office. In this way, the campaign stays on top of who's a supporter, who's undecided and why. Jane showed us her personalized notes to undecided voters who had requested information on a given issue. She and her block captains follow up with each voter in a personal way, and that's important, Jane says, because it's a following through of a promise: "We're representatives of Barack Obama, and when we say we'll get a voter information, we're giving our word."

The last time Jane remembers feeling excited about a presidential campaign was when she was a girl and saw Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy campaign in her state. This time, she's the bread and butter of Barack Obama's ground game.

Early voting began in Iowa yesterday morning, and we were there to capture the opening bell. Barack Obama's campaign has been putting an enormous emphasis on early voting and absentee voting by mail where applicable. The lower the burden on county clerks on Election Day, the shorter the lines, the fewer people who remain uncrossed off the GOTV lists for doorknocking and phonebanking reminders, then the greater efficiency with which campaigns can operate.

Both campaigns see the numbers of people who vote early in a given precinct. Each campaign knows exactly the history of that precinct, and they can determine when an individual has cast their ballot. If that voter is identified as a supporter, or is suspected by other patterns to be a likely supporter, then the campaigns know where they are hitting their targets or are falling short. That's a huge advantage for a well-organized campaign.

Consider a situation with no early voting. A campaign simply has to monitor the turnout throughout the day in targeted precincts to model what they expect to happen. The numbers get pipelined up to the boiler room and campaign staff makes decisions about where to throw ground troops to knock the final doors. But that is an extremely compressed period -- one day.

Now add in a multiday early voting period. When Executive Director Zach Moyle told us that the Republican Party will know several days in advance of November 4 whether they're going to win or lose Nevada, he wasn't kidding. That's what early voting/mail-in ballots do for a campaign. They can't actually see the tabulated vote, but they know if Joe Smith is a supporter of John McCain and Joe Smith has voted already, they don't have too much guessing what the score is.

The ground game is extraordinarily numbers-based. For both campaigns, every single precinct in every state has a vote goal -- a specific number of votes the campaign has determined it needs to stay on pace with its overall path to victory in the state. By voting early, a supporter of a given candidate are giving his or her candidate a kind of donation. The sacrifice is the feeling of having participated in a vote on Election Day -- it feels like giving up a little bit of tradition. But campaigns are less concerned with tradition than with winning.

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McCain's Mistake?

Forty-eight hours after the fact, I'm still not certain exactly what the McCain campaign was trying to accomplish with this whole drama surrounding the "suspension" of his campaign and toying with his idea of dropping the debate. Was it, as I argued yesterday, in fact an effort to increase the impact of the debate? Perhaps. Was it a razzle-dazzle play designed to distract us from Sarah Palin's poor interview with Katie Couric? I thought that was a ridiculous notion at first, but as more and more of the interview leaks out, I'm not as certain.

What I think McCain also might have done, however, is to confuse slightly different things: a tragedy and a crisis. In a tragedy -- say, a terrorist attack, or a Category 5 hurricane hitting a major American city -- people expect the political process to be put on hold. That's not to say there aren't political implications to such things -- decisions to be made, lessons to be learned. But those are the moments where we hope to come together as a country. Imagine if a politican were to run an attack ad during Hurricane Katrina -- this would seem completely inappropriate.

The financial tremors on Wall Street, however, were not a tragedy, but a crisis: an ongoing, slowly building, relatively forseeable event, but perhaps one lacking the acutely emotional impact. In that sense, it was more along the lines of global warming than 9/11. And in a crisis, people do not expect the political process to be put on hold. On the contrary, they expect it to go into overdrive to get them the hell out of the crisis.

Now, I'm making a semantic distinction here ... returning to Washington to work on the bailout would also be a perfectly approrpiate response to an economic crisis. But something about the timbre of the McCain response was off. They did not merely expect Ameriacns to view McCain's response as appropriate -- they also expected Americans to view it as honorable. But a crisis does not call for honor; it calls for cool-headedness, decisiveness, and hard work. One can argue about whether McCain has in fact demonstrated those things in response to the crisis, but I don't think that's what he was aiming for.

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Road to 270: Nebraska

Today we continue with our Road to 270 series with the Cornhusker State, Nebraska.

WHERE FOOTBALL IS RELIGION, Nebraska would ordinarily be as straightforward in the presidential electoral discussion as a Tom Osborne-era Big Eight title. However, there's a little quirk everyone needs to understand about Nebraska. Along with only Maine, the state allocates its electoral votes by congressional district (one per CD) and two for the statewide winner. John McCain is going to win four Nebraska electoral votes for sure, and there may be a battle for the final EV -- Nebraska's 2d congressional district.

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

Right now, John McCain looks poised to pick up all five electoral votes, and you'll know his campaign's internals are looking a little tight if he starts sending surrogates to the area. McCain starts from the basic fact that no electoral vote has gone for a Democrat since 1964. Bush won by his 4th biggest margin of any state in the union in 2004, and the 2d highest percentage of Republican voters (R 54% to D 24%) was here in the state. Only three states had fewer Democrats. Those are the kind of structural advantages that are simply tough to overcome.

What Obama Has Going For Him

Barack Obama wouldn't be thinking about Nebraska except for the electoral vote quirk. That, and the fact that Obama got a chance to organize here for the February 9 caucuses has given the campaign an opening to try and steal one EV. While Nebraska as a whole has only 4% African-American voters, many of them are in Omaha. The second congressional district is diverse, with a large blue-collar manufacturing base and many independents. In a state that has no trouble sending Democratic Senators to Washington, Nebraska voters are drawn more to the non-insider candidate, all things being equal. Obama also benefits from two additional factors: (1) the relative compactness of the district, which is basically a bit larger than Douglas County, makes it easier to canvass and organize; and (2) the fact that voting lasts for 37 days here when you count early voting. That helps a better-organized ground effort.



What To Watch For

In the presidential race, watch to see how many surrogate or candidate visits these campaigns make. As long as we're not seeing much movement on that front, we can infer that the internals are telling the campaigns the same thing. In particular, look to see what John McCain's campaign does, as they are the ones who would need to shore up the vote with a little defense.

In the downballot races, Scott Kleeb is struggling to get name recognition in the more-Democratic areas, after his 2006 run boosted his visibility in the huge rural CD-3. The formula would be win CD-2 by the same as he loses in CD-3, and then win CD-1 (Lincoln and most of the eastern 1/4 of the state) by one vote. Mike Johanns is a relatively popular two-term ex-governor and Bush Agriculture Secretary. He's also an extremely disciplined candidate who's been smart enough to take advantage of Kleeb's low name ID and tack to the left on issues like energy while keeping his pro-life base fired up.

Jim Esch is the young 32-year old Democratic candidate in the Omaha-dominated Nebraska CD-2 challenging Republican incumbent Lee Terry. His own significant ground organization works in parallel with Obama's large ground game, and indeed Esch has gotten himself on the DCCC Red to Blue list this cycle. Watch this race as a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats prospect.

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Today's Polls, 9/26

On the eve of the first Presidential Debate, Barack Obama is perhaps in as strong a position in the polls as he has been all year, now projecting to win the election 74.7 percent of the time. Both the state and the national polls that have come out within the past 48 hours have generally been quite favorable to Obama, and suggest that he may gained an additional point or so above and beyond his "Lehman Leap" from last week.

Still, there are a couple of silver linings for McCain in the state polling:



Wait, which silver linings? Well, McCain gets good numbers in West Virginia and Montana, two states that looked like they might just have been on the verge of being competitive. And although Obama looks as though he's slightly ahead in New Hampshire, it also looks to be polling behind his national numbers -- we project Obama to win New Hampshire by 0.7 points, but the national popular vote by 2.9 points. So if the race tightens up, Obama may no longer be able to bank on New Hampshire's 4 electoral votes.

Still, McCain has very serious problems in Virginia, and extremely serious problems in Michigan, which is starting to drift off the swing state list. And forget about the Pacific Northwest. But at this stage, the electoral math is starting to diminish in importance; McCain needs to make gains everywhere, which means he needs a clutch performance in tonight's debate.

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On the Road: Omaha, Nebraska

“In no time at all we were back on the main highway and that night I saw the entire state of Nebraska unroll before my eyes. A hundred and ten miles an hour straight through, an arrow road, sleeping towns, no traffic, and the Union Pacific streamliner falling behind us in the moonlight. I wasn’t frightened at all that night; it was perfectly legitimate to go 110 and talk and have all the Nebraska towns – Ogallalla, Gothernburg, Kearney, Grand Island, Columbus, unreel with dreamlike rapidity as we roared ahead and talked.”

– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

This past weekend in Omaha, Republicans knocked on 11,000 doors. Two weeks ago when Barack Obama's permanent office opened, 1,100 volunteers showed up for the office opening. Eleven hundred people. "We essentially shut down midtown," said John Berge, Obama's Nebraska State Director. Omaha -- land of one precious electoral vote -- is not being conceded.

John Kerry lost Douglas County (where Omaha sits) by roughly 37,500 votes, and by 18%. Of course, Kerry did not work the area. Obama has 15 staff and 10 field organizers in the diverse district. In red Nebraska, which has not given an electoral vote to a Democrat in four decades, Obama has an uphill task. As has been standard in our office-to-office experience, there is much more activity going on in Obama offices than the McCain/Republican offices. As Election Day draws nearer, we expect this differential to narrow.

If Theresa Herring has her way, Omaha and Nebraska will stay in the Republican column. Herring, a volunteer for the Republican Party, is like many Republican volunteers we've met, a conscientious self-starter. Nobody called her to volunteer, she just felt it was her obligation to be active if she believed John McCain should be elected. A transplant from Louisiana, Herring simply looked up the local McCain/Republican office in the phone book and got involved. She knocked on some of those 11,000 doors (and 30,000 statewide). Omaha Republicans are a legitimate ground force.

The McCain/Johanns office is two doors down from Scott Kleeb's Senate campaign office in Omaha (see one of Brett's photos). But the campaigns here, as they seem to be all over, are courteous with each other. Kleeb has a steep task ahead of him to win the open US Senate seat. His name recognition in Omaha is still very low, given that his 2006 run came in the western 3/4 of the state, the 3d district. Moreover, Johanns is popular as a two-term ex-governor who left office for George Bush's cabinet in 2005. Nebraska, of course, is one of those states where a small investment can go a long way. Kleeb's staff knows they need a big win in Omaha to win the state, and the big problem is name recognition and DSCC funding. In that race, look over the next couple weeks to see if any polls show the race in single digits. If that happens, the cheap return-on-investment factor may kick in.

In the presidential race, one key factor to watch is, again, the Voter Protection efforts. Early voting opens in Nebraska on Monday, September 29th, and goes all the way through the day before Election Day. That's the good news for Barack Obama's early voting-focused ground game. The bad news is that the lone early voting location as of now is located in a remote area far from Obama's base.

Issues like the printing of enough ballots are still being negotiated -- will the 105% of ballots be based on registration as of the February 9 caucus date or as of a date in October? The answer to that question will affect Democratic fortunes here dramatically. We got the sense that while negotiations were difficult, the fact that they were happening far upstream from November 4 meant that Barack Obama's campaign has learned from past campaigns that it's better to be in front of a judge seeking a court order, if necessary, in mid-October rather than 4pm on Election Day.

*_*

An update on Colorado we'd be remiss without noting. Yesterday morning, the Denver Post reported on the shrinking gap in mail-in ballots between Democrats and Republicans. Key graf:

Republican strategist Sean Tonner said he was "disconcerted" by the latest ballot request tally because the GOP usually has a bigger edge going into Election Day. ... "The numbers clearly demonstrate that Democrats have made a significant push on getting their votes in early and capitalizing on the Obama enthusiasm," Tonner said. "We have our work ahead of us."

It's worth a full read.

With so much driving in our trip, we're physically a little ahead of our reporting. We should note that we've been in McCain offices in Omaha, Des Moines and Missouri since John McCain "suspended" his campaign, and they're all open and working.

We've got on deck an Iowa on-the-road focusing on the opening of early voting yesterday morning, but we're in the car to Mississippi for our on-scene liveblog of the first presidential debate from Oxford. Thanks to everyone for their patience.

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Ann Selzer on Youth & Minority Turnout

Ann Selzer, as you may know, is among the best pollsters in the business. In fact, we have her firm, Selzer & Co., rated as the single best pollster out of the 32 companies that we evaluated. Polling for the Des Moines Register, she nailed both the Democratic and Republican outcomes in the Iowa caucus, races that other pollsters had a great deal of trouble with.

Selzer's polls, as you also may know, have tended to have significantly better numbers for Barack Obama than most other agencies. In Indiana, for instance, Selzer has the race at Obama +3, whereas most other polling firms show John McCain with a (small) lead. In Michigan, while several polls have shown Obama with a fairly large lead, Selzer's poll for the Detroit Free Press pegs the race at Obama +13, the largest Obama lead in any current poll of the state.

Clearly this is not random variance; the Obama "house effect" is highly statistically significant. So I asked Selzer what she might be doing differently from other pollsters.

Selzer thinks that a lot of pollsters may be undercounting the youth vote, and potentially also the black vote. Young voters are becoming harder and harder to reach. They are in the habit of screening their phone calls. More problematically still, a great number of them (roughly 50 percent of voters under 30) rely principally or exclusively on cellphones, which most pollsters (including Selzer) will not call.

Pollsters can attempt to work around this problem by weighting the young voters they are able to reach more heavily; indeed, it is imperative that they make at least some attempt at weighting if they want to produce accurate results. But Selzer says she knows of at least one prominent polling firm -- she would not mention them by name -- which is not weighting by age groups at all.

Moreover, many of the pollsters that do weight by age group may be doing so -- to her mind -- in the wrong way. Specifically, they tend to use the 2004 election as a benchmark, when 17 percent were aged 18-29. Selzer uses census bureau data as her benchmark instead; among American adults aged 18 and up, about 22 percent age 18-29. This might not seem like a large difference, but given Obama's strong performance among young voters, it makes a difference of about 1.5 points in the net Obama-McCain margin.

Mind you, Selzer is not necessarily assuming that 22 percent of the electorate will be under-30 voters. She is using that as her starting point, and then using her likely voter screen to refine her turnout estimate. For instance, suppose that 60% of voters aged 18-29 pass her likely voter screen, as do 70% of voters aged 30 and up. In this case, the algebra would dictate that 19.5% of her likely voter electorate would be age 18-29:

...         Percentage of      % Passing Likely
Group         Population          Voter Screen
=================================================
Age 18-29       22% (A)               60% (B)
Age 30+         78% (C)               70% (D)
=================================================

...         Percentage of
Group         Electorate           Equation
=================================================
Age 18-29      19.5%         (A*B)/((A*B)+(C*D))
Age 30+        80.5%         (C*D)/((A*B)+(C*D))

There is nothing particularly difficult about this algebra. But that may not be preventing some pollsters from getting it wrong. They may fix the youth voter figure at 17%, regardless of what their turnout model says (and ignoring the fact that youth voter turnout increased by 52% as a share of the Democratic primary electorate). Worse yet, they may start with the 17% and then apply their likely voter model, which has the effect of double-counting young voters' lower propensity to turn out. Or they may simply not stratify their sample by age at all, which creates even worse problems.

A parallel problem could very well be in effect among groups like African-Americans and Latinos. And Selzer told me that pollsters are having another, very peculiar problem with the black vote. Specifically, many respondents, but especially (she believes) black voters, are refusing to disclose their race to interviewers. This wreaks havoc with turnout models, and particularly poorly-designed turnout models.

Selzer is taking a big gamble on this election, as her results have tended to stand out from those of other pollsters. But she is meticulous in how she does her polling, and Selzer's polls have not had any particular partisan lean in previous election cycles. Don't be surprised if her gamble pays off again.

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McCain Doubling Down on Debate?

A somewhat contrarian view:

I really can't imagine John McCain not attending the debate tomorrow. Although it's hard to know exactly how the spectacle would play out -- Obama fielding questions from Jim Lehrer by himself? -- as I opined last night, I think Americans would largely not excuse McCain for failing to show up. SurveyUSA polling data now shows that 74 percent of Americans think there should be some sort of debate tomorrow night (though many think the subject should be the economy rather than foreign affairs). The considerable majority of people who oppose a debate are Republicans; 73 percent of indepenent voters want one, as do 77 percent of moderates.

Perhaps, however, rather than trying to postpone the debate, McCain is instead seeking to increase its importance. Surely the drama of the past 30 hours has made it an even more captivating event, probably leading to increased viewership. Moreover, with the subject matter likely to be expanded to include the economy, and the candidates having had less time to prepare, the entire exercise becomes less predictable, with gaffes more likely to occur, but also the potential for "clutch" performances.

So perhaps instead of gambling two polling points on the debate -- the average magnitude of the shift in opinion following one of these things, McCain would instead like to gamble four. A two-point swing probably would not be enough to put McCain ahead (though it would be close); a four-point swing probably would.

The downside, of course, is that if McCain has a bad night tomorrow, he might do enough damage to effectively end the campaign. If Obama were to pull, say, 7 points ahead, with some structural advantages in the electoral college and what will be a strong turnout operation, I don't think McCain would have better than about a 1-in-6 chance of pulling the election out.

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Selzer & Co: Correction on Cellphones

In a post on Saturday, I asserted that Ann Selzer's polling company, Selzer & Co., which conducts polling in Iowa, Indiana and Michigan, includes a supplement of cellphone voters in their interviews.

Selzer contacted me to let me know that this is NOT the case. They have been using random digit dialing of landlines (as almost all pollsters do) for their general election polling, and have not been calling a supplementary sample of cellphone numbers.

The reason I got the idea that they had been calling cellphones was because of this article at Pollster.com in October, in which Mark Blumenthal wrote that:

"Selzer also informs us via email that their completed interviews included a small number of voters interviewed on their cell phones."

There WERE a small percentage of cellphone numbers included in Selzer's Iowa caucus polling, because these polls were based on registered voter lists purchased from the state of Iowa, and some voters had left their cellphone number as their primary point of contact on those lists. So while there was no deliberate attempt to reach cellphone voters, she was able to reach some anyway via this list-based sampling. For their general election polling, however -- in Iowa as well as Indiana and Michigan -- Selzer is using random digit dailing of landlines, and so no cellphones will be included.

With the Selzer polls taken out of the sample, and refreshing my original analysis based on the most current data, I now show a cellphone effect of 2.3 points rather than 2.8 points. The cellphone variable remains statistically meaningful at the 95 percent significance threshold.

Yesterday, the Pew Research Center issued a detailed study on cellphones and the 2008 election. They found that Barack Obama performed a net 2-3 points better between three of their recent polls when a cellphone sample was included. They also found that cellphone-only voters were significantly more likely to support Obama than non-cellphone voters of the same age.

I apologize to Mrs. Selzer as well as our readers for any confusion. We will have another post up momentarily with some additional thoughts based on my conversation with Mrs. Selzer.

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Today's Polls, 9/25

Yesterday, we talked about all of the noise in the recent state-by-state results. With perhaps a couple of dozen polls coming out each day, from firms with radically different views about how to model turnout, and in regions of the country that are each reacting slightly differently to the post-convention environment, there are bound to be results that cause some cognitive dissonance.

Underlying all of this, however, is a high degree of near-term stability in the race. For each of the past six days, our daily point estimate -- formed from making inferences based on all the national and state polls that are released on a given day -- have shown Barack Obama with a national lead of between 2 and 3 points. This is what is represented by the big cluster of dots you see at the right endpoint of our supertracker chart:



The big takeaway, naturally, is not to get too hyped up about any one individual result. Rasmussen has Barack Obama 2 points ahead in North Carolina? Good for him. Gallup had John McCain draw back into a tie in their daily tracker? Good for him. The polls can actually be more difficult to read when a race is (relatively) stable than when it's shifting toward one or another candidate. But you throw everything into a blender, and the race is pretty much at a point of equilibrium -- which, of course, will probably be ruined tomorrow if and when we have the opening debate in Mississippi.

State polls, which I'm just going to touch upon briefly today:



The best results for John McCain and Barack Obama are the polls in Maine and North Carolina, respectively. The North Carolina number really shouldn't be all that shocking. The state had been stuck on about a 3-point McCain lead for months, but with the Obama campaign having worked the state harder than McCain, it's not surprising that we finally had a poll that showed him with a lead there. Still, the model is hedging on considering the state a true toss-up because of that McCain +20 poll from SurveyUSA, and the McCain +17 from Research 2000, each of which came out a couple of weeks ago. If SurveyUSA and R2K resurvey North Carolina and give Obama a better number, he will gain ground fairly quickly. Until then, caution is warranted. One other thing to keep in mind -- North Carolina is a big retail banking center, so the candidates' positions to the bailout may get extra scrutiny here.

SurveyUSA gives Barack Obama a relatively narrow 5-point lead in Maine, making this the second consecutive poll -- along with Rasmussen -- to show the state in the mid-single digits. Usually this is the point of the campaign where the candidates start to consolidate their number of states, but there's an argument that McCain ought to send Sarah Palin out there, particularly to ME-2, where her backwoodsy charm could play well (Maine awards one electoral vote to the winner of each district). With that said, SurveyUSA revealed nearly identical results between the first and second districts, and they have usually voted very similarly in the past. Like many campaign decisions, this one will probably be dictated by McCain's internal polling.

Finally, Pennsylvania and Michigan appear to be drifting past one another like slowly-moving tectonic plates. While Pennsylvania had appeared to be a stronger state for Obama for most of the cycle, we now have it projecting as an Obama +4.1, to Michigan's Obama +5.3. If an election were held today, Obama would almost certainly win both -- but if things tighten again, Pennsylvania rather than Michigan may be the focal point.

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On the Road: Denver, Colorado

“My moments in Denver were coming to an end, I could feel it when I walked her home, on the way back I stretched out on the grass of an old church with a bunch of hobos, and their talk made me want to get back on that road.”

– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

During the primaries, Kathy Archuleta supported Hillary Clinton. The former Chief of Staff to Transportation Secretary Federico Peña, Archuleta is now a Latina Advisory team member for Barack Obama. Along with three other women, she has organized an impressive women-to-women outreach program aimed at adding 10,000 undecided and/or least-likely women voters to vote for Obama.

In just two and a half weeks, Archuleta’s effort has coordinated a 1,000-strong-and-growing group. The goal for each member is to get at least eight women to vote for Obama who probably would not have voted otherwise. Among the group’s ranks, Archuleta counted 100 women in Colorado Springs, 100 in Vail, 100 in Evergreen, 50 in Pueblo, and 250-400 in the Denver area who would be counted on for this targeted outreach.

“First, you’re a Democrat,” said Archuleta. We caught up with her at the Adams County Thornton office just north of Denver, she was busy explaining to twenty women the program’s goals and planning for a large local event tonight.

The key to the story is that the campaign gives these groups the tools to communicate with voters but the creative ground for generating voter-to-voter outreach is left to volunteers. Stay consistent with the campaign’s overall goals of voter contact and neighbor-to-neighbor outreach, and you get great freedom to build a grassroots action plan. That type of ownership not only generates greater commitment to the plan, but it has greater potential to stay in existence after the election.

We stopped in the nearby McCain office in Thornton, and an organizer and several volunteers made dials. While they were diligently going about the tasks of voter contact, the scale is dramatically different. Moments after we saw three dialers in the McCain office, we counted 40 volunteers in the Obama office down the street.

For those who wonder about our access to field offices, we had our first strange and uncomfortable situation of the trip that underscores how friendly and helpful everyone on both sides has generally been. Brad, a full-time volunteer at Obama’s Arvada office who identified himself as an staff organizer (who cannot be quoted or give us anything for the record), physically barred us from going into the office. “No, you’re not,” an openly hostile Brad said, when we suggested we’d just like to look around and check out the action. Apparently he was terrified of being quoted in the press, something we never do for staff, but are allowed to do with volunteers.

But this strange incident just illustrates what an anomaly it is to be given the cold shoulder and how grateful we are for being allowed to tell this story in real time by interviewing volunteers and take pictures in these offices. Many offices are bustling with activity, and even when an office is relatively empty and quiet, or when, for example, a McCain office isn’t sure who we are, they quickly realize we’re there to tell their story, even as we cannot talk to staff. Nobody who gets into field organizing does it for the money. And certainly not for the healthy lifestyle. Whether staff is working for Democratic candidates or Republican ones, they’re pushing themselves to physical limits because they believe in what they’re doing. Direct action demands respect.

Many people have been asking about issues around the purging of voters from the rolls in various states, Colorado being a prime example. We hope to bring you more in-depth discussion of voter protection issues as we travel, and we’ve had several off-the-record conversations with campaign staff about those potential problems. We can report that Obama’s Voter Protection program, which has been actively soliciting local attorneys with civil rights experience, is fully on the case, much earlier than previous campaigns. In many instances, there are still negotiations going on with election officials where agreements in writing are being hammered out. Those party and campaign-negotiated agreements are much preferred to the injunction route to making sure voters have enough access, enough ballots, enough voting machines so that lines are as short as possible.

For the most part, we’re covering the ground game that organizers can control, and the voter protection issues are mostly handled by state and national directors. Our eye is on it, but more in depth coverage will come closer to the election.

Our journeys along the Front Range taught us that John McCain’s ground game is plugging along and going about its normal, highly targeted plan of action. Nearly all its 11 open field offices are on the Front Range, and Sarah Palin has clearly energized the volunteer base.

Steph Lindsey, a volunteer in Obama’s Denver HQ, respects what she’s seen from Republicans and their ground efforts. “Their machine works really well.” Then she looked around a full seventh-floor army of volunteers and smiled radiantly.

“It’s just that now there’s a new machine.”

Godspeed, Colorado.

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AM Trackers Suggest Poor Reaction to McCain Announcement

We'll have polling data rolling in all day, of course, but the very early returns suggest that the public may not have responded in the way John McCain might have liked to his announcement yesterday that he was "suspending" his campaign to attend to the financial crisis.

Two polls have been released so far that were conducting work in the field yesterday. The Research 2000 poll has Obama jumping from +4 to +6, on the strength of a +7 in the daily sample conducted yesterday. And Rasmussen Tracking has him moving from a +2 to a +3, his largest lead over McCain since 9/6.

Gallup, Hotline, et. al. may well turn turn out to show McCain gains, so we'll see how these numbers look in a few hours. It should be a fun day for poll-watchers.

UPDATE: Hotline has Obama at a +4, down from a +6 yesterday. Battleground, which as you may have noticed has a pretty strong (3-4 point) Republican lean, has him at -1, one point better than yesterday.

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Remains Of The Day

Maybe I'm grossly misreading this, but I don't think McCain's decision to "suspend" his campaign today self-evidently looks Presidential. It could look Presidential, or it could look like a stunt. Meaning, the way the decision is narrated by the media matters. And when you've lost Kathryn Lopez and David Letterman on the same day, things haven't gone quite to plan.

But really, McCain's problems have nothing to do with returning to Washington for a couple of days and calling on Barack Obama to do the same. That could have been a smart little ploy. Rather, the problem was quite specifically his call to postpone Friday's debate.

Let me digress for a moment. One of the reasons I probably turned out to be a Democrat is because of Ronald Reagan and Bugs Bunny. When I was a kid, once every now and then, they had Bugs Bunny specials scheduled for prime time ... I looked forward to these for weeks. But invariably, invariably! -- or so it seemed when I was six years old -- they'd be preempted by Ronald Reagan giving a speech. I was sure what Mr. Reagan was saying was very important ... but I absolutely hated him as a result.

Americans feel about the debates they way I felt about Bugs Bunny. The cumulative audience between the three Presidential debates will likely significantly exceed that of the Super Bowl. They like watching them, and look forward to them. If McCain denies them that pleasure, they are likely to be angry with him, perhaps in ways they have difficulty expressing.

*-*

Imagine instead if McCain had called on Obama to return to Washington, and also called on him to meet him at Georgetown University on Friday night for a "civil discussion" (a.k.a. a High Noon showdown) on leading America's economy forward. That could have been brilliant. Obama would probably have had to agree to the change of venue and subject matter. McCain would have needed to follow-through by actually winning the debate, but if he had, that would almost certainly have been a game-changer. But that's not what McCain did.

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Today's Polls, 9/24

This was one messy little day in politics. I was on a train up to Wisconsin, where I'm going to be giving a presentation tomorrow, and during that time not only had John McCain "suspended" his campaign -- but SurveyUSA had actually put out polling on it!

Likewise, the polls today are a big sloppy mess:



How can Barack Obama be 8 points ahead in Pennsylvania according to CNN, but 1 point ahead according to Strategic Vision? Because Strategic Vision's polls have had a 2-3 point Republican lean so far this cycle, and CNN's have had a 1-2 point Democratic lean. If you are able to account for that -- and we do -- the two polls are within one's anothers margin of error.

And even the polls that don't contradict one another require various sorts of caveating. No, I've never heard of the MRG poll in Michigan, nor the Project New West poll in Nevada, but they don't fail any of our bright line tests, so they're in. And remember that we're still using the registed voter versions of these polls where we have the choice, which is why the Obama's leads in the Marist polls in New Hamshpire and Iowa are smaller than you might see listed elsewhere ... Democrats seem to be closing and in some cases reversing the likely/registered voter gap, which means that the enthusiasm gap may also be widening again. We will switch over to the likely voter version following the debate on Friday (if there is one!)

The only thing we can say for certain is that things are going well for Obama in Colorado, where all polls have him ticking upward fairly sharply, and all have him polling ahead of his national numbers. But this is a day where it's probably best to take a mulligan and wait a day or so for things to settle down.

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On the Road: Boulder, Colorado

Just ahead, over the rolling wheatfields all golden beneath the distant snows of Estes, I'd be seeing old Denver at last. I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was "Wow!"

– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

There is a philosophical divergence in the respective ground campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain, and our back-to-back trips to Colorado Springs and Boulder exemplify this difference. Only Barack Obama is playing offense. In Colorado, call it the four corners offense.

John McCain's campaign doesn't have an office in Boulder's blue oasis, whereas Barack Obama is willing to put his organizers all over deep red territory. Overall, the Colorado field office edge stands at 32-11, after the Obama campaign added their 32d office Tuesday. Moreover, in our travels we're finding the Obama offices have generally opened earlier in the season than the McCain offices and have more organizers attached to each office. In the more rural areas like Cortez, Obama might have one full-time organizer, but in places like Colorado Springs and Boulder we counted very large staffs.

The structure of the McCain organization is different, and they take pride in staffing their offices with full-time volunteers. Typically, even in large offices we're seeing, McCain's team has one paid organizer in charge of the office and a group of veteran, savvy volunteers to direct traffic. It's just a different philosophy.

Boulder, with its giant base of Colorado University students, accounted for 8.0% of Colorado's vote in 2000, and 7.5% of the statewide total in 2004. As you'd expect, Dems carried the vote widely. Curiously, the Bush vote stayed flat both years, going from 50,873 in 2000 to 51,586 in 2004. Gore won 69,983 votes in 2000 but was hurt by Ralph Nader's 16,498. Nader was persona non grata in 2004, gaining only 964 votes while Kerry boosted Democratic totals to 105,564.

To be a professional poker player, one success principle you must learn is "Losing the Minimum." Everyone who plays seriously knows that players go through stretches where they can't catch a break and make a series of strong 2d-best hands that cost them money. It's structurally and statistically built in that you're supposed to lose certain hands. The most skilled players know how to keep their cool and lose the minimum on hands they are supposed to lose. More than figuring out how to profit when you get pocket aces or flop set over set in poker (because almost everyone knows how to win those hands), it's how to sense situational danger and avoid it that builds your bankroll in the long run. Your bankroll grows from the bets you save.

In the organizing world, Barack Obama's aggressive willingness to go into all corners of the state of Colorado (and Nevada, and New Mexico) is going to keep his losses to the minimum in areas he is supposed to lose. "Losing the minimum" is the mantra. And in Boulder, with McCain's field team abdicating the field, Obama can "extract the maximum" with no counterweight.

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Intrade Betting is Suspicious

There's something funny going on over at Intrade with respect to the pricing of the Obama and McCain contracts.

Right now, Obama is trading at 52.3 points. That is, Intrade implies that he has a 52.3 percent chance to become the next President.

Now, I happen to think that is a patently absurd price. But you don't have to take my word for it. Over at BetFair, another large UK-based gambling and futures site, you can also buy an Obama contract. But the price there is 1.62, which implies a 61.7 percent chance that Obama will become the next President.

That is a huge spread, 51.5 points versus 61.7 points. This is the equivalent of the Giants being 3-point favorites at the Bellagio Sportsbook, and 7-point favorites at the Mirage down the block. Those things just don't happen in efficient, sufficiently liquid markets, because they create arbitrage opportunities: you'd lay $10,000 on the Giants at the Bellagio and $10,000 on their opponents at the Mirage. Any time the Giants win by fewer than 3 points or more than 7 points, you lose nothing, since your two bets cancel out. But any time they win by fewer than 7 points but more than 3, you win both bets, and take home $20,000 (less the casino's vigorish) for absolutely no risk. Pretty good deal, right? That's exactly what's happening with these futures contracts.

It does seem to be Intrade specifically that's out of line, rather than Betfair. At Iowa Electronic Markets, yet another political futures exchange, the probability of the Democrats winning the popular vote is about 61 percent. They don't have an electoral vote contract, but if they did, presumably that number would be a little higher because of the structural advantages Obama has in the electoral college this year that we've discussed here at length.

In fact, the Intrade pricing doesn't even seem to be internally consistent. If you look at their pricing in individual states, they have Obama at no lower than 60 percent or so in each of the Kerry states, as well as in Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico. And Virginia, Nevada and Ohio are all at about 50:50. The relationships between the odds of winning any given state and the odds of winning the electoral college are difficult to determine, but I'm pretty sure that Obama should be higher than 51.5 percent given those parameters.

Finally, take a look at the actual pattern of the trading within the last 36 hours:



It's pretty obvious that this is not some sort of random walk. Rather, every so often, some individual trader or some small group of traders are shorting all the Obama contacts in bulk and resetting the entire market. The markets then organically climb back upward until the rogue trader strikes again six or eight hours later. The volumes on these contracts have been very high for the past week as a result.

Most likely, this is just some idiot degenerate gambler who is trying to have some fun. Between the Obama and McCain contracts, there appears to be about $400,000 in contracts changing hands every day, which is a lot by Main Street standards, but minuscule by either Vegas or Wall Street Standards.

What's a little weird, however, is that this rouge trader is not only selling Obama contracts and buying McCain contracts .... they also seem to be buying Hillary Clinton contracts:



This is the exact mirror image of the Obama trading -- in fact, the trades seem to be occurring at exactly the same times. So someone is betting on some sort of disqualifying event happening to Obama.

I don't think this is any cause for alarm... if Joe Biden contracts were being bought up as part of this scheme, that might be more concerning, but they aren't. Still, if I were the Secret Service FBI (**), I would probably want to know the identity of this trader. And if I were one of those Beltway pundits who thinks I can be hip by referring to Intrade, I would take a look at the gross inefficiencies in these markets and think better of it.


(**) It seems to me that too much attention is being paid to this particular point. No, I do not think it is at all probable that this is connected to some sort of physical threat to Obama. But I do think it is the job of the FBI to investigate improbable threats. This is the whole reason the Pentagon was arguing for terrorism futures markets a couple of years ago.

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Today's Polls, 9/23

Barack Obama has had another strong day in the state polling, holding leads in the states where he needs to hold them. John McCain, however, was able to hedge against this by ticking upward by a point or so in the national tracking polls, making the overall trend about neutral. Still, there is a lot of eye candy here for Democrats:



The PPP and Quinnipiac polls make it three surveys in a row where Obama has held a statistically significant lead in Colorado. In fact, he appears to have built up a pretty decent-sized lead, with Colorado is now polling between 2 and 3 points ahead of his national numbers.

Suppose that we rank the states from best to worst for Obama, and count up the number of votes we collect along the way. For each state, I'm going to list something called +/-, which is the state's performance relative to the national popular vote projection. That is, since our model projects Obama to win the popular vote by 2.2 points, we'll subtract 2.2 points from each state to get our +/- rating. In other words, this is what we'd expect each state to look like if the national popular vote were tied.



What you see here is that Obama gets up to a 269-269 electoral tie with relative ease. The state that gets him there is Colorado, but Colorado is still polling more than two points better than his national numbers. In theory, that means that Obama could lose the national popular vote by 2.2 points and still be even-money to manage an electoral tie.

A tie, of course, is not his optimum result. Although Obama would probably prevail when the vote went to the House, it wouldn't make governance very easy. The 270th electoral vote, however, is more difficult. The best place for it right now looks to be Virginia, which is polling right at the national average. Then you get New Hampshire, which is half a point behind the national numbers, before running into the big behemoths of Florida and Ohio, as well as Nevada.

What's interesting about this scenario is that if all you need is one more electoral vote to break the tie, it doesn't matter where you get it. New Hampshire and its four electoral votes would do just as well as Florida and its 27. Hell, one of the Nebraska Congressional Districts (which don't presently appear to be in play, but none of the recent polling has broken out the numbers) would also do the trick. So, depending on just how solid Obama feels about Colorado, one can argue that his campaign should spend more time focusing on states like New Hampshire and Nevada, which are much cheaper to compete in than Ohio or Florida. The Obama campaign also needs to think about whether it considers a 269-269 tie to be a desirable outcome, since this strategy only makes sense if you're concerned about 270th electoral vote rather than the 269th.

Of course, it's probably too soon to get into this level of detail. But if the gap continues to widen between Colorado and Obama's next-best tier of states, it becomes worth considering.

Obama also got good numbers today in Wisconsin, Florida and the Pacific Northwest. Oregon and Washington just aren't likely to play a starring role this year, or so it seems. Florida, meanwhile, is really starting to nip at Ohio's heels, and the Obama campaign has noticed, ramping up their ad spending in the state.

McCain does get one good result, in Minnesota, where Quinnipiac shows it as just a 2-point race. The model is now starting to take Minnesota seriously as a swing state. It has moved ahead of Wisconsin on McCain's list of targets (remember that Minnesota doesn't share a border with Illinois whereas Wisconsin does). And it may even be on the verge of overtaking Michigan.

So what is it about Minnesota? Well, McCain is spending a ton of ad money there, and Obama isn't. It is sort of McCain's version of Indiana, where the opposite is true. (Although, there is one important distinction: Obama still has a fairly robust ground game in Minnesota, whereas McCain has none in Indiana).

In both Minnesota and Indiana, the candidates are playing a sort of electoral Showcase Showdown: optimal strategy dictates that you want the opponent to come as close as possible without going over, wasting resources on a state where they just can't quite overtake you. As these states have tightened, both campaigns will now have to decide whether they have gotten to the point where they are actually at risk, or whether they want to lay low and induce their opponents to chase good money after bad.

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Oops

EDIT (9:52 CDT): All right, everything back to normal. But you can talk amongst yourselves here while I write up the polling update.

Ignore the numbers you see for the time being -- unintentionally overwrote some code when running the simulation a moment ago and it spit out some bad results. Everything will be fixed within 10 or 15 minutes.

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Road to 270: Iowa

Today our Road to 270 series continues with the Hawkeye State, Iowa.

A FIELD OF DREAMS and a classic Midwest battleground, Iowa is not easily categorizable in our demographic data. It's also a state that tends to know presidential candidates very well due to its critical early caucus, though not always. Bill Clinton essentially skipped the state in 1992 because home-stater Tom Harkin (up for a shoo-in Senate re-election this year) was sure to win it. Perhaps because candidates tend to work the state so hard, or perhaps because Iowans take extra pride in their civic responsibilities, the state ranks high in voter turnout.

Other than its very high senior population, with nearly 20% over 65 years old, and its high share of manufacturing jobs, Iowa sits squarely in the median of most American states on most other categories we track. In religious categories, for example, it has a nearly median white evangelical vote, a median Catholic vote share, and a median Mormon/LDS share. Education, "American" ancestry, and the Likert score for liberal-conservative rating sits squarely in the median as well. Iowa is a classic battleground.

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

John McCain can be happy that Iowa, which gave its Democratic caucus vote in 2004 to John Kerry, went on to prefer George Bush by less than 1%. Bush won Iowa's seven electoral votes. However, McCain didn't fare well in the Iowa caucus, finishing a distant third behind Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney with 13% of the vote. His politically gutsy opposition to corn ethanol didn't win him many admirers in Iowa, and this is probably one reason McCain is struggling to stay in contention here for the general election. It's likely a huge factor in McCain's terrible per capita fundraising numbers here (3d worst).

On the other hand, it's likely the pick of Sarah Palin has helped McCain consolidate his Republican base here. Since Mike Huckabee's religious conservatism played well enough for him to beat Romney's massive money operation, we know that Iowa Republicans are, in their base, the type of voters who we've seen drawn to Palin's candidacy. Still, McCain has an uphill climb in Iowa.

What Obama Has Going For Him

Barack Obama has a huge head start in Iowa for the general election based on the long retail politics campaign he ran during the caucus season. Voters know him in the state. The grassroots volunteer organizations simply came over intact for the general election and were up and running full bore from the getgo. McCain has had to build his from scratch.

As has been widely discussed, this is one of those states where Obama may have a reverse Bradley effect going on, if such an effect still exists. Nate projects that 56.9% of undecideds in Iowa will break for Obama.

Recent polling of the state point to Iowa being the Democratic Party's safest pickup from 2004, as multiple polls show Barack Obama with double digit leads. Five Thirty Eight currently projects Obama outside the Penumbra Zone here, at 10.5%, though as a red state in 2004 it can't be taken for granted. We'll somehow be there tomorrow night and Thursday morning, and we'll check whether McCain is seriously contending the state, or has pulled his resources out.

What To Watch For

The first thing to watch for is if and when McCain essentially concedes the state. It seems at this point that he's more likely to pick off Minnesota than hold Iowa. Barack Obama is not taking Iowa for granted, as Kerry States + Iowa is usually the starting point for plotting out a winning Democratic map. If you see either candidate scheduling visits this late in the campaign, it indicates their internal polling is telling them the state may be in play. If not, it's a tell that both know which way the 7 EVs will blow.

Another thing to look for in Iowa is the House races. In the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats sense, if 2008 is another downballot wave year, look for the longshot 4th and 5th CDs. Iowa Dems pulled off one of their most stunning upsets at the House level in 2006 when Dave Loebsack picked off moderate Republican (and Denver convention speaker) incumbent Rep. Jim Leach. The governor's seat is next up in 2010.

Note: please excuse our delay in this series, and strap in for a day-by-day sprint to the finish.

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