Reminds me of a story JFK tells about Thomas Hart Benton in Profiles in Courage. One of Benton's political opponents threatened to write "a little book, in which the behavior of Sen. Benton will figure prominently." Benton replied by promising to write a large book, in which his opponent would not figure at all.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The Obamamercial
From Samefacts.org:
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Over Fifty
As I mentioned in my last post, the closer we get to the election, the more important it is to look at whether one candidate is breaking through the fifty percent line. The reason that's key, of course, is that if one candidate is above 50, it means that the other candidate can't win, even if all the undecideds break his way. This is becoming a bit of a focus now, with McCain behind in so many places.
Yesterday, McCain's pollster released a memo arguing, basically, that Obama's support in the polls had reached a ceiling and that undecided voters would end up supporting McCain. Another Republican pollster recently made the same basic argument in Salon.com, and actually going even further by arguing that undecideds always vote for the White candidate if one candidate is Black. I'll leave it to others to debunk these claims but, for the moment, let's assume these folks are right and that Obama won't win a single undecided voter. Under that assumption, Obama can only win in states where he is at, or above, 50% in the polls. Taking the Pollster.com averages, here are the states where Barack Obama is above the magic line:
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusettes, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Those states alone are worth 282 electoral votes. Add in Rhode Island (which is missing since it has not been polled much recently and although the Pollster.com average has Obama more than 20 points ahead of McCain here, technically, he's still below 50, so I it off) and you've got 286 electoral votes.
There are two other states that we could reasonably add to this list because a candidate, in practice, will usually win if he or she gets more than 49.5% of the vote (since about 1% will go to minor party candidates). If we make the threshold 49.5 instead of 50, then Obama picks up Ohio and Nevada, bringing his total to 311 electoral votes.
So as the tracking polls contintue to show "tightening," it bears keeping in mind that an average of all the recent polls gives Obama majority, not merely plurality, support in a winning combination of states. If McCain wants to win he's got to get Obama's support under 50 in at least a few of these states. Also, it's worth mentioning that, aside from Ohio and Nevada, the only other state where Obama's polling lower than 51% is New Mexico. Take these three states away from him, and he still wins with 281 electoral votes (assuming Rhode Island).
Steep hill to climb, indeed.
Late Update: Just today, new polls at Pollster.com have bumped Obama's average in Nevada over 50%. Just thought I'd let you know.
Yesterday, McCain's pollster released a memo arguing, basically, that Obama's support in the polls had reached a ceiling and that undecided voters would end up supporting McCain. Another Republican pollster recently made the same basic argument in Salon.com, and actually going even further by arguing that undecideds always vote for the White candidate if one candidate is Black. I'll leave it to others to debunk these claims but, for the moment, let's assume these folks are right and that Obama won't win a single undecided voter. Under that assumption, Obama can only win in states where he is at, or above, 50% in the polls. Taking the Pollster.com averages, here are the states where Barack Obama is above the magic line:
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusettes, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Those states alone are worth 282 electoral votes. Add in Rhode Island (which is missing since it has not been polled much recently and although the Pollster.com average has Obama more than 20 points ahead of McCain here, technically, he's still below 50, so I it off) and you've got 286 electoral votes.
There are two other states that we could reasonably add to this list because a candidate, in practice, will usually win if he or she gets more than 49.5% of the vote (since about 1% will go to minor party candidates). If we make the threshold 49.5 instead of 50, then Obama picks up Ohio and Nevada, bringing his total to 311 electoral votes.
So as the tracking polls contintue to show "tightening," it bears keeping in mind that an average of all the recent polls gives Obama majority, not merely plurality, support in a winning combination of states. If McCain wants to win he's got to get Obama's support under 50 in at least a few of these states. Also, it's worth mentioning that, aside from Ohio and Nevada, the only other state where Obama's polling lower than 51% is New Mexico. Take these three states away from him, and he still wins with 281 electoral votes (assuming Rhode Island).
Steep hill to climb, indeed.
Late Update: Just today, new polls at Pollster.com have bumped Obama's average in Nevada over 50%. Just thought I'd let you know.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The Tightening
The conventional wisdom is that Presidential races (and perhaps most races at all levels) get closer in the final week of an election. With Barack Obama holding a rather significant lead coming into today, exactly one week before election day, are we beginning to see that tightening? Certainly, if you look at Pollster.com and turn the "sensitivity" up to high, you get this picture:
It does look like John McCain is closing in a bit, and Obama is falling off somewhat. That seems to suggest that there is, at the least, a bit of tightening happening at the national level (the state level is another matter). But I want to point out a few things about the national "race."
Before get there, though, let's look at more fun graphs (one of my loyal readers, in particular, has been very positive about these graphs I make). I took all the national polls from Pollster.com and plotted them here based on a five-day rolling simple average (just like my state graphs):
The five day averaging smooths out quite a bit of the variation, and leaves me with the unmistakable impression of relative stability. There may, indeed, be a bit of tightening today but, even so, the range for each candidate has been really narrow. Obama's low of 49% came 27 days out from the election, and his high of 51.6% was 9 days out. That's a range of less than 3 percentage points (and in fact every day except for his high point was within the range 49-51%). McCain's support has ranged from 41.7% to 43.5%, also remarkably stable.
Now, as I mentioned, part of that stability comes from the fact that I'm using a five day average. For state polls, that's useful because there are, in general, fewer polls. For the national numbers, it may be better to use a shorter time span, say 3 days. Here's that picture, with the 5 day lines in there just for comparison's sake:
Not a whole heck of a lot of difference, though the recent tightening is a bit more pronounced. My point in posting this second version, with a shorter rolling average time-span is to underline the basic stability of this race over the past 20 days or so.
I have one other point to make. Ignore Senator McCain's level of support for a moment and focus on Senator Obama's. Using either the 3 day or the 5 day average*, its clear that Obama's support hovers right around 50%. That is actually the key takeaway from all this, and it's a point that doesn't get mentioned enough in the media.
The media and the talking heads usually focus on the spread, the difference between Obama and McCain in any given poll, and that's ok. That margin is a good indicator, especially in the early days of a campaign. But as we get closert to election day, if one candidate is consistently at 50% or above, the margin no longer matters. Don't forget, the final margin is actually irrellevant. We operate in a winner-take-all system, so what matters is who gets to 50% (or more like 49.5% assuming 1% to minor candidates). The bottom line here is that if Obama has a solidified support of 50% to McCain's 44 or 45%, and there only remains about 4 or 5% of voters who have yet to decide, then there's not enough "undecideds" left for McCain to win over. He would essentially have to win all of the remaining undecideds to have shot at pulling even (I'll write about my feelings on how the undecideds will break down in a later post).
This principle, to look and see if one candidate has crossed the 50% threshold, both nationally and on a state-by-state basis, is how you should read the polls for the next seven days. I'll apply my own advice to current polling in battle ground states in my next post.
*Incidentally, in addition to the 3 and 5 day simple averages, I also produced a few graphs using 3 and 5 day weighted averages wherein polls are weighted according to sample size (bigger samples are more accurate). For those of you who are interested, here's that graph:
It does look like John McCain is closing in a bit, and Obama is falling off somewhat. That seems to suggest that there is, at the least, a bit of tightening happening at the national level (the state level is another matter). But I want to point out a few things about the national "race."
Before get there, though, let's look at more fun graphs (one of my loyal readers, in particular, has been very positive about these graphs I make). I took all the national polls from Pollster.com and plotted them here based on a five-day rolling simple average (just like my state graphs):
The five day averaging smooths out quite a bit of the variation, and leaves me with the unmistakable impression of relative stability. There may, indeed, be a bit of tightening today but, even so, the range for each candidate has been really narrow. Obama's low of 49% came 27 days out from the election, and his high of 51.6% was 9 days out. That's a range of less than 3 percentage points (and in fact every day except for his high point was within the range 49-51%). McCain's support has ranged from 41.7% to 43.5%, also remarkably stable.
Now, as I mentioned, part of that stability comes from the fact that I'm using a five day average. For state polls, that's useful because there are, in general, fewer polls. For the national numbers, it may be better to use a shorter time span, say 3 days. Here's that picture, with the 5 day lines in there just for comparison's sake:
Not a whole heck of a lot of difference, though the recent tightening is a bit more pronounced. My point in posting this second version, with a shorter rolling average time-span is to underline the basic stability of this race over the past 20 days or so.I have one other point to make. Ignore Senator McCain's level of support for a moment and focus on Senator Obama's. Using either the 3 day or the 5 day average*, its clear that Obama's support hovers right around 50%. That is actually the key takeaway from all this, and it's a point that doesn't get mentioned enough in the media.
The media and the talking heads usually focus on the spread, the difference between Obama and McCain in any given poll, and that's ok. That margin is a good indicator, especially in the early days of a campaign. But as we get closert to election day, if one candidate is consistently at 50% or above, the margin no longer matters. Don't forget, the final margin is actually irrellevant. We operate in a winner-take-all system, so what matters is who gets to 50% (or more like 49.5% assuming 1% to minor candidates). The bottom line here is that if Obama has a solidified support of 50% to McCain's 44 or 45%, and there only remains about 4 or 5% of voters who have yet to decide, then there's not enough "undecideds" left for McCain to win over. He would essentially have to win all of the remaining undecideds to have shot at pulling even (I'll write about my feelings on how the undecideds will break down in a later post).
This principle, to look and see if one candidate has crossed the 50% threshold, both nationally and on a state-by-state basis, is how you should read the polls for the next seven days. I'll apply my own advice to current polling in battle ground states in my next post.
*Incidentally, in addition to the 3 and 5 day simple averages, I also produced a few graphs using 3 and 5 day weighted averages wherein polls are weighted according to sample size (bigger samples are more accurate). For those of you who are interested, here's that graph:
Monday, October 27, 2008
More 2004 and 2008 Comparisons
A few days ago I wrote about how Barack Obama is outperforming both John Kerry and George Bush both nationally and in a couple of key states. Here is a quick update to that post. You can click on the graphs below to enlarge them and get a better look.
And here's one additional state for your viewing pleasure:
A couple of quick notes about these graphs. First, it does seem like, despite all the polls showing small movements here and there, the race has been pretty stable for the past 10 days or so. Second, Obama continues to do far better than Kerry* did, both at the national level and in key states. Third, the Florida race still looks a lot like a repeat of 2004, but with the parties flipped. I don't have any good reason for this, but it is interesting none-the-less. Finally, these numbers suggest that Obama is actually in a better position in Ohio than he is in Florida. I'm not sure if that jibes with my gut feeling, but them's the numbers.
*"Kerry" here refers to Senator John Kerry, 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate, and not to my Portland fan base. Hi Portland!
And here's one additional state for your viewing pleasure:
A couple of quick notes about these graphs. First, it does seem like, despite all the polls showing small movements here and there, the race has been pretty stable for the past 10 days or so. Second, Obama continues to do far better than Kerry* did, both at the national level and in key states. Third, the Florida race still looks a lot like a repeat of 2004, but with the parties flipped. I don't have any good reason for this, but it is interesting none-the-less. Finally, these numbers suggest that Obama is actually in a better position in Ohio than he is in Florida. I'm not sure if that jibes with my gut feeling, but them's the numbers.*"Kerry" here refers to Senator John Kerry, 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate, and not to my Portland fan base. Hi Portland!
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Is Georgia in Play?
There is a new poll out today from Democracy Corps that shows Obama down only 2 points in Georgia. That's a substantially closer margin than most other recent polls, but it does beg the question, "Could Obama win Georgia?"
After the Mississippi primary back in the spring, I wrote a post asking that same question about Mississippi and the answer was basically, "no." In order for Obama to have a realistic shot in Mississippi, African American turnout would have to go up by about 10 percentage points over 2004 levels, or Obama would have to win substantially more white voters than Kerry did.
Georgia, it turns out, is a somewhat easier task, but still a long shot. Take a look at this graph:
This grpah shows the percentage of white voters that Obama would have to win in order to carry the state, given a variety of other assumptions (I assume 5% of the electoral will be both not White and not Black and that Obama will win 60% of these voters). The three blue lines correspond to differing levels of Black support for Obama, and on the X axis you have increasing degrees of Black turnout as a percentage of total voters. You can see pretty easily that as Black turnout increases, the share of White voters Obama needs to win goes down. That makes perfect sense. Also, the stronger the Black support is for Obama, the less White support he needs. Again, no surprise there.
Now, for the moment let's look at the middle blue line, which assumes 90% of Black voters will cast a ballot for Obama. This is a reasonable, though perhaps conservative, assumption given that 88% of African American voters supported Kerry four years ago. With 90% of the black vote, and 2004 turnout levels (as indicated by the red arrow on the left), you can see that Obama would need just under 35% of the White vote to win. Kerry got 23%, and even in today's very optimistic Democracy Corps survey, Obama's only winning 24% of Whites.
So, basically, Obama needs three ingrediants to win Georgia (or any state in the South for that matter):
1) Strong support among Black voters approaching unanimity
2) Black turnout at record levels
3) Slightly stronger support from White voters than Kerry got
To be more specific, for a squeaker win, Obama needs better than 90% Black support, an electorate with about 35% Black voters, and 25% of the White vote. Can he do it? Let's take them one at a time.
1) Better than 90% Black support? The Democracy Corps survey pegs his Black support at 90% even. The second most recent survey, from Research 2000, has it at 91%. Interestingly, both surveys show McCain with anemic levels of Black support, far lower than even Bush got four years ago (2% and 5% respectively, compare to 12% for Bush). Both polls, therefor, suggest that there are between 5 and 7% of Black voters who are still "undecided." If those folks split evenly, or even largely to McCain, that means Obama's support among African Americans will be closer to 92 or 93%. So, first ingredient: check.
2) African Americans make up about 30% of Georgia's population, but were only 25% of Georgia's electorate four years ago. Is a ten percent jump possible? The early data says that maybe it is. Early voting has already begun in Georgia, and already close to 900,000 ballots have been cast. That's 27% of the total ballots cast four years ago. So far, African Americans have made up about 35.5% of all early voters. Can that rate hold througout the election? I don't know, but for now, second ingredient: check.
3) Democracy corps has 24% of White voters supporting Obama, Research 2000 has it at 21%. Of course, these are polls, so we can't really know exactly where Obama's White support currently is. At the very least, it's not outside the realm of possibility that he gets to 25%.
The bottom line is that Obama has a real, but slim chance to win Georgia. This might be one state to watch on election night (call it an upset special, if you will).
After the Mississippi primary back in the spring, I wrote a post asking that same question about Mississippi and the answer was basically, "no." In order for Obama to have a realistic shot in Mississippi, African American turnout would have to go up by about 10 percentage points over 2004 levels, or Obama would have to win substantially more white voters than Kerry did.
Georgia, it turns out, is a somewhat easier task, but still a long shot. Take a look at this graph:
This grpah shows the percentage of white voters that Obama would have to win in order to carry the state, given a variety of other assumptions (I assume 5% of the electoral will be both not White and not Black and that Obama will win 60% of these voters). The three blue lines correspond to differing levels of Black support for Obama, and on the X axis you have increasing degrees of Black turnout as a percentage of total voters. You can see pretty easily that as Black turnout increases, the share of White voters Obama needs to win goes down. That makes perfect sense. Also, the stronger the Black support is for Obama, the less White support he needs. Again, no surprise there.
Now, for the moment let's look at the middle blue line, which assumes 90% of Black voters will cast a ballot for Obama. This is a reasonable, though perhaps conservative, assumption given that 88% of African American voters supported Kerry four years ago. With 90% of the black vote, and 2004 turnout levels (as indicated by the red arrow on the left), you can see that Obama would need just under 35% of the White vote to win. Kerry got 23%, and even in today's very optimistic Democracy Corps survey, Obama's only winning 24% of Whites.
So, basically, Obama needs three ingrediants to win Georgia (or any state in the South for that matter):
1) Strong support among Black voters approaching unanimity
2) Black turnout at record levels
3) Slightly stronger support from White voters than Kerry got
To be more specific, for a squeaker win, Obama needs better than 90% Black support, an electorate with about 35% Black voters, and 25% of the White vote. Can he do it? Let's take them one at a time.
1) Better than 90% Black support? The Democracy Corps survey pegs his Black support at 90% even. The second most recent survey, from Research 2000, has it at 91%. Interestingly, both surveys show McCain with anemic levels of Black support, far lower than even Bush got four years ago (2% and 5% respectively, compare to 12% for Bush). Both polls, therefor, suggest that there are between 5 and 7% of Black voters who are still "undecided." If those folks split evenly, or even largely to McCain, that means Obama's support among African Americans will be closer to 92 or 93%. So, first ingredient: check.
2) African Americans make up about 30% of Georgia's population, but were only 25% of Georgia's electorate four years ago. Is a ten percent jump possible? The early data says that maybe it is. Early voting has already begun in Georgia, and already close to 900,000 ballots have been cast. That's 27% of the total ballots cast four years ago. So far, African Americans have made up about 35.5% of all early voters. Can that rate hold througout the election? I don't know, but for now, second ingredient: check.
3) Democracy corps has 24% of White voters supporting Obama, Research 2000 has it at 21%. Of course, these are polls, so we can't really know exactly where Obama's White support currently is. At the very least, it's not outside the realm of possibility that he gets to 25%.
The bottom line is that Obama has a real, but slim chance to win Georgia. This might be one state to watch on election night (call it an upset special, if you will).
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
All Pennsylvania, All the Time
One of my loyal readers recently asked, "Will you please start posting about some other state besides Pennsylvania?" Fair enough, and I was all set to do that but then John McCain apparently decided to go "all in" on a Pennsylvania strategy.
In case you have missed it, the basic story is that McCain's campaign seems to think that along with Iowa and New Mexico, Colorado is also essentially out of reach for them. The problem, then, is that if Obama wins all the Kerry states along with those three states, that gives Obama 273 electoral votes and thus the Presidency. Note that this map would mean an Obama victory even if McCain won Ohio and Florida and Virginia and North Carolina and Missouri and Indiana. What has finally become clear to the McCain campaign is that if this election is allowed to play out entirely in "Red" states, then McCain cannot realistically hope to win the election. Unfortunately for the Republicans, there aren't many Kerry states where they both have a realistic shot at winning and are big enough to make a difference. Pennsylvania, I guess, is the state that comes closest (although if you'd asked anyone two months ago, everyone would have said Michigan was their best bet).
If you've read this blog before, you know that I think Pennsylvania is out of reach for McCain due in large part to the huge registration advantage the Democrats now have. Combine that with available polling which shows Obama ahead by double digit margins and it leaves one wondering how McCain thinks he can win there.
There is some suggestion that the internal polling from both campaigns shows a much closer race than the public polls do. That's possible, but there's no logical reason why internal polls would be inherently more accurate than public polls. Both suffer from the same sources of error (random variation, response bias, etc). This being the case, even if internal polls show a 4 or 5 point margin, compared to the 10 or 12 point margin the public polls, that still means a substantial Obama lead.
I do think that Obama is very unlikely to win Pennsylvania by more than, say, 6 or 7 points. But don't forget that Obama is competitive, maybe even ahead, in places like Virginia and Indiana. Kerry lost those states by big margins (8 and 20 points respectively). Even though Kerry won PA by only 2 points, there's no reason to think that Obama can't improve on that margin by some significant amounts since he's clearly besting Kerry's showing in other places.
Nevertheless, if McCain and Governor Palin begin spending much, even most, of their remaining time in Pennsylvania, do expect to see the polls reflect that attention. Will it be enough? I don't think so, but given the electoral map and the dwindling number of days left before November 4, I can certainly understand why the McCain camp is hoping they can pull off a big upset.
In case you have missed it, the basic story is that McCain's campaign seems to think that along with Iowa and New Mexico, Colorado is also essentially out of reach for them. The problem, then, is that if Obama wins all the Kerry states along with those three states, that gives Obama 273 electoral votes and thus the Presidency. Note that this map would mean an Obama victory even if McCain won Ohio and Florida and Virginia and North Carolina and Missouri and Indiana. What has finally become clear to the McCain campaign is that if this election is allowed to play out entirely in "Red" states, then McCain cannot realistically hope to win the election. Unfortunately for the Republicans, there aren't many Kerry states where they both have a realistic shot at winning and are big enough to make a difference. Pennsylvania, I guess, is the state that comes closest (although if you'd asked anyone two months ago, everyone would have said Michigan was their best bet).
If you've read this blog before, you know that I think Pennsylvania is out of reach for McCain due in large part to the huge registration advantage the Democrats now have. Combine that with available polling which shows Obama ahead by double digit margins and it leaves one wondering how McCain thinks he can win there.
There is some suggestion that the internal polling from both campaigns shows a much closer race than the public polls do. That's possible, but there's no logical reason why internal polls would be inherently more accurate than public polls. Both suffer from the same sources of error (random variation, response bias, etc). This being the case, even if internal polls show a 4 or 5 point margin, compared to the 10 or 12 point margin the public polls, that still means a substantial Obama lead.
I do think that Obama is very unlikely to win Pennsylvania by more than, say, 6 or 7 points. But don't forget that Obama is competitive, maybe even ahead, in places like Virginia and Indiana. Kerry lost those states by big margins (8 and 20 points respectively). Even though Kerry won PA by only 2 points, there's no reason to think that Obama can't improve on that margin by some significant amounts since he's clearly besting Kerry's showing in other places.
Nevertheless, if McCain and Governor Palin begin spending much, even most, of their remaining time in Pennsylvania, do expect to see the polls reflect that attention. Will it be enough? I don't think so, but given the electoral map and the dwindling number of days left before November 4, I can certainly understand why the McCain camp is hoping they can pull off a big upset.
Monday, October 20, 2008
New PA Poll Really Bad News For McCain
There's a new poll out of Pennsylvanian today that shows Obama ahead of McCain by 8 points. That's actually closer than many other polls have shown recently. So the question is, "Is McCain closing in Pennsylvania?" Actually, a close look at this poll suggests that McCain is actually toast in Pennsylvania.
First, there's the demographic make-up of the poll. Only 8% of the respondents were African-American, only 6% were aged 18-29, and only 18% were aged 30-44. Now, in 2004, the Pennsylvania electorate was 13% African American, 21% were under 29 years old, and 28% were 30 to 44 years old. So this sample was both much much older than the PA electorate and much whiter. Does anyone think that this year African-American and younger voters will turnout in lower numbers this year than four years ago?
Second, even though the sample is skewed towards demographic groups that lean McCain, he's still behind by a statistically significant margin. Furthermore, McCain's favorability rating is only 44% in this poll, and has only a +4 net favorability (Obama's is 52%, +18). What does that mean? It means like even in an older, whiter version of Pennsylvania, McCain is not so popular.
The bottom line is that McCain is in a deep hole in Pennsylvania. This doesn't mean that the media won't keep pretending that Pennsylvania's a battleground, because they will. It's important for the media that Pennsylvania be considered "close," because without PA, McCain has an extraordinarily narrow path to the White House.
Anyway, sorry to keep harping on the Keystone state.
First, there's the demographic make-up of the poll. Only 8% of the respondents were African-American, only 6% were aged 18-29, and only 18% were aged 30-44. Now, in 2004, the Pennsylvania electorate was 13% African American, 21% were under 29 years old, and 28% were 30 to 44 years old. So this sample was both much much older than the PA electorate and much whiter. Does anyone think that this year African-American and younger voters will turnout in lower numbers this year than four years ago?
Second, even though the sample is skewed towards demographic groups that lean McCain, he's still behind by a statistically significant margin. Furthermore, McCain's favorability rating is only 44% in this poll, and has only a +4 net favorability (Obama's is 52%, +18). What does that mean? It means like even in an older, whiter version of Pennsylvania, McCain is not so popular.
The bottom line is that McCain is in a deep hole in Pennsylvania. This doesn't mean that the media won't keep pretending that Pennsylvania's a battleground, because they will. It's important for the media that Pennsylvania be considered "close," because without PA, McCain has an extraordinarily narrow path to the White House.
Anyway, sorry to keep harping on the Keystone state.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Comparing 2008 to 2004
There’s some interesting things here, but first we need to get some basics out of the way. The methodology of Electoral-Vote.com in 2004 was to award each state’s electoral votes based on the leader of the most current poll. That’s why you see such big swings back and forth between Kerry and Bush. There were a bunch of states that were very close and therefore polls kept showing the lead flip from one candidate to another. This year, however, Electoral-Vote.com decided to switch up its methods and now they use an average of the most recent polls (going back a week, I believe). The difference in methodologies explains why the 2008 lines are much more stable than the 2004 lines.
Stability issues aside, the graph reveals quite dramatically how different this race is right now. Obama has a lead that is greater than anything either Bush or Kerry ever achieved. Moreover, McCain is dwelling down in vote totals lower than anything suffered by Bush or Kerry. Indeed, neither Bush nor Kerry ever broke 300 electoral votes, and neither ever fell below 225. By contrast, Obama has not yet fallen below 350 electoral votes and McCain has yet to climb above 200.
So that’s the national picture. What about at the state level. Well, let’s look at my favorite state, Pennsylvania. Below is a graph of a the polling in Pennsylvania over the last 32 days leading up to election day this year and four years ago. Each day’s level is a simple average of all polls released that day and four days prior (a five-day rolling average, in other words).
This graph has a lot of the same patterns as the national picture. Obama is far outperforming Kerry and McCain is way behind Bush. The result is a big lead for Obama.
Finally, let’s look at one more state: Florida, that swingiest of swing states. Here’s the same graph for Florida:
Now this is really interesting. Again, Obama is outperforming Kerry and McCain is underperforming compared to Bush. But what I think is fascinating is how similar the Obama line is to the Bush line and how similar the McCain line is to the Kerry line. Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future behavior, but one wonders if the pattern will hold through the next few weeks. If so, we can expect polls to tighten some in Florida, but the averages will favor Obama.
One final note about Florida. Notice that in the final tally, Bush actually did far better than final polling suggested (by about 4 points). Since it is unlikely that all the undecideds broke his way (exit polls indicated that late deciders split about evenly), this disparity suggests the effects of a very successful get-out-the-vote effort. Indeed, we know that President Bush implemented an unprecedented GOTV operation in both Ohio and Florida (he similarly over-performed in Ohio by about 3 points). What does that mean for 2008? Well, if Obama does have a GOTV advantage, it could be worth up to four points.
Speculation aside, there is really no doubt that 2008 looks very different from 2004.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Another Look at Pennsylvania
Three weeks ago, I wrote a long post about how registration data in Pennsylvania could be used to predict the outcome of the election there. I found that, even after making some generous assumptions for Senator McCain, he would still lose because there are simply way more Democrats than Republicans this year in Pennsylvania.
Well, three weeks have gone by and Pennsylvania isn’t looking quite as close as it did back in the middle of September (even my parents have mostly stopped worrying). Pollster.com now has Senator Obama ahead of Senator McCain by more than 12 points in PA. RealClearPolitics has the deficit at more than 13 points, and FiveThirtyEight.com has Obama ahead by 11. All three sites now list Pennsylvania as “Safe,” “Solid,” or “Strong,” for Obama. Quite a dramatic change from three weeks ago. But it might even be worse for McCain than that.
In the time since I wrote that initial post, registration has closed in Pennsylvania and so we have some “final” numbers to look at. If you’ll recall, my methodology is to use the relationship between county registration numbers and vote tallies from 2004 to predict the 2008 tallies. Three weeks ago, using this method, I came up with the following unadjusted prediction:
Obama – 54.6%
McCain – 45.4%
Now, between then and now, Democrats have added another 117,000 registrants while the Republicans have added only 41,000 new registrants. That’s right. In just a few weeks, the Democrats added to their registration advantage by more than half of the total margin by which John Kerry defeated George Bush. What do all these new registrations do to my prediction? Have a look:
Obama – 59.7%
McCain – 40.3%
A twenty point blow-out! Is that possible? Yes. Is it likely? Probably not, but it certainly suggests those polls showing Obama up by 15 are not outliers.
I also want to take this opportunity to address a question that readers have asked about the methodology. The questions is, “What about the independents?” As you probably noticed, I talked a lot about Democratic and Republic registration numbers, and how these numbers can be used to predict the outcome. Where are the independents? Well, they are actually already implicitly included in the model. The idea here is that the number of registered Democrats in a given county is an excellent predictor of the total number of votes that the Democratic candidate will receive in that county. Those votes can come from Democrats, Republicans and Independents, it doesn’t matter. The point is that the registration numbers are, indeed, great predictors of vote totals (at least in Pennsylvania). If there are many more registered Democrats than Republicans in a given county, it doesn’t matter how many registered Independents there are, the Democratic candidate will win that county. Why is this the case? Well, its probably the case because Independents aren’t usually all that independent. In fact, it turns out that most Independents have a fairly consisted lean toward one party or another. Moreover, and I’m speculating a bit here, it seems likely that in a county that is dominated by, say, Republicans, that the Independents are likely to be Republican leaners. Similarly, in a more closely divided county, it seems likely that the Independents are likely to more evenly divided. This may account for the fact that we can predict real vote totals based on party registrations alone.
The other question I’ve gotten is, “What about race?” Some have asked if race won’t make some of these Democrats act more like Republicans. That’s a fair question and even though I think that the events of the past few weeks will mitigate some of this behavior, I also think that there will be some otherwise Democratic-leaning voters who pull the lever for McCain because of race. But it would take a huge number of these folks to change the outcome. Indeed, for the regression model to predict a McCain victory, about 800,000 registered Democrats need to switch over and be treated like registered Republicans. For reference, 800,000 is more than 60% of the total number of voters who cast their ballot for Hillary Clinton in the primary. If McCain’s gonna pick off any Democrats its going to be among former Hillary voters. Does anyone believe that he can win more than 10% or 15% or even 20% of them?
The bottom line today is the same as it was three weeks ago. McCain will lose Pennsylvania because there are simply many more Democrats than Republicans in the state.
Well, three weeks have gone by and Pennsylvania isn’t looking quite as close as it did back in the middle of September (even my parents have mostly stopped worrying). Pollster.com now has Senator Obama ahead of Senator McCain by more than 12 points in PA. RealClearPolitics has the deficit at more than 13 points, and FiveThirtyEight.com has Obama ahead by 11. All three sites now list Pennsylvania as “Safe,” “Solid,” or “Strong,” for Obama. Quite a dramatic change from three weeks ago. But it might even be worse for McCain than that.
In the time since I wrote that initial post, registration has closed in Pennsylvania and so we have some “final” numbers to look at. If you’ll recall, my methodology is to use the relationship between county registration numbers and vote tallies from 2004 to predict the 2008 tallies. Three weeks ago, using this method, I came up with the following unadjusted prediction:
Obama – 54.6%
McCain – 45.4%
Now, between then and now, Democrats have added another 117,000 registrants while the Republicans have added only 41,000 new registrants. That’s right. In just a few weeks, the Democrats added to their registration advantage by more than half of the total margin by which John Kerry defeated George Bush. What do all these new registrations do to my prediction? Have a look:
Obama – 59.7%
McCain – 40.3%
A twenty point blow-out! Is that possible? Yes. Is it likely? Probably not, but it certainly suggests those polls showing Obama up by 15 are not outliers.
I also want to take this opportunity to address a question that readers have asked about the methodology. The questions is, “What about the independents?” As you probably noticed, I talked a lot about Democratic and Republic registration numbers, and how these numbers can be used to predict the outcome. Where are the independents? Well, they are actually already implicitly included in the model. The idea here is that the number of registered Democrats in a given county is an excellent predictor of the total number of votes that the Democratic candidate will receive in that county. Those votes can come from Democrats, Republicans and Independents, it doesn’t matter. The point is that the registration numbers are, indeed, great predictors of vote totals (at least in Pennsylvania). If there are many more registered Democrats than Republicans in a given county, it doesn’t matter how many registered Independents there are, the Democratic candidate will win that county. Why is this the case? Well, its probably the case because Independents aren’t usually all that independent. In fact, it turns out that most Independents have a fairly consisted lean toward one party or another. Moreover, and I’m speculating a bit here, it seems likely that in a county that is dominated by, say, Republicans, that the Independents are likely to be Republican leaners. Similarly, in a more closely divided county, it seems likely that the Independents are likely to more evenly divided. This may account for the fact that we can predict real vote totals based on party registrations alone.
The other question I’ve gotten is, “What about race?” Some have asked if race won’t make some of these Democrats act more like Republicans. That’s a fair question and even though I think that the events of the past few weeks will mitigate some of this behavior, I also think that there will be some otherwise Democratic-leaning voters who pull the lever for McCain because of race. But it would take a huge number of these folks to change the outcome. Indeed, for the regression model to predict a McCain victory, about 800,000 registered Democrats need to switch over and be treated like registered Republicans. For reference, 800,000 is more than 60% of the total number of voters who cast their ballot for Hillary Clinton in the primary. If McCain’s gonna pick off any Democrats its going to be among former Hillary voters. Does anyone believe that he can win more than 10% or 15% or even 20% of them?
The bottom line today is the same as it was three weeks ago. McCain will lose Pennsylvania because there are simply many more Democrats than Republicans in the state.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Wonkery in the Face of Wankery
You might have noticed that most political reporting over the past several days has been focused on a guy named Bill Ayers. I have not written anything about Mr. Ayers nor do I intend to. Instead, in my own tiny little protest of how astoundingly useless the cable “news” networks are, I’m going to offer you the following wonky post about John McCain’s health care plan.
There are over 40 million people in this country without health insurance (8 million of them, by the way, are children), but the number of the uninsured is only one metric of the growing healthcare crisis we face. There are millions more who are “underinsured,” meaning they have some insurance but not enough to cover many illnesses or injuries. And then there are the millions of Americans for whom, though they have health insurance, health care costs are nevertheless eating up more and more of their budgets.
Not surprisingly, both candidates have plans to address this. Barack Obama’s plan (which I’m not going to go into in much detail) essentially builds on the current system, relying heavily on the employer-based healthcare coverage model, while expanding successful programs like Medicaid and SCHIP, and it includes subsidies for low-income families and mandatory coverage for children. Implementing Obama’s plan would actually mean very little for people who already have health insurance (though it may become somewhat cheaper under Obama’s plan), and is, fundamentally, not a particularly “revolutionary” proposal.
McCain’s plan, counter-intuitively, is much more radical, though much simpler. In a nutshell, Senator McCain wants to give everyone a $2,500 tax credit ($5,000 for couples) with which they can purchase their own health insurance coverage. This sounds great. If you don’t have health insurance, with the McCain tax credit, you’ll be able to buy it. If you do have health insurance, you can use the credit to help pay for it. Of course, in order to ensure that the credit is used only for health care, the money doesn’t go to you, it goes straight to the insurance company, but for those of you who already pay for health insurance (and most people do), that still means money in your pocket.
Now, if giving out checks of $2,500 to every American seems kind of expensive, you’re right, it is. McCain knows this and so his proposal is to begin taxing employer sponsored health benefits as income. This would be the first time in history that health benefits would be taxed like this.
To better understand this, let’s imagine up a hypothetical worker. Bob, age 25 and in good health, makes $40,000 a year at his job with Generic Co., where he also gets health insurance. His health benefit costs his employer $5,000 a year (which is about average for single coverage), and Bob pays about $50 a month. This year, when Bob pays his federal income taxes, his taxable income doesn’t include that $5,000 benefit, but under McCain’s plan, that $5,000 would be considered income and so, because Bob is in the 25% tax bracket, he would have to pay an additional $1,250 in federal income taxes.
But for Bob, that’s still a good deal. Sure, he has to pay more income taxes, but that’s offset by the tax credit, and the rest of the credit goes to pay all his health premiums. At the end of the day he’s $750 better off.
But wait. Bob’s a smart guy and he realizes pretty quickly that there is an easy way for him to be even better off under McCain’s plan. All he has to do is drop his employer provided health insurance and instead buy his own health coverage. Why? Because if he’s buying his own insurance instead of getting from his job, then he won’t be taxed on that benefit. He’ll still get the health credit to buy insurance, and he won’t have to pay the extra money in federal taxes. As long as he can find a private insurance policy that costs less than $2,500 a year, then he’ll end up the full $2,500 better off (and that’s not a problem for him, a young, single, healthy guy).
So, Bob drops his employer sponsored health coverage in favor of a policy purchased on the open market and he’s just made himself $2,500 richer. Herein lies the huge problem with the McCain health plan. It works just fine for people like Bob who are young and healthy and have no families to support. But for everyone else, things don’t work out quite as well.
Health insurance is, at base, is a bet that you make with your policy provider. You bet that’ll get sick sometime this year, and they bet you won’t. You pay them a monthly fee, and if you “win” they’ll pay for your care. If they “win” they get to keep your premiums. If you’re young and healthy, the health insurance company is especially eager to take that bet, and they’ll even take smaller monthly payments. If you’re older or you have some health problems, that company is going to be much more reluctant to make the bet without much higher payments from you and maybe they won’t make the bet at all.
But…perhaps they’d be willing to cover the older, sicker individual, to bet with him on his health, if he finds a young, healthy person to come in on the bet too, for a slightly higher cost than she would otherwise have to pay on her own. In that case, you see, the company feels a bit better about the bet because even if they lose on the older guy, they’ll win on the younger gal, and make money anyway. That’s essentially what happens with employer-sponsored coverage. The health insurance company offers “reasonable” premiums to large firms because they have both young and old workers, both sick and healthy employees.
Now back to Bob. Bob has figured out that under John McCain’s health plan he’s better off going outside his employer and getting health insurance on his own. Bob tells his co-worker Jackie, who is 28 and also healthy, about his discovery and she too drops out of the employer-sponsored coverage.
Jackie tells her colleague Sally about how great she has it now that McCain is President. Sally, unfortunately, is a bit older, and she has two kids. For family coverage, Generic Co. pays $12,000 a year (again, that’s the average cost for employer sponsored family coverage), of which Sally pays $100 a month. Sally makes $60,000 (also in the 25% tax bracket), and so the McCain plan means her health benefit costs her an additional $3,000 in income taxes at the end of the year, more than the $2,500 tax credit. Ouch. McCain has just cost her $500. Sally looks around for a private policy, but with her age and her two kids, she can’t find a single good policy (one with anything lower than a $1,000 deductible) that would cost less than $3,000 a year. Oh well, she guesses she’ll just stick with her employer coverage, even though its now costing her $500 more a year.
So far, we’ve seen that McCain’s plan is good for Bob and Jackie but not so good for Sally. Sadly, things are about to get a whole lot worse for Sally. Pretty soon, most of Generic Co.’s younger, healthier employees figure out that they’d rather get their coverage from private insurers. Soon after that, the health insurance company realizes that its bets on Generic’s employees aren’t looking so hot since all of the “good” bets are out of the game. They have no choice but to raise premiums for Generic Co. Now, Sally’s policy costs Generic Co. $15,000 instead of $12,000, and Sally’s income taxes rise by another $750. Moreover, Generic Co. can’t keep charging Sally only $100 a month, so they raise her monthly premium to $150 a month. All of sudden, the McCain health plan, which gave young and healthy Bob an additional $2,500 a year, has cost Sally and her two kids $1,850.
Sally’s actually not the biggest victim of the McCain plan, however. Sally, at least, still has health coverage because Generic Co. decided to eat the extra costs instead of dropping health coverage all-together. Lots of other companies, of course, will make the obvious choice and forgo offering health insurance altogether. Offering health benefits only to your older and sicker employees is a profit-killer, and most businesses won’t do it.
McCain wants people to buy health insurance on the open market like they would any other good, and his plan would certainly make this happen. It might take a few years, but the end result of his proposal would be an end to employer based coverage. While that might work out ok for young, healthy, single folks, it would be an absolute disaster for the middle-aged, for sick people, and for parents and kids.
I should also note, by the way, that I haven’t even touched on several other aspects of McCain’s plan that would also have extremely negative, but currently hidden, effects (things like the impact of the rising costs of health care, and his proposal to allow people to buy insurance across state lines).
Wonky blog post accomplished. Take that, CNN.
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