Obamamamama's Right: It Ain't Over Yet

You know, there's no tunes from the fat lady...

Frankly, I'm not nearly as optimistic as Slublog, but he makes an interesting case (and he does know from statistics, lying therewith, etc., etc.)

...Polling is, at best, an extremely inexact science and even the best polls are based on numerous assumptions about the population at large. And it's safe to say the polls we've seen this election season are not the best.

You would also have to believe that only 27% of those who show up to vote on election day will be Republicans.**

...Some of the pollsters have justified their out-of-whack party distribution numbers by assuming that Obama will bring in huge numbers of new voters. How well did that work out for him in the primary? He lost the big rural states and his massive army of new voters was only good enough to give him a bare win over Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates.

That "yout' vote" stuff has been around for a long time, by the way--and it's been mostly a pipe-dream. They simply don't show up to vote.

**By the way: "independent" does not mean mushy-middle in all cases. I'm an "independent" because I haven't been a member of either Party for several years. But, as Charlie likes to say, "I'm not a Republican; I'm a Conservative." That may be anecdotal, but it's probably a lot more significant than the pollsters think it is.

Very next post on Ace quotes Geraghty, who speaks with "Obi-Wan"--who said this:

"Believe me, there is someone in the Obama campaign who is deathly afraid of the 'McCain pulls even or goes ahead' poll." (And in Gallup, it was within 2 percent.) "That Obama strategist knows how much depends on the whole Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel approach —work with the media to demoralize conservatives, and keep the perception of a juggernaut going. But a day or two of a few bad polls, and that strategy backfires. The conservatives know they've still got a shot at this."

Emanuel is (deservedly) reviled as a scumbag pol of the Daley Machine School...