Last week was a really bad week for the McCain-Palin ticket, according to the Media Consortium’s useful summary of the news at HuffPo. You had the Colin Powell endorsement of Obama, the Palin Shopping Spree story, the Palin the Rogue Candidate story, and of course the bizarre racial hoax in Pittsburgh instigated by a College Republican staffer. And day by day, the message of the GOP ticket became nastier and more remote from real-life issues.
Check it out for a stroll down short-term-memory lane.

The latest data point being seized on by conservatives to support the idea that the presidential race is “tightening” is yesterday’s results for the Investors Business Daily/TIPP national tracking poll, which had Obama’s lead down to 1.1%. This is supposed to be especially important because IBD/TIPP came closest to predicting the 2004 results.
Nate Silver, bless his pointy little head, noticed a really bizarre internal finding in that poll: it showed McCain beating Obama by a 74-22 margin among 18-24 year-old voters. He proceeds to blow up the whole survey:

Suppose that the true distribution of the 18-24 year old vote is a 15-point edge for Obama. This is a very conservative estimate; most pollsters show a gap of anywhere from 20-35 points among this age range.
About 9.3 percent of the electorate was between age 18-24 in 2004. Let’s assume that the percentage is also 9.3 percent this year. Again, this is a highly conservative estimate. The IBD/TIPP poll has a sample size of 1,060 likely voters, which would imply that about 98 of those voters are in the 18-24 age range.
What are the odds, given the parameters above, that a random sampling of 98 voters aged 18-24would distribute themselves 74% to McCain and 22% to Obama?
Using a binomial distribution, the odds are 54,604,929,633-to-1 against. That is, about 55 billion to one.
So, there is an 0.000000002% chance that IBD/TIPP just got really unlucky. Conversely, there is a 99.999999998% chance that one of the following things is true:
(i) They’re massively undersampling the youth vote. If you only have, say, 30 young voters when you should have 100 or so in your sample, than the odds of a freak occurrence like this are significantly more likely.
-or-
(ii) Something is dramatically wrong with their sampling or weighting procedures, or their likely voter model.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, a huge batch of new state polls yesterday gave John McCain what Silver called his worst polling day of the year.

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.

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.

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.

The long-awaited September fundraising totals for Barack Obama are finally out, and they vastly exceeded very high expectations. Could his campaign actually pull in $100 million in a single month, we all wondered as rumors swirled? Yeah, that and more: around $150 million, more than doubling the record $67 million he collected in August. The Obama campaign is now at around $600 million for the cycle, from more than three million individual donors. Following the long-established pattern of small donor domination, the average contribution to Obama among 632,000 first-time givers in September was under $100.
Add in the $50 million or so raised by the Democratic National Committee in September, and you can understand why Democrats are now heavily outspending Republicans on paid advertising, aside from hard-to-quantify but definitely superior investments in field operations.
The weird thing is that Obama’s September fundraising completely obscured what would have otherwise been an astonishing month for the Republican National Committee, which took in $66 million in September. With McCain himself limited to $84 million in public funds for the entire post-Convention period ($32 million of that was spent in September), there’s zero doubt that Obama will have a sizable advantage down the stretch.

Via Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, Survey USA has some pretty remarkable numbers from polling early voters in five states. Obama’s up by 23% in New Mexico; 18% in Ohio; 6% in Georgia; 34% in Iowa; and 34% in North Carolina. Those polled represented at least 10% of each state’s overall likely voters everywhere other than NC (5%).
Notes Silver:

Obama is leading by an average of 23 points among early voters in these five states, states which went to George W. Bush by an average of 6.5 points in 2004.
Is this a typical pattern for a Democrat? Actually, it’s not. According to a study by Kate Kenski at the University of Arizona, early voters leaned Republican in both 2000 and 2004; with Bush earning 62.2 percent of their votes against Al Gore, and 60.4 percent against John Kerry. In the past, early voters have also tended to be older than the voting population as a whole and more male than the population as a whole, factors which would seem to cut against Obama or most other Democrats.

Looks like Obama’s much-vaunted ground game is already producing some results. And it’s worth remembering that even if the race tightens down the stretch, these early votes are already in the bank.

Some nervous Democrats, watching as Barack Obama’s lead in the polls slowly grows, may be concerned that a lead of five points or so may not be enough, thanks to the notorious “Bradley Effect”–the phenomenon, named for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s losing gubernatorial campaign in 1982, whereby white voters lie to pollsters about their willingness to vote for an African-American candidate.
They should probably relax. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who’s long argued that the Bradley Effect seems to have expired in recent years, offers a recapitulation of his arguments (now reinforced by Bradley’s own pollster from 1982), along with speculation about why this has happened.
All along, Silver’s argument has been very simply that during the primary season, Barack Obama generally outperformed his poll standings, which shouldn’t have happened if the Bradley Effect was operating. In retrospect, it’s clear that much of the talk about the Bradley Effect was spurred by the one primary state, New Hampshire, where Obama narrowly lost despite pollster predictions that he was ahead. Absent any fresh evidence–and the ability of pollsters to “push” respondents for honest answers should have produced some by now if it existed–it’s time for Democrats to stop worrying that racist voters will revert to type in the privacy of the voting booth. Racism, of course, still exists, and may be hurting Obama, but not in the sort of secretive, poll-refuting manner that is suggested by the Bradley Effect. As Silver points out, there are plenty of more socially acceptable reasons voters could offer for deciding to vote against Barack Obama, no matter what’s actually going on in their hearts and minds.

With three weeks and a day left in this campaign cycle, Barack Obama seems to be expanding his narrow lead into something more substantial. That’s certainly the impression provided by the latest big national survey, the Washington Post-ABC poll, just out today.
The poll shows up Obama up 53%-43% among likely voters. The previous Post-ABC poll at the beginning of the month had Obama up 50%-46%.
The internals of the poll are even more troubling for Team McCain. Obama’s favorability rating is up to 64%, while McCain’s has dropped to 52%. Over half of respondents volunteered the economy as the most important issue, and among them, Obama’s leading by a 62%-33% margin. And Obama now leads McCain as the candidate deemed best able to conduct the right kind of tax policy by 11%; the effort to bash Obama on taxes has, of course, been the centerpiece of McCain’s strategy to deal with the economic crisis.
Is Obama’s lead too big to be overcome? The Post notes that “turning around a late double-digit deficit would be unprecedented in the modern era,” though it offers several examples of leads larger than Obama’s being reduced dramatically in the home stretch.

As Ed noted last night, one of the surprises in the second presidential debate is that McCain did not pursue the “change the subject from the economy” strategy that his campaign had heavily telegraphed, and that his running-mate had already initiated in remarks about William Ayers and Obama’s “radicalism.” The names “Ayers” and “Wright” never came up.
Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith have a pretty thorough discussion of that development at Politico today. Statements by McCain staffers after the debate made it clear this was a strategic decision by the campaign, not some temporary tactic based on the debate format, or a “let Sarah do it” division of labor. They’ve concluded McCain can’t “change the subject” so long as the economic crisis is actually getting worse. Yesterday’s plunge in the Dow was probably the clincher.
We’ll see if the decision sticks should McCain’s poll ratings fare worse than the Dow going forward.