Presidential election minus 10 days

Since our previous episode we’ve had individual polls from red states Georgia and Montana showing Barack Obama narrowly in front, so they’re now included in the polling aggregates. However, John McCain leads in both due to the overall polling picture from the past few weeks. The other remarkable development has been an Obama blowout in Ohio, underscoring a picture of Democratic strength in the rust belt states.

Obama McCain Sample D-EV R-EV
Michigan 54.7 39.4 3005 17
Washington 54.9 40.1 3379 11
Maine 54.5 40.0 2185 4
Minnesota 53.3 41.8 3677 10
Iowa 52.6 41.7 3530 7
Pennsylvania 52.2 41.7 5505 21
Wisconsin 51.5 42.1 3490 10
New Hampshire 51.5 42.3 3305 4
New Mexico 50.5 43.3 2927 5
Colorado 50.8 44.3 3450 9
Virginia 50.9 44.7 3777 13
Ohio 48.7 43.0 4337 20
Nevada 50.0 45.4 3418 5
Florida 48.2 45.3 5021 27
North Dakota 45.5 44.7 1206 3
Missouri 47.4 46.5 4050 11
Indiana 47.4 47.0 3828 11
North Carolina 47.2 48.9 4564 15
Montana 44.8 48.7 2628 3
Georgia 45.6 50.0 3530 15
West Virginia 42.7 51.0 3622 5
Others – – – 175 137
RCP/Total 49.9 43.9 – 363 175

So who’s going to win then? The polls of course leave little room for doubt. However, there are a couple of items of conventional wisdom floating around which suggest they might not be telling the full story, one way or another.

• The Bradley effect. A compelling paper by Dan Hopkins of Harvard University examines the popular notion that polls overrate the performance of black candidates in biracial contests due to white voters’ reluctance to appear illiberal when interrogated by pollsters. Hopkins finds the effect was a serious factor into the 1980s, most famously when black Democratic candidate Tom Bradley failed to win the Californian gubernatorial election in 1982, but has ceased to be so. Pew Research charts a corresponding decline in the number of respondents willing to admit they would not vote for a black candidate, from 16 per cent in 1984 to 6 per cent. Hopkins notes a very sudden decline in the Bradley effect (he prefers the “Wilder effect”, after Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder) “at about the time that welfare reform silenced one critical, racialized issue”.

• The reverse Bradley effect. Strictly speaking, a “reverse Bradley effect” would involve voters telling pollsters they were voting for McCain or were undecided when they were in fact set on Obama, which is plainly not on the cards. Far more likely is that turnout of black voters is being underestimated in pollsters’ determinations of “likely voters”, which in many cases go on whether they voted last time rather than what they say they will do this time. Whatever methods are being used to account for the certainty of higher black turnout, I’m pretty confident they are overly conservative. When a pollster is required to explain inaccuracy after the event, “I was going on past experience” makes for a more professional sounding excuse than “I made a wrong guess”. I haven’t studied this systematically, but the one example I have looked at has proved to be an eyebrow-raiser: the most recent SurveyUSA poll of Pennsylvania has 10 per cent of black voters among its overall sample, whereas this paper from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies tells us it was 13 per cent in 2004. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight provides support for this and related impressions in taking to task pollsters who have gaps of 4 to 6 per cent between results for “registered” and “likely” voters.

• The late Republican surge. I recently heard it said that Republican candidates tend to come home strong in the last week or two of campaigning. Remembering how much of Bill Clinton’s lead vanished shortly before the 1992 election, I thought this sounded plausible and went burrowing through the archives for evidence. The following chart plots the last 15 days of polling at presidential elections from 1992 onwards, day 15 being the election result. I have used composites of polling obtained from Real Clear Politics for 2000 and 2004; Gallup tracking polls for 1996; and a list of various pollsters’ results I found in the New York Times for 1992.

The case of 1996 stands out, but this might well point to a general inaccuracy in the Gallup series I was using rather than a late surge to Bob Dole (unfortunately I could only locate one poll from the final week). Beyond that, the chart provides pretty thin gruel if you’re in the market for a McCain comeback in the last 10 days. The 1992 Bush recovery was less dramatic than I remembered it once I removed Gallup from the equation, which exasperatingly shifted from “registered” to “likely” voters in the final week, eliminating much of Bill Clinton’s lead at a stroke. If anything the trends from 2000 and 2004 point the other way.

• Front-runner decline. The aforementioned paper on the Wilder/Bradley effect by Dan Hopkins informs us that polls “typically overstate support for front-runners”, which is demonstrated in the scatter plots under “Figure 3” (see right at the back). These suggest a candidate like McCain who is on about 42 per cent is probably being underestimated by as much as 2 per cent, while a candidate like Obama on 50 per cent is probably being represented accurately – unless he’s black, in which case he will suffer a Bradley effect of a bit over 1 per cent.

• Advertising. The Washington Post informs us that the cashed-up Obama campaign is fielding “as many as seven commercials for every one aired by Republican Sen. John McCain”.

My guess is that point one will be comfortably countered by point two; point three is worth little if anything; point four might help McCain close the gap by 2 per cent, but some of this gloss should be taken off after accounting for point five. In sum, there seems little reason not to take the polls more-or-less at face value. That being so, my final prediction is that Obama will win every state where my polling aggregates currently have him ahead except North Dakota, where the result is derived from two small sample polls, one from an agency of little repute. The margin in Florida is narrow enough that front-runner decline might be expected to account for it, but I find it hard to believe Obama would fail to carry so marginal a state when he’s up by eight points nationally. That makes it 375 electoral votes for Obama and 163 for McCain.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,057 comments on “Presidential election minus 10 days”

Comments Page 19 of 22
1 … 18 19 20 … 22

  8. Possum,
    I know you’re just having another of your droll marupial jests, but my CA ballot had County Board of Supervisors, Water District Supervisors, School District Board members and that sort of thing.

    A couple of the 12 propositions were complicated, particularly the one to create a state commission to draw up electoral bounderies. Most interesting is that the former CA Governor and Prez candidate, Jerry Brown, is now Atty. General. He decided to phrase the title of the anti-gay marriage prop. as “to eliminate the right”, which the prop’s ardent supporters were very cranky about.

  15. ShowsOn,

    that reminds me of something Tanner said in OT earlier this month about the Libs, he said they were only reliable in their hypocrisy …… 😉

  16. Good news for Election Day: Channel 9 is doing a live coverage from 11 AM(EST) on Wednesday. I guess it’ll be a combination of feeds from U.S networks & their own correspondents.

  18. [Rumour from Daily Kos: Obama might campaign in Arizona before Election Day.]
    I think it would’ve been nice if he campaigned in Georgia. Even if he doesn’t win, the African-American turn out there is surely making him feel pretty content.

  19. 905 at 6/532 with no class spinner; I’d say McCain would be ahead of the Aussies 49-47 (though theat’d be a Zogby poll, so you can’t trust it 😉 )

  23. ltep @ 921,

    If Obama wins, continue life as normal. If McCain wins, march to the US consulate in Perth, formally turn in my US citizenship, then continue life as normal.

    We move to Perth in mid January.

    Since we know Obama will win and it will no longer be like reading the death notices of a newspaper to now read and pay attention to US news again, I will pay much more attention to whats going on than I have been the last 8 years 😉 …….

    Still no intention to go back though, unlike jj who travels back regularly, I’ve no intention to ever go back again. I’m an Aussie now and live here. I’ve got relatives in the US, if they want to see me, they can come here.

    Why, you might ask, do I not formally turn in my US citizenship no matter what? Because I enjoy voting and participating in the process. It is only the hypothetical stupidity of a majority of dead beat Americans who would elect McCain in an alternate reality that would make me angry and frustrated enough to give up on the process and turn in my US citizenship.

    If not for the 24/7 nature of US politics right now, I would be resident on other threads on PB, so I will still be around 🙂 …..

  24. Oh on the immediate aftermath of the election? Gary Bruce, I thought he was talking about the short and medium term …..

    If you look at the day itself …. yes celebrate as much as a mother of a 7 and 10 year old can …. my husband won’t be home (travelling on business) so I won’t be at any parties or anything ….. probably a nice bottle of wine 🙂 …..

  25. I used to work in the building next door the US consulate in Perth and once met the US Consul. We used to joke about their electronic scrambling devices ruining our communications devices.

    Completely off topic but hey. Somehow I suspect you’ll hang onto your citizenship should McCain win, you’ll need to vote again in 2/4 years time after all!

  26. You know what’d be really cool? If Obama’s first act was President was to repeal the Patriot Act. And abolish the Department of Homeland Security.

  28. no ltep, not going to happen. I might be yapping it up here or somewhere else, but never to vote again in the US. If my fellow Americans are so clueless as to elect McCain after everything that has transpired in the last 8 years as well as this campaign, that is NOT an America that I want to be a part of {officially} any longer. You maybe have read in some quarters jokes about Republicans or Democrats who will flee to Canada pending the results of the election next week? Its been on one or another newsite at various times over the last 2 months. I don’t have to do that because I am already out of the country, I left post 2004 election after Bush sunk Kerry. If it bloody happens again, I’m not participating any more, this is it period. I won’t go there any more, then I will be just like you and like my husband and everyone else – only eligible to vote in Aussie elections.

  29. Fox News has been running 2:1 negative stories on McCain since the conventions, which is still the best for McCain. And NBC has been more favourable to Palin than Fox.

    [The project did say that Fox News and MSNBC have been mirror images of one another. MSNBC has been more negative toward Republican and positive toward Democrats in its coverage, with Fox the opposite. This was primarily due to the prime-time lineups; the coverage shows more balance during the day, Rosenstiel said.

    CNN fell distinctly in the middle between its two rivals, the study said.

    In an indication of how it’s been for McCain, even on his most sympathetic outlet _ Fox News _ his negative stories outweighed positive ones by 2-to-1, the project said.]

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/30/study-nbc-news-doesnt-fol_n_139162.html

  33. MSNBC 5 minutes ago: “Wait for some really, really interesting poll figures from Pennsylvania coming soon, good news for McCain”.

  37. I just read a Karl Rove article (I need a bath badly, I feel cheap and dirty) which said that since 25 Sept, Obama has won 252 national polls in a row.

  39. MSNBC

    Florida +4 Obama
    Missouri +2 McCain
    Virginia +9 Obama

    Won’t mention the PA one yet.

    Gallup Likely
    Obama +3 (49-46)

    Zogby/Rueters
    Obama +7 (50-43)

  40. The hacks on Fox are talking about how excited they are that McCain now looks better (but not winning) in Florida, Ohio and North Carolina. They’re red states, fools.

  42. Mason-Dixon has a 3% Repug house bias. Nothing to see here, move along.

    The Fox hacks clearly haven’t seen the CNN poll for NC with Obama 6% ahead which is his biggest lead ever. You almost feel sorry for them.

  43. [The Fox hacks clearly haven’t seen the CNN poll for NC with Obama 6% ahead which is his biggest lead ever. You almost feel sorry for them.]
    I do kind of feel sorry for them – all that broadcast time, and nothing to interesting to say.

    Isn’t that like a media operator’s worst nightmare?

  46. Haha. Morning Joe on MSNBC, doing the electoral college with Chuck Todd.

    JOE: “Well, let’s give McCain Ohio… and Florida… and Nevada… and um, North Carolina…”

    CHUCK: “Well, Joe, Obama still wins.”

    JOE: “OK, well what about if McCain wins Virginia…”

    CHUCK: “Well, Joe, Obama still wins.”

    JOE: “OK, well what about Pennsylvania and Virginia?”

    CHUCK: “Well, McCain wins, then”.

    JOE: “OK. Well I hear the undecideds breakin big for McCain in Iowa.”

    I’m dead serious.

  47. [Adelaide is on Drudge for the first time ever !!! (for an attack on a blind 75 year old flamingo). He must be linking for the outrage angle and the geriatric abuse angle.]
    I have no idea if this is still considered true, but I read a while ago that people who harm animals when they are young often go on to act violently towards people.

    I hope the adult attackers (I think one is 17) receive a short jail term for what they did. Apparently they can get up to 4 years, and / or a $50,000 fine.

  48. [JOE: “OK. Well I hear the undecideds breakin big for McCain in Iowa.”

    I’m dead serious.]
    I thought blow hard Joe gave up on the Republicans after Katrina?

  49. CHUCK: “Obama is more likely to get 370 electoral votes than McCain is to get 270”.

    JOE: “Well, remember back in 2004, when we all said…”

    Classic

  50. Diogenes,

    You chipped me the other day about being some guy who shot at local larries stealing John McCain signs.

    The shots were 101’s, which those in the know call “love pellets”.

    Everyone knows that anything labelled 101 can’t do any damage.

Comments are closed.

Comments Page 19 of 22
1 … 18 19 20 … 22