Well, here we are twelve days from the general elections, and only now is the political world focusing on the high likelihood of voter supression shananigans. It would have been nice if the persistence of these tactics had led to national legislation to deal with the national problem of wildly varying, arbitrary, and partisan election administration.
A New York Times editorial on voter-list purges and other voter suppression tactics starkly exposed the situation:

Congress and the states need to develop clear and accurate rules for purges and new-voter verification that ensure that eligible voters remain on the rolls — and make it much harder for partisans to game the system. These rules should be public, and voters who are disqualified should be notified and given ample time before Election Day to reverse the decision.
For this election, voters need to be prepared to fight for their right to cast a ballot. They should try to confirm before Nov. 4 that they are on the rolls — something that in many states can be done on a secretary of state or board of elections Web site. If their state permits it, they should vote early. Any voter who finds that their name has disappeared from the rolls will then have time to challenge mistakes.

Americans shouldn’t have to “fight for their right to cast a ballot.” And we can only hope that after this election, finally, the next president and Congress get serious about election reform.

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.