GA-Sen: Woah! Chambliss at 50%, Dem Martin within 6

I follow the Senate races pretty closely but I have to admit this surprises me. Rasmussen has Sen. Saxby Chambliss of GA (the man who, you may recall, beat Max Cleland in one of the most depressing elections ever six years ago) just clinging to the magic 50% number, with challenger Jim Martin rapidly closing the gap. Who would have possibly expected this race would be competitive?

Of course, Rasmussen is right to point out that this could just be a bounce produced by Martin's finally winning the primary, and we are talking here about just one poll. But look how well it fits the trend:

And it's also true that Chambliss has like eighty bajillion dollars in his campaign account and Martin has, I don't know, $10. Which, regardless of close polls, makes the odds of a Democratic win here pretty microscopic. But it could happen if Martin picks up momentum (and remember, the presence of Bob Barr might cause screwy things downticket in Georgia)... keep an eye on this one.

--Another indicator of growing dissatisfaction with Republicans in unlikely areas: Oklahoma. A DSCC poll (and, yes, consider the source) has Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) at that same 50% mark, up 9 against his opponent Andrew Rice. Even if national numbers do now appear to be stalling, the picture in downticket races just keeping looking better for Democrats...

Re(2): Dear Markus

I wish I knew where to find all those cool graphs. Then I might actually stand a chance in these arguments ;)

I think my concerns are best classified as "frustrations" rather than "panic," and upon further reflection I think they lie mostly in my third point.

I don't want Obama to win just by exciting and registering more liberal voters. Don't get me wrong: I think it's amazing that this election is breaking records and the Obama campaign is working so hard to register more people and get them involved; it's a great step forward for this country, and I'm proud to have joined them in registering voters this summer.

But it would be an even bigger step forward if that excitement came coupled with an overwhelming mandate from the center of the electorate for Obama and the Democrats. Maybe I'm too idealistic, but in my mind the Obama campaign in the primaries billed itself as capable of building a broad coalition across the political spectrum, and from the recent numbers I just don't see that happening.

Without that coalition, this movement is just a one-time thing. Republican Senators up for re-election in 2010 and beyond are not going to be scared into voting for health care or alternative energy if they know that the Democrats' win in 2008 came merely from the insurgence of marginal voters who were only inspired by one man and who are not likely to vote again.

We need to be convincing the center of the electorate that, on the major issues (the economy and health care especially) the Democrats are better. Certainly given the way the campaign has gone so far, we should be well on our way to doing that. My disappointment with the state of the race lies in the fact that as yet, we have not.

Maybe it's too early, and all of this will settle itself in the fall. But the only way to make true progress is to move the center of the country left, and I'll judge Obama's overall success on his ability to accomplish that.

Re: Dear Markus

Whee! This is fun. Brian, here is why your concerns are misplaced:

See that tiny little uptick in the red line there? That's the thing that has everybody horrified. Meanwhile, Obama has since about April been consistently pulling 45-47% or so, which considering unallocated undecideds and a race with THREE prominent third-party candidates is clearly a winning percentage. Damn but Democrats scare easy.

To your specific points:

1. John McCain is a terrible candidate who is running a terrible campaign... Barack Obama, on the other hand, is the most exciting candidate the Democrats have ever had. So WHY IS HE ONLY WINNING BY TWO POINTS?!

   Excitement about a candidate, and the quality of the campaign, will manifest itself almost entirely in election-day turnout and polls from the days immediately beforehand, as marginal base voters decide whether or not to bother voting. You can't measure that in August. Meanwhile, Obama's lead -- which has ranged in the past few months from about 2 to 7 -- reflects the structural advantages he has in this electorate very well. (I repeat: John McCain is not, in fact, winning.)

2. I disagree that people aren’t paying attention. This election is different from every other before it, and I think people are watching.

   Be careful with your assumptions here. Yes, this election is different; but in order to know that, you have to have been paying attention already, and you have to be familiar with previous elections. That leaves out the huge and decisive portion of the American public that only follows politics with a passing interest, and which never pays attention before the conventions and Labor Day. It's quite likely that the politically-engaged population (like us, and all of our friends) is more excited and paying more attention than usual, but that doesn't matter, because we vote consistently. It's the disengaged, low-information marginal voters that matter.

   But even if they’re not paying too much attention, every household in every swing state is currently getting bombarded with McCain’s attack ads. And while the ads may be completely freaking ridiculous, the problem is that they’re not being countered by the Obama campaign, and impressions are formed early and are hard to change.

   Yes, there are a bunch of attack ads airing, but their main purpose right now isn't to reach marginal voters (who, I reiterate, don't give a damn this early) nearly as much as it is to define the media narrative which, in traditional campaigning, shapes the actual gameplay in September and October. Now, Obama's campaign is hardly traditional, and it's going to rely on a whole different voter universe (see: their startling voter registration efforts) than the one which is traditionally swayed by media, so I'm not too concerned about that.

3. I also reject the argument that the race is all about the electoral votes and the popular vote doesn’t matter.

   I didn't say that. My point was that national polls aren't very indicative because they can't reflect Obama's weird impacts on turnout. Certainly a rising presidential tide lifts all downticket boats, and I expect that to happen much more dramatically than the polls can possibly represent.

...The thing to remember is that not only does Obama have a consistent lead, recent Chicken-Little-ism notwithstanding, but we can reasonably expect him to overperform that lead substantially on November 4. Feel better?

Dear Markus,

I respectfully disagree with your take on the latest polls.

The recent numbers showing Obama with narrow leads, or even statistically even (I know, it’s Rasmussen so it doesn’t really count) are so frustrating to me that I can’t help but feel fairly pessimistic about the way things are going. Three reasons:

1. John McCain is a terrible candidate who is running a terrible campaign. He has made gaffe after gaffe after gaffe (I’m not even bothering to find links for each gaffe because they’re so well-chronicled on this and every other blog in existence), he is uninteresting, he is getting zero media coverage, and everyone hates Republicans right now.

   Barack Obama, on the other hand, is the most exciting candidate the Democrats have ever had. So WHY IS HE ONLY WINNING BY TWO POINTS?! If Obama cannot beat McCain under the current conditions, or even if he wins by a slim margin, I cannot imagine another situation in the foreseeable future in which a Democrat would actually win the Presidency.

2. I disagree that people aren’t paying attention. This election is different from every other before it, and I think people are watching.

   But even if they’re not paying too much attention, every household in every swing state is currently getting bombarded with McCain’s attack ads. And while the ads may be completely freaking ridiculous, the problem is that they’re not being countered by the Obama campaign, and impressions are formed early and are hard to change.

   Obama is afraid to get his feet wet after claiming a "new style of politics." He’s been running his campaign too conservatively, and he has to start firing back early and often. It doesn’t need to be mudslinging. But the fact that this video isn’t seared into the mind of every American and "mental recession" isn’t a household phrase is appalling, considering that this election is gearing up to be all about the economy.

And while he’s at it, he can show McCain’s ads to be the old kind of politics by producing a negative yet substantive ad.

3. I also reject the argument that the race is all about the electoral votes and the popular vote doesn’t matter. Obama’s weak (given the political atmosphere and the events of the race so far) numbers are disappointing from a down-ticket race stand point. Standing on the assumption that a majority of people will vote straight down one of the party lines, Obama needs to start doing better with the working-class white people and the moderately-conservative independents who will be the key to a 6- or 7-seat gain in the Senate and a 30-seat gain in the House (both of which should be attainable given the political climate).

Politico: Obama is winning, therefore, Obama is losing

See this right here? This is why I don't bother reading Politico.

In the two months since Barack Obama captured the Democratic nomination, he has hit a ceiling in public opinion polling, proving unable to make significant gains with any segment of the national electorate.

While Obama still leads in most matchups with John McCain, the Illinois senator’s apparent stall in the polls is a sobering reminder to Democrats intoxicated with his campaign’s promises to expand the electoral map beyond the boundaries that have constrained other recent party nominees.

GAAAAHHHHHH. Three things.

1. Only in DC journalism does it make sense to write an article claiming that, because Barack Obama has a narrow but significant lead, Barack Obama is clearly in trouble. This is like a sportswriter saying that the Bruins are obviously screwed because they keep winning games by just two goals.

2. It's not surprising that the polls haven't moved this summer -- it's the summer. Nobody pays attention to politics in the summer, except high-information voters (basically all of whom have already made up their minds). What would be strange is if the polls were moving. Gallup's Frank Newport seems to agree, in this delightfully loopy (and obviously truncated) quote from the article:
   

   “What’s remarkable this summer is the stability of this race,” Gallup’s director Frank Newport said. “In a broad sense, it is similar to previous elections.”

   (Sidenote: why do reporters always quote pollsters to make them sound like Zen masters? Take this, also from the article: "ABC News Polling Director Gary Langer asked, “If everything is so good for Barack Obama, why isn’t everything so good for Barack Obama?”" I really don't think that sentence means anything at all.)

3. Obama's promise to "expand the electoral map" would naturally expand it beyond pollsters' likely-voter screens, so we really can't ascertain whether that strategy is working by looking at national polls. We won't know that until election day.

It really saddens me that people spend their time reading this bullshit. WHEN will the elite media learn the basics of polling? WHEN?

2nd national poll gives Obama double-digit lead (UPDATED)

When that Newsweek poll came out last week showing Obama over McCain by a whopping 51%-36%, I don't think I was alone in assuming it was a kooky outlier. But here comes Bloomberg/L.A. Times today saying basically the same thing -- they have Obama up by 12%, and if you add wildcards Ralph Nader and Bob Barr, Obama leads by 15 -- 48% to 33%, the same margin as Newsweek.

Folks, there are bounces and then there are bounces. You rarely see a presidential race poll this lopsided -- sure, current performance is not indicative of future resuts (see: Dukakis '88), but even with maximum skepticism there's no way to read these results as anything but a big advantage for Obama.

Pollster.com's national averages are here. As of this writing, they stand at Obama 48%, McCain 42%, without the aforementioned Bloomberg number.

UPDATE (June 26): Some questions have been raised by McCain partisans over Bloomberg/LAT's party identification numbers, arguing that this poll underrepresents Republicans. This actually is a valid concern -- though Republican identification has been declining drastically lately, it's hard to believe it's down to 22% of the country. But this goes to one of the most controversial questions in polling: do you weight for party identification, or not? That is, do you standardize your results to a known level of partisanship (as you do with things like race, gender, income, etc) or do you take what you get as a reflection of the national mood? Evidence has not answered that question in the affirmative or the negative, and polls using either methodology have been variously accurate, so this issue isn't enough to discredit the Bloomberg/LAT poll. Mark Blumenthal has more on this.

I say the real culprit, in both the matchup results and the party ID, is probably that both Bloomberg and Newsweek polled a universe of registered voters (as vs. likely voters, which is what many other pollsters use). Polls of registered voters always favor Democrats disproportionately, because our supporters -- being predominantly young, lower-income, and minorities -- tend to vote less regularly. But I think an RV poll is actually a much better indicator for the 2008 race at this point, both because we're trying to measure the state of the race as a whole (not predict its outcome), and because Obama will probably fuck up everybody's turnout models (thanks to his strength among African-Americans and young people, plus his legendary field operation). So for those reasons I'd give the Bloomberg and Newsweek numbers more credence than the McCain people want us to, and less to polls that use a likely-voter screen.

(NB: One criticism of the RV/LV argument for this discrepancy points out that the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll, which uses an RV universe, shows a much closer race than anybody else. But that's a tracking poll, which is really apples and oranges; it's designed to measure day-by-day trend shifts, not the overall picture.)

Poll: Statistical Tie in... Nevada?

Geez but the Obama campaign is a game-changer. Mason-Dixon has McCain 44%-42% Obama (16% undecided, MoE 4%) in Nevada, ordinarily a solid red state.

The swing region, if you're curious, is traditionally Republican Washoe County, which includes Reno and a sizable swath of desert towns. It's for McCain by just 3%; the Las Vegas metro area is for Obama (lots of unionized workers there) and the rural counties are strongly McCain. Another interesting figure: Hispanics are for Obama by a potentially decisive margin of 53%-28%. Not sure what any of that signifies.

(Note: I actually take the position, and I'll explain this in a long post sometime, that this election comes down 100% to Ohio and everything else is bullshit. Nevertheless it's interesting and comforting to see how Obama's widening the playing field.)