Shock and Awe, Paid Organizer Version

Amid on the ground reports that McCain is outspending Obama on the air at least 2-1 in places like Missouri, we learn that Obama’s team is betting on a different strategy – overwhelming ground organization early and often.

In Missouri, Obama will have 150 paid organizers and maintain a 12-1 paid organizer edge in my native state. Show-me, indeed. In Michigan, Obama will put an unprecedented 150 field organizers on the ground. In Ohio, why not go for 300 field organizers? That sounds like a nice, absurdly large, round number.

This is the campaign equivalent of invasion with overwhelming force. In the coming days, we should be hearing more reports like these from other battlegrounds (here's Iowa, for example), giving us a clearer and clearer picture of each campaign’s voter contact strategy. Already, however, Marc Ambinder has pointed out that:

The polls don't account for the force multiplier effect that Obama's campaign will almost certainly bring to bear with its millions of volunteers and thousands of paid staffers. Whether that effect is 1.01, 1.05 or even 1.3 -- we don't know yet. But even the McCain campaign acknowledges its existence.

Those paid organizers are each recruiting underneath them volunteers and precinct captains (themselves responsible for recruitment and management of volunteers). As I’ve said before, it’s a pyramid scheme aimed at massive voter-to-voter contact. Millions and millions and millions of voter contacts, all knocked out 5, 10, 50 at a time by volunteers. The info gleaned from the contacts is re-looped into the voter file, and repeat contacts are thereby more informed (undecideds can be persuaded; supporters can be urged to early vote; banked early votes allow campaigns to use resources more efficiently in the closing days, etc.). The principle is: voters persuade other voters more personally and powerfully than a 30-second TV ad. Ads give impressions; real people close the sale.

Consider for a moment an oft-discussed example that directly relates to ground organizing – the burgeoning power of the Latino vote. High-information voters like you and I read stories about Obama or McCain each speaking to this or that Latino group, each man arguing why he is the better candidate to implement policies that will improve quality of life for Latinos. But which campaign is more likely to do the actual on-ground registration and one-to-one voter contact in places Latinos live, such as Nevada?

Whatever the ultimate election outcome, it’s clear the Obama campaign believes it knows what it’s doing and a wise investment of resources when it sees one. An “almost preternatural self-confidence about their strategy” is how Ambinder describes it.

And it makes sense; Obama’s team has been vindicated after undergoing months of second-guessing previously during this campaign. In the months before Iowa, outsiders and even supporters were questioning the campaign’s strategy in view of the consistent polling showing Obama lagging behind “where he should be.” Obama’s team remained confident that those polls were Charmin-soft and Obama himself trusted his sense of meeting the moment, that the Democratic electorate was so hungry to turn the page that it would even turn the page on its biggest brand name.

Yet without the deep, well-planned and executed advance work, without having recruited and built the best on-ground political organizations in the key early states, this confidence would have been a false front. Obama likes to say he "made a bet" on the American people by entering the primary despite doing so as a conventional-wisdom prohibitive underdog, now he is making another bet, that the summer's silly season mini-narratives will be washed away in convention and debate drama, and that chance will favor the better organized in the end.

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Today's Polls, 7/9

If Memorial Day marks the start of political spring training, and Labor Day the start of the playoffs, the July 4th holiday might be the beginning of the regular season. John McCain comes out of the break with one of his stronger polling days in some time.

There are two polls out in Missouri, both of which give McCain the lead. Rasmussen places his lead at 5 points, and Public Policy Polling puts it 3. This marks a reversal from a period where Obama had been polling fairly strongly in Missouri, having held the lead in Rasmussen's last poll conducted about a month ago.

There might, however, be a relatively simple explanation for this one: McCain has been saturating the state with advertising. Should Obama fight back? Well, he already is, having tripled his staff in the state. So, we might have the makings of an old-school air-versus-ground battle. But I also think that Missouri could be a little bit of a trap state for Obama. Our model, which now accounts for the relationships between the states in more sophisticated ways (more on this shortly), found only 43 simulation runs out of 10,000 when Obama won Missouri while losing Ohio. Missouri is essentially Ohio with 15 percent more evangelicals -- I don't think that's outweighed by its sharing a border with Illinois, but I can understand if the Obama people feel differently.

Another interesting state is New Jersey, where Rasmussen shows John McCain closing to within 3 points (5 if leaners are not included). Rasmussen has generally had New Jersey much closer than other pollsters, and as we noted this weekend, it is an exceptionally expensive state to compete in. Nevertheless, it has different demographics from virtually any other swing state -- McCain's one window into the Mid-Atlantic region. If he runs somewhat to the left, emphasizing his fiscal conservatism to wealthy New Jersey suburbanites while deemphasizing the guns and gays stuff (Scott Rasmussen also likes the offshore drilling issue for him here), the state could be competitive.

Lightning Round: In a now somewhat outdated Pan Atlantic SMS poll of Maine, Barack Obama has a 14-point lead (counting leaners). The poll also has great numbers for Susan Collins. And in Alabama, a Capital Survey poll has Obama within 13 points after having trailed by 24 last month.

Lastly, the Zogby Interactive results are now incorporated into the averages. Although we discount the value of these polls heavily, there are nevertheless 34 of them, and they provide enough help to Obama numbers in states like Arizona and North Carolina to mitigate McCain's gains in Missouri and New Jersey. Obama, however, has been polling below his trendline for the past couple of days, including mediocre results in the Gallup and Rasmussen trackers. If that continues through the end of the week, we may be able to credit McCain with a little momentum.

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Today's Polls, 6/25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Today's Polls, 6/5

We've been in a little bit of a lull for polling, as pollsters, quite understandably, might have wanted to wait for the Democratic nomination to resolve itself before putting new surveys out in the field. But a couple of late-breaking polls this afternoon.

In Missouri, Rasmussen has Barack Obama with a trivial, 1-point lead over John McCain. In Rasmussen's previous survey, Obama had trailed by 6. SurveyUSA had also shown Missouri closing to toss-up status; our regression model is liable to remain a little bit skeptical until Obama can improve his numbers some in other Southern states. But this is a state that's going to be competed in from now through November.

Just across the border, a Research 2000 / Daily Kos poll has John McCain ahead by 11 points in Kansas. The poll also suggests that Kansans are fairly lukewarm about the prospect of Kathleen Sebelius as VP -- though importantly, a 36-24 plurality of independents say she'd make them more likely to vote for the ticket. We're going to have some research out over the next couple of days about the home-state effects triggered by a Vice Presidential nominee.

Finally, in Alabama, a Capital Survey Research Center poll has John McCain 24 points ahead of Obama.

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Today's Polls, 6/3

SurveyUSA has released a whole bunch of data within the past 24 hours related to the series of Vice Presidential surveys they conducted last week:



The result that has gotten the most buzz is Obama's +2 in Missouri. What's a little bit unusual is that SurveyUSA appears to have conducted a second Missouri poll over the same period, which included Senator Clinton's numbers rather than the VP matchups. So far as I can tell, these are completely separate polls (they have different sample sizes, for instance) and so we will continue to list both of them. And really, they're close enough to one another that it probably isn't worth sweating the difference; both point toward Missouri being competitive in November. With that said, those who argue that Obama performs better when Hillary Clinton's name isn't mentioned in the survey could point to this as evidence.

Obama's numbers out on the Pacific Coast look very good, as they have been in almost all polling recently. On the other hand, McCain is a bit closer than expected in Minnesota and Massachusetts, but that has been a consistent facet of SurveyUSA polling in those states. SurveyUSA polls appear to be less hewed to party identification than those of most other agencies, so just as they tend to show Obama polling a bit closer in red states like Nebraska, they also tend to show McCain more competitive in certain blue states.

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Today's Polls, 5/21 [UPDATED]

One of our largest collections of polling data in some time:



Big picture here?

For Obama, his electoral map is sharpening. He's presently winning all Kerry states except for New Hampshire, although he makes up for that with a safe-looking lead in Iowa. In order to win the election, he'll either need to:

1) Win Ohio (while holding Michigan and Wisconsin), or
2) Win two or three of the Western "four corner" states (NV, CO, NM) and either Ohio or Michigan.

By contrast, the "Southern Strategy" of putting states like North Carolina, Virginia and Florida into play does not appear to be polling especially strongly for him at the moment. If he needs a third alternative, he might stand a better chance by aiming to flip the Midwest-Southern hybrid states of Missouri (where he's still trailing, but these numbers are an improvement) and Indiana.

As for Clinton, she's had a couple of weeks where she's been polling pretty strongly everywhere. I would not pay especially much attention to the SurveyUSA poll showing her ahead by 6 in North Carolina. I am not saying it is an 'outlier'; I agree with Charles Franklin's philosophy that there is no such thing as an outlier. But this is the whole point of taking a weighted average of polls, and other polling in North Carolina has not shown her especially competitive.

Nevertheless, Clinton certainly seems to have improved her hand in the South -- I haven't looked to see whether she's getting more of the white Southern vote, or whether some black Southerners are starting to come back to her. The Florida and Missouri numbers definitely look good for her.

Somewhat counterintuitively, Clinton may actually have the broader electoral map than Obama, putting at least as many red states into play but also having more blue states that she'd need to defend. And for the time being, it is probably also the stronger electoral map, although the Obama folks can argue -- not unreasonably -- that things will change once the Democrats unify behind Obama, and also that Clinton's map would look different had she been taking the frontrunner's heat that Obama has been.

UPDATE: Inserted SurveyUSA's California poll, and corrected the sample size on Missouri. It was actually quite a large poll (1,523 respondents), helping both Democrats.

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Today's Polls, 5/8

Rasmussen has new surveys out in Missouri and Georgia, two states that have been somewhat underpolled.

In Missouri, John McCain leads Barack Obama by 6 points and Hillary Clinton by 2. These numbers are actually an improvement for both Democrats from Rasmussen's previous poll of the state. Nevertheless, Missouri certainly looks to us like a stronger state for Barack Obama than for Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton than for Barack Obama, as there are enough of those Appalachian voters in the Southeast portion of the state to take a couple of points off Barack Obama's margin. What's interesting is that you won't hear the Clinton campaign talk much about Missouri, because it somewhat defies the connection between performance in the general election and in the primaries. That is, by trumpeting their superior polling in Missouri, the Clinton campaign would open up the door for Obama to point out that he's polled stronger in states like Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico, in spite of losing (or not competing in) those primaries.

In Georgia, John McCain leads Obama by 14 points and Clinton by 11. Our regression model insists that Barack Obama should be able to do somewhat better than this in Georgia. It's a very young state, and it has higher education levels and more of a white professional class than other states in its region. But so far, those results have not shown up in the polling.

Also, in Texas, a Research 2000 poll conducted on behalf of Daily Kos has John McCain leading Barack Obama by 13 and Hillary Clinton by 15. Overall, it's not a particularly good polling day for the Democrats in the Southern states.

Finally, I'd like to thank Mark Blumenthal of the National Journal and Pollster.com and Meteor Blades at Daily Kos for their kind words today.

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Today's Polls, 4/17: Obama takes a hit, with caveat

SurveyUSA has a new round of polling out in more than a dozen states. Let's run the numbers first and then let's talk.



These are generally, although not uniformly, a poor set of polls for Barack Obama. The ones that are perhaps especially problematic for him are in Virginia and New Mexico, states where SurveyUSA has generally showed him running fairly well. The Ohio result, naturally, is important, although that's consistent with what we've seen in other polling. And SurveyUSA shows a close race for Obama in Massachusetts, as it has all cycle; it would be nice to be able to look at another pollster's numbers on that race.

As you can see, Obama's win percentage against John McCain has declined to its lowest ever number, 41.4%, which leaves him essentially tied with Hillary Clinton, who is presently at 40.2%. When we began this project, the polls indicated that Obama was at a hair over 60% to win an election against John McCain; that number has now fallen by more than 20 points.

But for the Obamaphiles in the crowd who are inclined to panic, a couple of things to keep in mind: Firstly, even in a bad set of surveys, Obama retains some areas of strength. These are, particularly, the Pacific Northwest region and our North Central (e.g. Upper Midwest) region. In Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, as well as in Washington and Oregon, Obama is likely to win fairly easily, whereas all of those states are in play in a Clinton-McCain contest. It's these states, plus neighboring Michigan -- which will not be a slam dunk for Obama but appears to be a better state for him than for Clinton -- that account for why Obama is still at least tied with Clinton overall, in spite of performing worse than her in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Secondly, notice that the SurveyUSA polls were taken over the weekend, just as the bittergate controversy was hitting the radar. Keep in mind my prediction about bittergate, which is that it would have no real impact on the Democratic primary numbers, but perhaps a couple of points worth of medium-term impact on Obama's general election numbers. So far, that prediction has been pretty well borne out.

The other dynamic in play here is something that I call 'timing bias': pollsters tend to release surveys in the wake of major news events. Consider, for instance, that the last time SurveyUSA released a big set of polls was just as the Jeremiah Wright controversy was breaking. Naturally, pollsters (and the clients they work for) want to gauge the electoral reaction to important events in the news cycle. But really, if you buy one of my fundamental arguments about polling, which is that most bounces are just that -- temporary aberrations in the polling numbers -- these are the very worst times to release polls. And it cuts both ways. If, say, Obama wins Indiana, and essentially concludes the nomination with an 'upset' victory, we'll probably see a lot of polls released in the aftermath of that. Those numbers too, I'm guessing, would likely show a fairly big bounce for Obama -- and that bounce too, I'm guessing, might well prove to be ephemeral. It's helpful to have a pollster like Rasmussen on hand, which releases its polling data in dribs and drabs