Karl Rove can't change Republican voters

By Frank Moraes 

Nate Silver wrote a very interesting article that goes right along with something I've been thinking: "New Rove Group Could Backfire on G.O.P." He goes into a lot of detail, but basically his argument is that lack of money is not the reason that establishment candidates lost primaries. This ought to go without saying; by definition the establishment candidates are going to have more money. Still, it is surprising just how big the difference is. Of the 23 races he looked at, the median establishment candidate funding was $3 million compared to the median "outsider" candidate funding of a bit less than $400,000 -- a 7.5 fold advantage for the establishment candidates.

There is one overwhelming reason that this funding is a bad idea: the optics. The sad truth of the Tea Party people is that they think of themselves as anti-establishment even while all of their policy preferences are elitist. "We've got to stop those establishment politicians from being so mean to those billionaires!" So as a result, the more an "establishment" candidate is pushed via the media, the more the base will rebel.

Read more »

Cell phones and polling

By Richard K. Barry

During the campaign, a lot of people were making the point that robocalls didn't call cell phone numbers and therefore were not sampling the kind of people who use cell phones exclusively. Those who were being missed were part of a younger, urban demographic. In other words, they were the kind of people more likely to vote Democratic.

For example, Rasmussen doesn't call cell numbers but say they use an online panel to supplement their polling and presumably capture cell phone users. Typically Rasmussen shows results more favorable to Republican candidates, which, as noted above, hardly seems surprising if they are not calling cell numbers.

Polling guru Nate Silver was on Morning Joe last week talking about this cell phone problem. Again, this isn't news, but one would have to wonder why any polling company, assuming it wants to be accurate, would not modify its methodology to do a better job of reaching cell phone users now and in the future.

I know it's getting tedious, but it does make me ask if we should pay any attention to polls that don't make an effort to call cell phone users at a rate consistent with average national use. Is there anything about this that's hard to understand?

The meltdown on Bullshit Mountain News

By Comrade Misfit

The folks at Bullshit Mountain News (BMN) had to deal with the fact that they were so terribly wrong in their forecasts of the election.

Jon Stewart had a lot of fun with it. [Clips one, two, and three.] (Ed. note: These clips are available only in the U.S. If you're in Canada, go here to see last night's episode. If you're anywhere else, I'm not sure what to tell you. -- MJWS)

What the folks at BMN are doing is classic "Frank Burns" mode: "It is G-d's will or someone else's fault."

Nate Silver was on The Daily Show last night and refrained, mostly, from gloating about the triumph of arithmetic over gut feelings. 

(Cross-posted at Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I.)

Don't worry, they won't figure it out

By Comrade Misfit

In an election year when Republicans were expected to get control of the Senate, they lost ground. The reason that happened can be laid at the feet of the religious right and the Tea Party.

In 2010, the combination of the evangelicals and the Tea Party defeated moderate candidates in the primaries and then went on to lose Senate races in Colorado, Nevada, Delaware, and Connecticut. In this election, they did the same thing and went on to lose Missouri, Indiana, Maine, and Connecticut.*

Conservatives like to say that this nation is "center-right." But when it comes time to nominate their candidates, they forget the "center" part. So they'll keep saying things such as "Romney lost because he wasn't a true conservative" and they will continue to get their asses beaten.

Look at the other GOP candidates for the White House this last election. Does anyone truly believe that any of them, other than maybe Jon Huntsman, would have had a prayer of winning over the middle-of-the-road voters? But Huntsman was too moderate for his party and his campaign sank faster than the Costa Concordia.

By the way, I hope that somebody has the good grace to send a bottle of good champagne to Nate Silver and a box of Seppuku knives to the pundits at Fox News, with a specially-engraved one being delivered by messenger to Newt Gingrich.**
______________________________

* Back in 2010, Linda McMahon, who is a pro-wrestling magnate, won the Connecticut primary, defeating the moderate candidate of the party. She self-financed her campaign, to the tune of about $50 million or so, and got shelled in the general election. In this election, she spent about as much of her own money, outspending her opponent by something like 4 or 5 to 1 and lost by 80,000 votes.
** The old European tradition of sending a finely-engraved revolver and one cartridge would be an acceptable substitute. But given the number of "too close to call" pundits this time around, we might have to cheap out a bit.

(Cross-posted at Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I.)

Don't mess with the nerds

By Frank Moraes

Monday evening, Nate Silver released his final predictions for the presidential race. The most remarkable aspect of the prediction was that Florida, which two weeks earlier had been solidly in Romney's favor, slipped into a slight lean towards Obama. How slight? Silver predicted that Obama would win Florida by 0.022 percentage points. Earlier that day, I predicted that Florida would go to Obama, based upon the clear trend that had been evident the previous two weeks. Regardless, I predicted even odds that Obama would get 332, 303, or 294 electoral votes. Right now, we aren't sure which way Florida will go -- just as Silver predicted. But we do know that Obama won re-election with either 332 or 303 electoral votes.

I don't bring this up to show how smart I am. In general, all I did was follow Nate Silver's work and understand it more than most people. For example, I heard a lot of people claim that they thought Obama would win 313 electoral votes because that was the average prediction that Silver released. But that number was extremely unlikely. What was much more helpful was the electoral vote distribution that indicated that Obama had a 20% chance of getting 332 votes, 16% chance of getting 303 votes, and 13% chance of getting 345 votes. Here it is:

As you may recall, Dean Chambers of Unskewed Polls, predicted a 359-179 vote Obama loss. I went over to his website this morning and it is like a ghost town. But I noted that he had updated his prediction. As of Monday, he had Romney winning by the much less ridiculous margin of 275-263. What does that mean? It means in the end he abandoned his claim that the polls were skewed and went along with them, but gave the benefit of the doubt to Romney in Ohio and Florida.

Needless to say, this is not science; this is partisanship. We saw the same thing throughout the right wing echo chamber. George Will predicted Romney would win 321 votes. Dick Morris predicted 325 votes. What was most interesting about these conservative predictions was how extreme they were. While liberals were mostly predicting modest Obama wins (290 and 294 were the most common), conservatives were all predicting blow outs. The reason for this seems to be that conservatives had to assume that the polls were systematically wrong. In order to predict an Ohio win for Romney, they had to predict that a number of other unlikely states would go for him too. Thus the 321, 325, and 359 predictions.

It isn't just Nate Silver who did well last night. Drew Linzer of Votamatic had been predicting a 332-206 Obama win for weeks. What all this means, of course, is that as always the polls were right. The models were better than the straight polling averages because they took parameters like trends into account. Real Clear Politics, for example, had Romney up in Florida by 1.5% on Monday. Even still, a simple poll average was enough to predict 49 out of 50 states. There were no surprises last night in the presidential race.

The bottom line here is: don't mess with the nerds. They may be boring. They may be unfathomable. But they have special Nerd Powers. You'd be foolish to play poker with them. And masochistic to publicly challenge their splendid statistical models of the real world. 

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Pundits always say the race is tightening

By Frank Moraes

Yesterday, I read the following campaign intel from James Pethokoukis, "I just talked to one of my best Team Romney sources who told me that heading into today all the key battleground polls were moving hard and fast in their direction. The source, hardly a perma-optimist, thinks it will be a long night, but that Romney is going to win."

Actually, that's not what it said. If that's what it said, I wouldn't be quoting it here. This is because such information is everywhere right now. Steve Schmidt was promoting this same bullshit line over at MSNBC the other night. George Will predicted that Romney would win with 321 electoral votes. As best I can tell, he means that Romney will win Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia. And Minnesota. And Oregon, Nevada, and New Mexico. This would be a surprise, to say the least. But the point of all these confident proclamations is that the election is somehow moving in Romney's direction.

That's why the quote above is so telling. It was written on 4 November 2008 about John McCain. I just changed "McCain" to "Romney." Here's the actual quote:

I just talked to one of my best Team McCain sources who told me that heading into today all the key battleground polls were moving hard and fast in their direction. The source, hardly a perma-optimist, thinks it will be a long night, but that McCain is going to win.

You may recall, that even though Pethokoukis's source may not be a perma-optimist, he was a that-day-optimist. McCain lost big. Obama got 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173.

I think it is interesting that all the liberals I read are predicting modest Obama victories. David Atkins over at Hullabaloo predicts an Obama win 294-244. But he does note that Obama could win Colorado and bring the total up to 303-235. Ezra Klein is predicting only 290 electoral votes for Obama (which means he also thinks that Obama will lose New Hampshire). This contrasts starkly with the Republican landslide fantasies. Romney may well win, but he will eke out a narrow victory if he does.

My only thought is that the only way that Republicans can argue that Romney will win is to assume that the polls are systematically wrong or that undecideds will break heavily for Romney. One can't assume voters are going to break hard for Romney in Ohio but not in Oregon. Thus you end up with something like the Unskewed Polls prediction of a Romney 359-179 victory. The liberal approach is to assume the polls are basically right, the undecideds will break the way they always do, and that Republican voter suppression (and just bad luck because liberals are pessimists) will lead Obama to lose the close ones: Florida, Colorado, and New Hampshire.

My best guess is still that Obama will win 332-206. However, that does not mean I think that is the most likely outcome. That is just the most likely single outcome. I think it is slightly more likely than 303-235. But I would lay even odds that Obama will win 294, 303, or 332 electoral votes. Nate Silver gives the odds of that happening at roughly 35%. But he also gives the odds of a 345 vote Obama victory an 11% chance. That would require Obama winning North Carolina. I just don't see this happening, but maybe 11% is about right.

The main thing is that it is pretty hard to see how Romney wins this race unless the polls are completely wrong. Check out this great interactive battleground state tool over at the LA Times. Start by giving Obama Ohio. If that happens, it is almost impossible for Romney to win. So tomorrow night, it really does all come down to Ohio. If Florida goes for Obama, it will be a blowout. Otherwise, it will be relatively close regardless of who wins. 

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

The alignment

By Mustang Bobby

If you're following the polling numbers — and chances are that if you're reading this, you have been — Nate Silver is saying that the national polls are showing President Obama with a "modest lead":

This happens to be a reasonably friendly group of polls for Mr. Obama, and it's more likely than not that at least some national polls published late Sunday or on Monday will still show Mitt Romney ahead.

Nevertheless, there is enough data to conclude that Mr. Obama probably has a slight edge from national surveys, which until recently had pointed toward a tie — or perhaps a modest advantage for Mr. Romney in the immediate aftermath of the Denver debate.

A number of these polls had very large sample sizes, meaning that the results are less likely than usual to have resulted from statistical variance.

But the modest gains that Mr. Obama has made in the high-profile national surveys should not be that much of a surprise. We've observed the race shifting toward him over the past two to three weeks in polls of swing states, where overwhelming majorities of polls have had Mr. Obama ahead over the past few days.

This leaves a little breathing room, but not much. Still, Mr. Silver has the president with an 86.3% chance of winning.

Almost there.

Oh, wait; George F. Will says that Mitt Romney will win 321 electoral votes. So I guess Nate Silver and his algorithms are wrong and Mr. Will and his bow tie are right. Well, that settles that. After all, pundits are never wrong.

Oh, wait. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

What's up with Romney focusing on Pennsylvania?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Desperation. It's that simple.

Axelrod:

Senior Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod said Mitt Romney's visit to Pennsylvania shows the GOP nominee's campaign is in "deep trouble" and losing in the traditional battlegrounds.

Axelrod told Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" that the Romney campaign's move into Pennsylvania is a sign of desperation because they are trailing in polls in Ohio, a state no Republican has won the election without.

"The battleground states on which we have been focusing on are not working out for them," Axelrod said. "We're ahead in all of them and now are looking for somewhere, desperately looking for somewhere to try and dislodge some electoral votes to win this election. And I can tell you that's not going to happen."

Silver:

Pennsylvania — where the forecast model puts Mr. Obama's chances at better than 95 percent.

One poll of Pennsylvania on Saturday, from Susquehanna Polling and Research, showed a different result, with the two candidates tied at 47 percent. But in context, this is not such a great poll for Mr. Romney.

The polling firm has had a very strong Republican lean this cycle — about five percentage points relative to the consensus, a much larger lean than firms like Rasmussen Reports and Public Policy Polling that are often criticized for having partisan results. Susquehanna is the only pollster to have shown Mr. Romney ahead in Pennsylvania at any point in the race, as they did on one occasion in February and another in October (Mr. Romney led by four points in their previous poll of the state). Perhaps they will be proven right, but it is usually a bad bet to bank on the one poll rather than the many.

Still, Mr. Romney's campaign is making a late play for Pennsylvania with advertising dollars and a visit there on Sunday.

That is probably a reasonable strategy, even though Mr. Romney's chances of pulling out a victory in Pennsylvania are slim. What makes it reasonable is that Mr. Romney's alternative paths to an Electoral College victory are not looking all that much stronger.

I suppose you can't blame Romney for trying. Just don't buy his campaign's spin that his presence in Pennsylvania is a sign of strength.

It's anything but.

It's no toss-up!

By Frank Moraes

Nate Silver is not the kind of man to make brash statements. He doesn't even defend himself when people dismiss his work because he is "thin" and "effeminate." But there is one thing that seems to bug him: people saying that the presidential race is a toss-up.

Don't misunderstand. He isn't saying that Obama is necessarily going to win. In yesterday's column, he spent a great deal of time talking about polling errors. In particular, he talked about the likelihood that there is some kind of systematic bias in the polls against Mitt Romney. This seems unlikely. But it is possible.

(What I worry about is not that the polls are wrong, but that the Republican efforts to deny Democratic leaning voters the right to vote will be successful. For example, I would tend to think that Obama will win Florida except for this fear. Similarly, I wouldn't even give Ohio a second thought. But it is hard to say just how successful the Republicans have been. In a sense, one just has to have faith in the Democratic ground game. In a bit more than two days, we will know.)

Silver argued that the poll deniers make more sense than the ignorant claims in the mainstream media that the race is a toss-up:

Yes, of course: most of the arguments that the polls are necessarily biased against Mr. Romney reflect little more than wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, these arguments are potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that the race is "too close to call." It isn't. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can't acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.

Ouch! For the mainstream reporters who want to push the squeaker horse race narrative, that's got to sting.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Polls, projections, and probabilities

By Michael J.W. Stickings

If you're really into the polls, a couple of things to read today:

-- Nate Silver: Obama's "firewall" is holding.

-- Mark Blumenthal: But what if the polls are wrong?

Well, anything can happen, of course, but it's nice to see the president up over 300 Electoral College votes and with a chance of winning over 80 in Silver's forecast (303.4 and 80.9, respectively).

With the trend in Obama's favor abundantly clear.

Bored with polls

By Frank Moraes

This is just getting boring. Like all good liberals, I check Nate Silver's blog several times a day. (It's a Good Liberal Club rule!) But now it is just getting predictable. Let's think about this for a moment.

It must suck being Mitt Romney. Here you are working your campaign strategy of never answering questions. And: bam! This hurricane comes along and makes President Obama look heroic and now your surrogate Chris Christie seems to have a man crush on the President. Damn! And you know Romney was on non-message:

For those keeping score at home, today marks three weeks since Mitt Romney last took a question from a reporter.
— Garrett Haake (@GarrettNBCNews) October 31, 2012

The nine Ohio polls of the last four days all show Obama winning the state -- except for the Rasmussen poll, which is kind of like your mother picking you for her basketball team.

But frankly, I don't give a shit about Romney. He has already had far, far more happiness than he deserves in life. So any pain he gets is good for the universe. The problem is that I'm a little deficient in the happiness race. I'd like to get a little back from the universe. But I'm sure not getting there via the Good Liberal Club and Nate Silver. It's become de rigueur.

The fabulous Nate Silver [yawn!] has increased President Obama's chances of winning re-election to 78.4% with a predicted electoral college total of 299.7. But that's not all. The most likely electoral college total is 332 votes -- there is more than a 17% chance of this being the number of electoral votes he gets. You know what they call that? A landslide. [yawn!]

There's never a good first presidential debate when you need it!

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Tarnishing Silver

By Mustang Bobby

I'll bet Nate Silver predicted this, too: 

The New York Times' Nate Silver has created a model to predict the outcome of the presidential election that's watched by just about every pundit, and yet Silver's model refuses to perfectly reflect the conventional wisdom spouted by just about every pundit. The pundits do not like this! Silver's FiveThirtyEight model uses math to show that President Obama has a 74.6 percent chance of beating Mitt Romney, even though Romney has unmeasurable things like "momentum" as well as newspaper endorsements, plus a lead in several national polls. Obama's chances remain high, Silver explains, because he has a significant lead in enough swing states to win the needed 270 electoral college votes. The latest pundit outraged that Silver's model doesn't feel right is MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, who ranted Monday morning:

Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president's going to win. Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73.6 percent — they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning.

...Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue [that] they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops, and microphones for the next ten days, because they're jokes.

Scarborough is very committed to defending what feels true to him, even when it's not true.

I have no way of affirming or refuting anything Nate Silver has stated, and even he has said that he's only putting out what his algorithms are coming up with. But his track record in 2008 and 2010 was close enough to the actual outcome that unless someone comes up with actual proof — as opposed to Joe Scarborough's guts — that Mr. Silver is wrong, they should clam up and let the guy do his job.

Obviously, the people who don't like what he's writing are the ones who are complaining, and if it was Mitt Romney with the 73.6% chance of winning, the Republicans would be calling Mr. Silver the Oracle of Delphi. They sure loved him in 2010.

Mr. Silver seems to be shrugging off the attacks:

He acknowledges that his reputation, made as it was in the last election cycle when he correctly predicted 49 out of 50 states, could just as easily be tarnished this time.

"I'm sure that I have a lot riding on the outcome. I'm also sure I'll get too much credit if the prediction is right and too much blame if it is wrong," he said.

There are a couple of reasons why I hope he's right. Obviously I take comfort in his prediction of an Obama win, but I also think that it lends credence to the simple but powerful idea that I first learned at the hands of the late Margaret Cahill in Grade 5: math doesn't lie.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

All polls are not created equal

By Richard K. Barry

Rasmussen is not calling.

Those of us who anguish over the polls day in and day out tend to have conversations about polling methodologies. It sounds more exciting than it is. Anyway, some of it is well beyond me as it involves the kind of math I abandoned in my second year of university. But some of it pertains to something as simple as whether or not a given polling company calls cell phone numbers in addition to land-line numbers.

You may not be surprised that a lot of people, younger people in particular, rely exclusively on cell phones. If you don't include cell phones in your sample, you are going to miss accounting for these people. Guess which candidate cell phone users are most likely to vote for?

Pollster and political strategist Stan Greenberg at Democracy Corp makes the case, which I'll post in detail because it's important: 

The main issue is cell phones and the changing America that most are under-representing. Our likely voter sample includes 30 percent reached on cell-phones from a cell-phone sample conducted in parallel with our random-digit phone sample. Some other surveys have moved to that level and methodology, but most have not. They are missing the new America, and we’re not sure we are keeping up either.

In the real America, most Americans are now cell-phone only or cell-phone mostly users. With no one really sure what is the right proportion for the likely electorate, everyone has been cautious but that may be the riskier option.

Pay attention to this. In the last half of 2011, 32 percent of adults were cell-phone only according the Center for Disease Control that is the official source on these issues; 16 percent were cell phone mostly. But the proportion cell-phone only has jumped about 2.5 points every six months since 2008 – and is probably near 37 percent now. And pay attention to these numbers for the 2011 adult population.

• More than 40 percent of Hispanic adults are cell phone only (43 percent).
• A disproportionate 37 percent of African Americans are cell only.
• Not surprisingly, almost half of those 18 to 24 years are cell only (49 percent), but an astonishing 60 percent of those 25 to 29 years old only use cell phones.
• But it does not stop there: of those 30 to 34 years, 51 percent are cell only.

That's a lot of potential Obama supporters that some pollsters are managing to avoid.

Rasmussen, for example, a Republican-friendly polling company, doesn't call cell phone numbers and consistently find greater support for GOP candidates.

I don't have data in front of me that goes through which polling companies call cell phone numbers and at what percentages, but it seems like a pretty important question.

Back in September, Nate Silver covered the same territory finding that companies that call cell phone numbers show a better result for President Obama.

I'm just saying what we all know, which is that the development of technology is moving very quickly and those who aren't keeping up are going to get it wrong. 

All polls are not created equal, though we do seem to treat them like they are.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Today in polling: Obama improving?

By Frank Moraes

The big news is that Obama's poll numbers keep improving. On October 4, Nate Silver predicted that Obama had an 87.1% chance of winning the electoral college vote. This was his highest chance during the campaign because the first presidential debate happened on October 3. (Actually, the causality is not so clear; it looks like Romney was improving before the debate.) That was the start of the liberal freakout, where Silver's prediction went down steadily until reaching its nadir on October 12 with a 61.1% chance of winning. I'm sure you remember that week: it was a dark time for us all.

But since then, things have turned around. Obama has steadily increased his chances of winning. As of yesterday, Silver gives Obama a 74.4% chance of winning the electoral college. The popular vote is much tighter, but we see the same dynamic. On October 4, Obama was predicted to win 51.6% of the popular vote. This number dropped to 49.8% on October 12. Note: even on that day, Romney was only predicted to win 49.1% of the vote. So even at his lowest point, Obama was still looking okay. And it has only gotten better. Nate Silver now predicts that Obama will win 50.3% of the popular vote.

None of this means that Obama will win re-election. The race could change in the next ten days. And Republican voter suppression efforts could be highly effective. And the Frankenstorm could upset everything. And Silver's model could be all wrong. Perhaps he doesn't have sufficient height and weight to accurately predict elections. (See below.) But right now, the Obama campaign has to be a lot happier than the Romney campaign.

Undecideds

Last month I wrote about undecided voters and how they will vote. Whoever is winning always claims that this group will break heavily toward them. I've been in this situation many time. But in my experience, they generally go pretty much as the decided voters. It is pretty much never the case that the undecided votes are anything other than a fifty-fifty split.

John Sides over at The Monkey Cage looks at this question quantitatively, "How Will the Undecideds Break?" He finds that they will go 50.1% for Obama. However, looking only at those who claim they will definitely vote, they skew toward Romney with 56%. But even with this, it would add only 0.4% to Romney's total. The final prediction is that this will not be enough to give Romney the popular vote.

Bizarro World

You probably don't know who Dean Chambers is, but I'd bet you know about him. He's a little brain who decided that all the bad polling for Romney before the first debate was one vast left-wing conspiracy. So to counter it, he started the website UnSkewed Polls. Even though I feel pretty good about the polls going into this election, I'm willing to admit that it could go either way. The polls are indeed all over the map. But not according to Mr. Chambers. Using his unskewing procedure, every poll now shows Romney with a handsome lead over Obama. This morning, his poll average is Romney +5%.

According to Chambers, it isn't just the polling that has been skewed. The election models are in on the conspiracy. Yesterday at Examiner.com (more or less the dreadful San Francisco Examiner), he wrote an article attacking Nate Silver and his model. Remember that, if anything, Nate Silver is far more bullish on Mitt Romney than all the other models. But that doesn't matter to Chambers. Chambers knows Silver's model is wrong. How? Because Nate Silver is short and skinny:

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the "Mr. New Castrati" voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he's made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.

Mostly, the article is just a proclamation that Nate Silver must be wrong because Dean Chambers doesn't like his results. In particular, he complains that Silver's model weights some polls higher than others. This is true. For example, he weights Rasmussen rather lightly because they have been shown year after year to be wrong. Apparently, Chambers doesn't understand the difference between weighting data according to their value and weighting them just because you don't like what they're telling you.

Chambers ends his article with another unsubstantiated claim:

[Nate Silver] claims to have been highly accurate in predicting the 2008 election results, and perhaps he was. But it's highly unlikely his current methods and projections will have the level of accuracy unless he changes them quite a lot between now and election day. The race has shifted profoundly in favor of Mitt Romney while Nate Silver is still projecting an Obama win. Unless he changes that, the credibility he earned in 2008 will be greatly diminished after this year's election.[1]

It isn't clear what exactly it would mean for Nate Silver to be right about this election, given that he is just providing probabilities. But let's suppose that Romney wins by a sizable margin. I'm sure this will cause Silver to go back and change his model. On the other hand, if his model turns out to be right and Obama wins by a comfortable margin, will Chambers admit that he was wrong? If I know conservatives, he will not. In 2016, he will still be predicting ridiculous Republican wins.

**********

[1] Note: I fixed about five grammar errors in the sections I quoted from Chamber's article. The awkward syntax was left in. I did this rather than throw in a bunch of [sic]s. I understand this is the Internet, but he's writing for kind of a real publication. Geez!

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

New poll: Romney hits 50%, but who has the momentum and what does it all mean?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

ABC News:

Mitt Romney has seized further advantage on economic issues at the core of the 2012 campaign, taking him to 50 percent support among likely voters vs. 47 percent for Barack Obama – Romney's highest vote-preference result of the contest to date.

The difference between the two candidates is within the margin of sampling error in the latest ABC News/Washington Post daily tracking poll, and their individual support levels have not significantly changed. But the momentum on underlying issues and attributes is Romney's.

This has been, recently, the dominant media narrative, one they are reluctant to let go of: Romney is on the rise, and there's no stopping him, as if he can just keep going up and up. This has been the story ever since the first debate, Romney's one solid outing in the entire campaign, even though Obama won the next two debates, Biden beat Ryan in theirs, and Romney has continue to spew his dishonesty and nonsense out on the campaign trail, very much the candidate he always has been though now with a phony "Moderate Mitt" twist.

(For more on this media-driven development, now fueled by the Romney campaign's inevitability spin, see Alec MacGillis's critique of the "liberal" media's "trajectory" narrative. It very much mirrors my own view of things following the first debate, when I said that the media wanted Romney to win -- not so much because they agree with his politics but because they wanted a new story, and some drama -- and so aggressively gave the debate to Romney on style and hammered the "Romney crushed Obama" meme, willfully ignoring Romney's deluge of dishonesty.)

Now, obviously, there's something to it. Romney has in fact risen in the polls, even if the debate was only part of it (basically, the race was bound to tighten), and at least this one poll now has him up to 50%.

But a poll, a single poll, is just that: a single snapshot of a complex and narrowly volatile situation. The question isn't whether a single poll is an accurate measure of where the electorate stands but how the race is going generally, and the way to do that, as scientifically as possible, is to aggregate polls while accounting for individual polls' biases. The result is still a snapshot, of course, but one that tells a more comprehensive story.

And as Nate Silver writes -- and he knows a thing or two about such things -- Romney's "momentum" appears to have stalled, if not stopped:

Mr. Romney clearly gained ground in the polls in the week or two after the Denver debate, putting himself in a much stronger overall position in the race. However, it seems that he is no longer doing so.

Take Wednesday's national tracking polls, for instance. (There are now eight of them published each day.) Mr. Romney gained ground in just one of the polls, an online poll conducted for Reuters by the polling organization Ipsos. He lost ground in five others, with President Obama improving his standing instead in those surveys. On average, Mr. Obama gained about one point between the eight polls. 

And, indeed, if there is any momentum, it may now be going Obama's way:

The FiveThirtyEight model looks at a broader array of polls — including state polls — in order to gauge the overall trend in the race.

Our "now-cast" also finds a slightly favorable trend for Mr. Obama over the course of the past 10 days or so. Mr. Romney's position peaked in the "now-cast" on Friday, Oct. 12, at which point it estimated a virtual tie in the popular vote (Mr. Obama was the projected "winner" by 0.3 percentage points). As of Wednesday, however, Mr. Obama was 1.4 percentage points ahead in the "now-cast," meaning that he may have regained about 1 percentage point of the 4 points or so that he lost after Denver. Mr. Obama's chances of winning the Electoral College were up in the FiveThirtyEight forecast to 71 percent on Wednesday from 68.1 percent on Tuesday.

I don't pretend to be a polling expert, but I know enough to know that you have to take a step back to see the bigger picture, and that's something many in the media are simply incapable or unwilling to do, preferring to latch on to out-dated narratives (or, rather, to become enamored of their own narratives, as if they've discovered the meaning of the cosmos) and participate in the echo chamber that develops whenever a new narrative takes hold (think of a petulant child, facing a plate of broccoli, sticking his fingers in his ears and yelling in response to his parents telling him to eat up, it's good for you, which of course it is, he just doesn't know it yet, and perhaps never will).

Look, we're still talking about an awfully tight race that could go either way. And of course it's a race for Electoral College votes, not the total national vote, so what we really need to look at, as Silver does, is the state-by-state picture, particularly the key swing states like Ohio.

And there, President Obama has maintained a fairly consistent lead, even if it's down from the pre-first debate highs, with the race certainly not close enough for comfort -- and with anything possible heading into the final ten days.

A comment on the Gallup poll

By Richard K. Barry 

Hey Nate, I bought your book.

At the risk of sounding cranky, I feel compelled to note Nate Silver's comments yesterday on the Gallup tracking poll that shows Romney up by seven points over Obama, results which he says are "deeply inconsistent with the results that other polling firms are showing in the presidential race, and the Gallup poll has a history of performing very poorly when that is the case":

In 2000, for example, Gallup had George W. Bush 16 points ahead among likely voters in polling it conducted in early August. By Sept. 20, about six weeks later, they had Al Gore up by 10 points instead: a 26-point swing toward Mr. Gore over the course of a month and a half. No other polling firm showed a swing remotely that large.

Then in October 2000, Gallup showed a 14-point swing toward Mr. Bush over the course of a few days, and had him ahead by 13 points on Oct. 27 -- just 10 days before an election that ended in a virtual tie.

I'd rather get it right at this point, and this just seems wrong.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Don't panic

By Mustang Bobby

When the Pew Poll came out on Monday and showed Mitt Romney ahead of President Obama, you could have heard the feathers fluttering all over the place; Democrats freaking and Republicans crowing. Yes, it's a narrow race. Yes, it's because of the debate. But like I said yesterday, it's what was expected, and the great guru of all that is poll-y, Nate Silver, said it was bound to happen. In fact, he would have been surprised had it not:

Polling data is often very noisy, and not all polls use equally rigorous methodology. But the polls, as a whole, remain consistent with the idea that they may end up settling where they were before the conventions, with Mr. Obama ahead by about two points. Such an outcome would be in line with what history and the fundamentals of the economy would lead you to expect.

[...]

In some ways, then, the election might not be quite so unpredictable as it appears. There was reason to believe that Mr. Obama's numbers would fade some after his convention — and the first debate has quite often been a time when the challenger drew the race closer.

He still gives Mr. Obama a 75–25 percent chance of winning, which is narrower than before but right in line with the last time an incumbent won re-election: 2004.

P.S.: Gallup has Obama up by five. Feel better now, Andrew?

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Settle down

By Mustang Bobby 

There's all sorts of polling out there about the presidential race and how much or how little the first debate, followed by Friday's jobs report, may have changed the outlook. Some are showing a big bounce for Mitt Romney — ooh, much rejoicing where there was doom and gloom — while some are showing not so big a bounce but still a tick up in his numbers. You can search all around until you find the poll that fits your particular narrative, too; the Republicans have their favorites, and the Democrats have theirs, too.

But if you want one source that has a track record of accuracy, check out Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. Of all the tea-leaf readers out there, he is by far the most reliable, and also the most calming. You may not like the results and you can grasp at a number of straws in his data, but overall, I'd say that on November 6, he's the one who will be on target with the actual results. (And the fact that he's a baseball fan and likes the Tigers has nothing whatsoever to do with my admiration for him and his work.)

Here's his latest outlook showing that after a busy week of debates and jobs reports, the bouncing is over for the moment and the polls are settling to where they were expected to be:

Mitt Romney remains in a considerably stronger polling position than he was before last Wednesday's debate in Denver. But the polls released on Sunday did not tell quite as optimistic a story for him as those in the debate's immediate aftermath.

The four national tracking polls as published on Sunday were largely unchanged from their Saturday releases. Mr. Romney maintained a 2-point lead in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, but President Obama's lead held at 2 points in an online poll published by Ipsos and at 3 points in the Gallup tracking poll. In the RAND Corporation's online tracking poll, which lists its results to the decimal place, Mr. Obama's lead declined incrementally, to 3.9 percentage points from 4.4 on Saturday.

Only the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll consists of interviews that were conducted entirely after the debate, but the share of post-debate interviews is now large enough in the other polls that we can start to come to some inferences about the overall magnitude of Mr. Romney's bounce.

[...]

If the polls settle in at showing something like a 1- or 2-point lead for Mr. Obama by this point next week, that would be reasonably well in line with where our model and others think that the election "should" be based on economic trends; it would no longer be as appropriate to think of Mr. Romney as being an underachieving candidate.

For my part, based on nothing more than just a lot of years watching elections, I've always said this would be a close race. I still think Obama will win narrowly, and I'm relieved to see the facts and the polls backing me up on it.

That said, I would still like him and the Democrats to try to win big.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

President Obama has a lot of work to do

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I don't think the president just threw in the towel last week, giving away the election, and I think Andrew Sullivan's overreacting a bit, but, needless to say, these numbers are bad. Very, very bad:

Romney has drawn even with Obama in the presidential race among registered voters (46% to 46%) after trailing by nine points (42% to 51%) in September. Among likely voters, Romney holds a slight 49% to 45% edge over Obama. He trailed by eight points among likely voters last month.

And it's even worse than that:

Coming out of the debate, Mitt Romney's personal image has improved. His favorable rating has hit 50% among registered voters for the first time in Pew Research Center surveys and has risen five points since September. At the same time, Obama’s personal favorability rating has fallen from 55% to 49%.

In the presidential horserace, Romney has made sizable gains over the past month among women voters, white non-Hispanics and those younger than 50. Currently, women are evenly divided (47% Obama, 47% Romney). Last month, Obama led Romney by 18 points (56% to 38%) among women likely voters.

Okay. (Deep breath.) Romney won the debate and got a boost. But... really? Was the debate so decisive that it erased an 18-point Obama lead among women?

I'm not saying the numbers are wrong -- no right-wing "truther" am I -- but I think what we're seeing is some settling of the numbers. Obama was certainly ahead by a fair margin going into the debate, but he probably wasn't that far ahead.

And while Romney lied his ass off in the debate (making the numbers all the more troubling, showing that people were taken in by his lies), he was able to make the case, on a major national stage, that the economy is still strugggling and that change is needed. (It hardly matters what change, as people are generally prepared to blame the sitting president for the weak economy, even if it's a lot better than it was when he took office and the recovery is doing fairly well, though Romney's dishonest portrayal of himself as a sensible moderate certainly did a great deal to convince persuadable voters that he's okay.) That message clearly resonated.

I'll leave this to expert polling analysts like Nate Silver, but my sense is that there was significant "soft" support heading into the debate to allow for this sort of shift. And maybe Romney, simply by virtue of appearing to be a credible (and not crazy) candidate, was able to win back some of the support he had lost to Obama in the aftermath of the Democratic convention.

But there's more, and it comes down to this: Let's not make too big a deal of this one poll (from Pew). As Nate Silver tweeted yesterday:

So the Pew poll really is a huge data point for Romney. But his polling today was pretty mediocre without it. 

And as Steve M. notes, "the press and blogosphere and Twittersphere are ignoring [other] polls and obsessing over Pew":

This just tells me that the press is, for the moment, on Romney's side -- that's the real story here. Yes, I think Romney got a bounce, but I think the bounce brought the race more or less to parity, which is where it is in the Real Clear Politics poll average. (Talking Points Memo still has Obama up by 2.7 -- and oh, look, Mitt's still down by nearly 4 in RAND's multiple-decimal-point poll.) I'm sorry, but Romney hasn't done anything to build on that strong debate -- his foreign policy speech was a flop, and no one except his base wants to hear a Republican rabble sabers. It will worry me if we're still talking Obama's-in-trouble by the end of the week, and it will worry me if Obama and Biden have any more bad debates. But Mitt Romney is still a weak candidate. Obama's advertising and messaging have defined him as such, as have Romney's own words and deeds. Polls in the next few days should confirm that.

I certainly hope so. Because while I'm trying not to let the polls bother me too much, another debate performance like the one we saw last week could really mean the end for Obama.

The old college ties

By Mustang Bobby 

The election is five weeks from yesterday. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has run a series of state electoral college scenarios wherein the vote ends up in a tie:

As of Monday's FiveThirtyEight forecast, there were 21 states that Barack Obama was projected to have at least an 85 percent chance of winning on Nov. 6. The list includes three important states, Ohio, Wisconsin and New Hampshire, where Mr. Obama's polling has improved by an especially clear margin since the Democratic convention. It did not include several others, however, where he is favored, but less definitively so, such as Virginia, Iowa, Nevada, Colorado and Florida.

If Mr. Obama's overall standing holds in its current position, he should have no trouble winning some of those states, perhaps along with others like North Carolina. But suppose there is a deterioration in his polls between now and Nov. 6 — or that the polls have overestimated his standing across the board. And so Mr. Obama wins the states where he has at least an 85 percent chance of victory in the forecast, but no others. Then we'd be left with the following map:

If you add up the electoral votes in that case, they come out to Obama 269, Romney 269: an exact Electoral College tie. The election would then be thrown to the House of Representatives, which would cast votes based on the provisions of the 12th Amendment.

Mitt Romney would probably win such an election, because Republicans will probably control a majority of state delegations in the incoming House of Representatives. (The forecast model draws lots and awards the election to Mr. Romney 80 percent of the time in such cases.)

But it would surely come with tremendous controversy, especially if the 269-269 tie came in an election in which Mr. Obama had won the popular vote.

Fortunately, such an outcome remains quite unlikely. Of the 25,001 simulations that we ran on Monday, a 269-269 tie came up in 152 model runs, or about 0.6 percent of the time.

That seems like the worst-case scenario, but I think we all need this kind of reminder just in case folks start putting the bubbly on ice and start looking for hotels in D.C. for the inauguration. (I'm talking to you, Romney folks.)

Frankly, I'd rather be looking at a narrow win forecast now so that people on the Democratic team don't get complacent and cocky; that's how Dewey lost in 1948 (not that I was there or anything).  And there are other signs that some states are beginning to become lost causes for Romney, including New Hampshire, which is as close to being his home state as any, and I'm even picking up rumors that the Romney campaign is pulling ads from Ohio.

The chances for anything other than an Obama win are slipping away, but it ain't over yet. Five weeks is a long time, but I think we're beginning to see the first little signs of the end game.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)