The epicenter of the latest battle in the war over gay marriage is California, where Proposition 8, which would ban celebration or recognition of same-sex marriages, is fueling an expensive and highly competitive campaign.
Polls earlier this year showed Prop 8 losing decisively, which led to a lot of premature talk about the decline of this classic conservative wedge issue. But the pro-Prop 8 campaign, rooted in evangelical churches and heavily bankrolled by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), made definite gains and appeared to pull ahead in public opinion last month.
Now there are dueling polls on Prop. 8. A Survey USA poll on October 17 showed the initiative ahead by a narrow 48-45 margin. But last night, the Public Policy Institute of California released a poll showing Prop. 8 losing among likely voters, 52-44.
It does appear by all accounts that the momentum behind Prop. 8 may have peaked a bit early. Spending on both sides is heavy (over $20 million each), and roughly equal.

I’m happy to report that for the first time in quite a few years, I’ve read a piece by Michael Barone that wasn’t ruined by his Republican bias.
It’s a pretty basic article for non-junkies on polling, and it covers issues ranging from the Bradley Effect to exit polls with a brisk competence. The only false note was his suggestion that Barack Obama’s lead in the polls is roughly the same lead Thomas Dewey enjoyed at this point in 1948.
For political people over a certain age, Barone’s devolution into Republican talking points distribution has been a sad development. As co-founder of the Almanac of American Politics, Barone once was (and still could be, if he wanted to) the preeminent objective numbers-cruncher of them all. And indeed, the Almanac itself remained relatively free of Barone’s Republican proclivities until pretty recently (I did a review of the 2006 edition noting the growing starboard tilt of that onetime Bible of Politics).
So it’s nice to find a brief moment when the old Barone–the better Barone–reappears. We’ve missed him.

Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman drew attention today to a finding in the new Pew poll that I missed: the persistent belief of many voters that Barack Obama is a Muslim.
Currently 55% of registered voters correctly identify Obama as a Christian, while 12% say he’s a Muslim, and the rest are unsure. These numbers have been remarkably stable since June. Among voters who say they support John McCain, only 47% say Obama’s a Christian, while 16% say he’s a Muslim (down from 19% last month).
In defense of Colin Powell’s claim that Republicans bear significant responsibility for the Obama-the-Muslim myth, Waldman provides a good compilation of evidence from conservative journals and Republican operatives who have sought to fan the flames by alluding to an Obama-Muslim connection.
But in the end, maybe it doesn’t matter that much. Far and away, the age demographic with the highest levels of confusion over Obama’s religious identity (45% Christian, 19% Muslim) is under-30 voters, his strongest generational group. And 8% of Obama supporters think he’s a Muslim, but don’t care, as well they shouldn’t.

Amidst sinking poll numbers for his running-mate, and considerable criticism of his choice of Sarah Palin from conservatives, John McCain’s “amazed” at all the buyer’s remorse. So amazed, in fact, that he’s engaged in a bit of hyperbole in describing Palin’s qualifications:

John McCain called out fellow Republicans who have questioned running mate Sarah Palin’s credentials Tuesday.
“What’s their problem?” McCain asked during an interview with radio host Don Imus.
“She is a governor, the most popular governor in America,” McCain said. “I think she is the most qualified of any that has run recently for vice president.”

Now that’s an interesting claim. If McCain means Palin is the most qualified of all recent vice presidential candidates, then he’s saying she more qualified than former White House Chief of Staff, Congressman, and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney; former Congressman and Senator Al Gore; and his own reputed favorite for vice president, Joe Lieberman.
If he’s saying she’s the most qualified Governor to run recently for vice president, well, that’s another thing. The last sitting Governor to appear in the second spot on a major-party ticket was Spiro T. Agnew in 1968. Palin may well be more qualified than ol’ Ted, who we now know was accepting brown bags stuffed with cash from road contractors before, during and after his first Veep bid.
Want to guess the last time a sitting Governor ran for vice president on the Democratic ticket? 1924, when William Jennings Bryan’s younger brother, Charlie, then Governor of Nebraska, ran with John W. Davis in one of the great electoral disasters of the twentieth century.

The new Pew Research poll I wrote about last night has some pretty interesting internal findings.
Comparing the two candidates’ standing in this poll to a mid-September Pew poll in which they were basically tied, the trends are clear and broad. In September McCain led among white voters 52-38. Now they’re tied at 45%. Obama’s gained 8% among men, 5% among women. Among white men and white women alike, Obama gained 7%. Most strikingly, Obama was down 50-36 among white non-college-educated voters in September. He’s closed the gap to 45-42.
Looking at the electorate from a religious-affiliation point of view, Obama made high single-digit gains between the September and October polls among mainline Protestants, Catholics (both weekly attendees and those who are less observant), and less-observant white evangelical Protestants. (McCain still leads among white evangelicals overall by a 67-24 margin).
Obama leads significantly among voters who are “strong” supporters of one candidate or the other (36-21). And in a question that got a lot of attention in the last presidential cycle, 77% of Obama supporters say they’re voting for him instead of voting against McCain. In the 2004 exit polls, only 43% of Kerry voters said that.
Pew rates 23% of voters as “swing” in the sense of not being completely certain of how they will vote. Of those, 8% lean to Obama, 6% to McCain, while 9% claim to be purely undecided.
Any way you slice it, Obama’s lead over McCain is exceptionally broad-based and doesn’t seem to depend on any particular demographic group. And with under two weeks left, that doesn’t offer much of a strategic target for John McCain.

Earlier today we drew attention to Nate Silver’s analysis of national tracking polls. But two big standard polls, which happen to be among the most credible, came out today, and they both show Barack Obama at over 50% with a double-digit lead.
Pew Research’s poll, which has a relatively large sample and a respected methodology, shows Obama up by fourteen percentage points among both registered voters (52%-38%), and likely voters (53%-39%). Pew had the two candidates tied among likely voters in mid-September.
Meanwhile, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has Obama up 52%-42% among registered voters. Two weeks ago Obama led in this poll 49%-43%.
There’s lots of interesting internals in both polls–particularly Pew–but I’ll get to those tomorrow. The topline finding from Pew is that Obama’s support is now more solid and more positive than McCain’s–much as George W. Bush’s support was four years ago as compared to John Kerry’s–and voters really don’t like McCain’s campaign, by big margins. The NBC/WSJ finding that’s getting a lot of attention tonight is the evidence that Sarah Palin is having a significant negative effect on assessments of John McCain’s judgment and temperament. It seems Palin’s a bigger problem for McCain than George W. Bush.

One of the underlying realities of 24-7 media and ubiquitous recording devices is that candidates for office above a certain level can’t just say whatever the hell an audience wants to hear without the people who might be offended getting wind of it as well. You’d think the George Allen/Macaca incident of 2006 would have made this clear beyond a reasonable doubt.
But among others, Rep. Robin Hayes (R-NC) clearly didn’t get the memo. Over the weekend, he informed attendees at a Republican rally that “liberals hate real Americans who work and achieve and believe in God.” When news reports, well, reported those remarks, Hayes’ staff denied them, and even accused the godless liberal news media of lying about it.
Turns out there’s an audio tape showing that Hayes indeed said what he said, and now he’s spluttering that he was just trying to fire up the crowd.
So who’s the liar now? And who’s the God-fearing “real American?” Probably not Robin Hayes, who clearly violated the Ninth Commandment, arguably twice, by bearing false witness against his fellow Americans and then lying about it.

The always-insightful Mark Schmitt has a piece up on the American Prospect site that discusses Barack Obama’s unusual form of “populism without pitchforks,” which adopts a strong empathy for middle-class Americans, but not in the exclusionary, vilify-the-villains manner of traditional left- and right-wing populism.
This “communitarian populism,” says Schmitt, is politically superior to the old Bob Shrum-branded “fighting for you” style in that (a) it’s more authentic; (b) it’s more inclusive from a voter-bloc point of view; and (c) it’s better connected with mainstream values. I’d personally add that it’s also more amenable to the demands of governing as well as politicking, but the former does tend to flow from the latter.
Here’s Schmitt’s coda:

[T]he late 19th Century populists were naïve in certain ways: failing to anticipate the barriers to bringing farmers, urban workers and rural African-Americans together in a single movement; or the counter-tactics that would derail their effort “to bring the corporate state under popular control. And Obama’s soft, communitarian populism may similarly understate the structural divisions in society or the disruptive power of predatory capitalism. But these are different times, Obama’s movement has different origins, the corporate state lies in ruins, and we really are all in it together.

A big part of the vast haze of polling data out there this year has been the proliferation of national “tracking” polls, which keep up on a continuous basis with a reasonably stable sample of voters. They’re popular for the obvious reasons that (1) they’re available to feed the political beast every day, and (2) they’re useful for following trends, even if the actual findings are suspect.
In case you’ve been ignoring polls up until now, it’s time to wake up and smell the numbers. Fortunately, Nate Silver has now published detailed assessments of the eight national tracking polls, with all sorts of notes on their strengths, weaknesses, biases, and usefulness.
His bottom line is that Rasmussen’s tracking poll seems to be the most reliable, though it’s worth noting that two others–Washington Post/ABC and Gallup–are the only ones that include cellphone-only samples, which arguably gets at an important source of votes for Barack Obama. Interestingly enough, those two tracking polls (for Gallup, the revised likely voter model that doesn’t weight results according to 2004 turnout patterns) have Obama up by nine percentage points, while Rasmussen has the margin much lower, at four percent.

Two weeks from Election Day, it’s now time for political junkies to begin thinking about the dynamics of the Big Day. And right on cue, David Paul Kuhn of Politico has a very instructive primer on changes in the network-sponsored exit poll operation for November 4.
As you probably recall, the early exits in 2004 were a misleading mess. Leaked in every direction, they showed John Kerry ahead in several key battleground states, most notably Ohio. It later transpired that sampling errors–especially an oversampling of two pro-Democratic voter groups, young people and women–skewed the exits crucially (I can personally remember noticing that exit polls from SC showed 60% of the electorate as female, which I should have known made the whole thing suspect).
With younger voters in particular leaning so heavily towards Barack Obama, Kuhn reports that the nets and the Edison-Mitofsky organization that actually runs exit polling are extremely focused on sampling bias. The fact that during this year’s primaries early exits almost always overestimated Obama’s ultimate vote is a data point as well. Aside from the age and gender composition of exit poll respondents, it’s been observed over the years that very enthusiastic voters tend to get oversampled, for the simple reason that they are eager to participate.
So what are the exit wizards doing to improve their accuracy? For one thing, the average age of exit pollsters has risen from 34 to 42, in response to the theory that they might unconsciously over-approach their generational peers. Edison-Mitofsky has also undertaken more training for exit pollsters on how to maintain a good random sample, and wherever possible, arrangements have been made with election officials to secure better and closer physical locations for the distribution of questionnaires.
In terms of what we will “know” when, the most dramatic change–first undertaken in 2006–will be the isolation of exit poll compilers and analysts to reduce leaks. The networks who are paying for the whole show won’t get access to any data until 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time, when two “waves” of exit polls are in. Once actual votes begin to come in, of course, the exits will be “adjusted” almost continuously, so you can expect the political commentariat to spend early Election Night trying to figure out what the prelimary analysis really means, and who is saying what based on which “wave” of exit polls.
On the other hand, as Matt Yglesias has already pointed out, a number of battleground states–FL, NC, VA, IN, and OH–that John McCain must win will be among the first to close the polls. If Obama’s up in most or all of them in the early exits, word will get around, with a hard-to-define impact on turnout in the vast majority of states where polls are still open.
The really crazy juncture will be right around the time raw votes start tumbling in, and the analysts try to figure out if the exits are on or off this year. Back in 2002, you may remember, the whole exit poll system crashed, leaving Americans with the archaic experience of having to wait on actual returns. That’s unlikely this time around, but you never know til Election Day arrives.