Is she fabulous, or what?! I saw her at UCLA, and I was in awe. I am so proud to have her autograph on my Women for Obama rally sign. When she becomes First Lady, I’m going to have it professionally matted and framed. Michelle Obama rocks!
Various outfits have been producing scorecards of pollsters lately. Poblano at Five Thirty-Eight has a good one, but it’s strictly about general elections, so its applicability to the present primary season is iffy.
SurveyUSA has a report card of the 2008 primaries through Wisconsin - actually two: one ranked by median differences from the ultimate results, and the other ranked by mean differences. It’s pretty useful, though it’s got some problems that are too complicated for this post.
One meme that’s been bouncing around the blogosphere is the claim that some pollsters whose overall track record is iffy, are adapting to polling under the special circumstances of this campaign, and some pollsters whose overall track record is good, are starting to look less brilliant than they were earlier.
So I decided to do a pollster scorecard of just OH, TX, and PA, since a lot of pollsters had polled all three. (I took a pollster’s most recent pre-primary poll, but excluded anyone who hadn’t polled within the last week before the primary.) I used whole numbers for the margins, except for TX where Clinton won the popular vote by 3.5%, and ISTM that rounding, either way, would advantage the pollsters who erred in the direction I rounded. So half-points for Texas.
Here’s the six pollsters who showed up in all three states, and how far off they were from the actual margin of victory in each:
State OH TX PA
SurveyUSA 0 4.5 3
Zogby 10 0.5 1
ARG 4 0.5 7
Rasmussen 4 4.5 4
Mason-Dixon 6 4.5 4
PPP 1 2.5 12
Maybe not so much. SUSA’s still best, and while Zogby and ARG are doing OK overall, Zogby’s got one serious clunker (calling Ohio a tie), and ARG’s got one middlin’ clunker (calling PA for Clinton by 16). Whether they’re better than Rasmussen depends on how you rate a mixture of being on the nose and way off, versus a string of middlin’ misses such as Rasmussen had. I personally prefer a pollster that never exactly nails it, but never totally blows it, to one that sometimes nails it, and sometimes seems to be in the wrong universe: at least I don’t have to worry about which it is, this time. But YMMV.
From a practical standpoint, one would turn my bias into a rating by summing the squares (or some other power) of the errors.
No matter how you cut it, SUSA still looks awfully good, PPP’s bad day in PA kills them, and ARG, as much as I hate to say it, fights its way back to semi-respectability. RCP’s been asterisking them and not including them in their averages, but I’d say it’s time for RCP to reconsider that.
Pollsters that surveyed just two of the three states did quite well. Insider Advantage has been polling NC, and given how they did in TX and PA, you’ve gotta take them seriously. (Currently they have Obama up by 5 in NC.)
State OH TX PA
Suffolk 2 --- 1
Insider Advantage - 1.5 2
Quinnipiac 6 --- 2
Will Obama’s Meet the Press performance have any effect on the numbers come Tuesday? My listen had him doing fine but he failed to reach out to Republicans as well as he could have or to state things as clearly as he could have. He could have more clearly explained how the most likely outcome of the gas tax break will be that consumers will pay the exact same amount and the money will go to the oil companies rather than to infrastructure. He could have more *forcefully *explained how Hillary is promising to pay for it with money that she has also promised to use for other purposes and that doesn’t even currently exist. He is too cool one on on.
Any other reads?
I think when a person is known for being rhetorically gifted and articulate, there comes a point of diminishing returns where every time he opens his mouth at least some groups of people (as of the latest polls, it seems the white w/o college degree group, for one) will conclude that anything he says is just verbal jousting and impressive semantics but aren’t going to really ‘buy’ what he says; ironically, precisely because he says it so well. It can come off as a magic trick to some.
I expect it will come to see that way to more folks as time goes on and he’s then further reduced into a mere political figure whose hot air is merely scented rather than stale. But hot, and air, nonetheless.
Yeah, it’s very true that it may not help her actually win; then again, delegates can switch their allegiances at any time including the regular pledged so you never know; it could depend on how far Obama falls in polls.
But if nothing else, I think he’ll be toast for the general and McCain wins in a squeaker if Obama manages to hobble to the nomination.
Nah, the race baiting was the Obama campaign’s MO right from when they played the race card against Toni Morrison’s first black POTUS Bill Clinton. Rearing heads, indeed. What’s ugly is to call race baiting when there is none in order to try to engender grandstanding offense over nothing to solidify a base that wouldn’t otherwise feel you that much and then claim the moral high ground. That’s ugly.
As Bob Johnson recently reiterated, in agreeing with Ferraro, he wouldn’t be where he’s at if he wasn’t deeply tan. LOL Too bad that observation triggers stupid accusations of race baiting to try to win an argument by inducing baseless shame.
It’s a tired ploy that would make even Al Sharpton blush.
Okay, maybe not Al. LOL
They can but they won’t, whatever issues she manages to raise about Obama would pale in comparison to what giving her the nomination would cause.
9th Floor - are you a democrat?
Not if she has the popular vote. That would lend some credence to a switch and you can argue (as I would) that you can count MI and FL in considering the number of people that voted as a separate issue from discounting those states in terms of delegates.
I think if she goes in there with more people having cast their votes for her than for him (whatever the name on the ballot situation was in MI – he, after all, chose to take his name off; and in FL he ran ads there as part of his national and she didn’t), with his polls crashing, and with say one or three new scandals to boot, there might be an argument for it.
Beyond which, I don’t see it as beyond Obama’s moralizing grandstanding to be one to stun everybody by conceding if he sees things getting ugly in Denver to try to come out of it all smelling like a rose as the Messiah of ‘uniting’ the party at the convention and elevate his profile long-term in that manner.
All he’d be missing for such a move is a cross and some nails.
Seeing as how Hamas supports him, it shouldn’t be hard to get some Jews for the crucifixion scene either. 
Independent.
Thanks.
Is there a website or something where I can learn all about this other reality? I’ve followed a lot of these threads and I really try to take everything in good faith, but… man. I simply don’t know.
De nada, Ph. You know I love ya. 
straightdope.com’s board. 
I, too, got to hear Michelle Obama speak last week. She mentioned the idea that Obama got where he is by virtue of being a biracial, phenotypically black child raised by a single white mom in the sixties US. It’s hard to imagine a more absurd hypothesis.
Daniel
There’s not a website, because the same things happened to Hillary after February when she was being overtaken by Obama. Everyone was abuzz about how she was terrible, nothing was going her way, debates were being to hard on her, and in most ways the media loved Obama etc…etc…
Now that the tables have changed a bit, and Obama is in the negative limelight, people are jumping all over him. It’s status quo for dems really. I’ve given up, my hands are in the air and I cannot personally do anything to effect what is going to happen in August.
I certainly hope a man like Barack Obama will not be passed up by some back room smokey dealings. I really hope not. I’ve got no ill will towards Hillary, she has done some bone headed things, but then so has Barack. However, I trust Barack Obama much more than I trust any Clinton. If the Superdelegates decide Obama should be the nominee, then he will have fought the good fight, been beaten up quite a bit, but come out on top. There are a lot of paths for Obama to take to this eventual August outcome.
Now if the supers go and give the nomination to Clinton, and Obama still has the popular vote, it will mark for me the beginning of the end for the democratic way. I will truly be sad. I take some solace in that Obama is a smart man and has a lot of smart people working for him, and has run a very good campaign, raising more money than **ANY OTHER DEMOCRATIC ** candidate in history without taking lobbyists money. Clinton herself has said Obama has brought people together in a way that is beneficial to the party and if he were to win she would stand behind him - she said that 2 or 3 debates ago I don’t remember.
Further, I have never seen young and old alike as jazzed about a candidate as I have this primary season for Barack. It’s a phenomenon that will live on well past his candidacy and [hopeful] presidency.
Jackmannii is already on record: 5-7% for Obama in NC and the same for Clinton in IN. Time for the rest of us to lay our markers down.
I’m a bit pessimistic but not expecting total disaster. But just shy of it. Obama failed to really communicate this weekend in a way that would sway over the undecideds and bring Republicans to come out for him, and he had the chance. I see the bulk of the undecideds again pulling for Hillary.
NC is an Obama win but a narrow one, say 3%. IN Clinton by 9 or 10%. Wright has hurt Obama, no fatal blow, but hurt him nevertheless. More so Obama has not responded in a manner that takes control of the narrative.
His failure to do that will keep this train wreck going for a while longer I fear. Again, like in PA, I hope that I’m wrong.
Any one with other guesses? What’s that Bob? You say Hillary wins IN by 13 and NC by 5? Well we’ll see. 
Obama by 8 in NC hillary by 3 in IN
I don’t see a win in NC for Hillary.
OTOH, the margin of victory in IN could be larger than the polls show.
I’m guessing even swap. NC for Obama by 8, Hillary by the same in IN.
Nah, I disagree. I think he answered the Wright nonsense extremely well, and apparently so do a lot of other people. The latest CBS & NY Times Polls say, Poll Shows Most Voters Unaffected by Wright
And, Support For Obama Rebounds
I say Obama by 9 in NC and by 3 in IN.