I haven’t been sweating the polls and some people have been privately asking me why. First of all, convention bumps are historically temporary. The post-convention bump for McCain, which is already receding, is likely to be his high water mark during this campaign. Other than a brief period in early August, McCain was never ahead in this race until he held his convention. But, secondly, there is a much different reason why I am not sweating. You can see it in the internals of today’s Research 2000 tracking poll for Daily Kos.
DATE MCCAIN OBAMA BARR NADER OTHER UND
13-Sep 47% 47% 2% 2% 1% 1%
NE 39% 56% 1% 2% 1% 1%
SOUTH 56% 37% 3% 1% 1% 2%
MIDWEST 46% 49% 2% 2% 0% 1%
WEST 44% 50% 2% 1% 1% 1%
What do those internal numbers tell us? They tell us that Obama is ahead everywhere but in the South. The overall numbers show a 47%-47% tie, but that is deceptive. Obama is trailing by 19% in the south and leading by 17% in the Northeast. But all the key states (except Florida and Virginia) are outside of the South.
I’m not smug, and I don’t like looking at poll numbers that have tightened considerably in the battleground states. McCain is doing well enough at the moment to have a real chance of victory. But it remains true that McCain has to run the table. If Obama holds the Kerry states and wins New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado, and New Mexico, it’s over…even if Obama loses Florida and Ohio and Virginia and Missouri, etc. And McCain is not showing real strength in any Kerry states.
So, I’m not happy, but I’m also not terribly worried. The Sarah Palin honeymoon is wearing off and we should see the numbers return to the status quo ante.
Agreed. And McCain just had the best couple weeks that he is likely to have in this campaign. It’s gonna get worse from here. I’ve been encouraged by the fact that the media is starting to call McCain/Palin on their lies, and that Charles Gibson was more aggressive in his interview of Palin than we expected.
The two variables that are hard to grasp in this election are just how much turnout from youth and minority Obama can expect, and how much closet racism is out there that will help McCain.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago that McCain had declared war on his base (the press) and that it would not go well for him because he is an empty suit without his sycophants constantly fluffing him.
“the media is starting to call McCain/Palin on their lies“
It has been a pleasant surprise to see the overall media reaction to Palin. But will it matter? I don’t know.
“Charles Gibson was more aggressive in his interview of Palin than we expected.“
And yet more than just a few dyed-in-the-wool liberals around here did not see through her “blizzard of words”, did not perceive that she was mainly just parroting the talking points she had memorized, that when she didn’t have or couldn’t remember the talking point, she sent a tsunami of meaningless verbiage to cover that fact, and that overall she looked like the politically ambitious fool that she is. Many took her to be a “quick study” and felt better about her after the interview. What they are not understanding, among many other things, that being able to quickly rote memorize lines is not the same thing as having knowledge and an understanding of your subject, and what she showed over and over was that she had no real knowledge and did not have a clue what she was yapping about a good deal of the time.
And of course, she lied at every opportunity, but what is new about that?
It’s usually good enough to get through a beauty pageant, which is what it sounded like.
Exactly – well put!
Hurria — You need to get some new friends, because everybody I know realized she sounded like an idiot.
and that Charles Gibson was more aggressive in his interview of Palin than we expected.
Not by my viewing of the interview. Gibson played down to the expectations I had for him, actually.
The thing that was amazing about the interview we’ve seen so far (there’s one more day of it, right?) is that Gibson was lobbing fairly softball questions at her and she answered them so poorly. I actually think you might have been able to have Larry King in Gibson’s seat rolling Nerf balls at her and she still might have done poorly – and that shocks me. She really isn’t ready yet – the radical wing of the GOP might have overplayed their hand. If Obama wins this in November her national career may well be over – and she was one of their “great hopes” for the future.
“If Obama wins this in November her national career may well be over…“
From your hand to god’s ear – I certainly hope She gets it!
And that is a very big if! This is scarier than 2004.
Thanks for this post but I’ve grown cynical.
The only numbers that count on the evening of November 4th going into early AM of November 5th, are either ‘the stolen’ or the ‘allowed to win’
The vast majority of voters are misinformed or disengaged.
We’ll see who is allowed to prevail; – McCain, the candidate of war profiteers or Obama, the candidate of the silent majority – including moderate Republicans – hoping for a return to reality.
I’m not sanguine, but panic and worry doesn’t help anyone think clearly or execute intelligently.
And frankly, I’d still have the level of calm concern if we were up 20 points. Just work harder and register more folks. My Mom walks around with registration forms in her purse.
Let me remind your that my parents live in Virginia.
Please help their efforts to make Virginia presidential blue! 🙂
Will Obama win this election the way Gore did in 2000? The Republicans have already shown that they are in no mood to give up power willingly.
The margins are not going to be so high to make the election unstealable.
When was the GOP in the mood to give up power willingly? Even Dems only give up power unwillingly, but at least they do it a lot.
Gore willingly gave up power in 2000 and Kerry willingly gave it up in 2004.
The GOP would be in a mood to give up power willingly if their base and opinion-makers were demoralized because they realized that their ideology is bankrupt, the way the Soviets did before the breakup of the Soviet Union. As their convention showed, the Republicans are not demoralized.
I’m actually sick to my stomach and expect to be that way until November….when hopefully I can relax.
Tomorrow, my local newspaper will distribute with its Sunday edition a propaganda DVD about radical Islam. Seems it’s only targeting swing states. I know the newspaper business is tough these days, but are their journalistic standards so low that they can be sold for ad revenue? I guess we don’t really need an answer to that…
The hell is it with the old people? They STILL haven’t been around long enough to know what’s going on? They really don’t give a shit about whether the next generation has social security? They just want to break the geezer glass ceiling? They’re still racists after all those years?
I mean these are the ones who remember what the New Deal and the Great Society achieved and now they’re all a-tremble for the GOP to administer the coup de grace? None of the old persons I know are for McCain, so I can’t do the personal research. Somebody explain, please.
Of course the 30-44 demo is almost as bad, but they’re probably easier to explain: the new suburbanites who imagine that they’ve made it and that the Bush disasters can’t get them.
In any case, it seems like whether the Dems are able to get the old ones to use some common sense could tip the balance in places like FL, NC, and the Southwest. But the first step would be to understand what in hell they’re thinking.
They’ve hated and feared blacks all their lives. And they identify with the old white guy. Deep down they can’t believe that he really wants to gut Social Security and Medicare.
while you may not be worried, but l’m not so sanguine, especially given the fact that the election is a mere 7 1/2 weeks away and 538 has this up:
not sanguine at all; and colorado’s still a toss-up.
color me cynical, but this one’s gonna be a squeaker.
At this time in ’04 the polls as summarized at RealClear Politics had Bush up by margins ranging from 1 (Pew) to 14 (CNN/USAT/Gallup) averaging out to around a +7 percent Bush advantage. So Obama’s still running much better than Kerry was doing.
Not that we should just sit back and wait for the votes to roll in, but I think the objective observer of the campaigns would expect the tide to turn back in favor of Obama.
not to put too fine a point on it, but “objective observers” never expected chimpy to win in 2000, let alone in 2004…didn’t work out so well, eh.
l’m worried, and l’m going to stay worried till it’s over…and l’m not sitting around doing nothing…we lose this one, we lose the country, imnsho.
Maybe so, but like in sports, I’d still rather have a nice lead at half-time.
I was comfortable till palin showed up. shes bringing out huge crowds like Obama. that is not good. it’s incredible to me that people see her as a viable candidate.
shes bringing out huge crowds like Obama.
Maybe she’s bringing out huge crowds, or maybe the McCain campaign is lying about that too.
She’s definitely drawing bigger crowds than McCain was by himself, but if the campaign is feeling the need to “boost” those numbers with lies, maybe she’s not as big a draw as the hype is suggesting.
Or maybe she is.
If she is, then why does the McCain campaign feel the need to lie about the crowds she’s drawing in?
Seriously, Hurria, your tone is starting to feel less like “concerned” and more like “concern troll” lately. Take a deep breath and realize that despite what Republicans say not every bit of bad news is actually good for John McCain.
In one sense, I’m not sweating the polls either. The reason is because (a) a great deal of Obama support is not being tracked at all (younger people w/o landlines, first-time voters, newly-reformed Republicans; (b) the recent polls are exaggerating McCain’s support:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/09/poll-madness-mccain-takes_n_125158.html
So I actually think Obama is doing very well. I also believe that most of this Palin excitement is in states that would have gone to MccCain anyway.
But in another sense I’m sweating a lot, and this is based on the experience of the last two elections: In order for Obama to win, it just can’t be close. The reason is that only if Obama has a substantial lead in the polls, will the Repugs NOT be able to pull off the kind of election fraud they got away with the last two times (especially 2004).
Call me paranoid, but I think paranoia in this case is well merited. Since everything else in McCain’s campaign is bullshit, I don’t think it’s an accident that some polls are being weighted to make him look like he’s doing better than he really is. Such a “perception”, or so goes the Rovian thinking, I am sure, would make it possible to pull off yet another heist of this country.
There are many factors this year that put the Dems in a better position than in 2000 and 2004. As I said, I have no doubt Obama is leading and that it’s not even as close as it may appear. But I really hope the Obama camp is giving its fullest consideration to the way the Republican thugs will try to use gaslighting and other forms of “perception management” to soften things up for their next grand theft. How one deals with this I don’t know, but I hope they know, because sure as hell Rove & Co. will do it if they think they can get away with it.
Correction:
I wrote,
“I don’t think it’s an accident that some polls are being weighted to make him [McCain] look like he’s doing better than he really is.”
Apparently, the polls that do this are just following their normal procedure of NOT weighting for the fact that there are a lot more registered Dems than Republicans in this country.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/lets-get-few-things-straight-party-id.html
Nevertheless I do think such polls are oversampling Republicans. But they have been doing so all along, and if anything, slightly less now than before the R. convention (according to the above link).
This doesn’t change my main point, which is that the Dems must be prepared for attempts at election fraud in swing districts.