I love Nate Silver and I think his analysis isn’t just the best in the business…he’s got the business to himself. But there is one problem, and that is that he’s relying on polls. He’ll tell you all the limitations of his analysis because he’s totally honest and has complete integrity, but there are still limitations. If you have bad or meaningless input, the output won’t be much better. That’s why this insight from Josh Kraushaar is important:
This should be a golden age of political prognostication. Any armchair strategist with an Internet connection can get loads of insider information and blog or tweet their viewpoints. Congressional polling, once a true commodity because few media firms commissioned it regularly, has proliferated, with numerous start-up pollsters releasing data that’s eaten up on a daily basis by junkies.
But amid all the information, I’m finding that we’ve lost a lot of old-fashioned common sense in evaluating and understanding races. We’ve become beholden to numbers, any numbers, at the expense of states’ and districts’ fundamental characteristics and candidates’ and campaigns’ own unique qualities.
Do you remember how one advertisement from Joe Sestak crashed Arlen Specter’s poll numbers and effectively ended his career? That was somewhat predictable. Maybe we couldn’t anticipate the exact ad, or that it would be so devastating, but we knew that Specter had glaring weaknesses that could and would be exploited by any halfway competent campaign. But you couldn’t predict that Specter would lose based on polls that came out before the campaign was truly engaged.
We know that the recent Republican nominees have real weaknesses. They’ve said and done things that are embarrassing, or hard to justify, or that they will now disavow (effectively flip-flopping). Their positions are out of the mainstream, and their personal histories are often checkered. They’ve lied on tape and in print. They’ve embellished their resumes. One of them has even sent around links to images of bestiality by email. Most of the impact of these weaknesses is not being seen in current polling data because the public has not yet been exposed to media that discusses it.
I believe that this election is going to be another YouTube election. And private citizens using their creative powers to make viral videos are going to be an extremely important part of our success. George Allen called someone ‘macaca.’ We have dozens of macaca moments to choose from in this election cycle. We need to get to work.
Polls right now show important warning signs, but they mean little when you consider what that campaign is actually going to look like. If you are fair-minded, there aren’t more than two or three Senate races that can be called even. Our candidates totally outclass their candidates. That’s going to show. But we need to do our part in this. So, I hope Jed Lewison is getting ready. I hope there are dozens of unknown Jed Lewisons waiting to emerge with new creative video.
Boo…but…even I, a right-wing nut job, am surprised at the intensity and superior turn-out of the Tea Party.
Sorry for the bad news, but if the polls are wrong, they are wrong in favor of your side.
And I wanted Castle to win!
Yes, but here’s my point. Polls didn’t show that George Allen was going to lose. Polls didn’t know that a video would come out that would cripple his campaign. But we know that lots of videos will come out that are similar to the Macaca video in that they powerfully demonstrate that a candidate has some very unpopular views or has done some powerfully embarrassing things.
We know this to be true of more than dozen Republican senate candidates.
So, it’s like looking at Baghdad’s defenses before we’ve done Shock and Awe and declaring that they look formidable. Yeah, they look formidable because they haven’t been blown to bits yet.
LFA: Maybe you are right. But it’s also possible that intraparty intensity will not translate into general election victory…it doesn’t take a whole lot of tea partiers to win a primary…and those folks were always going to vote republican anyway.
Or, to take the case in New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte just had approximately 50% of Republicans vote against her and now she needs them to turn around and vote for her in six weeks. That’s not so easy to pull off.
And can you tell me how many contested Democratic primaries there were as compared to Republicans? How many seriously contested primaries were there? Specter/Sestak, Lincoln/Halter, and Kuster/Swett?
To have another YouTube election, you’d have to have the first one, first.
We’re all wired, but we’re not typical. We’re not close to typical.
People in the aggregate still get most of their news from the top-of-the-hour rip-and-read on the classic-rock, all-country or sports-talk station on their car radio, or from what’s above the fold on the paper at the convenience store where they get their gas, or from non-cable television.
And since they’re looking for, or listening for, news that supports the way they already think, even that has limited ability to actually move votes.
Let’s agree that voting for Democrats is the only rational choice for anyone who’s unhappy with the economy. We want people to vote rationally, so we make rational arguments. That sounds reasonable, but I believe it’s all wrong.
There are millions of people who’ve never implicitly trusted Obama or the Democratic party in general, and they’re angry about the economy. Voting against incumbents and especially Democratic incumbents, is how they plan to express that anger.
The way to get them to act rationally is to address their emotions, resolve them, put them to rest. Every criticism of a Republican or argument about how things would be worse if not for the Democrats misses the point because people aren’t ready for it yet. Before those kinds of arguments can work, Obama has to show the angry populace that he really gets it. Maybe something like the health care summit for the economy, with a focus group of open-minded by angry and desperate people. Definitely putting the middle class tax cuts up for a vote. But showing how crazy the tea partiers are? Not yet. People first have to be receptive to Democrats to internalize the message of the videos. The fact that people are voting for these tea party candidates without really knowing what they stand for doesn’t mean that we should show them what they stand for. It means that they don’t care (now) because they’re voting for anyone but the Democratic incumbent. Change that, and the rest is easy.
The more we learn about human behavior the more we realized that people hardly ever act rationally. Assuming people are rational was always our first mistake, that’s not how human beings are wired.
And that’s why Glibertarianism(see Megan McAdled) will never work
Not to mention the undefinability of “rationality”.
This election is beyond the point of persuasion, rational or otherwise. It is to the point of rounding up the voters who agree with you and getting their vote entered and counted. The only thing you have to overcome at this point are despair, complacency, and laziness. All campaign messaging from this point will deal with those three things.
People don’t rationally evaluate choices, they shape them through conversations with their personal networks. That means that the rationality or irrationality of the choice depends on the rationality of irrationality of thinking of the folks within their personal networks that they most trust. There is no such thing as a pure opinion leader.
I’m not so much interested in protecting the Democratic incumbent (although that needs to be done) as in taking seats away from Republicans. If there is a failing, it has to do with not realizing how weakened the Republicans are because of their lockstep strategy over the past two years. When folks realize what has been happening, it is Republican incumbents who are vulnerable. And we have the gift this year of a lot of progressives opposing Republican incumbents mainly because the establishment Democrats thought the seats were unattainable and did not step up to the plate. We were here before in 2006 and again in 2008. And neither of those happened automatically but through the immense efforts of a lot of people, progressives included.
This election is about breaking the Republican grip on the national narrative. We either do it or we do not. If we fail, it looks less like a GOP takeover and more like continued gridlock for two years.
According to TPM, a PPP shows:
The entire party is out to lunch.
Or maybe they all plan on voting and reasonably, rationally expect their candidate to win.
The current composition of the House is 255D-178R-2 vacant. Forty seats (16% of Democratic seats) would have to swing to the Republicans for them to gain control. If Republicans pick up the two vacancies, that would mean that 38 seats would need to swing. What is that list of 40 vulnerable Democrats? The total Blue Dog caucus is 58. What is the chance that the Republicans can safely pick up those specific seats?
Likewise in the Senate. Right now Republicans have to not lose more than one of the seats considered to be vulnerable for Democrats (and keep all of their current seats) to gain control of the Senate. Their upside is 51 (52 if they can persuade Lieberman to join them). And that includes vulnerable seats like Patty Murray’s.
The Democratic upside in the Senate is 67 (68 if Glassman knocks off McCain).
In both the House and the Senate the numerical advantage is with the Democrats in keeping control.
The generic polls for Congress are misleading because of how gerrymandered the districts have become. And because of the self-identified red state-blue state identification. Growth in Republican support has occurred most strongly within already Republican-held areas. Loss of Democratic support has occurred most within already Republican-held areas. State-wide races such as US Senate and governor might be affected, but Congressional district races less so. Congressional races will depend on who gets out their people.
So there is for each House maybe a 30% chance that Democrats will lose control, which means a 9% chance of losing both Houses. But there is also a 30% chance that Democrats could wind up with more seats in either House. And because of which seats are vulnerable, the Democratic caucuses come next January are likely to be less conservative.
Republicans have been making their case, essentially unanswered all summer. We will see what happens if and when Democrats start making their case.
It is not just YouTubes that can and will confound the polls. The interaction of several technologies affect polls in ways that pollsters are assuming are random but may not be. For example, they might be related to specific demographics. Folks with only cellphones might constitute a different demographic that folks who still have land lines. But both might not answer calls from numbers that either do not identify themselves on caller ID or are unknown to the person. Cellphone-only use could exclude younger voters and minorities. The use of caller-ID could exclude older folks who are afraid of being bothered or being scammed and folks who are behind in their bills because of the economy and are being dunned.
What effects YouTube will have will be because a particular YouTube goes viral enough to be talked about with folks who do not see YouTubes or even have a computer and because the local or national media takes note of it like they did the Breitbart videos.
And Democrats should not be complacent, thinking that they are the only ones with technology. Breitbart, case in point.
But a campaign is more than media shaping opinion. It is also about mobilizing volunteers to mobilize the vote. The concerns about the current polls go to the effect that has on these. People might be in agreement that the candidate should be elected but still not vote because of either a they’re-gonna-win-anyway attitude of a they’re-gonna-lose-anyway attitude. In this sense there is a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy or autocorrelation in polling and its importance in elections. Why else would politicians shop for favorable pollsters and then trumpet the poll reults? They’re out to create a bandwagon effect.
Media buys do two things. They provide name recognition, present a biography, and say that the candidate has enough money, experience, and reputation to be serious and that the candidate is different from his/her opponent in matters of policy, character, or ideology. There is not a lot of evidence that ads change opinions or get out the vote, except in some historic cases. And even in historic cases, the ad need not air–just become buzz. The opinions of voters are shaped by their personal networks (even the opinions of so-called opinion leaders), and motivation to vote is shaped by how often a candidate or campaign volunteers ask them to vote and unblock any reasons, like transportation, that would keep them from successfully voting for the candidate. In write-in elections that includes education about how to correctly spell the candidate’s name in order to have the vote counted–something Lisa Murkowski’s team are probably pondering right now.
George Allen lost as much because he didn’t anticipate a new technology and thought he could get away with insulting someone that he assumed (rightly it turns out) was a “tracker”. What he didn’t anticipate was how YouTube could spread knowledge of this incident around the internet and become a topic of conventional media conversation. And he lost by the thinnest of margins after all. A margin that might as much had to do with the excitement of volunteers who wanted him out as it did with the YouTube.
I think that this is going to be a GOTV election primarily because it is not persuasion on issues but turnout of those that already agree on issues that will win the election.
A progressive failing is to believe in the magic of right ideas and right message and ignore the fact that most people vote because of personal interactions, either with their personal network who tell them that this is important, with the candidate directly who answers their questions and asks for their vote, or with the candidates volunteers who remind, prod, wheedle the person into getting off the couch and going to the polls.