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.
Ed Kilgore
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.
Note: this item was originally published on October 10, 2008
Throughout this long presidential campaign, there’s been endless discussion of race as a factor. But until recently, such talk revolved around hard-to-assess white fears about Barack Obama’s racial identity, along with efforts to conjure up the ancient hobgoblin of the Scary Black Man via images of Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
Now, in the wake of the ongoing financial crisis, racism has entered the campaign conversation from an unexpected direction. In the fever swamps of conservatism, there’s a growing drumbeat of claims that the entire housing mess, and its financial consequences, are the result of “socialist” schemes to give mortgages to shiftless black people whose irresponsibility is now being paid for by good, decent, white folks.
Some of this talk is in thinly-veiled code, via endless discussions on conservative web sites (though it spilled over into Congress during the bailout debate) attributing the subprime mortgage meltdown to the effects of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which was aimed at fighting the common practice of mortgage “redlining” in low-income and/or minority areas (basically, a refusal to make any mortgages, regardless of the creditworthiness of individual applicants, in such areas).
In truth, the CRA didn’t require lending to unqualified applicants (though it did provide that applicants’ credit-worthiness could be established through means more sophisticated that standard credit scores), and in any event, CRA doesn’t even apply to the non-bank lenders responsible for the vast majority of bad mortgages. (Sara Robinson has a very useful primer on CRA at the OurFuture blog).
A closely associated and even more racially tinged element of the conservative narrative on the financial crisis focuses on lurid claims about the vast influence of ACORN, a national non-profit group active in advocacy work for low-income Americans. Among its many activities, ACORN has promoted low-income and minority homeownership, mainly through personal counseling. More to the point, though it’s unrelated to any of the claims about ACORN’s alleged role in the financial crisis, the group worked with Barack Obama back in his community organizing days on the South Side of Chicago.
Now as it happens, I’ve never been a huge fan of ACORN, mainly because its ham-handed voter registration efforts in recent years have supplied Republicans with their only shred of evidence that “voter fraud” is a legitimate concern in this country. But ACORN, a relatively marginal group, had no real influence over toxic mortgage practices, which again, to state the crucial point, had little to do with CRA-enabled loans to low-income and minority homeowners. Google “ACORN financial crisis” and you’ll be treated to an amazingly huge number of articles and blog posts on the subject, virtually all of them from conservatives. None of them, so far as I can tell, establish that the group has had any significant involvement in mortgage decisions, mainly because most subprime loans were made in areas where ACORN activists would never set foot. ACORN is being singled out by conservatives for a leading role in the crisis simply because it’s crucial to the whole CRA/Socialist/Minorities/Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/Obama narrative about the financial crisis. And that narrative is not simply all over the internet: it’s common on the airwaves as well, from Lou Dobbs to an assortment of “analysts” at Fox.
While some conservatives are careful not to get too explicit about the racial underpinnings of this argument, others aren’t.
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.
After writing my last two posts, about the ludicrous Joe the Plumber scam and the probably-bogus “tightening presidential contest,” I had a dark thought. What if McCain somehow pulls this out? My God, it’ll be attributed to Joe the Plumber! And we’ll see a lot more of this kind of stupid stunt in the future.”
Due to the eternal popularity of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy (after this, therefore because of this), which confuses coincidence with causation, copy-catting questionable political gimmicks is a very common phenomenon.
A good example was the “abolish the car tax” message adopted by 1997 Virginia gubernatorial candidate Jim Gilmore (the very man who’s running a hopeless Senate campaign against Mark Warner this year, after a brief and largely invisible presidential bid). Gilmore went on to crush Democratic rival Don Beyer (a car dealer, ironically), and for several years, Republicans running in virtually every state that had any sort of tax on automobiles made “abolishing the car tax” a centerpiece of their campaigns. Someone finally noticed that it wasn’t working much of anywhere, and the mania finally abated.
In retrospect, there were plenty of reasons Gilmore won in 1997, but it was far too easy to focus on the gimmick and go with it.
An even more vivid example of questionably successful gimmickry, similar in its fundamental stupidity to the Joe the Plumber furor, occurred in my home state of Georgia in 1992. A Republican warhorse, Paul Coverdell, was running against incumbent Democratic Senator Wyche Fowler. For most of the campaign, Fowler maintained a large and steady lead in the polls. One day, according to the legend, a beehived grandmother from South Georgia named Margie Lopp called up Coverdell HQ and sang them a campaign jingle she had composed.
Now Margie’s jingle was not only content-free (its deepest line was : “Let’s put Paul Coverdell in the Senate and put Wyche Fowler out!”), but gratingly annoying in a bad nursery rhyme sort of way. For whatever reason, the Coverdell campaign made it the sole sum and substance of about ten thousand radio and television ads. Political observers universally mocked it, and even Coverdell’s staff later admitted they were flooded with calls from supporters complaining about it.
But lo and behold, on Election Night, Coverdell ran surprisingly well, and though Fowler ran ahead of him, an archaic Georgia law requiring a majority of the general election vote for victory knocked the incumbent into a rare runoff. I’ll never forget watching local election coverage from the Coverdell party, where a gaggle of young Republicans were defiantly singing the Lopp classic. Coverdell went on to win the runoff (thanks mainly to a predictably small turnout), and headed to the Senate, where his main accomplishment was quarterbacking the Senate Republican fight against health care reform. Post hoc ergo poster hoc: Margie beat Wyche Fowler, and indirectly, Hillary Clinton.
As it happens, Coverdell’s win, despite the polls, wasn’t that surprising. Aside from the weird 50% requirement, Georgia was beginning its big trend towards the GOP about then (Bill Clinton won the state very narrowly in the presidential contest that year). And Fowler, a good and relatively progressive Democrat, had a bad habit of personally antagonizing key voting blocs (his hostile interaction with gay/lesbian activists led a significant number of Atlantans to vote Libertarian, feeding Fowler’s non-majority). My guess is that Coverdell didn’t win so much as Fowler lost. But like Gilmore’s car-tax gimmick, Coverdell’s Lopp jingle was the most obvious factor that accompanied his surprise win.
I recently ran across a semi-academic article quoting Coverdell campaign staff as suggesting that the jingle boosted their candidate’s name ID in an insidious way. I suppose this is the same theory by which some advertisers deliberately screen obnoxious ads that consumers at least remember (a theory I try to fight by, for example, swearing I will never buy insurance from GEICO until it not only kills but apologizes for its interminable “caveman” series). But it’s a dubious proposition at best.
There’s an interesting denouement to this saga. Coverdell died suddenly in 1999, and Roy Barnes appointed then-Democrat Zell Miller to the Senate seat. Miller had to face the voters for the remainder of Coverdell’s term in 2000, and his Republican opponent, Mack Mattingly (the very man that Fowler beat in 1986 to get to the Senate in the first place) dutifully brought Margie Lopp on board to compose a jingle. Mattingly lost decisively.
Maybe I’m looking at this whole thing in the wrong way. If John McCain does pull an upset, and Joe the Plumber gets the credit, then quite likely a whole host of future GOP politicians will slavishly imitate the stunt, with contrived and even imaginary “real people” exemplifying the sturdy folk virtues and heartland values of conservatism. I can’t imagine a better formula for big Democratic gains in the future.
In case you’ve been exposed today to all the “news” about a tightening presidential contest (sometimes referred to by conservative gabbers as a “dramatically tightening” contest), you need to spend some time at FiveThirtyEight.com. As Nate Silver has carefully explained, the poll most often cited for this proposition is a Gallup Tracking poll that utilizes a “historical” turnout model–i.e., one that is heavily based on 2004. This poll shows McCain within two points of Obama, at 49%-47%, which might be alarming to Democrats if somehow the turnout patterns happened to closely resemble those of four years ago, which hardly anyone credible expects.
But a second Gallup tracking poll, based on the “current intentions” of voters, shows Obama up by six percent. Gallup started releasing this second tracking poll recently for the precise reason that experts were criticizing its “traditional” model as potentially misleading.
If the “traditional” Gallup model is indeed skewed significantly towards a “redder” electorate than is real, then it wouldn’t be that surprising that McCain’s base-pleasing debate performance on Wednesday night might bump his numbers there a bit.
In any event, we’ll need better evidence than a half-self-repudiated Gallup Tracking poll to conclude that the race is in fact “tightening” to any significant extent.
John McCain hung his final presidential debate performance on an Ohio plumber who campaign aides never vetted.
A day after making Joseph Wurzelbacher famous, referencing him in the debate almost two dozen times as someone who would pay higher taxes under Barack Obama, McCain learned the fine print Thursday on the plumber’s not-so-tidy personal story: He owes back taxes. He is not a licensed plumber. And it turns out that Wurzelbacher makes less than $250,000 a year, which means he would receive a tax cut if Obama were elected president.
The selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate isn’t looking like such an aberration anymore.
But the really weird thing today is that McCain and his backers are still talking about Joe the Plumber as though his story is not only legitimate, but iconic. As I noted yesterday, this is a particularly extreme example of the eternal Republican effort to put a middle-class face on fisal policies designed to relieve the wealthy of tax liabilities. Having found their white-male-from-Ohio poster boy for regressive taxes, they aren’t going to let go of him even though he’s pretty much a fraud. Indeed, some are even using ol’ Joe to reinforce the mood of self-pity and victimization that has infected conservatism so profoundly this year. Here’s the reliably obnoxious Michelle Malkin:
Obama-Biden simply can’t tolerate an outspoken citizen successfully painting the Democratic ticket as socialist overlords. And so a dirty, desperate war against Joe Wurzelbacher is on.
The left’s political plumbers are attacking the messenger, rummaging through his personal life and predictably wielding the race card once again. It’s standard operating procedure for the Obama thug machine.
So here’s a guy who gets himself on televison (and right-wing talk radio) by making up an imaginary identity for himself and confronting a presidential candidate with a pack of lies. John McCain refers to him twenty-one times in a debate, as though his gripping tale of fiscal woe provides the irrefutable evidence of Obama’s socialist perfidy. And anyone who has an issue with that is a “thug.”
Why not just design an avatar and name it “White Working Class Voter” and parade it across the airwaves? Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what Joe the Plumber has become.