US Politics: Elecciones Generales 8 De Noviembre, 2012

[Fez]

I'm now very interested in the nation/state poll split (as Nate Silver just posted). O should be 1-2 points ahead, but the national polls arent tracking that. I've also seen a graph from Wang's site that shows this discrepancy.

So the question is whether national polls are underrepresenting O or if state polls are showing an advantage for him. The reason most pollsters hesitate to show a EC-PV split is because the polls from non-competitive states dont appear to jive too well with this story.

R+2 or more should make us all a bit jittery about the state poll biases.

Considering there's been a much larger number of state polls than national ones, and from a much larger number of pollsters, I'm more inclined to believe that the bias lies with the national polls.

Specifically, I think the bias is almost solely with Gallup and Rasmussen. As Nate's own chart showed, without Gallup providing numbers right now the Monday national average was O+0.9. Without Rasmussen it'd be ~O+1.2

[Guest]

Hmm...I don't know. The Pacific Northwest has definite chances for earthquakes/tsunamis (and the odd volcanic eruption). Not to mention forest fires, etc. I was thinking the northern Great Plains region, but we have blizzards, floods, and tornadoes/severe thunderstorms, too. I think everywhere has it's own share of natural disaster potential. The only question is exactly what form they will take.

I think that the Pac NW is relatively unthreatened by natural disasters. The threat of Tsunami exists, I guess, but Seattle is the only major coastal city and it's only sort of coastal, right? Someone from there could probably speak more authoritatively.

There's Mt. St. Helens which had a pretty large eruption in 1980, and that wasn't really much of a threat to Portland, the nearest city.

Flooding is supposedly a threat, but we never see the disastrous types of flooding you see along the Mississippi, for example.

There is supposed to be a threat of a huge earthquake in the PacNW one of these days, so that might be when the karma all comes home to roost.

[IheartTesla]

Specifically, I think the bias is almost solely with Gallup and Rasmussen. As Nate's own chart showed, without Gallup providing numbers right now the Monday national average was O+0.9. Without Rasmussen it'd be ~O+1.2

Yes, I was thinking of removing those two myself from any averages I look at. A cynical part of me is also believes Ras will start trending his numbers towards parity once he sees the writing on the wall, so I'll be keeping an eye towards a Ras tie in the next week.

Still, a part of me feels like doing that is cherry picking. But I am also reminded of a graph on Sullivans blog that showed that if you just take Ras and Gallup, you see Romney leading since September (I think I remember that graph correctly).

[Whoring Drunkard]

Stat experts, is the argument in favour of the national polls over the state polls here http://www.wallstreetexaminer.com/blogs/winter/?p=5565 debunked by "the partisan splits are a function of who respondents support, rather than a sample quota" reasoning? Or is this a plausible argument for the national polls being less biased than the state ones?

[awesome possum]

Has anyone listened to any talk radio or watched any Fox News today? I want to know what's being made of Chris Christie on the right.

I haven't subjected myself to it lately, but I did find this clip of Christie speaking on Fox & Friends.

Take a look at the dummy on the right's face at the 51 second mark. I think that about says it all.

Also, damn, Christie looks worn out there. Understandable considering what he'd been through, but the guy looks like he's wavering and barely keeping his feet.

ETA:

I just went out to smoke and listened to 5 minutes of Rush's show. He's trying to put a positive spin on it as if Christie just rope-a-doped Obama into wasting precious time away from the campaign trail by getting him to go to NJ, which he's going to win anyways.

[Fez]

Yes, I was thinking of removing those two myself from any averages I look at. A cynical part of me is also believes Ras will start trending his numbers towards parity once he sees the writing on the wall, so I'll be keeping an eye towards a Ras tie in the next week.

Still, a part of me feels like doing that is cherry picking. But I am also reminded of a graph on Sullivans blog that showed that if you just take Ras and Gallup, you see Romney leading since September (I think I remember that graph correctly).

Its not cherry picking if it can shown that a pollster is simply way-off base due to some problem in the methodology. I imagine in the post-election period Silver will do a fair amount of analyzing of where pollsters went wrong and I wouldn't be surprised if Zogby (internet ones only, phone ones still allowed) will get some company on the 'ignore' list.

[IheartTesla]

Of course, but we still dont know what the electorate will turn out like. So far we have strong evidence indications, but we can make only make post-hoc justifications based on actual voting data that shows Gallups demographics and Ras party IDS are wrong. But till then we are really relying on intuition (although the early voting trends are the other half of the story that may justify the 2008 level numbers of minorites nationwide).....

[Shryke]

Of course, but we still dont know what the electorate will turn out like. So far we have strong evidence indications, but we can make only make post-hoc justifications based on actual voting data that shows Gallups demographics and Ras party IDS are wrong. But till then we are really relying on intuition (although the early voting trends are the other half of the story that may justify the 2008 level numbers of minorites nationwide).....

What most of the arguments rely on is actually inference from other polls and previous elections. So things like:

- Gallup is crap because the only alternative is every single other pollster is massively wrong

- Gallup is crap because they show ridiculous swings day to day that are not picked up by anyone else

- X pollster's LV screen is crap because it goes against all the demographic movement we've seen over the past 4 elections

And things of that sort.

[Inigima]

So Bloomberg broke some news about Romney's tax stuff while everyone was hurricane-watching. Turns out he's basically using the Mormon Church as a tax shelter:

In this instance, Romney used the tax-exempt status of a charity -- the Mormon Church, according to a 2007 filing -- to defer taxes for more than 15 years. At the same time he is benefiting, the trust will probably leave the church with less than what current law requires, according to tax returns obtained by Bloomberg this month through a Freedom of Information Act request.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-29/romney-avoids-taxes-via-loophole-cutting-mormon-donations.html

EDIT: To be clear, this is legal, it just looks very bad.

[Fez]

Stat experts, is the argument in favour of the national polls over the state polls here http://www.wallstree.../winter/?p=5565 debunked by "the partisan splits are a function of who respondents support, rather than a sample quota" reasoning? Or is this a plausible argument for the national polls being less biased than the state ones?

Maybe I'm just tired right now (and, in fairness, I am), but that author appears to be spouting complete gibberish. Its like he looked up a few terms and numbers seen on other blogs and strung them together to say "Obama won't win because I don't want him to!"

[Shryke]

I can't remember if this was posted yet, but Ezra Klein has a fantastic article on the arguments over polling going on in the media. There's a bunch of great stuff there, but here is the heart of it imo:

Come to think of it, a lot of the odder critiques of Silver have been coming out of Politico. But that makes a kind of sense. Silver’s work poses a threat to more traditional — and, in particular, to more excitable — forms of political punditry and horse-race journalism.

If you had to distill the work of a political pundit down to a single question, you’d have to pick the perennial “who will win the election?” During election years, that’s the question at the base of most careers in punditry, almost all cable news appearances, and most A1 news articles. Traditionally, we’ve answered that question by drawing on some combination of experience, intuition, reporting and polls. Now Silver — and Silver’s imitators and political scientists — are taking that question away from us. It would be shocking if the profession didn’t try and defend itself.

More recently, we in the media — and particularly we in the media at Politico — have tried to grab an edge in the race for Web traffic by hyping our election stories far beyond their actual importance. The latest gaffe is always a possible turning point, the momentum is always swinging wildly, the race is endlessly up in the air. It thus presents a bit of a problem for us if our readers then turn to sites like Silver’s and find that none of this actually appears to be true and a clear-eyed look at the data shows a fairly stable race over long periods of time.

http://www.washingto...ilver-backlash/

[Rorshach]

AP:

Not a big deal, but this is not correct. Election day is the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. Therefore it is always the Tuesday between Nov 2 and Nov 8. I don't remember why that rule is in place, or if they even had a reason.

To quote from a book I keep returning to: America (the book) (bought it on a whim in a bookstore in Addis Abeba long before I knew who Jon Stewart was):

This is because having it on the first Thursday after the second Saturday in November would be silly

[Slick Mongoose]

How long until Rebublicans bring out their own slew of polling analysis websites? And would it work?

[Fez]

How long until Rebublicans bring out their own slew of polling analysis websites? And would it work?

They did. It called unskewedpolls.com and its a joke.

[Ormond]

I think that the Pac NW is relatively unthreatened by natural disasters. The threat of Tsunami exists, I guess, but Seattle is the only major coastal city and it's only sort of coastal, right? Someone from there could probably speak more authoritatively.

There's Mt. St. Helens which had a pretty large eruption in 1980, and that wasn't really much of a threat to Portland, the nearest city.

There is supposed to be a threat of a huge earthquake in the PacNW one of these days, so that might be when the karma all comes home to roost.

This is getting off the thread topic, but I really feel the need to point out that Mr. Rainier is way much more of a volcanic threat than Mt. St. Helens. It could cause major destruction in Tacoma and the southern Seattle suburbs even if it had only a fairly small eruption if there was enough sudden snow and glacier melt to create lahars (huge mudflows).

[Slick Mongoose]

They did. It called unskewedpolls.com and its a joke.

Sure, but that's just the first amaturish attempt. There are far more subtle ways to nudge things in the preferred direction.

[TrackerNeil]

When I saw Christie praise Obama RE: Sandy, I cackled like a loon. If Romney wins, Christie won't get his shot until 2020 at the earliest; if Romney loses, the defeat won't much affect Christie, who can make his preparations to run in 2016. So the man has little incentive to do too much for the ticket, except that which all prominent Republicans are required to do. I suspect Romney's people were grinding their teeth at those comments, though.

Edited to add: I don't think Chris Christie will ever be president, mind you, but he seems to think so, poor deluded man.

[Prince of the North]

I think that the Pac NW is relatively unthreatened by natural disasters. The threat of Tsunami exists, I guess, but Seattle is the only major coastal city and it's only sort of coastal, right? Someone from there could probably speak more authoritatively.

There's Mt. St. Helens which had a pretty large eruption in 1980, and that wasn't really much of a threat to Portland, the nearest city.

Flooding is supposedly a threat, but we never see the disastrous types of flooding you see along the Mississippi, for example.

There is supposed to be a threat of a huge earthquake in the PacNW one of these days, so that might be when the karma all comes home to roost.

Yeah, I basically agree with you. And this is just semantics but I'm not sure it's exactly correct to say that the Pac NW is relatively unthreatened by natural disasters. I think, like most everywhere else, the potential or threat is just as present. It's just that nothing really huge in the natural disaster dept. has happened in the region since, what, maybe the San Francisco earthquake?

Another thing to keep in mind (as been mentioned before) is population density. I mean, just as a couple of examples, there was an ice storm a few years back that left southwest North Dakota, northwest South Dakota, and into Montana and Wyoming without power for quite some time during the winter and, of course, there was the flooding on the Missouri and Souris rivers (two completely unrelated rivers) last year. I don't think these sorts of things register as much nationally (and, to a certain extent, rightly so) simply due to the fact that it doesn't effect as many people, etc.

I heard something on Maddow last night that really sort of put things in perspective: (paraphrasing) She was talking about how the combined populations of ND, SD, MT, and WY (a large geographic area) did not add up to the population of just one of the effected small northeastern states that wasn't even the size of New Hampshire. I didn't catch the state she was talking about but you get the idea. To me, it really illustrated the actual size of Hurricane Sandy combined with the population density (and resulting physical infrastructure in place) of the region that it hit making it so incredibly devastating.

I haven't subjected myself to it lately, but I did find this clip of Christie speaking on Fox & Friends.

Take a look at the dummy on the right's face at the 51 second mark. I think that about says it all.

Also, damn, Christie looks worn out there. Understandable considering what he'd been through, but the guy looks like he's wavering and barely keeping his feet.

ETA:

I just went out to smoke and listened to 5 minutes of Rush's show. He's trying to put a positive spin on it as if Christie just rope-a-doped Obama into wasting precious time away from the campaign trail by getting him to go to NJ, which he's going to win anyways.

I also was interested in what the Right would think of Christie praising Pres. Obama. Basically, I think it looks bad for them no matter what they try to do. Unless, of course, they try something totally outlandish (like your Limbaugh example above) that doesn't even make sense :D

[Fez]

Too much to link to all of it, but today's been a really, crazy good polling day for Obama (at least state-wise), might be a sign of late break back towards him; or a one-off, we'll see (although with this many different pollsters, that'd be an odd thing). I do predict that Nate SIlver's percentages are going to have quite a jump tonight though.

ETA: Plus an O+5 national poll from the National Journal Congressional Connection Poll (odd name that)

[Fragile Bird]

I think that the Pac NW is relatively unthreatened by natural disasters. The threat of Tsunami exists, I guess, but Seattle is the only major coastal city and it's only sort of coastal, right? Someone from there could probably speak more authoritatively.

<snip>

There is supposed to be a threat of a huge earthquake in the PacNW one of these days, so that might be when the karma all comes home to roost.

One more derail for this question. :)

Triskele, as you know, there was a major earthquake off the coast of British Columbia on the weekend (7.7, after shocks of up to 6.4) but it did little damage because of the location. First, because it was remote, but second because of the plate where it happened, one that slides. If the quake happened a couple of hundred miles south off the coast of Vancouver Island, where the plates move up and down, not sideways, there likely could have been massive damage to Victoria, Vancouver and Seattle. Here is an interview with Bob McDonald, the CBC's science reporter explaining what happened.