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My best non-slant look at recent polling numbers

Dr. Jones

In pursuit of #9
Contributor
Honestly, I'm not sure whether we're really seeing a positive 'bounce' for Obama, per se, considering not-great economic news came out right after the DNC convention and the fact that Obama's speech was, at best, the third-best of his own convention, and maybe fourth or fifth (I preferred Deval Patrick's and Julian Castro's to his, to go along with the obvious Michelle and Clinton speeches).

What we might be seeing is more of a resignation, ala 2004, that the public thinks it is better with the evil you know than the evil you don't. What I will say is that Bill Clinton's policy-oriented, "our approach will work because it's worked before, give it more time because we've never been that bad off before" speech does appear to have made a great deal of difference. The public trusts him as a centrist leader, a populist voice and a good President. The right doesn't have that sort of heavy hitter in the wings.

I really do think Romney would stand a better chance if he'd actually outline policy goals. But his advisers are so scared of his inability to sell anything other than "Obama sucks" that they won't even give him a chance. And the policies he does outline are so out of line with mainstream American goals and preferences it's not even funny. Deficit reduction without revenue increases? Massive defense spending increases? A trillion in tax cuts for people making over a million a year?

How Romney's team thinks THOSE are the policy proposals that will win him the Presidency is beyond me.

I also think Romney made a massive strategic error in saving all their money for this late push. We're down to 5% undecided from 10% a month or two ago, and there's no way in hell that money wins him the 75%-80% of the undecideds it's going to take to take the lead. Their campaign allowed the Obama campaign to write the book on Romney, and the book isn't that he was a successful businessman who did his civic duty and saved an Olympic Games, but that he's a job-killing tax-dodging heartless *******. And I don't like the DNC's strategy with it, but I like losing less. So I guess that's what we're stuck with.
 
Now we have Romney saying that he likes part of Obamacare, then backpedaling, then saying that the insurance 'market' will take care of people with pre-existing conditions. Wow. Could Romney really possibly be this clueless?
 
Now we have Romney saying that he likes part of Obamacare, then backpedaling, then saying that the insurance 'market' will take care of people with pre-existing conditions. Wow. Could Romney really possibly be this clueless?

More a boat without a rudder, but essentially, yes.

The increasingly fringe center of the GOP destroyed Romney before this even began. They are so out of touch with reality that it is baffling, and to win, you must align. Romney is a centrist, and I am not that opposed to the person he is and was in contrast to the candidate that he is forcing himself to be.
 
I really do think Romney would stand a better chance if he'd actually outline policy goals. But his advisers are so scared of his inability to sell anything other than "Obama sucks" that they won't even give him a chance. And the policies he does outline are so out of line with mainstream American goals and preferences it's not even funny. Deficit reduction without revenue increases? Massive defense spending increases? A trillion in tax cuts for people making over a million a year?

How Romney's team thinks THOSE are the policy proposals that will win him the Presidency is beyond me.

First, I want to be clear that 1. I don't like either party, and 2. I generally consider the Democrats the lesser of two evils. That said, on the last election cycle, I remember thinking that I liked McCain a lot better before his campaign managers got to him. I know less about Romney than I did about McCain going into the election, but I'm perfectly willing to believe that the campaign managers are mishandling things the same way. The Republicans seem to be the worse offenders in forcing the party line into their candidate's mouth and stifling any independent thought he might actually have.
 
More a boat without a rudder, but essentially, yes.

The increasingly fringe center of the GOP destroyed Romney before this even began. They are so out of touch with reality that it is baffling, and to win, you must align. Romney is a centrist, and I am not that opposed to the person he is and was in contrast to the candidate that he is forcing himself to be.

I agree 100%. I personally have nothing against Romney. I believe in his heart he is a pragmatic centrist, but that he has morphed into this hard right winger to appeal to the increasingly extremist and out of touch Republican base. Unfortunately for him, and hopefully for the rest of us, this will cost him the election. Not that I'm opposed to Romney per se as President, but I am 100% opposed to anything that empowers the extremists in the Republican party, and I'm hoping that a loss (and with luck a good drubbing) in this election will pull the party back to the center so that we actually have a real choice in the future between two parties committed to governing and the give and take that requires, as opposed to implementing some form of ideological nirvana.
 
Convention bounces tend to fade over time to the zero point (I have no idea who these people are who get excited by conventions but apparently they exist).

In any event, here's a pretty scholarly look at Obama's convention bounce data from Nate Silver:

https://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytim...ions-may-put-obama-in-front-runners-position/

On Friday, we began to see reasonably clear signs that President Obama would receive some kind of bounce in the polls from the Democratic convention.


Mr. Obama had another strong day in the polls on Saturday, making further gains in each of four national tracking polls. The question now is not whether Mr. Obama will get a bounce in the polls, but how substantial it will be.

Some of the data, in fact, suggests that the conventions may have changed the composition of the race, making Mr. Obama a reasonably clear favorite as we enter the stretch run of the campaign.

On Saturday, Mr. Obama extended his advantage to three points from two points in the Gallup national tracking poll, and to four points from two in an online survey conducted by Ipsos. He pulled ahead of Mitt Romney by two points in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, reversing a one-point deficit in the edition of the poll published on Friday.

A fourth tracking poll, conducted online by the RAND Corporation’s American Life Panel, had Mr. Obama three percentage points ahead of Mr. Romney in the survey it published early Saturday morning; the candidates had been virtually tied in the poll on Friday. (The RAND survey has an interesting methodology — we’ll explore it more in a separate post.)

The gains that Mr. Obama has made in these tracking polls over the past 48 hours already appear to match or exceed the ones that Mr. Romney made after his convention. The odds, however, are that Mr. Obama has some further room to grow.

The reason is that the tracking polls are not turned around instantaneously. The Gallup poll, for instance, now consists of interviews conducted between Saturday, Sept. 1, and Friday, Sept. 7. That means that many of the interviews in the poll still predate the effective start of the Democratic convention on Tuesday night.

That Mr. Obama has made these gains in polls that only partially reflect the Democratic convention suggests that his bounce could be more substantial once they fully do so. Mathematically, Mr. Obama has to have been running well ahead of Mr. Romney in the most recent interviews in these surveys to have made up for middling data earlier in the week.

In fact, it is possible to reverse-engineer an estimate of what Mr. Obama’s numbers look like in the postconvention part of the tracking surveys. Specifically, I will be looking to infer Mr. Obama’s numbers from interviews conducted after Bill Clinton’s speech on Wednesday night, which in my view was the pivotal moment of the convention.

Let’s use the Gallup tracking poll as an example. Mr. Obama now leads in that survey by four percentage points. Conversely, he led by one point in the version of the poll published on Wednesday afternoon, ahead of Mr. Clinton’s speech. What must Mr. Obama’s numbers have looked like in the interviews since the Clinton speech in order for him to make those gains?

This can be determined with a little algebra if we know what percentage of the interviews in the Gallup survey reflect post-Clinton data. Fortunately, this calculation is fairly straightforward.

Gallup’s tracking poll is reported over a seven-day window, and roughly the same number of people are polled each day. The interviews Gallup conducted on Saturday, Sept. 1, and then on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, predated the Clinton speech. The interviews it conducted on Thursday and Friday post-dated it. The only day about which there is any ambiguity is Wednesday itself. But, since Mr. Clinton’s speech was made late Wednesday night, only a small fraction of the respondents in the poll would have had the chance to watch it by the time that Gallup called them — probably just the last round or so of interviews that Gallup conducted on the West Coast. (We’ll assume that 20 percent of the Wednesday interviews did reflect Mr. Clinton’s speech, although the fraction was probably a little lower than that in practice.)

Over all, that means that only about 30 percent of the data from the Gallup poll post-dated Mr. Clinton’s remarks.

If you do the math, it implies that Mr. Obama must have been leading Mr. Romney by 10 or 11 points in the minority of the poll conducted since Mr. Clinton’s speech for him to have gained three points in the survey over all.

In the table below, I’ve run through the same calculation for the other tracking polls. The results imply that Mr. Obama has run about nine points ahead of Mr. Romney in the portion of the Ipsos poll conducted since Mr. Clinton’s speech, about eight points ahead in the RAND poll, and about four points ahead in the Rasmussen poll.



On average between the four polls, it appears that Mr. Obama must have held about an eight-point lead since Mr. Clinton’s speech in order to have gained so much ground so quickly.

This method is not perfect — the only way we would know exactly how well Mr. Obama had been doing is if the polling firms published day-by-day results, which none of them do.

But on Friday, I wrote that Mr. Obama might eventually hold about a five-point lead over Mr. Romney once the tracking polls fully rolled over to post-convention data. Now it looks like his advantage could potentially be a bit larger than that, depending on how long the bounce holds. Despite a mediocre jobs report on Friday, there were no signs in the polls that Mr. Obama’s bounce had immediately receded, as he gained further ground in the surveys that were released on Saturday.

Earlier in the week of the convention, before there was any data on the magnitude of Mr. Obama’s bounce, I used a series of golf metaphors to serve as a guide to interpreting the postconvention numbers. By that nomenclature, it now appears that Mr. Obama is on track for a “birdie” convention, meaning that he would exit the conventions in a somewhat stronger position than where he entered them.

The equivalent of a par score remains a possibility if Mr. Obama’s numbers cool off a bit, which they very well may, although that would be better than Mr. Romney’s bogey.

But there is also the possibility of an eagle, with Mr. Obama holding as much as an eight- to nine-point lead over Mr. Romney in the polls once they fully reflect post-convention data. His polls seem to have been about that strong since Mr. Clinton’s speech, at least.

Again, this is just the upside case for Mr. Obama — not the reality yet. But the fact that it seems plausible is a bit surprising to me. Very little has moved the polls much all this year — including Mr. Romney’s convention and his choice of Paul D. Ryan as his running mate, events that typically produce bounces. But Mr. Obama has already made clear gains in the polls in surveys that only partially reflect his convention.

As surprising as it might be, however, I do not see how you can interpret it as anything other than a good sign for Mr. Obama. All elections have turning points. Perhaps Mr. Obama simply has the more persuasive pitch to voters, and the conventions were the first time when this became readily apparent.

Polls conducted after the incumbent party’s convention typically inflate the standing of the incumbent by a couple of points, but not usually by more than that. Otherwise, they have predicted the eventual election outcome reasonably well.

Since 1968, the largest post-convention polling deficit that a challenger overcame to win the race was in 2000, when George W. Bush trailed Al Gore by about four points after the Democratic convention but won the Electoral College — although Mr. Bush lost the popular vote.



And unlike Mr. Bush, who at least led in the polls after his own convention that year, Mr. Romney did not, essentially only bringing the race to a tie in polls conducted early in the week of his convention.

In fact, Mr. Romney has never held a lead over Mr. Obama by any substantive margin in the polls. The Real Clear Politics average of polls put Mr. Romney ahead by a fraction of a percentage point at one point in October 2011, and he pulled into an exact tie at one point late in the week of his convention, after it was over, but he has never done better than that.

That makes this an extremely odd election. You would figure that at some point over the past year, Mr. Romney would have pulled into the lead in the polls, given how close it has usually been. John McCain held occasional leads in 2008; John Kerry led for much of the summer in 2004; and Michael Dukakis had moments where he was well ahead of George H.W. Bush in the spring and summer of 1988. But Mr. Romney, if there have been moments when his polls were ever-so-slightly stronger or weaker, has never really had his moment in the sun.

Instead, the cases where one candidate led essentially from wire to wire have been associated with landslides: Bill Clinton in 1996, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Richard Nixon in 1972 and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.

There is almost no chance that Mr. Obama will win by those sort of margins. But this nevertheless seems like an inauspicious sign for Mr. Romney. If even at his high-water mark, he can only pull the race into a rough tie, what pitch can he come up with in October or November to suddenly put him over the top?

Conservatives sometimes cite Ronald Reagan’s win in 1980 as a favorable precedent for Mr. Romney, because the polls showed him in a tight race with Jimmy Carter in October and early November, 1980. Nevertheless, Mr. Reagan had shown much clearer signs of upside potential earlier in the race — most conspicuously, in leading Mr. Carter by nearly 30 points after the Republican convention in Detroit.

Because of demographic changes, the Republican base is probably just a bit too narrow to win the election for Mr. Romney on its own, even with a strong Republican turnout.

Certainly, Mr. Romney will win his fair share of independent voters because of the economy — and if there are substantive signs of economic decline in October and November, probably enough to win him the election.

But unless there is some change of course, it looks increasingly as though he lacks the appeal to the voting blocks that might allow him to win 51 percent of the vote rather than 49 percent.

Mr. Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital and his opposition to the auto bailouts may be a negative with the Reagan Democrats of the Midwest. His conservative stances on immigration will likely prevent him from having George W. Bush’s comparative appeal among Hispanic voters. He is mostly playing defense among the so-called security moms with whom Mr. Bush performed fairly well in 2004, having largely sidestepped discussions of national security.

Highly educated voters who are moderate on social policy but conservative on fiscal policy might be a natural constituency for Mr. Romney, and they were critical to his election as governor in Massachusetts in 2002. But Mr. Romney has rarely broken from the Republican orthodoxy on social issues. By contrast, it was Democrats who were much more forthright about touting their support for abortion rights, gay rights, and less rigid immigration policy at their convention in Charlotte, N.C.

I will acknowledge that there is the risk of jumping the gun with this analysis. Our forecast model began to see Mr. Romney’s subpar convention bounce as a bearish indicator for him early during his convention week. Now that Mr. Obama appears to be making gains when Mr. Romney did not, it has become more entrenched in seeing Mr. Obama as the favorite — enough so that it now gives him almost a 4-in-5 chance of victory. Taking the temperature of voters around the party conventions is tricky: it is a period when a lot of undecided voters start to tune in for the first time, but it is also associated with volatile polling. Every election is different, and no statistical method to analyze them is beyond reproach.

But in the immediate term, it seems like the upside case for Mr. Romney is that Mr. Obama’s polls cool off quickly — and soon revert to where they were before the conventions, with Mr. Obama about two points ahead in the polling average. That’s certainly a very winnable election for Mr. Romney, but nevertheless one where he is the modest underdog.

And Mr. Romney’s downside case is that Mr. Obama’s polling bounce will be a little stickier, and that Mr. Obama will already be fairly close to having achieved 50 percent of the vote with precious few undecided voters left in the race. That would make Mr. Romney a clear underdog — perhaps even one who needs some foreign policy or economic crisis to intervene to give him much of a chance at winning.
 
Both parties have become caricatures of themselves, but the Republicans especially. It's particularly interesting (not in a good way) that you can't be a republican and a true social moderate and expect to maintain any viability as their candidate.
 
I remember when. . . . the Democratic Party wasn't a worse sell-out to the bankers than the Republicans.

I've wondered all along. . . . why the Bush Dynasty supported Romney, unless they are just really all that buddy-buddy with the Clintons in the first place. I'm sure it wasn't because they really thought he could win.

I've been thinking the financial facts of life were clear enough the real money has shifted away from Obama, but if that were true the mainstream media would shift away, too. After all, the news media is wholly-owned and subservient to the "real money". Obama probably did pull an upset four years ago, knocking Hillary out of line for a while. Bill Clinton, and Hillary, are wholly-owned by the Rockefellers. Obama is truly a progressive ideologue who thinks the real American Revolution should be continued in the vein of British socialist management. He's what I think is best described as a "plantation manager", a sell out to his roots and ideals. Certainly no marxist. Maybe a bit of a street-smart player.

His ideals about anti-colonialism remind me of the Filipino "Ibagsak Ang Imperialistong Kano" variety. "Go Home Imperialist American" had some reality in the Philippines, where in some upscale gated communities in Makati, like Forbes Park, were heavily represented by carpetbag American capitalist stock. You could make some hay in the shantytowns by blaming all their poverty on rich Americans hauling all the resources off on the cheap. Nowadays I imagine there are a lot of companies exploiting the working poor in sweatshops just like in China. If you read Obama's own writings, he would have fit right in with those shantytown folk who were just ignorant enough to transfer all the blame to foreigners and the whole Brit Empire, including their subsidiary American co-empirists.

Another generally unknown fact is how "State Capitalists" going by various handles from socialists to marxists are generally operated by Western capitalist money, just like our newspapers.

I couldn't help but notice how Obama kept all the essential links of power in place when he won four years ago. Anyone who thinks he's not wholly-owned and controlled by the real money has probably just been smoking too much pot, doing too much dope, or believing too much mainstream media, to think logically. So the best case you can make is that Obama is no different from Romney in reality. And the worst case you make about Romney is that he is actually no different than Obama.

Romney might be more willing to pay lip service to American independence values, or sound financial policies like paying down our debts and reducing some of the more extravagant and wasteful government cash outlays, along with reducing the tax disincentive for productive enterprise, but he's still wholly owned and controlled by the real money.

So I'm back to wondering if the "real money" has truly just lost their minds, or not. If we re-elect Obama, we've lost our minds and our ability to have any positive impact on our own destiny. And we're headed for a life not all that different from the third world shantytowns.
 
And the policies he does outline are so out of line with mainstream American goals and preferences it's not even funny.

Deficit reduction without revenue increases?
Massive defense spending increases?
A trillion in tax cuts for people making over a million a year?

How Romney's team thinks THOSE are the policy proposals that will win him the Presidency is beyond me.

Reducing the deficit without increasing taxes?
Tax cuts?
Increase in Defense Spending?

How are those bad things?
 
Racist thread title. Why do you hate Asia?

Probably you said this with a chuckle, right? Maybe to make a reverse logic sorta point?

People with the particular physiological trait which is the basis of the remarks about their difference from say Caucasians nowadays live all over the world. Millions in Brazil and Mexico. . . . . lots around here and even in London. And it's really not about hating a place. . . . lol.

Get over it. It's not all about Asia.
 
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