Additionally, the Obama campaign fires its hardest shot of the campaign, with the launch of a web site pulling together parallels between the S&L crisis of the late 1980s and today's financial disaster movie (discussion and link below). I don't think it's coincidental that it's released a day before the debate; the goal is to try and put McCain off his game, and the campaign is responding angrily. My guess would be it doesn't make much of a difference, but the Obama campaign is (as it has done from day one of the primary season, which explains how he won the nomination in the first place) playing three steps ahead of the game, and understands that not losing support will shortly become at least as important as gaining new adherents--in the zero-sum game of a head-to-head election, there comes a point where keeping your opponent from getting a vote out of the undecided column is an awfully big deal. If the six to 12 point lead in the poll is accurate, even keeping undecideds undecided is a winning tactic.
Rasmussen widens its Democratic Party ID advantage slightly, to a full six points from 5.6. Importantly in Rasmussen's poll, for the first time Obama is leading among male voters--this is either an outlier or a sign that the McCain campaign needs an iron lung. Rasmussen points out that this is the largest lead any candidate has enjoyed not just in this campaign but bigger than any margin in the 2004 race as well. I wouldn't put much store by it now, as it could be an outlier, but it's significant in that Rasmussen has historically been less Democratically-weighted than the other polls, as far as we can tell, and because in general men tend more to the GOP than women. We've all been talking about Obama's performance among white women; if he wins among men, he can lose among red, green and polkadot people and still move down the road to 1600 in January. Oh, and Rasmussen does the same mini-analysis I did yesterday about undecided voters, only without the little graphic with the cool arrows and stuff. Take that!
Diageo has a couple final (hooray!) points on the VP debate, showing that generally people thought both candidates did well (Biden's performance was viewed favorably by 77%, while Palin's was by 61%), and that Biden won the debate by a 47-28 margin, which is a shade higher than other polls we've noted. Ultimately, though, the debate here too shows very little impact on the actual election, so we can forget about it now. Srsly.
Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time." "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes. --Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Silver Blaze"
All polls have fallen into a narrow band, a point here, a point there, but with no significant movement in trends. Unless we consider the fact that this petrification to be a serious trend in and of itself. This would be especially true a couple weeks from now, after the debates and as the campaign moves into the last lap, but is still worth noting now. It would argue that if Sen. McCain's renewed emphasis on negative advertising (per the campaign itself) and the next two debates do nothing to begin to shift the momentum, nothing will. Tomorrow night's Town Hall-style meeting, a format in which the conventional wisdom is that McCain excels and Obama is relatively weak, is in my mind the key to any potential turn in the GOP's fortunes.
Gallup has a poll of voters in the 18-29 year age group, showing an expectedly significant preference for the Obama/Biden ticket over McCain/Palin, by a 61-32 margin, with 7% undecided. Survey participants gave Obama a lead in all nine of the questions on personal qualities, from a sixty point advantage in "understanding the problems of young people" to a ten point lead in "is a strong and decisive leader." They categorically rejected the idea that McCain is "too old to be president," by a 22 point margin, but do suggest that Sarah Palin is unqualified, by a similar majority. Interestingly, only 30% of these young voters felt the economy was the most important issue facing the nation, compared with a total closer to 50% in other polls, yet still give Obama a very large edge in the overall voting. Finally, nearly 80% of these young voters feel this could be the most important election in the last 50 years, though what they base their historical perspective is an open question, as is whether this poll portends a significantly higher turnout among under-30 voters than in past elections. Remember that 18-29 year old voters only comprised 17% of the electorate in the 2004 election; if they really do support Obama by nearly a 2-1 margin and actually do comprise north of 20% of the voting population, Obama's support in the polls, which mostly weight by age according to 2004 turnout, could be understated by a couple points.
One We Missed And Why It Matters
I hate to look back when there's too much info being thrown at us every day, but there's one VP Debate (arrgh) poll that came out on Saturday that's worthy of note: an Ipsos/McClatchy survey that suggested voters really liked Sarah Palin but really preferred to vote for Joe Biden. In a survey of undecided voters immediately after the debate , 52% said they would vote Obama/Biden. Before the debate, McCain/Palin was leading among those same voters by a 56/44 margin. Despite the fact that Palin was "liked" by nearly two-thirds of the voters surveyed, found "believable" by 53%, and (wait for it) would do a better job of bringing change to Washington by an extraordinary 58-42 margin, they also felt by an eight point margin that Biden had won the debate and their overall preference moved significantly from McCain to Obama after the debate compared with before. Ultimately, while I usually shout myself hoarse telling people that running mates don't matter, in this case a running mate of a candidate with a lot of questions regarding his judgment and fitness for the presidency had an opportunity to persuade voters that the nation would be in capable hands, and she failed. Outpacing low expectations only cuts it among cable commentators parsing a debate; the world stage demands a higher level of performance, and this survey would suggest the American voter has a feeling for this. Catch it here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53475.html
LA Times Boldly Goes Where No Media Outlet Has Gone Before, And It Could Get Ugly
The LA Times this morning has a piece out John McCain's military record. While nobody is seriously questioning what happened after he bailed out over Hanoi, spending five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison, the Times piece looks into the four crashes he'd been involved with before that time. I don't see how it matters whether you can prove or not that he was a terrible pilot (and it is hard to see how anyone who wasn't the son and grandson of Admirals would have got to the point where he could dump his fifth plane and get captured--the story points out that losing a single plane today is enough to get you grounded, much less four), or even if he was the beneficiary of nepotism or coverups of the record in the mid-1960s. The only thing that might be of any interest is the cherry picking the candidate may have done in releasing 19 pages of his 636 page military record, reminiscent of his (and Sen. Biden's) medical records as well as the veracity of the stories of the crashes as he reported them in his autobiography. Don't get me wrong; I'll always stand up for a Constitutional right to privacy, but there's also a right to be nervous about what's being hidden. Go ahead, read on: http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-aviator6-2008oct06,0,5446252.story?track=ntothtml .
Please Stop Saying Obama Isn't Fighting Back Just Because You'd Do Differently--You're Not Running For President, And This Might Not Work
In the midst of the worst banking crisis since the Depression, the Obama campaign has been holding back on responding to the McCain campaign's "guilt by association" jibes, most notably by Gov. Palin at an appearance on Saturday. I'd mentioned yesterday that guilt by association was a risky tack for the GOP as McCain's own record isn't entirely clean. Leaving aside the connection we mentioned yesterday to the World Anti-Communist League, McCain's role as a member of the Keating Five in the S&L crisis in the late 1980s. As the only Republican in the group, you can certainly make a case for McCain's bipartisanship out of it, but still. In any event, the Obama campaign has launched www.keatingeconomics.com to remind people of the role McCain played nearly 20 years ago when abuses to the banking system nearly led to a collapse. It's a bold move on the Obama campaign's part, and wholly consistent with the "don't shoot til you see the whites of their eyes" strategy they've used since day one of the primaries. The site is loaded with press reports from the last few weeks drawing parallels between the current crisis and the S&L debacle, and a documentary film is on the home page. It's a bold move, but if it backfires, it backfires big with people who liked Obama because he was visibly taking the high road. Not as big as the LA Times story, but still.
McCain Filing Complaint On Obama Donations, Obama Campaign Points Out $1.2 Million In Returned McCain Donations, Blah Blah Blah
The RNC has demanded an audit of all donations to the Obama campaign because some small donations, including from foreign donors, added up to more than the $2.300 limit, including $33,000 it had already returned from two Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In response, the Obama campaign noted that McCain has had to return more than $1.2 million in questionable donations, including $50,000 raised by one Jordanian donor and more from a 'bundler' of their own. Additionally, conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch filed a complaint against--yes--McCain several months ago asking the FEC to investigate whether a fundraiser held by McCain in London for Americans abroad was held at a venue paid for by a British citizen. Ultimately this is about trying to blunt the Obama campaign's success in raising money privately and not accepting public funds; as McCain did accept government financing for his campaign, he's much more strictly limited in what he can spend, so the only way to stem that tide is to have his opponent's fundraising declared illegal. Hard to imagine there isn't a lot of money that maybe shouldn't be there on both sides, and it seems like a pretty modest issue. Early impact seems to be a modest upsurge in small donations to the Obama campaign.
Breaking Investing News (It's Still October 2007, Right?)
Thestreet.com publishes a piece entitled "Value Investing Is Broken." No duh. And if the popular press is just getting to this, the doo doo is only getting deeper, because that's been true for quite some time now. Relative measures of worth (such as nearly all stock valuation criteria) have been on the shelf for, oh, a year or so. A recession combined with a credit crunch combined with hedge fund deleveraging and redemptions lead to something of a technical mess. Please don't tell me you're buying stocks because they look cheap. I'll say it one more time: nothing is cheap when valuation is meaningless.
Oh, and don't forget old editions, because you clearly have nothing better to do, are posted at http://trackingpolls.blogspot.com . Collect them all!
John
Herbert Hoover Quote Of The Day
You will expect me to discuss the late election. Well, as nearly as I can learn, we did not have enough votes on our side.
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