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.

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.

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.

Aside from the desire to create an imaginary avatar of the White Working Class Voter threatened by Barack Obama’s tax plan, there’s another big reason for the Joe the Plumber obsession among Republicans right now. Conservative gabbers are convinced that Obama’s “spread the wealth around” remark in his original encounter with Samuel J. Wurzelbacher was politically disastrous evidence that he wants to use tax rates to engineer a socialist “redistribution” of income.
Last week Hilzoy usefully went through the Obama/Joe the Imposter exchange and showed convincingly that Obama was talking about the macroeconomic benefits of more broadly distributed wealth, not advocating redistribution-via-the-tax-code. In terms of tax policy, I think it’s abundantly clear that Obama was challenging the whole conservative premise that wealth and jobs are created strictly by investors and employers, whose marginal tax rates must be kept as low as possible, so that those middle-and-lower income freeloaders may continue to passively benefit from their munificence. This does indeed represent a sharp dividing line between progressive and conservative economic philosophies, since progressives do tend to believe that the skills and work–and for that matter, the buying power–of non-capital-holders are a very big deal for the economy. And that’s the actual difference between the Obama and McCain approaches to tax policy, with Obama wanting to make income tax rates more progressive, while McCain–like all those conservative “flat tax” or “fair tax” advocates–wanting to make them less progressive.
If a majority of Americans agreed with conservatives on this fundamental issue, they would surely agree that taxes are high enough, and perhaps too high, for upper-income Americans and for corporations–you know, for the people who create all the jobs and wealth.
But if you check out the Gallup site, the most abundant source of polling on the broad outlines of tax policy, it becomes clear that the McCain-Palin campaign is really barking up the wrong tree.
As of April of this year–long before the Wall Street scandal roused particularly intense populist feelings–63% of respondents told Gallup that “upper-income people” paid too little in taxes. 9% said such people paid too much in taxes. While the term “upper-income” wasn’t defined in the poll, Obama’s definition–the top 5% of earners–couldn’t be too far off the mark. And for the record, the “too little” figure was actually a bit higher back in the Clinton years, when the top rate was very similar to where Obama would try to put it.
Another common conservative talking point on taxes, echoed by John McCain in the final presidential debate, was that corporate taxes in the United States are too high. According to Gallup in the same April 2008 poll, 6% of Americans think corporations pay too much in taxes, while 73% think they pay too little.
But let’s take this to another level. Suppose Republicans can convince people that Obama really does want to pursue a Robin Hood tax policy. Would that represent a political death sentence for the Democrat?
Here’s another question posed by Gallup: Do you think our government should or should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich? In April of 2008, 51% of Americans answered that question “yes,” while 43% said “no.” Those who think of the New Deal Era as the high tide of American “socialism” might want to note that Roper asked the identical question in 1939; 35% said “yes” while 54% said “no.”
So the bottom line is that under the most abrasive (and inaccurate) characterization of what Obama meant by “spreading the wealth around,” he would still be reflecting a majority sentiment. Once again, the McCain-Palin campaign probably ought to be talking about something else.

Byron York of National Review spent some time at a McCain rally in Northern Virginia, and came away with a very revealing look at the strange relationship between the GOP base and, well, objective reality.
Wonder why McCain and Palin are still beating the Joe the Plumber drum despite the abundant evidence that the whole “story” is a complete scam? York explains it:

In recent days, the Joe the Plumber phenomenon has taken on a deeper meaning for McCain’s audiences…. [H]e is a symbol of their belief that Barack Obama is going to raise their taxes, regardless of what Obama says about hitting up only those taxpayers who make more than $250,000 a year. They know Wurzelbacher doesn’t make that much, and they know they don’t make that much. And they’re not suspicious because they believe that someday they will make $250,000, and thus face higher taxes. No, they just don’t believe Obama right now. If he’s elected, they say, he’ll eventually come looking for taxpayers who make well below a quarter-million dollars, and that will include them.

York goes on to explain at some length that these base voters are angry at “the media” for “investigating” the facts about Joe the Plumber. Stands to reason, if you think about it: Who cares about “facts” when Joe was really unveiling the deeper truth that Obama wants to raise his taxes no matter what he’s saying about it?
There’s a lot of this “thinking” going at present, and McCain and Palin are clearly responding to it. “Obama’s a socialist!” we hear over and over from grassroots conservatives. He would not only raise taxes on the middle class, but would give “welfare” to deadbeats who don’t pay income taxes, through refundable tax credits. And his “socialized medicine” plan would crucify small businessmen (sic!) like Joe (sic!) the Plumber (sic!).
In reality, Obama’s tax plan would place rates pretty much where they were under the Clinton administration, when the economy created not only the most astonishing number of very wealthy people in American history, but the first mass upper middle class in human history. Refundable income tax credits for people with no income tax liability, but with payroll tax liability (the larger tax burden for a majority of working Americans) was an idea once championed by that well-known socialist Ronald Reagan, and initially pioneered by another lefty, Richard Nixon. Obama’s health care plan is based on expanding private health insurance, against the advice of a clear majority of Democratic health care wonks who favor a single-payer system. And small businesses are generally exempted from its coverage mandates.
But once you have decided that Barack Obama’s actual proposals are irrelevant to what you “know” are his “real” intentions, all these objections are just annoying distractions from truthiness. And hence the fury at the news media for “protecting” Obama with facts that are actually lies.
No wonder the McCain-Palin campaign continues to serve up half-truths and outright lies about Obama, or that the really crazy stuff–Obama’s a secret Muslim, or secret terrorist, or an agent of the Antichrist–seems to lurk right under the surface at every GOP grassroots gathering.
I did a radio show recently in which another guest–a Republican as it happened–suggested that McCain’s handlers know his candidacy is doomed, and are focused on keeping the base excited in order to put a floor under his numbers and avoid a down-ballot landslide. I was skeptical at the time, but the theory is beginning to make sense. The truthiness-gone-wild at the core of the GOP effort, which makes the smears of past Democratic candidates look like patty-cake, isn’t working among persuadable voters, and McCain doesn’t have the resources to outshout the Obama campaign with a parallel-universe story line about the candidates, even if the fundamentals of the election weren’t so damning to his case.

I had reason today to call my buddy Jim Galloway, the top political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and he called my attention to a grim and revealing story about the ground game as it’s playing out in Georgia right now. Here’s Jim’s lede:

The chairman of the Pike County Democratic party says she found a cooked, severed mouse head in a take-out meal after a confrontation with the husband of the restaurant owner — who allegedly accused her of registering “gutter scum” for the coming Nov. 4 election.
“Without saying it, he was referring to black people in no uncertain words,” she said.

You should read the whole thing, which explains that the apparently intended consumer of the fried mouse head, the husband of the Pike County Democratic Party, is a Republican. It’s always possible that the whole thing was some sort of bizarre accident, but it’s more likely that collateral damage isn’t much of a consideration in the savage competition underway in Georgia.