Today we continue our Road to 270 series with the Pelican State, Louisiana.
CAJUN BAYOU TABASCO RED, Louisiana appears this year to be on pace to break its streak of supporting every presidential winner since 1972. Since 2004, Huey Long's home state has been ravaged by hurricane damage and lost a significant segment of its population. It's also seen political scandals and widespread graft in the FEMA rebuilding effort, so the relationship with politics may be a little skewed and hard to be certain of how the effect will play in Louisiana, land of Avery Island red gold.
Key Demographics
Note: Factors colored in red can generally be thought to help McCain. Factors in blue can generally be thought to help Obama. Factors in purple have ambiguous effects. Except where otherwise apparent, the numbers next to each variable represent the proportion out of each 100 residents in each state who fall into that category. Fundraising numbers reflect dollars raised in the 2008 campaign cycle per eligible voter in each state. Figures for seniors and youth voters are proportions of all residents aged 18+, rather than all residents of any age. The figure for education reflects the average number of years of completed schooling for all adults aged 25+. The figure for same-sex households reflects the number of same-sex partner households as a proportion of all households in the state. The liberal-conservative index is scaled from 0 (conservative) to 100 (liberal), based on a Likert score of voter self-identification in 2004 exit polls. The turnout rates reflect eligible voters only. Unemployment rates are current as of June 2008.
What McCain Has Going For Him
In Louisiana, site of his infamous June 3 Lime Green Speech, John McCain actually led Barack Obama in fundraising, and the white evangelical vote is strong here, as is customary in Southern states. Louisiana ranks in the top third of gun-owning and "American" ancestry states and factors that would ordinarily favor Obama -- high unemployment, high education, or even the vaunted Starbucks:Walmart ratio -- are all lagging near the bottom in Louisiana. The state ranks on the conservative end of the Likert scale, and indeed voted for George Bush twice, the second time by double digits. McCain should continue the Republican trend in the state by taking its 9 electoral votes.
What Obama Has Going For Him
Louisiana has the 2d highest percentage of African-American voters, and a high percentage of female voters. However, Louisiana lost a significant number of black voters after Katrina forced relocation, and this small but significant shift in demographics doesn't help Obama. Registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans in 2004, and in fact Dem registration was the 5th highest of any state in the nation. Louisiana has the 7th highest percentage of voters under 30. The Catholic vote is high and there aren't as many military vets, a factor that would tend to favor John McCain if it were higher. Obama organized here in the primary, which gave his campaign a head start.
What To Watch For
John McCain has been over 50 in nearly every public poll conducted in Louisiana, and though our projection for the state keeps getting closer, Barack Obama will only win the state if he gets into the 400 EV territory. Originally, Mary Landrieu's Senate seat was seen as the most vulnerable Democratic Senate seat, but it's clear she will cruise to re-election and Republicans will not add seats. The guy with the hookers isn't up for Senate re-election until 2010. But William "Cash Bricks" Jefferson is, and will likely continue to be an embarrassment for Democrats.
In Louisiana's 6th district, Don Cazayoux will try to hold on to the seat he won in the spring during one of those portentous special elections Democrats swept in deep red districts. Despite guilt-by-association-by-association attempts (Cazayoux-Obama-Wright), voters rejected the negative campaign and Cazayoux won by less than 3%. Will he win again in a regular election?
*_*
This has nothing to do with Louisiana, but Brett loves his teasers:
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Road to 270: Louisiana
Today's Polls, 10/14
Perhaps the CBS poll that shows Barack Obama with a 14-point lead among likely voters (12 points when third-party candidates are included) is a modest outlier. But if so, John McCain has more and more outliers that he has to explain away these days. There are now no fewer than seven current national polls that show Obama with a double-digit advantage: Newsweek (+11), ABC/Post (+10), Democracy Corps (+10), Research 2000 (+10), Battleground (+13), Gallup (+10 using their Likely Voter II model) and now this CBS News poll.
These are balanced by other results that show the race a hair tighter. Our model now projects that, were an election held today, Obama would win by 8.1 points. It also expects that the race is more likely than not to tighten some.
Nevertheless, we are a full month beyond the Lehman Brothers collapse in mid-September. Obama has enjoyed quite a remarkable run, turning a 2-point deficit into an 8-point advantage. What's especially remarkable about it is that Obama's lead has continued to increase with an eerily consistency. The collapse itself precipitated an almost immediate 3 or 4 point gain in Obama's poll numbers, moving him from a point or so down to a point or so ahead. But since then, Obama has won news cycle after news cycle, adding another two points or so to his national lead every week.
It's fairly unusual for a candidate to have such a sustained run of momentum so deep into the campaign cycle. And it does appear to be real momentum, with some real feedback loops: the worse McCain's poll numbers become, the more desperate his campaign looks, and the more desperate his campaign looks, the worse his poll numbers become.
McCain now has to go on a run of his own, a large enough run to wipe at least 8 points off of Obama's lead, and perhaps more like 9 or 10 to cover his inferior position in the Electoral College and the votes that Obama is banking in early and absentee balloting. It is imperative that McCain does not just draw tomorrow night's debate, does not just win a victory on points, but emerges with a resounding victory, the sort that leaves the spin room gasping for air. Failing that, we are getting into dead girl, live boy territory.
Let's look at the polls:
The state polls don't present a much brighter picture for McCain. In particular, the Quinnipiac set of polling, showing large leads for Obama in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, is bad news for him. Note that Quinnipiac conducted two separate sets of polling both before and after last week's debate, with the debate only seeming to consolidate Obama's advantage.
Pennsylvania, meanwhile, where SurveyUSA has Obama sustaining a 15-point lead, may be joining Michigan as a state which is completely out of reach to McCain. Ohio is still within reach -- and the fact that it's lagging a couple of points behind Obama's national numbers is reason for McCain not to give the state especial concern -- but clearly now seems to lean toward Obama. The Suffolk result in Colorado is a little better for McCain than the Quinnipiac numbers, at least, and PPP has Obama moving slightly off his peak in North Carolina, although that may only be because McCain has finally started to invest resources there that he'd rather be spending everywhere else. The Tarheel State, in other words, has served its purpose for Obama, whether or not he ultimately wins it.
CBS/NYT Poll Preempt
If Andrew Sullivan is right and the CBS-NYT poll to be released this evening shows a 14-point lead for Obama, we shouldn't actually regard this as all that shocking a result.
Presently, our best estimate is that Obama has about an 8-point national lead. However, CBS polls have leaned about 3 points more Democratic than the average this year. In other words, our baseline expectation is that a CBS poll should be showing about an 11-point for Obama right now.
You wind up to the Obama side of the +/- 3 point margin of error, and that's how you get to 14 points.
Not that this is good news for McCain exactly -- the balance of polling over the past 48 hours indicates that Obama's true lead is probably more like 8 points (maybe even inching upward toward 9) than 6 or 7. But it's not quite as bad as it will look on the surface.
UPDATE: Yes, the topline number is indeed Obama 53, McCain 39, although the version that we prefer -- with third party candidates included -- gives Obama "only" a 12-point lead.
On the Road: Toledo, Ohio
“In the misty night we crossed Toledo and went onward across old Ohio. I realized I was beginning to cross and recross towns in America as though I were a traveling salesman – raggedy travelings, bad stock, rotten beans in the bottom of my bag of tricks, nobody buying.”
– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”
Most of her life spent as a Republican, Debrah Harleston volunteered heavily for George Bush in 2004. As she threw herself into helping Barack Obama in Toledo, one of her first questions to her organizer was, "why are we canvassing so soon?"
Accustomed to the template she'd experienced with the Bush 2004 campaign in New York State, it seemed strange that Democrats would want to go talk to people at their doors many weeks in advance of an election. Phonebanking, sure, but the final weekend and final stretch was the customary time to knock doors.
Now that Debrah has settled into her role as one of Obama's Toledo Community Directors, she's amazed at the sophistication of the Obama structure. As a Community Director, she oversees three Neighborhood Team Leaders, volunteers who comprise the heart of Obama's volunteering infrastructure. Each neighborhood team, in turn, has up to five different coordinators: (1) the canvass coordinator; (2) the phonebank coordinator; (3) the volunteer coordinator; (4) the data coordinator; and (5) where applicable, the faith coordinator.
In Ohio, Campaign for Change State Director Jeremy Bird told us, there are 1,231 defined neighborhoods, as of August 25 there were about 800 in place, and as of Saturday approximately 1,100 NTLs had been tested and were up in operation. By "tested," Bird said, each NTL had undergone and met a series of specific challenges the field organizers had presented.
First, can the potential NTL organize a group of people? Whether by hosting a house party, a faith forum with a church group, or some other type of organizational meeting, the potential NTL needs to show they can lead the organization of their neighbors.
Second, can the potential NTL pass the voter contact test? Can he or she lead a canvass, can he or she build a group phonebanking night? It's a leadership test, built around voter contact.
Third, are they willing to make the final commitment by attending specific training for their role? Debrah Harleston smiled as she told us about the imminent blooming of satellite offices throughout the Toledo area so that neighborhood teams can begin running right in the neighborhoods autonomously. They've been trained, they've registered their voters, and now it's time to see how this baby runs.
After Barack Obama's major economic address to 3,500 people in Toledo, the office several blocks away swelled to capacity with newly-fired up volunteers. One of the volunteers who'd come into Obama's office in recent weeks is Debrah's husband, such a staunch Republican that he'd long been donating monthly like clockwork. He'd even gone into the nearby Toledo McCain office, but when he visited it had been nearly empty. The explosive energy difference, Debrah told us, particularly in the past few weeks, made an impression on her husband, who planned to vote for Barack Obama.
Obama's organizers, the younger workers that the hacktastically uninformed Michael Barone fingers-crossingly dismisses as orange-stockinged Deaniacs merely waving visibility, spend much of their time recruiting and training NTLs, monitoring their progress, coaching them when they run into trouble. The key is, Bird noted, that the organizers have time to coach NTLs and their coordinators with reporting and accountability.
To that end, the Obama campaign is doing something remarkable: rather than keeping their vote goals close to the vest and internal, they trust their NTLs with those numbers. "If we tell a team leader that the vote goal for this neighborhood is 100 votes, and we give them a list with 300 names of supporters and persuadable voters on it, they respond with, 'Wow, I can make this happen!'" Empower is not just an empty word emblazoned on Obama field office walls.
As to how to get buy-in from volunteers who may be used to different campaign practices, "they see it working," Bird says simply. A lot of the volunteers are first-timers so they have no baseline to compare it to, and the veteran volunteers have seen other campaigns try different programs... and fail.
Volunteers direct and train other volunteers, in turn directed by the coordinators under the NTL. The coordinators report numbers to the NTL, who in turn report to people like Debrah, the Community Directors, who in turn report to the field organizer. The field organizer reports to the deputy regional or regional field director, who reports to the state field director. The numbers are off the charts. Debrah estimated that in the central Toledo field office this past weekend, at least 2000 folks had streamed through to volunteer.
In Columbus, Bird told us that the long primary had taught the campaign incredibly valuable lessons. Sometimes one regional would have 32 field organizers, an incredible number of organizers for a given region, but it didn't work operationally because that's too many FOs for an RFD to manage. With the primary process, the campaign learned the right proportions and ratios of NTLs-to-FO, and FO-to-RFD. "It was a very conscious decision" for field organizers to have no more than about 10 neighborhood teams, Bird said.
It's why Obama for America State Director Aaron Pickrell told us, "Nothing about the structure worries me, which is weird," referring to comparisons with past campaigns he's experienced.
For some outstanding work on the Obama side of the ground game, check out Zach Exley's series as well as Al Giordano's blog, The Field. For organizers and any reader who wants further and deeper looks at the ground game, these folks are doing tremendous work that should get recognition.
We're in southeast Ohio tonight and tomorrow morning, between Marietta and Athens, where we finally come across Joe Biden. The southeast area of the state is a huge swing area, within this still-tight swing state, and we're still hoping to be permitted to talk to McCain volunteers so we can bring you that perspective. We're working on it.
After Ohio: Pennsylvania.
Road to 270: Oregon
Today we continue our Road to 270 series with the Beaver State, Oregon.
CASCADING FROM DESERT TO SEA, Oregon is simultaneously extremely liberal and extremely conservative, with a fair number of independents thrown in the mix for good measure. As much as any state, its overall demographic data can be a little misleading. For example, "gun ownership rate." The gun ownership disparity between liberal Portland and conservative eastern Oregon is wide. Oregon also boasts the smartest and best voting process, as all ballots are mail-in. As a result, Oregon has one of the best voter turnout rates in the country, minus the long lines.
Key Demographics
Note: Factors colored in red can generally be thought to help McCain. Factors in blue can generally be thought to help Obama. Factors in purple have ambiguous effects. Except where otherwise apparent, the numbers next to each variable represent the proportion out of each 100 residents in each state who fall into that category. Fundraising numbers reflect dollars raised in the 2008 campaign cycle per eligible voter in each state. Figures for seniors and youth voters are proportions of all residents aged 18+, rather than all residents of any age. The figure for education reflects the average number of years of completed schooling for all adults aged 25+. The figure for same-sex households reflects the number of same-sex partner households as a proportion of all households in the state. The liberal-conservative index is scaled from 0 (conservative) to 100 (liberal), based on a Likert score of voter self-identification in 2004 exit polls. The turnout rates reflect eligible voters only. Unemployment rates are current as of June 2008.
What McCain Has Going For Him
John McCain will run strong in the eastern 2/3 of the state, what is essentially the 2d congressional district. A high percentage of military vets live in Oregon, and Republicans actually outnumbered Democrats in terms of self-identification in 2004. The state doesn't have a high number of minority voters, but given the looming influence of Portland with its larger population base, Oregon scores out in much of our demographic data as not particularly hopeful for John McCain. The areas that are Republican are really Republican, white evangelical, "American" ancestry, gun-owning areas that probably rabidly oppose Barack Obama. It truly is the Obama v. Nobama election in Oregon.
What Obama Has Going For Him
Same-sex households and Starbucks:Walmart both rank 3d nationally, giving a pretty strong indication of Democratic voting, as well as underscoring that the liberal bastions of Oregon are pretty strongly liberal. Obama enjoys one of his higher fundraising-per-capita locales, as well as a realtively (top-third) education rates. Unemployment is in the top third, making the economic malaise a bit more pronounced in Oregon, and the state went for both Gore and Kerry pretty handily. Barack Obama will win the state of Oregon.
What To Watch For
Oregon's mail-in system allows for the field operations to see well in advance where the turnout seems strongest and where it needs a boost. As a result, if any of the candidates or their running mates show up with a surprise visit in Oregon in the final two weeks, you can probably infer that the internal numbers are telling the campaigns that a big jolt is needed in an underperforming area.
The other thing you might infer, particularly from Barack Obama's campaign, is whether he has a day to boost Jeff Merkley's Senate chances. That's the big race in Orgeon this year, as incumbent Gordon Smith runs away from John McCain and toward Barack Obama, as he has been doing all year. Obama stumping for Merkley might be interpreted as an indication that Obama thinks he's already going to win big nationally, now he wants both as many Democratic Senators as he can get and a Senator who owes him credit for helping him get over the hump by boosting turnout.
Oregon also gives me an opportunity to re-dsiplay for you one of my favorite charts Nate's done this year, one that many of our visitors haven't had a chance to see. It's fascinating, and you can see why the Mountain West is right on the cusp of many Democratic flips (NM, CO, NV).
Senate Projections, 10/14
The Democrats appear to have nearly as much momentum in the race for Capitol Hill as they do for the White House, and now have approximately a 3 in 10 chance of winding up with a 60-seat working majority in the Senate.
Noteworthy movement since our previous update includes Minnesota, which our model is finally giving to Al Franken after Rasmussen and Quinnipiac polls put him slightly ahead; North Carolina, where Kay Hagan is hardly out of the woods but now clearly appears to be favored, and Georgia, where one poll now shows a literal tie between Jim Martin and incumbent Saxby Chambliss, and several others have the race within the margin of error. Jeanne Shaheen and Mark Udall also appear to be solidifying their positions in New Hampshire and Colorado, respectively.
Indeed, it is difficult to identify any race in which the Republican candidate currently has the momentum. Alaska is perhaps the only state where the Presidential coattails clearly are liable to help them, but with a verdict still forthcoming in Ted Stevens' corruption trial, they have to dodge a bullet that has the potential to ruin their chances of retaining the seat. Meanwhile, the Republicans are being out-campaigned in North Carolina, suffering under the weight of the economy in states like Georgia and Kentucky, and are having difficulty mounting any offense in states like New Mexico where Barack Obama is strong. Even in Minnesota, where Al Franken's campaign has had many false starts, it's now Norm Coleman who is on the defensive.
The Democrats are now favored to take over eight seats from the Republicans: Virginia, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Colorado, Alaska, North Carolina, Oregon, and Minnesota. If the Democrats win all eight of those races, they will only need one more to achieve 60 seats, and they have good opportunities in Georgia, Mississippi and Kentucky.
The good news for the Republicans is that they have the financial advantage in most of these races, as the Democratic rank-and-file scrambles to put together a budget for candidates like Jim Martin in Georgia. But, all the money in the world won't help you if you don't have an attractive message to sell, and right now the Republicans' pleas for mercy are falling on deaf ears.
Voter Registration in North Carolina
The state of North Carolina maintains particularly good voter registration statistics. With their registration deadline having closed last week, let's take a quick look at the numbers.
Since the first of the year, Democrats have added about 250,000 voters to the Republicans' roughly 50,000, while unaffiliated voters also increased their numbers by about 170,000. What was a 10.6 point party ID gap at the start of the year is now 13.0 points. About half that gain came between the first of the year and the state's May primary, and the other half came between the primary and last week's deadline.
There is fairly close to a 1:1 correspondence between the party ID gap and the Obama-McCain gap, so these new registrations alone account for about one point's worth of the gains that Obama has made in North Carolina since the summer.
Meanwhile, about 150,000 black voters -- and 35,000 "other" voters -- have been added to the rolls since the start of the year. That compares with about 235,000 white voters.
Assuming that Obama captures 35 percent of white voters, 95 percent of black voters, and 60 percent of "other" voters, the change in the racial composition of the electorate since the first of the year is worth a net of about 1.5 points to Obama in his race against McCain.
EDIT: Also, some really good data mining on voter registration from Dr. Michael McDonald at George Mason University. Nearly half of newly-registered voters in Ohio are aged 18-29.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Road to 270: Florida
Tonight we continue our Road to 270 series with the Sunshine State, Florida.
LAND OF BEACHES, oranges, old people and theme parks, Florida was the home in 2000 of the nation's most dramatic and profound history-altering recount in electoral history. With 5% of the electoral votes in play, it is a true battleground again in 2008. If Obama wins the state and its 27 EVs, electorally that's all she wrote. If our current projection of Obama by 4.9% holds, then Florida will probably be called early enough to be considered the determinative state on Election Night. If the race closes up, it'll be another long night in the land of sunshine.
Key Demographics
Note: Factors colored in red can generally be thought to help McCain. Factors in blue can generally be thought to help Obama. Factors in purple have ambiguous effects. Except where otherwise apparent, the numbers next to each variable represent the proportion out of each 100 residents in each state who fall into that category. Fundraising numbers reflect dollars raised in the 2008 campaign cycle per eligible voter in each state. Figures for seniors and youth voters are proportions of all residents aged 18+, rather than all residents of any age. The figure for education reflects the average number of years of completed schooling for all adults aged 25+. The figure for same-sex households reflects the number of same-sex partner households as a proportion of all households in the state. The liberal-conservative index is scaled from 0 (conservative) to 100 (liberal), based on a Likert score of voter self-identification in 2004 exit polls. The turnout rates reflect eligible voters only. Unemployment rates are current as of June 2008.
What McCain Has Going For Him
This is the only state that McCain is still contesting for which Barack Obama did not build a primary organizing infrastructure, and McCain fought a contested primary here and won, thanks in no small part to the support offered him by Gov. Charlie Crist (who now wants little to do with McCain). Obama appeals to younger voters by huge margins, and there aren't many of those in Florida. There are a substantial number of military veterans, and McCain has huge fundraising numbers per capita -- his 4th best state. Florida has slightly better than the median for white evangelicals and slightly behind the median for Catholic voters, which adds up to a slight favoring of McCain. Though the population is highly Hispanic, many of these voters are Cubans, and Cubans have tended to be much more Republican than the Hispanic mean partisan lean. Florida tilts slightly conservative on the Likert scale and had more self-identifying Republicans than Democrats.
What Obama Has Going For Him
Barack Obama has several factors that sit to the more helpful side of the median for him and several that sit to the less helpful side for John McCain. In our sociological data, Florida is more permissive with same-sex households and has a respectable Starbucks:Walmart ratio. Also, low gun ownership doesn't help the Republican Party. It's a decently high African-American population state, and above the median in terms of female voters. Florida also ranks in the top third of states for unemployment rate, a factor that favors the Democratic candidate.
Although Obama did not have a contested primary to give him the organizing head start he's enjoyed in every other battleground state, he's made up for it by running one of the most aggressive general election campaigns in terms of offices and advertising, and forced McCain to spend money in an expensive market to compete. Florida has exemplified the repeat of Obama's "bankrupt-Hillary" spending strategy against McCain. Top staffers Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes have been dispatched to Florida, reflecting exactly how seriously Obama takes the state.
What To Watch For
How will elderly voters break in Florida this year? Moreover, Jewish voters are not captured in our demographic table, but there has been a big battle for these voters, with both sides actively courting this base vote to the point that Saturday Night Live's recent Palin-Biden debate sketch made reference to that message targeting. Joe Biden plays very well with elderly voters, particularly elderly women, and Florida was one place Sarah Palin hurt the Republican ticket even before her negatives began skyrocketing.
Florida is always dramatic, and early voting will help Obama begin to bank votes. Neither Al Gore nor John Kerry had anywhere near the ground operation that Obama has at his disposal, so you can count on Democratic turnout to be maximized here. McCain also has a large field operation in Florida, and we'll see when we get there in roughly 12 days how the campaigns line up on the ground.
Religulous
Outside Obama's major economic policy speech in Toledo today. Feels like the End Times for somebody, I am forced to report.
[UPDATE] Just to be clear, we at FiveThirtyEight are against Muslim-murdering Presidential Christian babies !FOR! Ohio.
On a completely separate note in Nevada:
Democrats now outnumber Republicans in Washoe County for the first time since 1978, the Washoe County registrar Dan Burk confirmed this afternoon.
As of 2:45 p.m., Democrats had 958 more registered voters than Republicans in Washoe County. However, that number will continue to change over the next several days as registrar officials input new voter registrations. The office is still working through a backlog of applications turned in through registration drives. And prospective voters are reportedly lined up out the door to register this afternoon. Tomorrow is the deadline to register in person and is expected to be a busy day.
Ground game.
Today's Polls, 10/13
It's hard to tell these days whether the McCain campaign is coming or going; they have thus far defied our prediction that they would revert to a kinder, gentler tone. But the polls continue to break in pretty much just one direction, and it isn't in Senator McCain's.
Both Rasmussen and SurveyUSA released a ton of polling today, and it is almost uniformly favorable for Barack Obama. All you really need to know about the Rasmussen polling is that the five state they now define as battlegrounds -- Ohio, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia -- went to George Bush by an average of 7 points in 2004. Today, Rasmussen has Obama ahead in four of the five (including his first lead ever in a Rasmussen poll of Ohio), and tied in the other (North Carolina).
SurveyUSA, meanwhile, shows Obama making big gains in Missouri, and (less interestingly) in Oregon, New Jersey and New York. Overall, our model looks at the polls that were in the field yesterday -- these include all of the Rasmussen and SurveyUSA polls that we just mentioned -- and thinks it was his second-strongest individual polling day of the year, trailing only one day in early February.
Obama even holds the lead in a Fargo Forum poll of North Dakota, a state which his campaign abandoned some weeks ago. Our model is not yet ready to call North Dakota a toss-up -- we have no context to evaluate the Forum's poll, since this is the first survey they have released all year, and September polling had shown a double-digit lead for McCain in the state. Still, along with West Virginia, Montana, and the 2nd Congessional District in Nebraska, the Peace Garden State represents another place that Obama could win on a very good Election Night. Winning all of those plus all of the more traditional battleground states would total 387 electoral votes, which would better Bill Clinton's figure of 379 in 1996.
The tracking polls, at least, did move on balance toward McCain today. However, they remain strong for Obama, and there is no reason to give special reverence to them. The one-off national polls deserve consideration too, and both ABC/Post and GQR/Democracy Corps give Obama a 10-point lead, as of course do the state polls. Our model considers the trackers along with everything else, and does not yet perceive any cessation in Obama's momentum.
There is a little bit of tracking poll housekeeping, however. Gallup is now listing likely voter results in addition to registered voter results. Our policy since the first debate has been to use the likely voter model when we have the choice, and so that's what we will do from here forward. However, Gallup provides two separate likely voter models: "Likely Voters I", which favors Obama by 7 points, is based on "current voting intentions and past voting behavior"; "Likely Voters II", which goes to Obama by 10, is based on "current voting intentions" only.
I understand that Gallup wants to cover its butt; this is a difficult election to evaluate. With that said, I'd wish they'd tell me which of their likely voter models they think is superior and stick with it.
If they're going to ask me to make a choice, then I'm going to go ahead and make one, and that is with the "Likely Voters II" model, as "Likely Voters I" would seem to entirely strip out the registration gains that Obama and the Democrats have made over the past four years. In addition, the fact that there is a massive Democratic advantage in enthusiasm makes me skeptical of any likely voter model that cuts 3 points out of the Democratic margin. Because of the way that our model handles national polls, neither decision actually advantages Obama or McCain any, but I do think that "Likely Voters II" is liable to be a more accurate reflection of the electorate.
If The Bradley Effect is Gone, What Happened To It?
It was Tom Bradley's 1982 race for governor of California, in which he lost to George Deukmejian in spite of leading in the public polls, that gave the Bradley Effect its name. But now Lance Tarrance, the pollster for Bradley in that race, has an article up at RCP suggesting that the Bradley Effect was merely a case of bad polling -- and that his campaign's internals had shown a dead heat:
The hype surrounding the Bradley Effect has evolved to where some political pundits believe in 2008 that Obama must win in the national pre-election polls by 6-9 points before he can be assured a victory. That’s absurd. There won’t be a 6-9 point Bradley Effect –- there can’t be, since few national polls show a large enough amount of undecided voters and it's in the undecided column where racism supposedly hides.Tarrance's article is a fascinating read into the way that polls are spun and campaign narratives are spread. It is well worth your time to read the entire piece.
The other reason I reject the Bradley Effect in 2008 is because there was not a Bradley Effect in the 1982 California Governor’s race, either. Even though Tom Bradley had been slightly ahead in the polls in 1982, due to sampling error, it was statistically too close to call.
With that said, the evidence is pretty strong that the Bradley Effect in fact used to exist in the 1980s and probably through some point in the 1990s. In this Pew Research article you will find several examples of it, spanning the window from Harold Washington in 1983 to Carol Moseley Braun in 1992.
The evidence is perhaps equally strong, however, that the Bradley Effect does not exist any longer. As can be seen in the Hopkins paper for Harvard University that I have referenced many times, at some point during the mid 1990s the Bradley Effect seems to be disappeared.
(A brief aside: This is not to suggest that there was no relationship between race an errors in polling during the Democratic primaries. There is clear evidence that Barack Obama overperformed his polls in states with a large number of African-American voters, a.k.a a Reverse Bradley Effect. There is not any statistically compelling evidence however that Obama routinely underperformed his polls in states with a large number of white voters).
If the Bradley Effect has disappeared or at least dissipated, it is worth thinking about why. I can think of several plausible answers.
1. As Hopkins suggests, racial hot-button issues like crime, welfare and affirmative action are largely off the table today.
2. It may be generational. Expressions of racism are strongly correlated with age, and is much more common among pre-Boomer adults. However, a smaller and smaller fraction of the electorate each year came of age in the segregation era. The Pew study that I linked to above reports that 92 percent of Amerians are now comfortable voting for an African-American for President. In 1982, when Bradley's race occurred, that number was more like 75 percent. (Although the Bradley Effect isn't about racism per se -- it is about people misleading pollsters because of social desirability bias -- racism is nevertheless one of its prerequisites).
3. Racism also has a strong inverse correlation with education, and the country is much more educated than it used to be. In 1980, 55 percent of the electorate had attended at least some college. By 2004, that number had increased to 74 percent. Most colleges are racially diverse, at least to a degree, and so the experience of interacting with African-American students as friends and classmates may be a significant deterrent to racism.
4. There may be some relationship to the revival of the religious right in the 1990s. For members of the religious right, there are now ample and automatic reasons to vote against any liberal candidate, a.k.a. their positions on issues like abortion. In addition, the religious right has made voting along cultural grounds (as opposed to policy grounds) more socially acceptable in general. So long as the voter believes he or she can articulate a "valid" reason for voting against an African-American candidate, there is little reason to deceive a pollster about one's intention.
5. Relatedly, there may also now be less overlap between those sorts of voters who are more likely to harbor racist sentiments and those who are more likely to vote for a Democrat. One test of this hypothesis would be to see whether black Republican candidates still suffer from a Bradley Effect, even if black Democrats largely do not.
6. Polling techniques may have improved. For instance, "pushing" leaners toward one or another candidate with an appropriate follow-up question may be a good way to tease out the preferences of voters who are shy to reveal that they won't support a black candidate.
7. People's attitudes toward polls may have changed. Our society has become more and more impersonal, and so when a pollster calls, the respondent may no longer regard the interviewer as a "neighbor" to whom he or she must seem socially desirable. This would be taken to the logical extreme by IVR polling technologies (a.k.a. "robopolls") in which there is no interaction with a human at all.
8. African-American candidates may have gotten smarter about how they market themselves to white voters.
On the Road: Columbus, Ohio
On a gorgeous Saturday in Ohio's capital city, we sat down with Obama's Ohio Campaign for Change State Director Jeremy Bird, Deputy Communications Director Tom Reynolds, and Obama for America State Director Aaron Pickrell, who ran Governor Strickland's successful election effort in 2006.
In 2004, John Kerry relied heavily on America Coming Together (which is not as naughty as it sounds) and other canvassing organizations to do his on-the-ground organizing work in Ohio. Kerry had his operation too, but a lot of those efforts were duplicative, given that the campaigns could not coordinate with each other and shared many of the same names. The vast majority of the canvassers were young people from out of state.
Most significantly, Bird told us, when the election was over, the culled lists that ACT had spent tens of millions of dollars refining -- data that is the most valuable long-term property a state party seeks to collect -- vanished.
The Ohio Democratic Party had to rebuild much of the state infrastructure, beginning in 2006. One of the leave-behinds from 2004, however, was the Voter Protection teams that organized in 2004.
The Voter Protection teams, necessary to defend against a malign Ken Blackwell, were ad hoc groups that stayed intact for 2006 and have not evaporated. That's important, Bird noted, because this year what it has allowed the campaign to do is take early action. Beginning early in the summer, the campaign went to each county Election Board and conducted extensive surveys. How many voting locations will be open? How many voting machines will there be at each one? Are they interpreting the laws correctly or incorrectly?
All of this action, Bird said, allows the campaign to know where it needs to push for more machines, more locations, or to ensure the Secretary of State's directives are followed. The Voter Protection effort itself is just like organizing -- organizing the election board officials into compliance with state laws.
On election day, the huge advantage all this advance prep work allows the campaign is that the political teams, field teams and voter protection teams are integrated. In Ohio, the legal protection teams don't need to wait for field organizers to pipeline up election day complaints to the top level before a decision is then handed back down about how to proceed. Field teams are prepared to deal with problems on the spot. It happens in real time, right at the county and precinct level.
Barack Obama has 89 field offices open in the state of Ohio right now, about a 2-1 edge on John McCain. Kerry had 50 offices open in Ohio, and only 4 field organizers in Franklin County. Obama has three dozen, and Franklin County itself comprises two regions. As elsewhere, Ohio is the beneficiary of the long primary season. "Well over half" of Obama's general election organizers were veterans of the primary. Every Regional Field Director went through the primary or caucus. They've been through the wars. An organizer ages in dog years.
What the long, multistate primary did, Bird pointed out, is help the campaign tinker and come up with best practices. "The primaries and caucuses were a proving ground," said Bird. Everything from capturing and recording data to voter registration strategies had a chance to be tested and retooled.
With 35 days of no-excuse early voting for the first time ever in Ohio rather than the traditional 13 hours, the campaign feels confident. "I feel good about all the things that are in our control," said Pickrell. Barack Obama himself is ready to find out what he's built. "Let's see how this baby runs."
We'll have more from our sit-down with the Ohio Obama HQ in our next post from the Ohio road, here at mile 7138.
Road to 270: South Dakota
Today we continue our Road to 270 series with the Mount Rushmore State, South Dakota.
BADLANDS AND PRAIRIE, South Dakota had the nation's lowest unemployment several months ago, and the home of Wall Drug will be another state John McCain will collect in an effort to get to 270. While it lingers around the median in several categories (education, manufacturing job share and Starbucks:Walmart ratio), South Dakota has a higher percentage of white evangelicals, Catholics and Mormons. What do you get when a Catholic, an evangelical and a Mormon walk into a bar? A bad joke, probably, and you also get South Dakota.
Key Demographics
Note: Factors colored in red can generally be thought to help McCain. Factors in blue can generally be thought to help Obama. Factors in purple have ambiguous effects. Except where otherwise apparent, the numbers next to each variable represent the proportion out of each 100 residents in each state who fall into that category. Fundraising numbers reflect dollars raised in the 2008 campaign cycle per eligible voter in each state. Figures for seniors and youth voters are proportions of all residents aged 18+, rather than all residents of any age. The figure for education reflects the average number of years of completed schooling for all adults aged 25+. The figure for same-sex households reflects the number of same-sex partner households as a proportion of all households in the state. The liberal-conservative index is scaled from 0 (conservative) to 100 (liberal), based on a Likert score of voter self-identification in 2004 exit polls. The turnout rates reflect eligible voters only. Unemployment rates are current as of June 2008.
What McCain Has Going For Him
South Dakota features a few notable sociological factors in John McCain's favor: more than half of South Dakotans own guns, and only two states have a lower percentage of same-sex households. It's also a higher than normal military veteran state. McCain has nearly equal fundraising figures per capita as Obama here, always a good sign for the Republican this cycle. South Dakota is also very male, very non-black, very non-Hispanic, and has a higher percentage of elderly than most states, which in this election would seem to favor McCain, even as he tanks among older voters worried about things like retirement and Social Security in this economic crisis. Last but not least, Republicans still enjoy a large structural partisan ID advantage in South Dakota, one that helped George Bush win by over 20 points and one that had a 15-point gap in partisan ID-hood in 2004.
What Obama Has Going For Him
A decent population of younger voters, as well as a large Native population with whom Obama does extremely well. Obama was expected to do much better in the primary here, however, and fell short of expectations despite widespread support among the state's superdelegates. Obama could wind up getting this state down into single digits, but this is also a ticket-splitting state, and many will opt to vote for McCain, Johnson and Herseth-Sandlin.
What To Watch For
Not much drama in South Dakota. Safe seats abound, including freshman defender Tim Johnson in the US Senate. After Johnson's 2006 stroke, many Republicans openly speculated that his seat was up for the taking. Johnson's seat is safe, as is Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin's House seat -- South Dakota's lone Congresswoman. All we can really tell you about what to watch in South Dakota -- not even the state legislative races hold much drama in terms of control (both should remain in Republican control), is that Deadwood is still the best TV series of all time, tied for #1 with The Wire. So watch it.
Mini Polling Update
New results for North Dakota are in the system -- Obama's up 2, but our model isn't buying that it's a swing state-- plus the Zogby and Rasmussen trackers and the ABC/Post national poll.
Full and official polling write-up won't likely come until after Rasmussen releases its swing state results at 5 PM today.
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