Sean Oxendine's blog

As one might expect, the situation continues to look grim for McCain.  I compiled this yesterday morning, so there's some data -- some good for McCain, some bad -- that is missing, but right now Obama is looking at a Clinton '92-style win.  What will this look like by November?  Who knows.  I could come up with arguments why this is like 2000, when last-minute undecideds broke heavily toward Gore, or I could come up with arguments why this is like 1980, when last-minute undecideds broke toward Reagan. 

But predicting what things will look like on election day based on what polls today are saying is a fools' errand, so I will just say this:  With a President of the same party with an approval rating in the 20s suddenly dragged into the foreground, with an economy rambling toward a severe recession or worse, after the ticket at the very best fought to a draw in three debates, and without any coherent narrative for the ticket, McCain is down by six in national polls.  Four-and-a-half if you weight the state averages (which is tricky because there are some states that don't have fresh data).  So the scenario is certainly there for McCain to win if the stock market stops plummetting and the economy stops looking catastrophic.  I don't think its likely; maybe a 1-in-4 shot.  Heck, I'm not even that certain McCain losing would be that bad a thing (see, e.g., here and here), but we've had that discussion, and no one much seems to agree.  So anyway, here's the map and the trend chart:

For those who don't know, most of what I write here (but not all, so keep reading here) is cross-posted at Race42008.com -- a great site for following polls and election-related commentary (/plug).  In the comments over there, BobH -- who has been posting at sites I've been writing and/or posting at for four years -- writes with regard to my post about the movement in the tracking polls below:

Sean: I find it interesting to compare the results of the LV and RV polls. Using the polls currently in the RCP average, the three RV polls have Obama leading by 11, 7, and 6 (an average of 8). The LV polls have the lead at 6,2,1,4,3,8,3 (an average of just under 4). The question appears to be how accurate the likely voter screens are this year. If McCain is really within 4 in mid-October, then this thing is very winnable. If he’s behind by 8, things are a good bit dicier.

That's spot-on, and I hadn't noticed the pattern (and had completely forgotten that Gallup Tracking is an RV poll). It also brings up some good points for discussion.

As I've said before, the million dollar question this cycle is what the electorate will look like. No one really knows for sure, and I think it is less certain than even 2004 (when increased Kerry enthusiasm was supposed to lead to a blowout). I have heard all the arguments for why turnout will favor Obama this time around, and I credit them (except for the "cellphone effect" argument).

But there are also countervailing arguments. In 2004, the improved Kerry GOTV, vote registration machine was about as hyped as the Obama registration and GOTV machine. It succeeded -- but so did a much less hyped Republican GOTV machine. In short, Kerry met targets that the campaign thought if they met would make it impossible for them to lose. The GOP did better.

So when I see analysis indicating that early voting is not as record-breaking in Ohio as many would expect, I start to wonder about the polls. And when I note that Party ID among the electorate has been astoundingly level over the past twenty years, in elections that have been good, bad, and ugly for both parties, I wonder how much I can expect them to be different this year:

In 1988, Democrats had a three-point party ID advantage over Republicans (38-35). In 1992, Democrats still had a three-point party ID advantage over Republicans (38-35). In 1996, that advantage increased to four - a shift of one point (39-35). In 2000, Democrats were steady, up by four (39-35), and in 2004 they dropped to even (37-37). . . . But note that in 2006, when Democrats clearly found enormous success at the ballot box, that the advantage in party ID was only three points (38-35).

Yes, Obama has registered tons of voters. As I note above, that is an argument to certainly credit in his favor. On the other hand, likely voter screens typically ask if you have voted before for a reason. Every cycle we hear about how likely voter screens are going to be off because of an anticipated surge in Democratic turnout, and it is usually wrong, even in very good Democratic years. They tend not to be. It is one thing to meet a college kid on Franklin St. and get him to sign up to vote; it is another to get him to show up. I agree wholeheartedly that if there is a year when these voters are going to turnout, this is that year. But I also would have said 2006 was arguably that year, and young voters actually made up a smaller portion of the electorate than 2004.

And yes, Democrats had great turnout in the primaries. The likes of which have not been seen since 1988 and 1984 (the previous record-breaking years).

So the question is this: Are the likely voter polls already anticipating a surge in Democratic party ID? Some certainly are. It is suspected that there reason Battleground went from showing McCain winning to showing Obama winning is that they re-weighted from their earlier D+3 electorate. What if, as in 2004, the ballyhooed Democratic turnout machine doesn't materialize, or only adds a point or two to the electorate? How many of those new Democratic voters were Democratic-leaning independents, or voters (either R, D, or I) who registered to vote AGAINST Obama?

On the other hand, what if these likely voter polls are anticipating a 1996 electorate, and we end up with something much different? What if Hotline/FD's +5 Dem electorate (with Obama leading by only 2 in what would be the most heavily Democratic electorate in almost a generation) is actually generous to Republicans?

The million dollar question continues to revolve around what the makeup of the electorate will be. If the likely voter screens still work and McCain is only down 4, I'd feel pretty good heading into November. If the screens don't, then we're really dun-zo.

Y'know, one of the perverse incentives of journalism --especially e-journalism where you don't have editors -- is that you have every incentive to publish a story prematurely.  That makes it difficult to allow story lines to play themselves out fully before you comment.  To put it more colloquially, if ya snooze, ya lose.

So in that spirit, I'll just note that the RCP average for Obama has gone from Obama +6.2 to Obama +4.7 in the past couple of days.  The Hotline/FD tracker now has narrowed from a 7-point Obama lead to a 2-point Obama lead in two days.  Rasmussen has narrowed from an 8-point lead to a 6-point lead.  Zogby (not an internet poll) has it at a 2-point Obama lead, down a point from yesterday.  Battleground shows a drop from a 7-point Obama lead to a 4-point Obama lead. Gallup hasn't come out yet today.

Now I'm well versed in error margins, but it would be pretty unlikely for all four polls to simultaneously move in the same direction.  One of the benefits of an average like RCP is that with 8 datapoints or so, the sampling errors should somewhat cancel each other out, since you should end up with an equal distribution around the true amount.

So what to make of this?  Just one-in-10,000 statistical fluke?  Republicans coming home?  Something we didn't see in the debates?  Ayers?  Discuss amongst yourselves.

Oh, and if the polls shift back toward Obama tomorrow, this post will self-destruct.

UPDATE:  Aaaaaaand just like that, Gallup comes in as the only one of the five (six if you count Kos/R2K) to show movement away from McCain (+9 to +11).

If you don't make HorseRaceBlog part of your daily read, you should.  Jay Cost is one of those people who has forgotten more about politics than most of us will ever know.

Anyway, I just mention this because he has a piece up today that is germane to the contributor discussion we've had going about how McCain turns this thing around.  It is a good read just for the commentary on the historical development of the parties, but also for his spot-on depiction of McCain's problems:

Above all, the Whigs had a pro-banking reputation. The Whig Party formed partially in response to the actions of President Jackson against the Bank of the United States. Believe it or not, banking was a big issue in the 1830s - and the Whigs were for a strong, central bank. The Republican Party, having inherited much of the pro-business sentiment of the Whig Party, has been pro-banking in spirit for 150 years. Your average voter might not know the historical reasons for why the GOP is a pro-banking party, but s/he understands that it is.

That could be hurting the GOP as much as anything right now. If this were an economic crisis precipitated by a massive labor union strike - akin to what Harry Truman had to put up with after World War II - I'd wager the horse race numbers would be reversed right now. After all, the Democratic Party is identified with labor. But this is a crisis precipitated by the banks. Combine that with the fact that George W. Bush is at the helm, and it's unsurprising that the public has assigned the blame to the GOP.

This has put John McCain in a terrible spot. McCain's key electoral strength (at least relative to GOP also-rans like Mitt Romney) is that he is not an orthodox Republican. His relationship to the GOP is a bit like Diet Pepsi's relationship to Pepsi. That's why he had such stiff competition for the GOP nomination - lots and lots of people in this country are still big fans of the GOP (we call them Republicans), and they weren't tickled with the idea of a Diet Republican winning the nomination. But in the broad middle of the country, there is disaffection with George W. Bush and, by extension, the Republican Party. McCain's maverick label was his best hope for overcoming those sour feelings.

. . .

Average voters do not have anything approaching perfect information. They are probably not keenly aware of how McCain is different from the average Republican. I think they have a sense that he is - and in a vaguely anti-GOP year, that might be enough. However, this banking crisis means we are no longer in a vaguely anti-GOP year. We're in a year when one of the groups the Republicans are thought to stick up for gets the blame for screwing up the economy. That changes things. To return to the soda metaphor - it isn't enough to be Diet Pepsi when the country really wants a Coke.

He has some interesting perspectives on the solution to this problem as well.  Well worth the read.

This question has been percolating around the blogosphere and on the right for the last week, after it became clear that the financial crisis was an inflection point in the election that did not inure to McCain's benefit.  I thought I'd add my two cents on this.

My first thought is kind of a dodge, but I think its important to keep the bigger picture in mind.  Not every election is winnable, and this might just be an election that the GOP was not supposed to win, even against a fairly weak candidate like Obama.  An economic shock was for the Democrats what an attack by terrorists would be for Republicans -- a game changer that focused undecideds on what they liked most about one party and liked least about the other.  Just as a national security crisis would likely have made Americans turn to a war leader like John McCain, so to an economic crisis turned voters toward the Democrats.  It also brought to the forefront the titular party leader, who happens to have a 30% approval rating.  That Obama is getting to around 50% does not surprise me -- in fact it only surprises me that it is that low.

At the same time, I'm not 100% convinced that all is lost.  Looking at the RCP average of national polling, we see that the difference between a three-point Obama lead (Democracy Corps) and a nine-point Obama lead (CBS News) is almost entirely found in the variance in McCain's numbers.  To put it in geeky statistical terms, Obama's variance in his national polling numbers is 1.69697, McCain's is 3.295455.  This could be statistical noise, but it could also be that Obama has convinced the people he is going to convince, and that there is a section of the electorate that is still not comfortable with him that is leaning toward McCain.  It may not matter since Obama is now pretty darned close to 50%, but there's at least a shot that McCain can still keep this close and potentially eke out a victory -- and making it close may be the difference between a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate and 57-58 seats.

So what's McCain to do to maximize his chances of winning?  I think that first he needs to sharpen his attacks.  This is not a 1990s election when people aren't tuned in, where generic ads about "painful taxes" will get it done.  People are paying very close attention, and while I generally am not one to underestimate the public's ignorance on political issues, but I think one advantage Obama has had on McCain is that his attacks that I have seen have tended to be more specific as to what John McCain has done, or will do.  I also think that attacks on the Fannie Mae crisis will be tough to pull off, as for better or for worse, the Republicans are the party of big business, and even though J-Mac isn't your average Republican, he's still a Republican (thank God Mitt isn't the nominee right now).

The other thing I think he needs to do is to settle on some kind of message.  This "originial Mavericks" schtick is a good one, but again, I still think people have some sense for what Obama would do as President.  I started to get worried about this when, after seeing Obama's commercial about taxing companies who send jobs over sees, my paleo-conservative mother said "that sounds like a pretty good idea." 

There's no comparable ad for McCain that I've seen.  McCain is making the same mistake that Obama nearly fatally made in the early primaries -- he's using vague promises which allows his opponent to paint on the canvas that he has left blank. 

In most elections, I think generic promises about lower taxes is enough to generate sufficient warm fuzzies from the electorate.  But this isn't "most elections."  There is an atypical Republican running against an atypical Democrat.  John McCain needs to make sure people believe the former, and ensure they absolutely believe the latter.

Oh, and no more suspending the campaign or generaly looking like you're running around like a chicken with your head cutoff.

It's been a while since I've updated my polls (weighted by age and accuracy), but there's a doins' a transpirin'!  The latest map is below, along with a chart showing movement.  Most of the movement is obviously toward Obama.  In the national polls, Obama has now moved to a 5.7 point lead, 49-43.3%.  Interestingly, when you weight state polls by the size of the 2004 electorate in each state and then average them (which should add up to the national electorate) you get a narrower Obama lead of 48.4-45.6%.  Not sure what to make of that, but it is out there.  In previous iterations, the two measurements have generally been within a point of each other.

This has utterly destroyed McCain's electoral advantage, and moved him to a 185-353 advantage to Obama.

The other interesting observation is how uneven the movement has been.  Some states have actually shown some movement toward McCain in the last week-and-change -- SC, ME, MT, CA, etc.  Other very important states have not moved at all. IN, AZ, CO, NM, MN are all within a point of where they were on September 22. Some states, though, such as TN, TX, NC, FL, PA, and WA, have seen movement toward Obama of more than five points.

Even given that the model weights (very lightly) polls taken as much as two weeks ago, this is surprising, because all of the polling included in the dataset is now done after the AIG/Lehman Bros. collapse.  This discrepency therefore can't be explained simply by the "lag" that's created by older polls.  I don't have any theories as to why this would be the case, but if anyone has any, I'll be happy to hear them!

One other piece of good news -- Although McCain is down, enough states are close that he isn't out.  He's within at least 3 points in states totalling 271 electoral votes.  It's never good to have to run the table to win, but hopefully once this bailout stuff passes and Bush recedes into the background, some of these states will come back over "on their own."

You own the defeat of the bailout bill.  For better or for worse you own it.  The American people will view it as your doing because (a) many of them believe you still control Congress and (b) the American people think of Republicans more than Democrats as the party that doesn't like bigger government.

Your response today was the absolute worst one imaginable.  The finger-pointing and lame excuses about partisan speeches from the House Speaker are the worst possible reason, for a public that is very tired of finger-pointing and lame excuses.  In the end the bill failed for one reason:  People were pissed off about government spending $750 BILLION to bail out Wall Street.  Your rank-and-file figured this out, as did much of the Democratic rank-and-file.  We are in a populist moment.  But populism (as opposed to progressivism) contains TWO great dislikes: Wall Street and Congress.  This bill was seen as an unholy alliance of the two.

You now need to claim ownership of this defeat, which is already assigned to you.  The argument is simple: "We are not going to vote for the $750 BILLION in spending of taxpayer dollars for Wall Street, the one proposed by President Bush and Nancy Pelosi."  You need to do the reverse of what President Clinton did -- they need to triangulate against the President and the House Democratic leadership.  Neither of them is very popular, and McCain is increasingly unlikely to win.  Drop them and run against them.  If Pelosi brings up a bill farther to the left, 190 Republicans need to vote against it.

You own this.  The American people think you stopped this bill.  They want to know why.  There is an argument for why which will resonate with them.  You need to start making that argument, before the Democrats and the press start making it for you, while you keep arguing that you don't own this defeat.

That might kill the economy.  But that die has already been cast, long ago.  I think the bailout bill might have helped, but not stopped this.  But there were also helpful signs today -- increased liquidity from the fed, the buyouts, rather than bailouts, of WaMu.  The Dow fell 7% today, a lot, but far less than the 23% it fell in October of 1987.   Maybe the bankers who would be bailed out by this bill's failure aren't the best people to listen to when they scream about impending doom.  Maybe, just maybe, we can weather this storm.

I think today was a political mistake, but I think the worst thing the GOP could do is to be perceived as weak, and trying to deny what is obvious to many Americans.  For better or worse, you now own this defeat, and it is time to take a stand on whatever it is you own.

Pace Soren, I tend to agree with Pejman's view of the collapse of the bailout bill.  Quite frankly, I don't think Nancy Pelosi is smart enough to look as many steps ahead as Soren posits.  Maybe Barney Frank, but even then, there were too many variables at work for them to make that kind of a play.  At best, I'm willing to concede that she was indifferent to the outcome, seeing potential either way.  But given that everyone seems to agree that Republicans were expected to supply quite a few more votes than materialized, I think everyone thought the bill would pass.

What we're seeing, I think, is a preview into what awaits a likely President Obama.  I've written this before, but the Democrats have a party that is custom made for controlling Congress, but they don't have a party custom made for governing it.  The reason is simple.  Begin with some theory:  Keith Poole maintains a rank-ordering of Congress by looking at all votes cast in a given Congress.  I won't go into the details, but the bottom line is that the rank ordering is generated by a complex computer algorithm, not by any subjective measurement.

Go take a look at the rank ordering.  Democrats control 235 seats in Congress.  The most liberal Republican -- Wayne Gilchrist -- has a lifetime ACU of 60.  That's not real conservative -- and wasn't conservative enough for the voters in MD-01 -- but it is still pretty conservative.  Count 15 seats into the Republican caucus -- about number 250.  That's Todd Platts.  Todd Platts has a lifetime ACU of 76.  That is not ultra-conservative, but no one is going to mistake him for a liberal.  Count in 45 seats, to Latham.  He's a member of the class of 1994, with an ACU of 86.  (Again, Poole-Rosenthal is different than ACU, but I thought it would be useful to give some type of reference point for people).

Now take a look at the Democratic caucus.  Its most conservative member is Tom Barrow.  HIS ACU is lifetime is 47, and has gone as high as 76 last year (well into the Republican caucus).  15 in is John Tanner, who still has a lifetime ACU of 43.  Go in 45, and you find Congressman Costello, whose lifetime ACU is 34.  Go another 20 in, to 65, and you're at Congressman Ortiz, whose lifetime ACU is 33.  You're now a little less than 1/3 of the way into the Democratic caucus, and you have a member who votes with the ACU about 1/3 of the time.

Your Friday question.  I ask this because I've been contemplating:  Had Bush lost in 2004, Iraq still would have been a disaster in 2006, and Hurricane Katrina still would have been a disaster on Kerry's watch and the economy still would have only stumbled along.  But instead of a Republican President shouldering the blame, it would have been a Democrat.

In other words, we would probably have picked up 10-20 House seats in 2006, would have held most of our Senate seats except maybe Pennsylvania, and probably would have picked up Democratic Senate seats in New Jersey, Minnesota, and maybe even Washington and Nebraska.  The credit crisis still would be going on today, and President Kerry would be going into this election with a horrendous approval rating.  Mary Landrieu would be toast, Democratic Senate seats in Montana, Iowa, New Jersey and Michigan would probably be a couple notches closer than they are today, and we'd probably only have a handful of competitive seats of our own to worry about.  In other words, we'd probably be heading toward a Republican President with a filibuster-proof Senate majority, instead of the opposite.

Now the counter-argument to all this -- and it is not a small one -- is that we would have lost Iraq, and Kerry would have appointed the Chief Justice and probably replaced Justice O'Connor, though control of the Senate would have limited what President Kerry could do.  These are no small considerations.  But the point is, you could make the argument that the Republicans would be better off in the long run if they had lost in 2004.

This time, the incoming President is likely to inherit an economy that stumbles along for several years. It may even be in a severe recession.  Things overseas may get better, but it is unlikely.  This will be blamed on Bush for a while (just as the 2001 recession was blamed by most Americans on Clinton in the beginning of Bush's term), but sooner or later, if it lingers, it will be blamed on the Democrats.  And there's reason to suspect it will linger: proposals like raising the capital gains tax and renegotiating NAFTA -- when exports are the only thing carrying the economy along right now -- are economic insanity.  And there will probably be no internet bubble to pull Obama's chestnuts out of the fire like Clinton's were pulled out.

In other words, 2010 would probably be a very good Republican year in the event of an Obama victory.  Remember, in 1993-1994, Clinton did a few small things -- raised taxes on the rich marginally, tried to let gays into the military, and signed a gun ban.  He lost 52 seats.  Imagine what happens if Democrats go down a similar path, and go into an election with 1/4 of their caucus in districts Bush carried twice, with a softer economy than Clinton had in 1994.  And quite frankly, the dirty little secret is that Obama doesn't have a fraction of Clinton's political sense and skill, and Joe Biden is a babbling buffoon, something that he (and the press) just won't be able to hide anymore once he is President.

2010, of course, is a critical election.  Democrats will be defending open Governors seats in Arizona, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming.  They will have incumbents in red or purple states up for re-election in Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio and Wisconsin, and will probably have unpopular incumbents or open seats in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Illinois.  Wins in many of those seats, accompanied by even marginal statehouse gains, will mean that Republicans will control redistricting in some of the biggest states in the country (though we will probably lose California, where it would be hard to do too much more damage to Republicans), which would set Republicans up for controlling Congress for the better part of the next decade.

The best thing that happened to the Republican party was Jimmy Carter winning in 1976 -- had Ford won, he would have had to have dealt with many of the same problems, and probably would not have fared much better.  It could be that losing in 2008 is a similarly good option.  There's some times the Presidency isn't worth having.

UPDATE:  Just to be clear on one thing; I think the Supreme Court is probably the best argument against this argument.  To make matters worse, this is basically unknowable.  People have been arguing that each election is the most important in a lifetime since at least 1996.  Democrats have warned that a Republican President would replace Justice Stevens since at least then.  Personally, I believe the man to be a vampire, who will live forever, but I digress.  The bottom line is that it is true -- President Obama probably has a good shot at replacing Stevens and Ginsburg, and possibly Souter, in his first term.  President McCain has a reasonable shot, though less than Obama.  If Obama is re-elected -- and I think whoever wins has a very small chance of being re-elected -- he has a better chance at Breyer, Scalia, and Kennedy which is much worse.  The bottom line is this:  This is an unknown.  It's all unknown, but the SCOTUS selections are more unknown than most things.  As such, its hard to weigh in the analysis.

I just take the longer view.  If we lose in '08 and Obama replaces Stevens, Ginsburg and Souter, but we win big in '10 and '12 and get whomever we want to replace Scalia, Kennedy, and Breyer, its a win.  At that level, and at other levels.