I am no fan of James Carvile and Stan Greenberg, but their pre-election surveys and polling are excellent and I think they’re right:
Two Democratic pollsters and strategists predicted Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) will win the presidential election in a landslide, and that there will be no Republican infrastructure left standing after Election Day.
“There’s basically going to be nothing left standing,” strategist James Carville said Friday.
Carville and pollster Stan Greenberg, talking to reporters at a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor, said Republicans are poised to not just lose an election, but lose a generation as well.
The two well-known Democratic players also said the 2008 election will, from top to bottom, mirror the Democratic wins of 2006.
“We haven’t had two wave elections like this,” Greenberg said.
But, as with the Republicans strategists, these two ass-clowns have no idea how to prognosticate absent some hard data in the here and now. Polls and surveys tell you how people feel in the present, but they do nothing to tell you how people will feel on election day and during the early voting period. What good is it to poll a congressional race in August when the challenger has no name recognition? You have to look at their fundraising, look at their web-page, analyze the demographics of their disrict, assess the vulnerabilities of the incumbent, and check the voter registration surge to see if it will change things.
Whether it’s Carville and Greenberg, Stu Rothernberg, Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato, or Chris Cillizza, they all do their prognostications based on current polling numbers. If a candidate is not ahead in a poll, they simply won’t predict that they will win. What good is that? We can all use the intertubes to collate polling data. If you wanted to know in April whether the Democrats might realistically get 60 votes, you should have been listening to me, not any of these ‘analysts’. Even today, they still insist on basing their predictions on current polling data. What they should be doing is looking at each remotely competitive congressional race and looking at both the voter registration dynamics and the presidential polls (including early voting, where available).
That’s a big job. It would take me an entire day to do it and I don’t have access to the same quality of data. But isn’t that what these guys are paid to do?
