And the Alanis Morissette “Misuse of ‘Ironic’” award goes to…
Actually, another repeat farce of 2000 seems almost inevitable.* Especially with Florida still in the dark ages, electorally.
*Well, I don’t know about five weeks. . . but I sure ain’t optimistic about the morning of Nov. 3!
Neither am I.
I still remember telling my wife, as she went to bed on Election Night in 2000, that I was going to stay up until it was clear who won. Needless to say, I had to break that vow! I’m sure not saying anything like that again this time.
And South Carolina is “weak Bush”? That’s surprising…
And Maryland is tied! Can’t even trust the poll trend on that one because it shows a 15 point spread (favoring Bush) by Nov 2. That’s a bigger margin than Bush 1 had over Dukakis (3%) in 1988.
…Ann Coulter award for “Lifting out of Context” goes to you.
A bit.
Just to keep things in perspective. A Gallup poll from Oct. 27, 2000 showing [ulr=http://edition.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/10/27/tracking.poll/"]Bush with a 13% point lead over Gore.
Arrrgghhh (PREVIEW PREVIEW PREVIEW)
I think that reasonable people can disagree on what the ratio of Dems to Pubbies is among the voting public. It’s also clear that it’s a variable. But it seems to be a pretty slow-moving variable, and that’s the key.
From the link, here’s the Harris polling organization’s Party ID tabulations, based on an annual sample size of ~6000:
Year Rep Dem Gap
2003 28 33 5
2002 31 34 3
2001 29 36 7
2000 29 37 8
1999 29 36 7
1998 28 37 9
1997 29 37 8
1996 30 38 8
1995 31 36 5
1994 32 37 5
1993 29 38 9
1992 30 36 6
1991 32 37 5
1990 33 38 5
I trust Pew’s a bit more, but their numbers are embedded in an image in the link, and I’m not going to type them all up here. But Pew uses an annual sample of ~19,000, which is why I trust them more, and they’ve surveyed for Party ID in 1987, and then every year from 1989 to the present. Things have moved around in a pretty constrained range - people identifying GOP have fluctuated between 28 and 33%; people IDing Dem, between 30 and 35%.
I’ll type up the numbers for the election years, though:
Year- R- D- I-
1992 28 33 39
1996 29 33 38
2000 28 33 39
2004 29 33 38
According to Pew, 9/11 had an enormous impact: they split their 2001 numbers into pre- and post-9/11, as shown here:
pre- 28 35 37
post 31 32 37
So the single most cataclysmic event in this country in my lifetime caused the GOP’s numbers to go +3, and the Dems’ to go -3. The point is, when we’re talking about party ID, that IS a cataclysmic change. For the most part, party ID can be regarded as a constant when the timescale is weeks or a few months. It’s still changing, but not by much when compared to the typical poll’s MOE.
So I’m personally a proponent of weighting polls by party ID. I don’t think it’s an open-and-shut case, but so far, it’s where the weight of the evidence I’ve seen tends to point.
What I think is unambiguous, though, is that party ID is one of those questions that has to be asked, and that a poll should be judged by. If a nationwide poll has 43% Republicans and 31% Democrats among its respondents, as the latest Gallup poll did, then it should surprise no one that Bush outpolled Kerry within that sample. (In fact, it should make Rove a bit nervous that Bush was up by only 52-44 among a group that heavily Republican.)
IOW, I don’t think the Gallup poll demonstrates that Bush is ahead; I’d even chalk it up as evidence favoring a narrow Kerry lead. But it’s only one poll of many, and Rasmussen, which does weight by party ID, continues to give Bush a lead that varies between 1% and 4%; ARG, which weights by party ID, had Bush up by 1% in its mega-poll earlier this month; and Zogby, which also weights by party ID, continues to give Bush a slight edge. Because of those polls, I’m convinced that Bush has a slight lead.
But regardless of who’s ahead in what poll, party ID is an important measure of whether or not sample bias is present, and normalizing for party ID appears to me to make polls more accurate rather than less so. We’ll get another chance to find out, five weeks from now.
OK, I’ll bite. How so?
I think electoral-vote.com has a lot of useful information on its site, but I think it’s important to use it as a tool, and not to just take the numbers at face value.
It uses the most recent polls for each state, regardless of reliability or reputation of the pollster. One tool it has that’s somewhat helpful is a page showing state polls by pollster. But even that’s limited because only those polls that were the most recent, at some point in time, show up there. (For instance, ARG has polled all 50 states and D.C. within the past month, but its ARG map is missing the polls of numerous states.)
For instance, MD will probably show up as tied on electoral-vote.com for some time, since nobody really believes MD is a Presidential battleground, so it probably won’t get polled again for awhile. CA is back up to “strong Kerry” after a brief sojourn as “weak Kerry”. And SC is “weak Bush”, but “weak Xxx” means a 5-9% edge for Xxx - and in this case, “Weak Bush” means a 51-42 edge for Bush. It’s not gonna go for Kerry.
Still, it’s worth combining the outliers with local knowledge, if you’ve got it, to see whether there’s a message. MD isn’t as solidly Dem as it once was. There have been serious unemployment problems in SC, and it’s made the numbers closer in SC than one would have expected. (But only close enough to be a tease for Dems, let’s face it. Culturally, it’s solidly in the Bushiverse.)
Look around the site. It’s got lotsa neat stuff. Just filter what you see there through your own thinking processes, is all.
I’ve never see anyone prove that you can’t prove a negative.
heh.
Oh, yeh? Prove it!
No!
I find the NY Times’ Election Guide to be far more helpful than these silly graphs.
If you ask me, the prospects for Kerry looks rather dire. He certainly won’t lose by a landslide, but he’s fully on course to lose by an indisputable margin. Kerry needs to carry virtually all of the swing states to win. Bush only needs one or two perhaps, if the one or two happen to include Florida and, say, Pennsylvania. You throw in the Nader spoiler factor in places like Oregon, and it’s just not looking good for the Dems. I fail to see the basis for optimism on the Kerry side.
For myself, I’m rather surprised to see NJ has turned into a swing state. I wonder if Gov. McGreevey had anything to do with that.
From the time I heard about the McGreevey Affair, I’ve thought this would be a tough state. It always has been; I myself voted for Whitman twice and Kean once. OTOH, I’d rather lose my left arm (I’m a leftie, besides being a liberal. Hmmm.) than vote for Cardinale, who’s the state senator from my district. He’s a spiritual brother of Delay and Jesse Helms.
New Jersey is one big suburb, and that’s never been a natural home for Democrats. Kerry has his work cut out for him here.
I did register my wife, who’ll be voting in her first US election ever (getting her to register was quite a bit of work, lemme tell you. She trusts politicians the way I trust home repair contractors - like a grenade with the pin pulled out). So that’ll be one additional vote for Kerry, anyway, besides my own. It just may come down to that, too.
The first set of polls most likely were after Rudy Giuliani’s speech at the RNC on Monday.
The second set must have been after Bush’s speech on Thursday.
Yee, latest polls put Kerry ahead in Ohio.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/
Extremely qualified by the Webmaster. . . but an interesting turn, nonetheless.
Gotta admit. This is one CRAZY electoral calculus this time.
By my count FLA has flipped four times in two weeks (depending on your polls). If it keeps doing this we’ll be ripe for alcoholism by the time Nov 2 comes around.
And the question is, will Bricker get free booze, or will it be you and me?