Monday, November 03, 2008

BARACK OBAMA, JOHN MCCAIN, HORSERACE

Obi-Wan: The Pollsters 'Seem To Have Slipped Into a World of Easy Assumptions.'

As promised, Obi-Wan Kenobi checks in... and the points he raises almost make me want to change my close-but-no-cigar forecast for McCain.

Okay, last night’s homework assignment was to look at Battleground and Rasmussen to see if there was any decay – as noticed by IBD poll released on Sunday – in the Obama lead.  There wasn’t. Obama went up by a point or two. Then IBD came out today and showed a similar Obama increase – making the race not a two pointer anymore but more like four and change.

So just when this seemed like a bad news day for McCain, along comes a pile of polls in key Battleground states from multiple firms showing McCain gaining in many places, winning in several and within reach –even the easy reach of a few points — in most of them.

Look, the real drama to this election is being provided not by the candidates but the polling community. By which I mean the decision they made to stake out — as Campaign Spot has noted — a remarkably bold position, that the Democratic Party turnout is not only going to exceed a recent historic advantage of 4 percent but go to 6.5 percent (Rasmussen) to 8 percent in many polls to even 12 percent in one.

I keep looking for the justification for this. Not easy to find. Rather like the academics' one-time belief in the Aristotlean spheres and an earth-centered universe, it just seems to be a pretty good working theory — some sort of way to make sense of observable phenomena and keep all the smart people talking agreeably and pleasantly among themselves.  

Part of this is the fascination or maybe the better word is shock of the political commentators and the consulting community as well as their cousins in the polling world with the role of voter turnout in the 2004 Bush victory. You want turnout (instead of TV spots)? We'll give you turnout, the Democrats seemed to have been saying the last few years. (For all of that, they only got themselves up to a 3 percent advantage in 2006.)

So the question is this? Did the Democrats make the mistake of fighting this election on the basis of a lesson learned in the last one? And then persuade everyone else this was the key to understanding the political universe? And by everyone, I mean the polling companies.

In the old days the networks had political directors like Marty Plissner and Hal Bruno who kept an eye on the tendency to politicize the number-crunchers. What happens when that sort of internal check is lost was evidenced by the spectacular embarrassment – the debacle — of the exit polls in 2004. (Obi took a moment to remind me that he was skeptical of them on Election Day 2004.) The polite explanation was that the skewing resulted from the fact that Democratic voters are more likely to talk to polling representatives at the polls. What got buried was the fact studies found that the cultural-political backgrounds of the exit-poll employees was a big factor.

Anyway, back in the days when exit polls were reliable — if a first or second wave of numbers were seen similar to the McCain-Obama battleground polls that came out today the network insiders would have been saying: hold everything, this is a very close one. (That's because they usually wacked two or three points off the Democrats' total since urban areas get better represented in the exit polls.)

So, if the polling community is basically right in their turnout models, this is looking like '64 — a nightmare scenario for the GOP. But if they are off to any significant degree, the state polls seen today (even though some of them favor a high Dem turnout model) make this a very different race. And what about the outlier polls in Pennsylvania and even one in Minnesota showing a close race?

And there are other questions. What about the reaction to media bias (Obamamania, the resentment towards Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber) driving up Republican turnout? What about the extent to which Reagan Democrats in Florida are being urged to the polls by the McCain campaign?

And the reason that the polling community, not to mention the Obama campaign should be uneasy is that finding the justification for their heavy Democratic weighting isn't readily accessible. And that is the point – along with failing to themselves take note that in this period of unprecedented economic turmoil and therefore any predictions this year might be questionable or at least hugely complicated, the pollsters and media gurus never really put their own premises about voter turnout front and center and asked for questions, objections and evaluations.

They seem to have slipped into a world of easy assumptions. Always dangerous for those whose job is to quantify and track the stars and planets of an ever-changing, ever-moving political universe.

Expect a mid-morning or afternoon update from Obi-Wan tomorrow.

11/03 07:56 PMShare