Oct 30 2008

Faux Bravado From Obama/Dem Pollster

Published by at 9:17 pm under 2008 Elections,All General Discussions

In an attempt to answer McCain’s internal poll numbers, showing McCain has a good chance to pull a hat out of a rabbit here in the final days, an Obama/Dem pollster (not sure which) tips his hand mathematically and confirms the McCain camp’s claims. Here is a item by item analysis and an important summary, but remember this is statistical math jabber and few really can claim to parse this accurately.  I will give it a shot (no promises!

  • Let’s start with the very important conclusion that Obama’s tracking number, now 50 or 51 percent, is “what he gets.” First, let’s not disparage 50 percent, as no Democrat has received that level of support since Jimmy Carter in 1976. The 3rd party candidates are polling about 3 or 4 percent – and showing about 2 points in our surveys of early vote tallies. That suggests that Obama would win even if you gave McCain all other votes. But our data does not support the “Obama gets what he gets” thesis. 

Greenberg (the Dem/Obama Pollster) is admitting in a round about way Obama is not getting 50% yet, and he claims the 3rd party candidacy of Perot (who took well over 10% and nearly 20% in 1992) somehow is pertinent. They acknowledge the 3rd party wannabes are only getting 2%, and they think this inoculates Obama from needing over 50%. That is some bizarre rationalizing there.

  • The memo reports that Obama is already getting virtually 100 percent of the African American vote in McCain’s polls. That is not true in our combined database of the presidential battleground states where Obama is polling 89 to 6 percent. On that basis alone, one would expect Obama’s overall vote to rise a point.

This is not exactly what McInturff (McCain’s pollster) claimed. McInturff said in a race where all demographics come out in about the same ratios as previous races, then there was no more increase in the total percentage Obama could get. If African Americans make up 11% of the vote, and Obama get’s 100%, they still don’t offset the other demographics.  But note the +1% Greenberg just tried to bank, because that is the important news.

  • Note that the same is true of Latino voters. In special surveys of Hispanics, using special lists, Obama is polling close to 70 percent, but in the combined battleground polls where Hispanic respondents are more acculturated and English-speaking, we have Obama’s vote at 56 percent to 36 percent for McCain. That too can produce another point of Obama support.

Note that the Hispanic vote edge is not helping Obama in the battleground states, but Greenberg tries to bank another percentage point.

  • The memo says that the “undecided” and “refused” voters “will break decisively in our direction, adding a “net three plus points to our margin.” That is pretty amazing. Using the combined database, we looked at the “undecided,” “refused” and the undecided “leaning” to a candidate – 7 percent of the electorate. Using their stated leanings to the candidates and feelings toward the parties, this undecided vote broke near evenly between Obama and McCain. In our latest presidential battleground poll, they broke near evenly as well. To get a 3-point net gain, the undecided would have to break 5 to 2 for McCain. There is no evidence to indicate such an impending break against Obama. Instead, the undecided could push Obama’s vote up at least another point.

Again Greenberg tries to bank a percentage point, when his argument clearly indicates each camp would gain equally, they both get a percentage hike if the Indies and undecideds split (which many polls disagree with)

  • Virtually every model that allows for expanded turnout shows an increased lead for Obama. Yesterday, Gallup’s “traditional” model showed the race at 3 points for Obama, but its “expanded” model put it at 7 – and has consistently shown a wider lead with larger turnout. In our combined database for the presidential battleground, Obama’s lead in the full likely sample is twice his lead in our narrower, core sample.

This is a big admission. Greenberg is admitting that Obama’s massive leads TOTALLY rely on never before seen discrepancies between DEM and GOP voters. But while the discrepancies are showing up, Obama’s lead is not tracking the same way and is instead showing some large DEM defections.

  • What do we make of the early voting – those most motivated or most organized to vote? In our latest presidential battleground poll, nearly one-fifth of the electorate had already voted and they broke 64 to 29 percent for Obama. In North Carolina, 1.8 million people have already voted, half the vote of 2004, with the turnout 5 points more Democratic.

But when we looked at Florida and Nevada with similarly high early voting discrepancies, the tight exit poll numbers showed increases in Dem voters were NOT resulting in huge Obama gains as the ‘extended’ models dictate. In fact, just the opposite happened, showing increased Dem turnout was unable to produce anything close to the two digit leads an extended model would produce with this lopsided of an advantage. And when the non-dem and non-black voters finally hit the polls, those close races would break wide open for McCain since most of his potential voters were yet to vote.:

  • The only way to get to “functionally tied” is to narrow the competitive battleground to those few states where Obama’s lead is less than 3 points and where Obama’s vote is at 48 percent or less, like Indiana, Florida, Georgia, Missouri and North Carolina.

Let’s look at RCP’s poll averages for these states: Indiana McCain +2 with Obama at 45.6%, Florida Obama +3.5 at 48.5%, Georgia McCain +4.2 with Obama 46%, Missouri Obama 0.2 at 48% and North Carolina Obama +3.0 at 49%.  Why pick these states? What about VA and PA? Weird selection of states there.

Even more hilarious Greenberg’s claim that Joe The Plumber and Obama being liberal has only hurt McCain!

  • Last week, we tested the big, unfolding tax debate – including the “Joe the Plumber” storyline of wealth redistribution, raising taxes on the wealthy and cutting taxes for the middle class. Obama was winning that argument by 14 points …  In this battleground poll, Obama has taken virtually no water on being “too liberal” or “will raise my taxes” – both essentially unchanged over the past month at 51 percent. 

Here Greenberg admits a majority of the people believe Obama is “too liberal” and “will raise my taxes”, yet that Mondale moment is not hurting him? Yeah right. Notice how Greenberg as tried to bank 3% points throughout his argument. A whopping 3!  That is in the margin of error and nowhere near the 10+% many of those state and national ‘extended’ models show. 

I take this as a sign of concern and faux bravado on the part of camp Obama.

15 responses so far

15 Responses to “Faux Bravado From Obama/Dem Pollster”

  1. Terrye says:

    There is something I have wondered about, when they say the early voting is going toward Obama, do they actually mean Obama or are they saying that most early voters are Democrats? And what about Independents?

    I know the Democrats have been pushing their people to get to the polls early, but I don’t know who is voting how. For instance, I heard that early voting in Florida was actually breaking for McCain, but who was doing the voting? Democrat or Republican or Independent?

  2. robert c verdi says:

    we shall see, I believe some of the closer states will break McCain Palin, enough to win, we shall see. Just vote.

  3. Terrye says:

    I also do not know what percentage of each party has voted. When they say 30% of the people have voted, does that mean half the Democrats and 20% of the Republicans or do they know?

  4. momdear1 says:

    They must not believe their own polls because now Erica Jong is warning that “BLood will run in the streets” if this eledtion is stolen from the Messiah. Check out the story on WorldNetDaily.com. Sound like a promised Jihad to me. Just becaue they dont’ call it Jihad doesn’t mean it isn’t a jihad. If it looks like one and walks like and quacks like on, it must be one.

    Maybe the NRA is right to stock up on guns and ammunition.

  5. kakypat says:

    Re: Early voting…

    I wonder how many of the Democrat ballots were filled out by PUMAs, Democrats For McCain, and the like?

    That would be a very interesting statistic to see.

  6. crosspatch says:

    The more I read over the past few days the more I think it is possible that McCain could win by a much larger margin than people are being led to believe.

    Something important to keep in mind: Networks do not make their money from news. They make their money by using the news to draw eyeballs to their advertising. Networks are advertisers. That is how they make their money.

    It is in the interest of the networks and all news outlets to build the suspense at the end in order to attract the maximum possible attention to their advertising on election night. Election night advertising sells in the range of super bowl, olympic games, and world series advertising, to get a prime time election night ad on the air costs a company big bucks and the networks rake it in.

    If it were a “shoo-in” for Obama or McCain, people won’t watch. If it is close, people will watch. If one candidate seemed to be way ahead and another candidate seems to suddenly come from behind and tie the score in the ninth inning, people who might not otherwise be interested are attracted due to the suspense.

    And this works in favor of ALL news outlets so it becomes in their interest for all of them to play this “its all tied up in the ninth inning” shtick. It draws the maximum attention when they are making maximum dollar on their ads. And that is what news is designed to do, attract eyeballs to commercials.

    Apparently the Obamanistas have been playing pretty hard trying to skew polling samples, polls, opinion content in blogging comments, etc. But that the race is so close says to me that they have failed utterly. They had, from my reading, hoped to have the numbers stoked into the couble-digits. But they can’t even hardly manage a 3 point lead in many polls. So with all that cheating, all that fraud, they still can’t pull clearly ahead says Obama is in deep do-do. Very deep do-do.

    I wouldn’t be surprised to see Obama lose by double digits, seriously. And he will if Republicans and crossover Democrats get to the polls.

  7. MerlinOS2 says:

    The bogus thing here is that he is trying to equate early voting counts with the results he does not know.

    If lets say a whole bunch of PUMA people are in the Dem voters who have already voted that means Mc is picking up a lot of those votes for tally purposes.

    Those votes are sealed and wont be counted till election night.

    Unless somebody does an exit poll of the early voters or some poll that relies on self identification they have zero way of knowing what the vote was.

    Submission rates of absentee votes or counts of early voters have no direct linkage to outcome of the vote itself.

  8. dave m says:

    Some Jewish exit polling, I found it in an NRO article linked
    from texasdarlin

    “Thursday, October 30, 2008

    First exit poll of actual American votes from Israel shows big McCain win [Tom Gross]

    Within the last hour, the first exit poll of 817 Americans in Israel, who attended U.S. election voting events in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening to vote by absentee ballot, has been released.

    A startling 76 percent of those polled said that they had voted for John McCain. This contrasts sharply with pre-election polls of American Jews in the U.S., which indicate a strong preference for Obama.

    The exit poll findings of American voters in Israel are all the more surprising because less than one in four were registered Republicans, and 46% of registered Democrats living in Israel said they had crossed party lines to vote McCain. By contrast, the Republican crossover to Obama was minimal – just 2%.

    The votes are significant as almost half of the 42,000 registered U.S. voters living in Israel come from key swing states including Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

    In the 2000 and 2004 elections, Israel had the third-largest group of American voters abroad, after Canada and Britain.

    The exit poll was commissioned by Votefromisrael.org, an independent, non-partisan organization dedicated to promoting voter registration and participation amongst American citizens living in Israel.”

  9. dave m says:

    oops error

  10. dave m says:

    Hey everybody

    There’s a great scoop over at atlasshrugs
    An Obama campaign staffer spills the beans on the internal strategy of
    the Obama campaign,
    This only a little snippet to get your interest:

    “1 – Hillary voters. Internal polling suggests that at best, we are taking 70-75% of these voters. Other estimates are as low as 60% in some areas – particularly Ohio and western PA. My biggest problem with this campaign’s strategy was the decision NOT to offer Hillary the VP slot. She was ready and able to take this on, and would have campaigned enthusiastically for it. This selection would have also brought virtually all of her supporters into the fold, and the Obama campaign knew it. Though I have no way of knowing this for certain, and I do admit that I am relying on internal gossip, Senator Obama actually went against the advice of his top advisors. ”

    Go and read the whole thing. It’s awesome.

    The spam thingy won’t let give her web address, but you could just
    use a search engine on atlasshrugs to find her

  11. dave m says:

    is moderation on for everything?
    or only if you say atlasshrugs?

  12. Terrye says:

    dave:

    I think moderation kind of grabs stuff from time to time. I saw that piece somewhere else too.

  13. Aitch748 says:

    Dave M, Terrye:

    RedState has that same piece up. Lucianne links to it as a “Must Read” this morning (“Your Friday Shocker Blog: We can’t second source this nor do we know who wrote it….but, it has the ring of truth to it that will leave you breathless”).

  14. archtop says:

    …This just in…very interesting!

    http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/10/notes_from_a_battleground_stat.html

    If PA goes for McCain, it’s over…for Obama…