With apologies for length--they will get shorter, as after today I'm done complaining in detail about existing weightings until the next set of changes.
R2K Obama 49 McCain 42 (49-43)
Rasmussen McCain 48 Obama 48 (48-48)
Gallup Obama 49 McCain 44 (48-44)
Diageo/Hotline Obama 45 McCain 44 (46-42)
A little more movement in Obama's direction and into statistical significance in two polls, though I still fear that R2K overweights Democratic ID just as I'm pretty sure Rasmussen overweights to the GOP. It will be interesting to see next week how Rasmussen re-weights, having cut the advantage of Democrat over Republican from 7.6% to 5.1% for this week. It's a 9 point advantage in R2K's poll, with more independents as well. I'm cool with the higher proportion of independents if I have to be, but I'd probably be more comfortable with a party ID number somewhere between the two. The trends are as they've been all week, the occasional one point move in Obama's direction in many of the demographic categories, most notably female voters, where he has a large lead in R2K. Nothing you'd pay attention to on a one-day basis, but give me a couple hundred data points and you begin to get something that looks like a pattern.
I also have a lot of difficulty figuring out the Diageo numbers today, showing a one point swing away from Obama and a two point swing towards McCain, while at the same time showing nearly half the respondents saying the economy is the most important issue, up ten full points in a week, and Obama holding a ten point lead among voters rating that issue most important. Something just doesn't seem right with the other 53% and this poll doesn't release internals, so we haven't a clue what the composition of the sample looks like, but that 53% is only about 160 people, which makes it awfully easy to introduce potentially significant sampling error in an opinion-based survey. Just a couple tinfoil helmets and your results are sunk for three days.
R2K continues, by virtue of its party weighting, to show extremely low net favorables for the McCain/Palin ticket, with Palin's now a -5 and McCain dead even, while Obama is +22 and Biden +16. Intuitively that would seem skewed even if we didn't have party ID numbers. Ethnically, R2K may overweight minorities, though that likely shows up in the Democrat/GOP weighting, with 13% African-American and 13% Latino in the sample. IF the Obama campaign's voter registration drives, particularly in urban areas, are as phenomenally successful as they have been claimed to be, and if the people they register show up to vote, the tallies on Election Day may certainly be more diverse than in the past, but I have trouble believing those figures will be reached. While pretty much everyone getting this note knows who I support in the election, I'm just not comfortable with aspects of the R2K survey design, as much as I'd like to be. That being said, on the other side, if Rasmussen is right and the race is tied after a week where the McCain/Palin (or Palin/McCain, depending on which of the candidates you ask) campaign has piled up an stunning string of blunders, missteps, gaffes, and just plain scratch-your-head-and-say-what-the-hell weirdnesses, I'd be just as surprised. And I've got things I don't like about Gallup and Diageo also. So there.
It will be interesting to see how the public likes each candidate's response to this week's financial crisis, and particularly how they respond to Sen. McCain reversing a couple decades' worth of well-publicized record against regulation of markets. I think the essential irony of the fact that Phil Gramm, one of the prime movers in the repeal of financial regulation late in the last century, is his chief financial advisor, is probably not going to register with most people, who wont' remember who he is or ever knew what Glass-Steagall was. What will register is quotes from the candidate, many of them from just a few months ago, talking about his general opposition to regulation.
That being said, Gallup has a poll out showing the public divided on the wisdom of the (to my mind absolutely incontrovertibly but sadly necessary) AIG bailout--interestingly, both Republicans and Democrats favor it, while Independents are strongly against-- and Rasmussen notes that nearly 50% of their survey sample fears the government will move too aggressively in preventing financial armageddon, which to my mind just shows how financially illiterate the public is. Personally, while I'm not crazy about this particular application of Your Tax Dollars At Work, it's like the government is creating a mess to avoid a cataclysm, and I'll take that trade. I'm not sure how good it is soundbite-wise for a candidate who was one of the Keating Five to have the Resolution Trust Corporation revived a month and a half before the election. If it were I, I'd really like them to call it something else.
There are other areas, though, such as the bans on short selling, that seem more like panic, overreaching, and cheap opportunistic populism. While there was some reason to look at short selling, and particularly to enforce existing laws regarding preventing naked shorting of stocks, the obvious question is really along the lines of "Uh, guys, if it's always been illegal, and some of the financial companies were brought to the brink of insolvency because shorting of shares set off solvency triggers, why the hell weren't you enforcing the damn law in the first place?"
If we were to ask how much of all of this is a result of deregulation and truly frighteningly lax administration of the rules that remained, we may have our answer as to why such a radical and potentially random jolt had to be administered here now.
Bizarre Quote Of The Day, courtesy of the Jacques Cousteau of the campaign, John McCain (and if anyone can find something stupid Obama or Biden says, please send it to me and I'll be happy to post--they're making this feature look really partisan by sounding intelligent):
And by the way, on that oil rig — and I’m sure you’ve probably heard this story — you look down, and there’s fish everywhere! There’s fish everywhere! Yeah, the fish love to be around those rigs. So not only can it be helpful for energy, it can be helpful for some pretty good meals as well.
Screen Crawl
On Bloomberg TV : "Fed Historian Meltzer Calls Paulson Action 'Social Democracy At Its Worst." OK, I have a couple bones to pick with that statement. First, "Social," yeah, OK, you're on the brink of a planned economy there. Next, I'm not sure I'd say "worst," because while there may be a fair bit of overreaction and politics in it, things were pretty dire and a shock to the system had to be administered. Finally, I'm damn sure it's not democracy.
As always, if you like this, tell your friends; if you don't, keep your big mouth shut.
Til next time,
John
Weekend web trawling recommendation: http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials . Presidential campaign commercials going back to 1952. They wrote songs back then, though i think a more sophisticated consultant might have urged the Stevenson campaign not to push the absent-minded professor angle so hard in the jingles. The I Like Ike song, though, gets stuck in one's head.
Herbert Hoover Quote Of The Day:
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. (1936)
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