How to interpret a dead-even horserace

April 17, 2008

The AP notes one of its own polls today, to explain, “Republicans are no longer underdogs in the race for the White House.” John McCain, the AP noted, has pulled about even with Dems thanks to support from disgruntled Republicans (who had been reluctant to close ranks), independents, and some disaffected Dems.

Partly thanks to an increasingly likable image, the Republican presidential candidate has pulled even with the two Democrats still brawling for their party’s nomination, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo news poll released Thursday. Just five months ago — before either party had winnowed its field — the survey showed people preferred sending an unnamed Democrat over a Republican to the White House by 13 percentage points.

Of those who have moved toward McCain, about two-thirds voted for President Bush in 2004 but are now unhappy with him, including many independents who lean Republican. The remaining one-third usually support Democrats but like McCain anyway.

Also helping the Arizona senator close the gap: Peoples’ opinions of Hillary Rodham Clinton have soured slightly, while their views of Barack Obama have improved though less impressively than McCain’s.

Now, it’s worth keeping a few caveats in mind. First, the AP ran a 1,000-word item about one of its own polls without noting the literal results. In other words, the piece notes that McCain has “pulled even,” but it neglects to mention any percentages for any candidate. Second, at the very end, the report notes, “The poll was conducted over the Internet by Knowledge Networks,” which raises a few doubts about dependability.

Nevertheless, the notion of McCain having pulled even with either of the Dems is bolstered by more reliable polls, including the latest AP-Ipsos national poll, Gallup’s national tracking poll, and the averages from other recent national polls.

It’s reminds me of a point that I’ve been pondering lately: is the fact that McCain is tied with his Democratic rivals encouraging or discouraging?

My initial instinct has been to assume the worst. McCain has been treated as a campaign after-thought for over a month, by virtue of media attention on the Democratic race. He’s not running a lot of ads, conservative 527s haven’t begun helping him, and his policy ideas (such as they are) haven’t gained any traction at all. Worse, about the most noteworthy thing McCain has done lately is make a bunch of foreign policy, military, and national security gaffes. And he’s still tied with two Democratic powerhouses.

Complicating matters, he’s running on a fairly ridiculous platform which most Americans should find reflexively revolting. John Heilemann recently noted:

[F]or all the hosannas being sung to him these days, and for all the waves of fear and trembling rippling through the Democratic masses, the truth is that McCain is a candidate of pronounced and glaring weaknesses. A candidate whose capacity to raise enough money to beat back the tidal wave of Democratic moola is seriously in doubt. A candidate unwilling or unable to animate the GOP base. A candidate whose operation has never recovered from the turmoil of last summer, still skeletal and ragtag and technologically antediluvian…. Whose cadre of confidantes contains so many lobbyists that the Straight Talk Express often has the vibe of a rolling K Street clubhouse. Whose awkward positioning issues-wise was captured brilliantly by Pat Buchanan: “The jobs are never coming back, the illegals are never going home, but we’re going to have a lot more wars.” A candidate one senior moment — or one balky teleprompter — away from being transformed from a grizzled warrior into Grandpa Simpson. A candidate, that is, who poses an existential question for Democrats: If you can’t beat a guy like this in a year like this, with a vastly unpopular Republican war still ongoing and a Republican recession looming, what precisely is the point of you?

In light of all of this, we see polls showing that McCain has “pulled even.” Even! Dems should be crushing this guy and his four-more-years platform.

And yet, there’s an important flip-side that gives me pause. In fact, I can almost persuade myself that, given the current landscape, McCain should be cruising to huge leads over Obama and Clinton right now.

No one’s laid a glove on McCain in months. He started off with high name recognition and strong favorable numbers, then won the Republican nomination fairly easily over a month ago. All the while, McCain’s enjoyed a startling, often embarrassing, advantage with the political media establishment, which has been practically sycophantic towards him.

Clinton and Obama have been engaged in a fairly contentious primary fight, in which they’ve not only hammered away at each other’s negatives, but have also been focusing far more of their energies on each other than McCain. There’s one independent attack ad running against McCain (Progressive Media USA’s spot), but it just started, and its initial ad buy was modest.

In other words, McCain, who most Americans liked to begin with, is running around, hanging out with Letterman and Jon Stewart, and laughing it up with his reporter buddies on the plane. He’s running on a four-more-years platform, but most of the country has no idea about this, because no one’s told them yet.

So, either Dems should be dejected that this conservative Republican running on a Bush-like agenda is tied with our great candidates, or Dems should be thrilled that this media darling who has it easy isn’t beating our candidates by double digits.

It’s a tough call. What say you?

McCain’s been getting a free ride. This will pass.

  • I think John McCain should enjoy this moment where he appears to have a chance of winning, for once the attention of the democratic nominee focus’ on him even underdog status will will be out of reach. He’ll be underground (gopher status?).

  • Until the polls have a specific democrat up against McCain, I think they do not tell us a whole lot. They are asking about a hypothetical candidate vs a actual candidate.

  • It is what it is(if it is). Until the damn family feud is over(if it ever is), we can’t know where we stand. Obama & HRC HAVE to make a deal soon to go after McSchmuk exclusively and just let the chips fall where they may in their little war.

  • My suggestion. After all the primaries are over, can Clinton and Obama agree not to attack one another? The voters will have had their say; tearing down each others’ public image would probably have a small or negative impact on the supers’ opinion from that point on…

    Instead, the two need to refrain from declaring a nominee (“we’re going to take it to the convention”) and just blast the hell out of McCain.

    I see two advantages:

    1) The candidates spend time and money taking down McCain instead of each other.
    2) It divides the Republican Attack Machine’s energy and resources.

    If the Democratic Party were to declare a nominee by June 3rd, as many have suggested, it would allow smear machines to focus their attacks. Let’s just leave it up in the air for now and let McCain squirm while Clinton and Obama turn their collective sights on him… CB has complained about the lack of such behavior, but the reason this hasn’t happened already is that people still have to vote. If C/O were playing nice right now, the primary would essentially be over (Obama leading in basically every category), and the smears would be targeting him.

    I know my logic’s a little convoluted and requires some good faith assumptions of what the candidates would do, but if Clinton abandons her GOP-talking points, then staying in the game could end up being a boon to the Democratic offensive against McCain.

  • No one is winning this year on a 4 more years platform. The economy has 7 more months to get worse and McCain has that amount of time to come up with a better message. If he doesn’t then he is toast, regardless of what the polls now show.

  • The Clintons – kowtowing to the GOP with, e.g., DADT and NAFTA – did their part to make “liberal” and “Democrat” dirty words in the American lexicon.

    Once Obama is free to promote Democratic values and to attack McCain (hopefully without any help from the damn Clintons), we will bury Bush III (aka McCain).

  • I think we’re kidding ourselves if we keep mumbling to ourselves that it will pass. It won’t pass until we kick it as hard as we can, as long as we can, as far as we can.

    Let’s start with:

    •McCain’s “solution” to the growing crisis in medicare healthcare is to take away the benefits (at least in the drug category) that many seniors are enjoying. What’s his next step – take away their walkers?

    • McCain’s “solution” to the national economic crisis is to keep on cutting taxes. This is what helped bring on the crisis for the past eight years. He seems to be driving the bus straight off the cliff into a depression. He says he doesn’t know squat about economics. Let’s take him at his word.

    • McCain’s solution to Iraq – with overextended and exhausted troops spread so thin that we’re unprepared for what’s going on in Afghanistan or what might happen next in other countries – is to keep the disaster going. Which of course also helps keep the financial crisis going, too.

    • McCain would be a disaster for our economy, a disaster for our young people in uniform, a disaster for our foreign policy, a disaster for healthcare and a disaster for the future of Social Security.

    Past it on. Past it on now. Pass it on again tomorrow. Pass it on often, and loudly. Otherwise, don’t be surprised if McCain passes the eventual Democratic candidate in the polls, and in the election.

    Crankily yours,
    The New York Crank

  • Richard (3) Until the polls have a specific democrat up against McCain, I think they do not tell us a whole lot. They are asking about a hypothetical candidate vs a actual candidate.

    This is a common opinion, but one I truly do not understand. The Republicans, whoever the candidate, are for continuing Iraq and perhaps more wars, low taxes for the wealthiest at the expense of the middle and lower income people, against environmental, safety, banking, investing, or trade regulations. And corruption is more than a few bad apples. It is part of the process. Meanwhile, Dems, regardless of the candidate, is the opposite. You can certainly argue that one candidate for either party may be more sincere, or will be more effective, but the worldviews are in such polar opposition, that to base a vote the actual choice of candidates rather than the party is incredibly naive.

  • “…either Dems should be dejected that this conservative Republican running on a Bush-like agenda is tied with our great candidates, or Dems should be thrilled that this media darling who has it easy isn’t beating our candidates by double digits…What say you?”

    I say…dejected.

  • I suppose your supposition is that McCain’s actual positions will ultimately be exposed, and his numbers then will tank. But, after last night’s wholly non-substantive “debate”, what basis is there for believing that the MSM will spend any time whatsoever in the general election campaign on presenting the candidates’ actual positions to voters? If it turns out to be the case that coverage of the campaign is as frivolous and non-substantive as I fear it will be, I think there’s every possibility that McCain will be able to ride his “straight talk” b.s. straight to the Oval Office.

  • McCain better enjoy it right now. He’s got nowhere to go but down. What everyone else said: free ride, disastrous “policies,” etc. etc. etc. Once this Democratic family infighting is over, McCain is history.

  • what’s even more pitiful than the actuall debate was, is that anyone would waste even 1 minute of their lives to watch it. They are, have been, and always will be the biggest waste of time in every election year. No one will remember one question or one answer given in any of the debates so far in november come election time…

  • I’m a bit bi-polar on this.

    On the one hand, McCain has gotten so many things wrong lately — things that would have sunk any Dem at any time — yet the media STILL hasn’t covered it. Instead, they obsess over bowling scores.

    On the other, the fact most coverage involves Dems oratorically beating each other up, means that even the nasty, ugly, and idiotic “controversies” aren’t leading to a free fall, which one would think would happen.

    At this point, all that matters is what happens during the general election. The GOP will go after whomever gets the nod, no matter what — we all know that.

    But for once the Dems have a storehouse full of ammo to use against their opponent and actually seem willing to discharge all of it (a nice change of pace).

    So until McCain is leading by double digits in early October, I won’t start looking for homes in Vancouver.

    🙂

  • all the eventual democratic candidate has to do it make the incredible easy case that mccain is “four more years.” that should give his current support among people who dislike bush a serious jolt.

  • If I recall correctly, Dukakis was well ahead in the polls at this point in 1988, and so was Kerry in 2004. I am with egadfly — McCain has nowhere to go but down.

  • With so much at stake, Dems should leave nothing to chance. After all, Gore nor Kerry could possibly have lost and they did, so having a plan to overcome the worst is wise and necessary. Unfortunately, HRC’s logical contortions as to how she can prevail are making the Dem race look like a circus, while McCain solidifies his image in the media. The more he’s allowed to solidify that image, however false, the harder it will be to crack in the 9 weeks between the Dem convention and the general election.

    Spending a year picking a nominee and leaving 9 weeks to battle the real foe is stupid beyond belief and an advantage Dems should not cede to McCain.

    BTW, I personally think Obama can and will lock up the delegates to win this thing outright before the convention. He’d have to have a complete meltdown not to — provided the FL and MI rules don’t change.

  • My initial instinct has been to assume the worst. — CB

    I’d say you should trust your initial instinct on this. The Corporate Media will be extremely reluctant to change their view and their preferential and deferential treatment of McCain. Assuming it’s even possible, it’ll take *months* to unscrew that skew. So we should start on that as soon as possible, preferably yesterday. And we can’t, not until our own nominee is announced, because neither of the current contenders is comfortable with concentrating on McCain, probably so as not to look to presumptuous (and also so as not to lose too much ground to the other).

    For all the money-edge we may have over the Repubs… People are still holding off on contributions to the DNC etc, because we’re still plowing our pennies into two separate candidates’ campaigns. That’s a waste of our resources, by which the Repubs aren’t troubled at all.

    Besides… I seem to remember a few cases, in ’06 campaign, where the media refused to take and propagate ads from Dems and Dem-leanig groups, money or no. Where’s the guarantee that, this time, it’s going to be any different? That ideology won’t trump the self-preservation instinct (revenues) once again? If anything, this election will be more important than the ’06 one and they could figure that, if the winner is McCain, they’ll get their payback one way or another and will make up their losses.

  • The only way to combat the media’s propensity to carry water for McCain is to take the message straight to the American people, as Obama has done at every speech and campaign rally. The trouble with Gore and Kerry was, neither of them knew how to communicate to real people, to get them fired up. Obama does. And that’s our only shot at winning this thing. Remember, as much as we might wish people would vote with their heads, they don’t. Bush came off as more likeable, to the people and to the press, so they were all in his corner. Obama doesn’t have that aw-shucks quality to him, but he has something better– empowering rhetoric. When people listen to Obama’s speeches, they are moved. They feel as if they themselves can change the future. And that feeling, not any in-depth explanation of policy issues, is what could turn this election.

  • I think it’s bad news. The media favors McCain. The American people like him, trust him, and think he’ll keep them safe from the terrorists, who, as we all know, pose an apocalyptic threat to western civilization itself.

    He’s like a favorite grandfather. Pretty hard to pick him apart – when you do so, you antagonzie those who revere him, you don’t change their minds. Instead, they turn on you, hate you for it.

    And don’t forget those tax cuts. All those with the power to influence the American people are, guess what? Rich. How objective can they be?

    McCain ought to be 20 points behind now. Instead he’s even. The American people overwhelmingly (81% NYT/CBS poll) think the nation’s on the wrong track. Yet they are as likely as not to vote for McCain. Something other than rational thought is shaping this election. Well, it always does. Otherwise the Republicans would never win.

    I don’t have any confidence that the Democrats know how to win, or have the guts to do what they need to do. Look how turned off they are by Hillary’s tactics, and those are mild compared to what the Republicans are going to do to smear Obama.

  • McCain winning this election is so absurdly unlikely that all this report tells us, is that polls do not mean much, this far out.

  • I am for a long time gone with the, “How is McCain not beating them by double digits” explanation. Maybe I’m just an optimist.

  • Murphy was an optimist.

    Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong it will.

    Corollaries

    1. Nothing is as easy as it looks.

    2. Everything takes longer than you think it will.

    3. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one that will go wrong.

    4. If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, than a fifth way will promptly develop.

    5. Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.

    6. Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.

    7. Every solution breeds new problems.

    8. It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

    9. Mother Nature is a bitch

    Higdon’s Law: Good judgment comes from bad experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

    Law of Unreliability: To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

    (Source: Murphy’s Law: The 26th Anniversary Edition)

  • If I recall correctly, Dukakis was well ahead in the polls at this point in 1988, and so was Kerry in 2004.

    Jimmy Carter led Ronald Reagan all the way up to the election, at which point he lost in an electoral landslide.

    You just make yourself crazy by paying attention to polling this far out. Most of the swing voters haven’t even started paying attention to the contest yet, and if they have, their opinions are half-baked.

    I’d really recommend to all of you to have a look at the Lichtman Keys, both as a general primer in election dynamics, and as applied to this election. Lichtman’s Keys are the result of sophisticated statistical/historical analysis of U.S. presidential elections since the civil war, and and have correctly predicted the popular vote winner in all elections since they were formulated, from 1988 on. (They also retrospectively predict the popular vote winner in all elections going back to the civil war.) The Keys use NO polling data, and make their predictions as much as a year in advance of the election date.

    You can read more about the Keys at the link. To me, however, what’s interesting about them is less their predictions than the way they cast light on underlying electoral dynamics. Once you understand these dynamics, you can see why it is so unlikely that McCain will win.

    I’ll just touch on a few points that illustrate this.

    First, understand that presidential elections are, first and foremost, a referendum on the performance of the incumbent party. I’ll repeat this because it’s the most basic fact about elections that you might not be aware of. Presidential elections are all about passing a judgment on the performance of the incumbent party. In fact, the specific characteristics of the challenger are almost irrelevant. People make a simple binary decision – do we keep the current party in or dump them and put in the other party? And they do this by judging how will the current party has performed. If that judgment is negative, then the challenger will get in, no matter who he or she is.

    One other point is that, counterintuitively, the campaigns have almost no effect on the outcome. All that motion and sound and fury, but in the end it won’t matter. What will matter will be the incumbent party’s performance, nothing else. We know this is so because the Keys correctly predict the outcome before the campaigns even happen.

    As we all know, the Bush presidency has been an unmitigated disaster, both in foreign policy and domestically. Bush’s economic mismanagement has produced his second recession right in time for the election. Even without Iraq, this would be enough to bury McCain. Add Iraq to it, and no amount of MSM fluffing is going to get McCain a win.

    So relax, and quit watching the stupid polls. They don’t mean anything.

  • Some back-of-the-envelope analysis of the ABC News – Washington Post poll released yesterday…

    Head-to-head results, Democrats and Democratic leaners: Obama 51%, Clinton 41%, Other 8%.

    Head-to-head results, entire sample: Obama 49%, McCain 44%, Other 7%.

    Democrats and leaners make up approximately 54% of the total sample. So, Clinton’s supporters within the Democratic sample are 22% (.41 * .54) of the total sample.

    According to the report, 23% of Clinton’s supporters claim they will vote for McCain if Obama wins the nomination. This is approximately 5% (.22 * .23) of the entire sample. An additional 13% may not vote for either candidate. This is approximately 3% of the sample.

    BUT PLEASE NOTE … THE OBAMA-MCCAIN RESULTS ALREADY TAKE THE CLINTON DEFECTIONS INTO ACCOUNT.

    Let’s assume that 60% of those Clinton supporters who claim they will vote for McCain, and two thirds of those Clinton supporters who claim they will not vote at all, come to their senses sometime between now and November and vote for Obama. Not only will Obama gain 5% (60% of 5 plus 2/3 of 3), but McCain will lose 3% (60% of 5), so the adjusted figures are now Obama 54%, McCain 41%, Other 5%. Just like that, a 5% margin turns into a 13% margin.

    This may seem like an overly optimistic scenario, and perhaps it is. Obama’s lead in the ABC News poll is as large, if not larger, than his lead in any other current poll; indeed, I can think of one current poll in which Obama TRAILS McCain by 5%.

    But also remember … we haven’t begun to campaign against McCain yet. If Democrats can inflict half as much damage on McCain as they did on their own candidates, McCain’s numbers will drop significantly.

    So, what does it all mean? Let’s take the poll’s 5% margin as truth. A total of 122 million votes were cast in the 2004 presidential election, and the 2008 contest will certainly exceed this number. Even assuming a relatively modest 126 million votes cast this year, a 5% edge translates into a margin of 6.3 million votes.

  • Re JimBOB’s “Lichtman keys”:

    Very, very interesting. And with keys #4 & 5 now in the bag (for us), and #6 also looks to be ours, it appears that the RNC has a 10 key deficit. If this model works, they are truly toast.

    OTOH, Key #3 (The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president.) in this election absolutely would not help the RNC, since Bush is deeply unpopular. So counting it for us is not logical at all. I would say it should not be counted at all in this situation.

    I would also like to add that the model was developed before American media turned into the pile of chattering idiots we now are plagued with, a fetid subsidiary of the corporations who dominate our culture. And the corporate media whores will no doubt try to influence “the answer” to several of Lichtman’s questions, namely:

    #12 The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

    Of course John McCain is a national hero, especially compared to that unpatriotic Barak Hussein Obama guy.

    #11 The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

    Wow, did you see the news? I think they finally located Osama bin Laden, and blew him to smithereens! There’s even a videotape of his #2 acknowledging that bin Laden is dead! And those videos are not easy to fake, let me tell you!

    #13 The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

    I would add “or a white person”. Racism is not dead yet, and Lichtman’s questions don’t even take it into account.

    All in all, I’d say the Lichtman stuff is interesting, but probably not enough to rely on given the changes in the playing field. We must not take anything for granted, we must work as if our lives depended on this election.

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