Campaign event WIN

As someone who has worked advance, let me tell you: pictures like this are basically the holy grail.

100,000 people at a St. Louis rally. Wow. +1 for whoever advanced that shit.

The Obama campaign understands polling

The Obama camp's David Plouffe and Dan Pfieffer:

We tried to get Plouffe to react to a spate of national polls showing a tightening race.

"All we care about is these 18 states," he said. He repeated, with emphasis, that the campaign does not care about national polling. Instead, the campaign's own identification, registration and canvassing efforts provide the data he uses to determine where to invest money and resources.

Plouffe also emphasized that the internal polling the campaign does is focused on those same 18 states, and that their real concern is not the horse race results but the "data underneath." Later, he added, "the top-line [polling data] doesn't tell you anything." Rather, they focus on who the "true undecideds" are, "how they are going to break," and what messages will best persuade them.

The Gallup Daily tracking poll is apparently a particular sore point. When asked whether they were unhappy that the Biden announcement had not produced a bounce in national polls, Plouffe shot back: "How would we know . . . from the Gallup Daily?" The Gallup Daily is "something we don't pay attention to," he said again.

Communications director Dan Pfieffer later put it more bluntly, expressing unhappiness with the "inordinate focus on bad polling" by the media and also in the routine misinterpretation of sampling noise in the Gallup Daily poll. "The Gallup Daily is the worst thing that's happened in journalism in 20 years," he said.

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES. YES. I feel so good about this campaign right now. Everything Plouffe and Pfieffer said is true, and it's stuff that professionals in politics and journalism very rarely understand. This is the best news I have heard in a long time.

...(Personal note: I promise I'll start writing long posts again soon. Two things have to happen first: the Convention has to end, and then I have to sleep for like a week.)

(Also: did you see Schweitzer's speech? If not, you should fix that immediately.)