If racism doesn’t explain the fact that McCain now only trails Obama in Deep Blue New York State by 5 percentage points in the latest poll, than what does?
A New York poll finds Sen. Barack Obama’s lead in the state has fallen to five points, down from 18 points in June.
The Siena Research Institute poll has Obama, a Democrat, leading Sen. John McCain 46 to 41 percent among likely voters in the heavily Democratic state. He led 51-33 in the June survey.
Likely voters say they believe Obama would do a better job revitalizing the nation’s economy, ending the war in Iraq, improving the health care system, and enhancing the education system. McCain, the Republican nominee, is seen as stronger on fighting terrorism and enhancing America’s strength in the world.
I can’t believe Sexy Sarah and all the McCain lies that the media is willing to repeat ad nauseam is the reason for Obama’s precipitous drop in the polls in New York. Maybe after Wall Street completely collapses people will regain their senses, but so far the only explanation I have is that a lot of people, even in a blue state, don’t want to let the “uppity” black man move into in their “White House.”
i think polling has a problem, because when I had a land line i would get polling calls. Know that I have a cell, i get no polling calls, even those fake ones put out by Repugs.
Even as pessimistic as I am about this, I’d have to go with this.
Having said that, Hillary and Bill haven’t done a thing since Sister Sarah made her debut. They could be helping Obama. They’re not.
“Clintons to the rescue!!”
Worst headline ever. Obama is his own man. It’s best that way.
When I had a land line I never got called for any political polls. Now that I use only a cell phone, I never get called for any political polls.
Maybe, if they also polled people with cell phones only things would look different. Or maybe not. It is all speculation. And it’s unbelievably scary.
The most dangerous thing in this country is the electorate.
i guess their reaching only those with a land line..land line polling..is that true polling??
You mean is it well-designed and likely to be accurate? that depends on whether excluding cell phone users actually skews the results. I don’t know whether it does or not, but I suspect that the types of people who will support an empty bubble with a nasty agenda use cell phones every bit as much as more enlightened types do. More of them might have land lines, but it is hard to know how much of a factor that really is.
The land line versus cell phone notion looks to me like grasping at straws.
With a land line, you know where you are calling; the area code virtually matches the media market.
With cell phones, you might be calling a phone with a upstate New York area code that is in the hands of a voter who lives and is registered in Kansas.
Very true.
Yup.
Polling is a fraud perpetrated by the corporations and the media who have a vested interest in making this a close race.
How can they claim their poll is a representative sample when they don’t reach all of us who screen our calls (the entrepreneurs and people who work from home and busy people)? Pollsters never leave a message because the automated dialers recognize a machine. We must be at least 10% of the voters. The educated ones.
How can they claim their poll is representative, when they ignore the probable third of the electorate that ONLY has cell phone and text… no land lines = no lists.
They don’t even know what part of the electorate they can or can’t reach! But they think they can massage the data points to sound convincing? Hah!
Numbers lie.
Garbage in, garbage out.
The raw data from the exit polls, before they massage it, will be interesting, and I hope that people who get the newswire feeds will capture that data as it flows.
Since polls lie worse than politicians, why don’t we ignore them?
Maybe, just maybe, it’s the War Hero vs. Snake Oil Salesmen debate?
A lot of people feel that way, but a lot of people also know that it’s wrong.
Also – polls lie or mis-speak, as do a lot of reporters.
Siena has a horrible record, they got the NY primaries wrong, I wouldn’t put any stock in this outlier. If Obama only won NY by 5 points, he’d lose the country by 15 points.
I don’t know about how reputable the polling outfit is. However, the poll was conducted at the height of the post-convention bounce for Republicans:
The radical left has not been happy with Obama’s stands on Iran, Iraq and the telephone company immunity issue. When, however, it comes down to Obama vs McCain, the activists will come out roaring for the Senator from Illinois. We are well aware of the dangers posed by the toxic military-corporate-religious complex.
I don’t trust polls at all. Thank god Harry Truman didn’t either.
Hillary and Bill, surprise us all. Do something for someone else for a change.
If the “radical left” is against the “military-corporate-religious complex” then they have no ally in Senator Obama. Obama is clearly running toward the “military-corporate-religious complex” and away from “radical” lefties. So I don’t know what you’re talking about.
If activists come out roaring for Obama they are being seriously duped. Sure, he’s better than the pure evil the other side is running. But his whole strategy is to run away from the “base” or the “activists” so if he’s counting on the left to come out in droves he’s screwed. Because his whole plan has been the opposite–it’s the old third-way Clintonian triangulation plan–you know–the one we’ve seen a million times? Where the Democrat runs to the right toute suite?
Obama should be getting a ton of these conservative White Appalachian voters he started making a move for this summer. He wrote the “radical lefties” like me off this summer. So where’s this bounce in conservatives that he was going for? He should be expecting a drop off in support of “activists” and “radical lefties” because he threw them under the bus already.
If he’s coming back to us radical lefties he’s in a world of hurt. And I for one demand a better quid pro quo than he has promised heretofore.
Any anti-war voter who was paying attention knew from the beginning that he was not their candidate, despite all the nice-sounding sound bytes about “bringing the troops home”. He spelled out his plan for Iraq in detail very early in the primaries, as did Hillary. Their plans were very similar, and were not withdrawal plans, but plans merely to reconfigure the occupation, and give it a lower profile. The problem is that almost no one was paying attention to anything beyond the sound bytes and the P.R. material on his website, and ditto for Hillary.
Even their promises to withdraw combat troops were verbal sleight of hand. Both of them spelled out some of the missions of the tens of thousands of occupation troops that would remain, and most of those missions involved combat, so unless they were planning to send cooks, truck drivers, and mechanics on combat missions, they could not withdraw all combat troops.
I voted for neither Obama nor Hillary in the primary, even though they were the only two left standing by that time. Everyone else had dropped out.
I can safely refuse to vote for him in the general, because there is absolutely no question that he will win my state. Therefore, I will vote for a third party candidate, or write someone in who is more in line with my principles. However, the idea of McCain as President scares me a great deal, and the idea of the narcissistic ignoramus Palin as VP, let alone President (and there is a 30% chance that she WOULD become president in the next four years) scares me to death.
The most dangerous thing in the United States is the electorate.
Right. You’re absolutely right.
I don’t mean to exaggerate Obama’s “move” to the right. It was clearly more of a rhetorical move and a campaign strategy rather than an ideological shift (although he did change his position of FISA, for one). And part of this “move to the right” was the natural unwinding of the Democratic primary foolishness. The candidates appealed to the left via a wink wink strategy in the primaries–meaning everyone knew they would disavow their new found “liberalism” in the general but maybe, just maybe, the candidate will enact liberal policies when he’s in office when there will be no political pressure (Ha!). Heck, a bet a lot of progressives would have settled for one single measly bone thrown their way (“just one issue–health care?–please?) and would have hailed Obama as the most progressive administration ever.
You’re right that it was foolish for actual progressives to think the wink wink was helpful. They should have known that the Democrats would cower in fear at the first Republican attack and would not be offering any more winks. Progressives should have known the Dems would instinctively turn into the Republican-lite cowards they are.
So much of this shift is simply the fact that more progressives have finally waken up to the fact that Obama is like all the other centrist Dems.
Right, and I hope it is clear that his Iraq plan was from very early in the primary, and was not a shift to the right or in any other direction. He spelled it out clearly and in detail almost at the beginning of the primary season, as did Hillary her nearly identical plan.
Neither of them EVER intended to make a full withdrawal from Iraq, but to leave somewhere between 50-75,000 troops there to, as Hillary put it complete the “military as well as the political mission in Iraq”. In other words, they intended from the beginning to continue the imperial project with a reconfigured occupation.
Since “the left” has come up, I might as well post a reply I gave to a European asking how McCain could be even with Obama now:
The Democrats haven’t changed, even for this election cycle. It now appears that they will continue forever not giving the people what they want, continually hoping that the public will finally come to its senses and realize that the Republicans are running the country into the ground, and that the Democrats, if elected, would try to moderate this process.
If the choice is Obama and Biden vs McCain and Palin, as it certainly is, and if the race in NY is close, then, we on the left have no choice but to support the former. I want to vote for the Green Party in the worst way, but, if necessary, I will hold my nose and vote for the Democrat ticket.
I agree with your assessment on Obama moving to the right and I think his realignment sucks. But, McCain is like more and more insane, and Palin, I think will bring back the Inquisition. If they win, it’s over for America.
Here’s a good piece that gets at the problem:
The Democrats Do Poland
This is looking to be a repeat of Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry. I don’t think race is the decisive factor. Obama just comes across as too phlegmatic for enough voters to be able to see him as president. It just doesn’t seem that he has the spirit to fight in him.
It’s called playing not to lose.
The Democrats have been playing not to lose for at least 2 years. They have turned a blowout into a nail biter. They chose this path. They chose this strategy of “hope” over fighting the Republicans.
This is pure centrist politics at work. Obama moving to the right. Democrats always move to the right and always lose.
They’re losers. That’s what Democrats do. They cut and run from the fight and then cry about how it’s not fair.
Someone call the fucking waaaaaaaaambulance because we got a critical case of loseritis. Someone needs to drag the lifeless body of the latest Democratic nominee off the stage. He’s the same as the rest–a “liberal elitist” that doesn’t have the courage of his convictions and is incapable of making the liberal argument. He’s a cut and runner and it’s too late. The Democratic party hasn’t learned it’s lesson. It once again chose to cut and run instead of fighting the conservative bullies.
And it always ends the same way. Losers wimps (Democrats) getting gunned down by the side with much more firepower and a better offense.
Yeah, and under skilled management its a good strategy.
But the Democrats don’t necessarily inspire confidence. They don’t act like winners. They strike me as the team that can’t even manage the clock properly.
And now instead of “managing the clock” they are back to their 2 minute offense.
I have even less confidence in the Democrats 2 minute skillz than I do their clock management skillz.
As an Ohioan virtually all of my life and a long-suffering fan of the Cincinnati Bengals, I can tell you a lot about the results of “playing not to lose” instead of “playing to win”. Like Democrats who cling to the Clintons, we here in Cincy can only cling to the 2005 season as a high water mark. It is truly pathetic.
If I didn’t know better, I would swear that Mike Brown is running the show for the Democrats.
Ha. I see where you’re coming from.
I too have seen my fair share of playing not to lose. Big Ten football is all about conservative football. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the Hawkeyes put a knee down when they have the ball with maybe a minute left in the first half and 50 yards or so to go. They play conservatively. They don’t have the same talent as other teams (its a much smaller state) and they have to focus on fundamentals and being more physical than the other team. They focus on not making mistakes. And it works. It’s a good style of football for what they have. It’s frustrating to watch sometimes but I have some confidence they can pull it out.
The Democrats on the other hand don’t play fundamentally sound football. They make a lot of mistakes. They can’t run the ball up the middle, manage the clock, and ultimately win in a controlled manner. Seeing them try to pull off a clock management/field position game is nerve racking. They do not inspire confidence.
They are trying to play Big Ten football against a pro offense. It. Just. Doesn’t. Work.
It’s racism.
I think there is plenty of closet racism, but the polls don’t capture the intensity of commitment among Obama’s base and the likelihood of huge turnout for him in November, especially among youth and minority voters. I’m guessing that the two opposing forces more or less cancel each other out, and that our main mission is simply to get out the vote big-time.
The polls aren’t capturing the level of intensity of the Christian fundamentalists either. And the Christian fundamentalists have a much better track record of voting than do minority and youth voters.
And McCain has the older vote on his side. They also have a history of high voting percentages.
And which side is more energized right now?
Obama has one hail Mary pass left. Maybe it will work. But he sure ran a funny campaign if he was betting the farm on youth and minority votes.
He should not have tacked to the right and he should not have disavowed his black preacher, his black church and the leaders of the black community. He should not have slapped progressives in the face.
He should run to the left if he’s going after minorities and the youth. Make the case to them. Maybe he should have put a pro marijuana Westerner on his ticket as VP if he wanted the young vote. Shit, he could have tried a lot of things to appeal to this vote.
But instead he tried to go after McCain’s older, white, religious, and conservative voters. Same as Gore and Kerry and Clinton did. And we get the same predictable results.
“…the polls don’t capture the intensity of commitment among Obama’s base and the likelihood of huge turnout for him in November…“
That sounds like nonsense speculation coming from utter desperation. How do you fail to “capture the intensity of commitment” in a poll? Either people are going to vote for him, or they do not, and it is irrelevant how intensely committed are those who are going to vote for him. If the polls are properly randomized, they will include those who are “intensely committed” along with those who are “unintensely committed”, along with those who are “reluctantly committed”, and they will be reasonably accurate regardless of “intensity of commitment”.
And what about the intensity of commitment for Palin? I have rarely seen so many people so thrilled to be making so much out of an empty, if attractive, bubble. And she is even fooling quite a few “dyed in the wool” liberals and centrist Democrats. I can’t believe how many of them have said they felt “reassured” after that abortion of an interview.
“It’s ’cause they’re not polling people with cell phones – no, it’s ’cause the polls don’t capture the intensity of commitment – no, it’s ’cause polls are never right – no, it’s ’cause [fill in the blank].” Bullshit! It’s ’cause too much of the American electorate is mindless, shallow, and does not bother to actually listen and pay attention, let alone think about the consequences of their votes.
The most dangerous thing in the United States is the electorate – what part of that is not clear by now?
it’s not just this poll…have a look at 538‘s compilations…they’ve been pretty damn reliable this election season, btw.
even with the barracuda’s bounce eroding, there’s plenty to be worried about:
this election coulda, shoulda, woulda been a slam dunk for the d‘s…and due to whatever your favorite reason why it isn’t, it’s about as far from it as you can get.
FWIW….this poll was from September 10, and the events of the past week have not been kind to McCain.
I looked at a “this day in 2004” map, and Bush was ahead in NJ by a few points too.
My guess is this is an outlier poll.
Keep on grasping at straws, people, if it makes you feel better.
Interestingly enough, the poll at the Newsday link is currently at 60.3% Obama, 39.7% McCain.
I suppose it could be racism, but I would have honestly thought that would have played out earlier in the polls. People do not become racist overnight. It’s inconceivable to me that people will actually vote against their paychecks, but we have seen it time and time again among the evangelical base. I still say timing is everything. The debates haven’t happened yet and the financial crisis narrative is starting to take hold. Just wait until they roll out their health care ads against McCain. That will really make people sit and take notice. For those that are lucky enough to have employer-sponsored group health, this will shake up the status quo like nothing else. The markets seem kind of foreign to most people and they tend to tune them out, but health insurance is another story altogether. Everyone understands what it means to be under or non insured. It may be a few more polling cycles before we really start seeing how this is going to play out.
In Reagan’s shadow
When will the Democrats realize that if they continue do disassociate themselves from the liberal tradition of FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson, they will have nothing of substance to offer voters as an alternative to the Republicans, who most definitely do have substantive ideologies: (neoconservative) nationalism, Christianism, and neoliberalism. All of those ideologies have now become discredited. So why are Democrats still scared to death of returning to the ideology that made them the majority party for most of the twentieth century?
Siena also put out a poll back during the primaries that said Hillary would only beat McCain by 3 or 4 points. It’s worthless.
Also, I notice they don’t even say how many people were polled. They contacted ~600 registered voters, but only report results for “likely” voters.