Sunday, October 28, 2012

The National Agony May Be Over

Statistics are the most elegant forms of lies, yes.  But they're still interesting.

...In the current tracking poll, Gallup finds the ten-point advantage for Democrats has now turned into a one-point Republican advantage. The current party breakdown is now 35 percent Democrats, 36 percent Republicans, and 29 percent independents. And just in like 2008, that one-point advantage increases when independents are asked which party they typically lean to, with 49 percent identifying as Republicans and 46 percent Democrats. That number backs up the trends in other polling showing Romney leading among independents by large margins.

To get an idea of what this shift means, I plugged the Gallup 2008 and 2012 partisan numbers into the actual results from the 2008 election. Under Gallup’s breakdown, Obama would have won in 2008 by 9.8 points (he actually won by 7.2), and would eke out a victory against Romney in 2012 by eight tenths of a point.
But here’s why you can feel the panic emanating from Chicago: Romney is currently doing better with independents than Obama did in 2008. Obama won independents by eight, in 2008 while Romney is currently leading by 10.6 points on average. If the independent numbers are entered in to the 2008 results, Romney would have a victory of over four points. Even if Romney does not take any more crossover votes (Democrats who vote Republican and vice versa) than McCain got in 2008, he would still win by over four points on Election Day.

And Gallup is not alone.

...taking the Rasmussen partisan breakdown of 2008 and 2012 numbers and plugging them into the actual results gives Obama a seven-point win in 2008 and Romney a half-point victory in 2012. Taking the same scenario as Gallup and moving the independent results to match the current polling average changes Romney’s half-point victory into a 5.7-point victory. (As with Gallup, I’m assuming the Republican and Democrat voting margins stay the same as 2008.) If these polls are accurate and Romney captures a popular-vote win of four to six points, there is no chance he could lose the Electoral College...

None of that polling takes the Benghazi scandal into account. either.  It WILL get worse for SCOAMF.

5 comments:

  1. Rasmussen is partisan fudging, ala El Rushbo. And Gallup - well, it's pretty good, EXCEPT when it differs from other reputable polling by more than one standard deviation.

    Real deal: pick whichever poll you want. We won't know till Wednesday morning.

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  2. I find myself again suggesting, on this " day after ", that you guys have to get a better source of information than Fox News and polls - which I know you abhor. Rassmussen, Dick Morris, Karl Rove, et.al. were DEAD wrong on everything.

    You have four years to fix that, or it's President Clinton - again - President H.R. Clinton.

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  3. Umnnhhh...actually, it is always the candidate, Tim--as you know.

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  4. Yup. Also, regarding your post about Tommy, he was the WRONG candidate, and I think you nailed it.
    A couple years back I did a big project for the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association, creating a website baby reporters could use to get them up to speed on WI laws, rules, politics, etc. (http://www.kidderbnrc.org) When the site was in Beta, in July of '09, we went up to a Green Bay TV newsroom to see how young reporters would use the info, if it was valuable, how it would display on their smart phones (a generation of smart phones ago), etc. We asked a young reporterette "suppose you get word that Tommy Thompson has been in a car wreck and may be dead - where is the first place you would go to get background information on him?" The reporterette - a freshly minted UW-GB grad -said "who's Tommy Thompson?" The News Director's eyes rolled;I supressed a laugh. "I'm Tommy Thompson" did not mean diddly squat to far too many voters.

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  5. The utter lack of knowledge of history is astounding. I find examples of it with my co-workers on a daily basis.

    What's more, the attitude is "So What?" that they don't know who (say) Joe Adcock was/is.

    There are some things (e.g., knowledge of Joe Adcock) which are not really important to a discussion of the nation.

    But there are some things which ARE.

    One wonders whether the necessary inculturation is a matter of experience, or whether that necessary inculturation (say, a passing knowledge of Aristotle's thought) is considered useless and therefore is rejected out-of-hand.

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