The Jewish Vote

Obviously there are a lot of interesting storylines to write about coming out of this historic election. I intend to write about many of them, but I want to start with a pet peeve of mine.

I'm going to quote myself at length, if you'll permit me. A post I wrote back in February:

Tonight, during the Democratic debate, Tim Russert asked Senator Obama how he felt about having the support of Louis Farrakhan. Apparently, over the weekend Minister Farrakhan decided to publicly endorse Senator Obama for President. Russert's question about it during the debate is sure to spark another round of my least favorite stale election year debate: "Is this the year the Jews vote Republican?"

Yes folks, every four years we have to go through these motions. Some high profile Jewish Republican comes out and makes some case about how this year, the GOP is going to make strong in-roads in the Jewish community. So, let's take a little peeksy, shall we, at the numbers and see if those prognostications have ever been right.

In 1992, Bill Clinton received 80% of the Jewish vote.

In 1996, Bill Clinton received 78% of the Jewish vote.

In 2000, Al Gore received 79% of the Jewish vote.

In 2004, John Kerry received 74% of the Jewish vote.

Strong in-roads, indeed. A whopping 6% change from 1992 to 2004. Just for comparison's sake, during that same time, the GOP share of the evangelical vote went from 61% in 1992 to 78% in 2004. Now that's some in-roading.

The simple fact of the matter is that Jews in America vote for Democrats overwhelmingly. Sure, the Republican candidate can hope to capture 25% of the Jewish vote, but at the end of the day, the other three quarters are voting for the Democratic nominee. There has been a truckload written about why Jews, despite the relative affluence of the American Jewish community in general, continue to vote reliably Democratic and I'm not going to add anything to that discussion here. Suffice it to say that, despite any nasty e-mails floating about claiming Obama was secretly born in Ramallah and has nightly seances with the ghost of Yasser Arafat, Jews in 2008 will again vote 3 to 1 for the Democrat.

Last night, Barack Obama won 78% of the Jewish vote. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, a guy who's middle name is Hussein and who was the target of a seriously nasty whisper campaign directed specifically at Jews, nevertheless won a larger share of Jewish voters than did John Kerry. I made a variety of predictions over the course of this election campaign, and many were off base, but I did have my moments, and this was one of them.

Can we all make a promise that the next time we hear some talking head or lazy journalist suggest that "this is the year that Republicans win over the Jews," we will change the channel and/or tear up the article?

Yes, we can.

Liveblogging II

10:18: 42 minutes until this race is officially over. At 11:00 PM, the networks will give Obama California, Oregon and Washington, and that will put him over 270 electoral votes and the Presidency!

9:49: Virginia Update. Right now, Obama is behind by only 2,000 votes with 75% of Fairfax county left to be counted. 1 in 7 voters live in Fairfax county and Obama will win it with 57% of the vote. It's closer than I expected, but Obama will win Virginia.

9:41: Game over. Ohio for Obama. McCain now has no realistic chance to be President.

9:17: It looks like my prediction regarding the networks calling Virginia is going to be wrong, but they still have not called Indiana, nor have they called North Carolina. Any one of those to Obama and its game over.

Liveblogging

8:38: NBC calls Georgia for McCain. Too bad, but not too surprising. I'll still be interested to see the final tally there.

8:32: The longer it takes to call Indiana, the worse it is going to be for John McCain.

8:27: Prediction...the networks will call Virginia for Obama before 9:30 PM.

8:05 PM: NBC just called PA for Obama, 2 minutes after the polls closed there. That means big margins there! Bad news for John McCain. His path to the Presidency has narrowed significantly.

8:00 PM: Coming into the election, I went through every county in PA, VA, and FL to project what Obama would need to win those states. I'll be referring to those projections throughout the night.

First benchmark. The only county in VA that has fully reported in King and Queen County. in 2004, Kerry got 45%. I projected that Obama needed to match that (with about 1600 votes). Obama won King and Queen with 52% of the vote and 1900 votes.

Prediction

Before it officially becomes election day, here is my prediction for tomorrow:



As you can see, I have Obama taking all the Kerry/Gore states plus Virginia, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada.

I came to this conclusion by taking the final five days worth of polling and averaging them together. Simple, but effective.

For most of the "battleground states," there was a clear leader. Several states, however, were very close, within 2 points. Those were North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, and Indiana. Obama lead in Florida by only 1.5 points, and McCain lead in Indiana by only 1.4 points. I allocated those two states to the nominal leaders. The other two were within half a point, but with McCain ever so slightly ahead in Missouri and vice versa in North Carolina. I went ahead and gave Obama both states figuring that in a "wave" election like this, things will likely break for Obama in very very close states.

I should note that even if McCain wins in every state where the average margin is less than three points, Obama still wins with 291 electoral votes.

My Posting Schedule

I shall not abandon you in this, your hour of need.

It's just that I'm going canvassing.

I expect to post this evening, and then probably not again until after the Virginia polls close at 7 PM Tuesday. After that, I will be semi "live-blogging" the election returns. That means that I will post thoughts and analysis during election night, about every half hour or so. So if that sounds exciting to you, then a) make sure to point your browser over to Centerpiece and b) you're one of those people who is going to have to find a new hobby on Wednesday.

Polls open in VA in 22 hours.

A Win is a Win

I detect a funny phenomenon among Obama supporters. I think I would call it "Landslide Letdown Syndrome." About ten days ago, it looked like there was a real chance for Obama to win upwards of 380 or 390 or even break 400 electoral votes. I think a lot of Obama supporters internalized this possibility and began to measure success against this very high bar.

Today, while it still looks like Obama will win the election, it seems much less likely that it will be a massive blowout. I think that's contributed to some of the "angst" that Obama supporters are feeling. In fact, today I heard a diehard Obama supporter say, after checking fivethirtyeight.com, "Oh my god, McCain's up to 200!"

Remember, though, that while the "expectations game" matters in the primaries, and it matters in the debates, it doesn't really matter on November 4. Whoever gets 270 electoral votes will be the next President whether he gets 270 exactly or 400. No one (except perhaps members of the losing party) is going to be saying, "Well, he won, but he didn't beat the spread, so he can't take office."

Just keep that in mind.

Like Catching A Hail Mary Pass on the 3 Yard Line

In the past three days, no fewer than four polls have shown Barack Obama with a lead of fewer than 6 points. The daily PA tracking polling has also shown a decline in the margin between Obama and McCain and today had Obama leading by eight points. As you, of course, already know, I believe that polls (especially averaged together) are accurate. Therefore, I cannot help but come to the conclusion that John McCain's efforts in Pennsylvania are paying dividends. Where he was 10 or 11 points behind a week ago, he is now only 6 or 7 points behind.




Before talking about this more, I want to point out that I think this is really good evidence for the idea that campaigning matters. Spending time and resources in a state has a real, measurable impact.

Anyway, there are a few things to take away from these new polls. First off, it should be noted that Obama is still ahead, and he is still ahead by a margin much greater than those by which Kerry ever lead.

Second, looking at the bottom graph, you can see that most of the narrowing in the margin has come from McCain's support rising and very little comes from Obama's support dropping. This is unsurprising. As I wrote in my last post about Pennsylvania, there was never a realistic chance that McCain would only win 40% in this state. His numbers were low because a lot of the "undecideds" were actually Republicans. With his recent blitz of the state, he has been able to remind a lot of these people of their original inclinations. As I've written before, party identification is essentially the strongest predictor of voter preferences. It looks to me like the Pennsylvania Republicans are coming home.

The final important takeaway from these new polls is that, despite the narrowing, Obama still breaks 50%. McCain can win every undecided left and still lose if Obama stays above 50.

There will likely be a few more polls out of the Keystone state before Tuesday, so be on the lookout to see:

1) How much more ground McCain can make-up and;
2) If Obama stays over the magic line

Georgia on My Mind

A week ago I asked, "Is Georgia in play?" I layed out three conditions that Obama needs to meet in order to win the Peach State:

1) Better than 90% support among African Americans
2) Black turnout approaching 35% of the electorate
3) Close to 25% White support.

As of today, more than 1.7 million voters have already cast ballots in Georgia. That represents more than half of the total number of ballots cast in 2004 overall. 35% of the early voters have been Black, and only 60.5% have been White. If these proportions hold throughout election day, Obama would need 23% of White votes (assuming 65% among other non-White voters, and 93% among Blacks). That's exactly what John Kerry got in 2004.

Moreover, there is some evidence that, among early voters, at least, Obama is far outperforming 23% among Whites. Here's the deal. According to the most recent Research 2000 poll among Georgia voters who have already cast a ballot, Obama is getting 55% (this is the only poll in Georiga that breaks it down by early voters, so we can't confirm). Now, we know that 35% of the early voters are Black, 60% are White and 4.5% are other non-White voters. If we allocate 99% of the Black voters to Obama and 90% of the other non-White voters to Obama, that gives him 38.7%. That means the remaining 16.6 points of his support come from White voters. Since 60.5% of the early voters are White, 16.6 of that is 27%.

Ok, that was pretty convoluted. Let me explain this another way. Imagine that there have only been 1000 early voters, 350 of whom are Black, 45 of whom are other non-Whites, and 605 of whom are White. Imagine futher that because of polling, we know that 550 of these early voters voted for Obama. We can safely assume that almost all of the 350 Black early voters were in the Obama camp (let's guess that only 4 didn't vote Obama). We can also guess that at least 30 or so of the other non-White voters were in the Obama camp as well. But let's be generous and assume that only 5 of them didn't vote for Obama. So, if we think that 386 (346 Blacks and 40 other voters who are not White) of the 550 Obama voters were not White, that means that 164 of them were White. In other words, out of the 605 Whites who voted early, 164 of them, 27%, voted Obama.

Does your head hurt? The takeaway point is that if that poll is basically right, and Obama is actually pulling in 55% of the early vote, then among early voters, Obama is besting Kerry's White support levels.

Bottom line: Right now Obama is meeting the 3 pronged standard for winning Georgia. The big question is how different will the NOvember 4th electorate be from the early voting electorate?

Pennsylvania, Part XVII

Two new polls out this week spell doom for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania!

The latest NBC/Mason-Dixon poll has it Obama 47, McCain 43, and the most recent Strategic Vision poll has it Obama 49, McCain 44!

Now, as you know by now, I believe that polls, especially averaged together, present a highly accurate picture of the current state of public opinion, so I definitely do not dismiss these polls out of hand. But neither do I dismiss the other polls that came out the contemporaneously with these. CNN/Time, for example, released a poll on Wednesday that has Obama at 55% and McCain at 43%. Muhlenberg, which is running a daily tracking poll in Pennsylvania, pegs Obama at 53%, almost exactly the same as it has been for more than three weeks.

For a better view, let's take a look at our rolling five-day average of polls:



There seems to be no doubt that over the last 12 days, McCain's support has trended upward. In fact, on our graph here, McCain hit bottom on October 16, with only 39.25% support. Since then, however, he has picked up nearly 3 points, bringing him up to 42%. This is totally unsurprising. Even though McCain has run a pretty subpar campaign in an environment that is very hostile for Republicans, it is nevertheless very hard to imagine him winning less than 43 or 44% of the vote in a state where George W. Bush twice broke 47%.

Indeed, what I find more telling about this graph is that, for the past 10 days or so, Obama's support has also been ticking upwards, though at a slower pace than McCain's. He's gained about a point and a half since the 19th of October. Since McCain and Obama are both gaining, that suggests that undecideds are coming off the fence. The troubling thing for McCain is that, contrary to his pollster's hope, they are not breaking exclusively for McCain. In fact, over the past ten days, as the percentage of undecideds dropped by by four points, McCain seems to have gotten about 60% of them. That rate will definitely help make the final margin in Pennsylvania closer than the current ten point gap, but it will not be enough.

One last piece of eye-candy for you. Here's a graph which just shows the margin by which the Democratic candidate is leading in the rolling 5 day average.



It does seem clear that McCain made a little headway after he made it known that he was going to vigorously contest Pennsylvania, but since then, not a whole lot of movement in his direction, and a lot of ground to make up. Notice also that in 2004, the final margin was basically spot on.

Karl Rove is Wrong

Today, in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove counsels voters not to, "let the polls to affect your vote. They were wrong in 2000 and 2004." There are several things wrong with this, and the most glaring is actually that in the column, Rove writes only about exit polls. His argument is that exit polls can lead to erroneous assumptions about who the winner will be be (that's certainly true, and is especially true of "early exits" of the type that were leaked in 2004).

But the implication of this column is that we can't really trust public opinion polls, so we don't know if Obama is really ahead. This insinuation is popping up all over the place. Take a look at the bottom story on today's msnbc website:


Now, you can probably guess where I'm going with this.

I downloaded electoral-vote.com's entire cache of 2004 polls and then I took a simple average of each state's polling from the last five days of the election. I used a simple average because, unfortunately, the data did not include sample sizes. Here are the results (note that in 16 states there was no public polling in the final five days) :

State	Kerry Avg	Bush Avg
Alabama	42.0	53.0
Arizona	41.0	56.0
Arkansas	44.5	51.0
California	53.5	43.0
Colorado	46.3	48.9
Connecticut	52.0	42.0
Florida	47.3	47.9
Georgia	41.3	54.0
Illinois	53.0	42.0
Indiana	38.0	57.5
Iowa	47.0	46.7
Kentucky	38.0	59.0
Maine	52.0	44.0
Maryland	53.0	43.5
Michigan	48.4	46.1
Minnesota	48.4	45.9
Missouri	45.3	50.3
Nevada	45.4	50.4
New Hampshire	48.3	47.0
New Jersey	48.2	41.5
New Mexico	45.6	49.0
New York	54.3	37.7
North Carolina	44.0	53.0
Ohio	46.7	48.3
Oklahoma	34.0	64.0
Oregon	51.5	45.0
Pennsylvania	48.4	46.4
South Carolina	42.0	54.5
Tennessee	40.0	58.0
Texas	34.5	58.5
Utah	24.0	69.0
Virginia	46.0	50.5
Washington	51.7	45.3
West Virginia	43.0	51.0
Wisconsin	48.2	46.2

Of these 35 states, the polling correctly "predicted" the winner in 34 cases. The only exception is Iowa, where the final average was closest of all the states. Moreover, the average difference between the final margin in the polls and the actual final margin was less than 2.4 points. Indeed, in 21 of these states, the polls "predicted" the margin of victory to within 3 points.

The story is even better when looking only at "swing states." Among the fifteen "showdown states" identified by CNN, the average difference between the final polling margin and the actual margin was less than 1.9 points. In Pennsylvania, for example, the average of the final polls gave Kerry a lead of 2.1 points. The final margin was 2.2 points.

Can polls be wrong? Yes, of course, there is always a chance that individual polls are off base. But when taken together, polls paint an accurate picture. Even a simple averaging of polls yields very reliable results (though I prefer to weight my averages when I have the data to do so). 2004, despite Karl Rove's ominous column, is great evidence of that.