Math is Hard

There’s a new poll out today that shows Obama and McCain virtually tied in West Virginia:  41.33 to 41.67, respectively.  Here’s what Jake “The Genius” Stump had to say about it in the Daily Mail:

The poll, however, randomly sampled nearly twice as many Democrats than Republicans yet it still shows McCain slightly favored here.

Conducted over a two-day period last week, the group sampled 344 Democrats, 182 Republicans and 74 independents.

Oh noes!  The poll oversampled Democrats and McCain still came out on top.  Newsflash:  The reason they polled nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans is because in West Virginia . . . drumroll please . . . there are nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans!

Democrats remain the dominant voting force in West Virginia, adding 26,416 to their ranks since the 2006 general election to total 675,305. Republicans gained 10,467 voters during that time, and now number 353,437.

If you pull out your trusty calculator, you will see that 675,305 divided by 353,437 is 1.9—that’s nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans.  The breakdown of the polling sample closely mirrors the breakdown of registered voters in West Virginia.

I’m not saying the poll is accurate.  I have no idea whether it’s accurate.  You’d have to ask Nate Silver about that.  I’m just saying the sample was a good representation of the West Virginia electorate, as far as party affiliation goes.  So there’s no need to offer a caveat that “the poll, however, randomly sampled nearly twice as many Democrats than Republicans yet it still shows McCain slightly favored here”.

All They See is a Black Man

Professional asshole Rush Limbaugh had this to say about Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama:

Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race. OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed.

Well, I think Joe Lieberman is only supporting John McCain because he’s white.  I am now researching Lieberman’s past endorsements to see if I can find all of the pro-life, conservative, white Republicans he has endorsed in the past.  If McCain is the only one, that must mean Lieberman is only supporting him because he’s white.  It’s totally about race—Lieberman refuses to endorse a black guy.

Sunday on Hardball, Pat Buchanan asked whether Powell would be endorsing Obama if he were white (video at the link).  When Chris Matthews pointed out that Powell went through a long list of reasons that he’s supporting Obama, Buchanan said:

This is why he threw in the whole kitchen sink, a lot of things that are silly and ridiculous—economics and Supreme Court justices.  All the motives except for the one everyone’s wondering about.

Did you get that?  Colin Powell used “silly and ridiculous” issues like economics and the Supreme Court to hide the fact that he’s only supporting Obama because he’s black.  You know, just like Joe Lieberman used the silly and ridiculous issue of the Iraq war to hide the fact that he’s only supporting McCain because he’s white.

Oh, but Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan don’t read ulterior motives into Joe Lieberman’s endorsement.  They just take him at his word.  They believe that Lieberman made a principled decision based on who he thinks would be a better president.  See, when white people vote for white people, we are presumed to make our decisions based on a careful examination of the issues.  When black people vote for black people, everyone knows it’s just because of race.  You can’t believe them when they claim otherwise—they’re just covering up their real motivation.

When people suggest that there are some white people who will not vote for Obama because he’s black, I’ve heard many on the right say “well, black people are voting for Obama because he’s black”.  In the wingnut mind, black people are being racist (against white people) when they support Obama because of his race.  Nevermind the fact that African-Americans overwhelming support Democrats in every presidential election.  Nevermind the fact that early on in the campaign, Hillary Clinton had more support among African-Americans than Barack Obama did.

Honestly, what really impressed me about Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama wasn’t the mere fact that Powell was endorsing Obama.  It was Powell’s detailed, thorough, and thoughtful explanation for why he supports Obama and not John McCain.  I don’t think I could express my support for Obama as well as Powell did.  I don’t know how you could listen to Powell’s explanation and come away thinking he wasn’t being sincere.  I mean unless, like Limbaugh and Buchanan, you look at Colin Powell or Barack Obama and all you see is a black man.

Why Does John McCain Want to Be President?

When I listen to Barack Obama’s speeches and interviews and debate responses, I get a clear understanding of why he wants to be president.  I’m not just talking about his specific policy proposals—cutting taxes for the middle class, expanding health insurance coverage, ending the war in Iraq.  I’m talking about the deeper reasons that Obama is running for president—what he hopes to accomplish in a larger sense, what direction he would like to take this country, why he thinks he is the right person to lead this country.

I was listening to John McCain the other day when it suddenly hit me:  I don’t have the faintest idea why John McCain is running for president.  Of course I get a sense that he wants to be president, but I don’t get a sense for why he wants to be president.

When I was in 8th grade, I decided to run for student council.  I hadn’t been involved in student council at all before.  I had friends who were, and when it came time to elect new officers I put my name in for Vice President.  I had no idea why anyone should vote for me.  I wanted to be Vice President, but I had no idea why I wanted to be Vice President.  Frankly, I barely had any idea what student council actually did, let alone what the Vice President did.  But I ran anyway.  Guess what?  I lost.

Why does John McCain want to be president?  The only sense I get is:  just because.  I’m afraid that’s not going to cut it.

100,000

John McCain Ignoring West Virginia

The bloggers at FiveThirtyEight have been traveling around the country reporting on the ground games of the Obama and McCain campaigns in various states.  (Hint:  Obama’s field campaign is much more extensive, active, and well-organized, generally speaking.)  Yesterday they posted a report from West Virginia.

We stopped in the college town of Morgantown, on the first day of West Virginia early voting. Obama has six main offices, 14 satellite offices in the state, and Obama for America State Director Tom Vogel told us that during the GOTV phase, all 55 counties in the state will have early voting and weekend GOTV rallies.

[. . .]

When we asked Vogel why he was confident about Obama’s chances in a state nearly everyone had written off until the recent surge in polling, he pointed out that Democrats had 20 open offices, over 30 paid staff and thousands of volunteers. (McCain, by contrast, has one Charleston office open and one paid staffer.)

That, in addition to the television ads that spill over from the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia media markets, is how Obama has been able to do this:

Yesterday the Obama campaign announced that it has bought airtime to run ads all across the state.  While the McCain campaign is pulling out of states like Michigan and Wisconsin [correction:  It's the RNC that has pulled out of Wisconsin; McCain is still there.], Obama’s campaign is expanding into states that President Bush won handily.

If the trend shown in the Pollster chart continues, it looks like Obama is entirely capable of pulling ahead of McCain.  The question is whether he can do it by November 4th.

(Do go over to check out FiveThirtyEight’s full report, if only to look at the gorgeous photos of the fall leaves in West Virginia.)

UPDATE:  The New York Times reports that either Obama or Biden will be coming to West Virginia.

In a sign of the differing fortunes of the candidates, advisers to Mr. Obama said he was escalating his effort in West Virginia, which Mr. Bush won by 13 points in 2004, with a surge in advertising spending and a campaign swing there in the coming days by Mr. Obama or his running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“West Virginia is real,” said Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe. “We have been watching it for a long time.”

Good to know we’re not imaginary.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

Don’t Forget to Watch the Final Debate Tonight!

Will McCain act like an angry little troll?  Will he bring up Bill Ayers even though it’s clearly not working for him?  How many times will he say “my friends” or flash that creepy grin?

Via Ezra Klein.

Behind the Biden Pick

Remember Joe Biden?  In the midst of the Palinmania, it’s easy to forget that Barack Obama has a running mate too.  He was in St. Clairsville, Ohio yesterday and said:

“Which way is West-By-God-Virginia?” He then said, “I want to send a message to West Virginia – we’re going to win in West Virginia! … We’re going to shock the living devil out of y’all!”

I think West Virginia is winnable for them, if they campaign here.  If Obama himself can’t come, they should at least send Biden and/or the Clintons.  West Virginians love them some Clintons.

The New Yorker has an article about Biden that goes into a lot of detail about the negotiations between Biden and Obama regarding his possible nomination for VP.  The Biden pick was officially announced by the campaign on August 23rd.  Ryan Lizza describes a meeting between the two about two weeks earlier.

On August 6th, Biden said, the Obama campaign “smuggled” him into Minneapolis, where Obama was campaigning, and the two senators stayed up late in a suite at the Graves 601 Hotel working out the details of a potential deal. Obama told Biden that the vetting had gone well—Biden assured me that it was “very complimentary.”

Later on (i.e., not at the Aug. 6th meeting), Biden told Barack:

“[L]ook, if you’re going to ask me to do this, please don’t ask me for any reason other than that you respect my judgment. If you’re asking me to join you to help govern, and not just help you get elected, then I’m interested. If you’re asking me to help you get elected, I can do that other ways, but I don’t want to be a Vice-President who is not part of the major decisions you make.”

Biden was concerned about giving up his seat in the Senate where he feels he has accomplished a lot and has had a lot of influence, particularly on foreign policy.  Amid the outcry from the die-hard Hillary Clinton supporters demanding that Obama choose her, I always had a hunch that she probably didn’t want Obama to choose her.  I figured she’d rather remain in the Senate, where she can probably accomplish more and be more influential.  I think my hunch was confirmed when a reporter in Florida asked Clinton if she was still interested in being chosen as Obama’s running mate.  She responded:  “I never said I was.”

The article goes into detail about the roles of various Vice Presidents through the years.

According to [Walter] Mondale, who spoke to Biden at the Democratic National Convention in August, Biden closely studied a memorandum that Mondale sent Carter outlining Mondale’s duties as Vice-President. “I believe the most important contribution I can make is to serve as a general adviser to you,” Mondale wrote. “The biggest single problem of our recent administrations has been the failure of the President to be exposed to independent analysis not conditioned by what it is thought he wants to hear or often what others want him to hear.”

Sound familiar?  You’d think he was writing about George W. Bush.  (By the way, who else can’t wait to see W.?)

Oh, there’s another tidbit of information in the New Yorker article—apparently Kathleen Sebelius was being seriously considered by Obama.  It almost sounds like she might have been in the final two, though it’s not clear.

[Obama] also tested Biden’s understanding of how broad his role would be, as opposed to that of another contender—apparently, Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of Kansas and the only woman known to be on Obama’s short list. “He said, ‘Well, you know, if I offered this to somebody’—he named her, a person—he said, ‘That person would be very happy if I assigned them to reorganize the government.’ And he said, ‘They’d be very happy doing that. How about you?’ ” That didn’t sound like much of a job to Biden. “No,” he told Obama. “That’s not what I want to do.”

It really sounds like Joe Biden would be a huge asset as Vice President, whereas Sarah Palin would be pretty much useless.

Are You Registered?

Today is the voter registration deadline in West Virginia—for new registrations or to update your address if you’ve moved.  You can either register in person or mail in your registration form with a postmark of October 14th.  Here are the instructions from the Secretary of State’s office.  Or you can do it through Barack Obama’s web site, if you’re so inclined.

Early voting starts tomorrow!

Poll Porn

Gee, I slack off on blogging for a couple of weeks and Barack Obama goes and sews up the election.  Sure, three weeks in election time can seem like an eternity.  Anything can happen from now until November 4th.  But honestly, I can’t really conceive of circumstances that would change things dramatically in McCain’s favor.

Obama is up by a comfortable margin in the national polls.  That lead might narrow, but what you really have to look at is the electoral map.  Go ahead—play around with it and see if you can come up with a plausible scenario in which John McCain wins.  As things stand now, he has to win every single battleground state in order to win the election, and that’s not really a plausible scenario at this point.  For Obama, on the other hand, there are a variety of plausible ways to get to 270.

As kind of a side note, both Real Clear Politics and Pollster.com have moved West Virginia into the toss-up category.  Not to be pessimistic (just realistic), but if I had to guess I’d say Obama loses West Virginia, but I think it will be close, not a blowout.  It’s hard to say, though, since there aren’t a ton of West Virginia polls.

Today McCain is reportedly gearing up for a comeback.  He claims to relish being the underdog, and he did end up winning the Republican nomination after most people had counted him out in the primary.  Theoretically speaking, anything can happen between now and November 4th, but I think the outcome is entirely out of McCain’s hands.  He blew his chances with his confusing, desperate, and gimmicky responses to the economic crisis.

Looking back at polls from 2004, I see that I was way too optimistic about John Kerry’s chances.  Look at this list of polls from September through election day—almost every poll shows Bush ahead with just a sprinkling of polls favoring Kerry.  I guess I clung onto the few that showed Kerry up and hoped all the rest were wrong.  That was some serious wishful thinking and denial.  I’ve been reluctant to get my hopes up this year, but I think Democrats have every reason to be optimistic.

If we look back to 2004, 33 national Bush vs. Kerry polls were done between October 1st and November 1st (November 2nd was election day). Out of those 33 polls, 27 showed George W. Bush leading (his lead ranged from 1%-8%), four showed John Kerry leading (his lead ranged from 1%-2%), and two had ties. The final three polls done in 2004 all showed Bush leads of 2%-4%, and the final poll average was Bush 48.9%, Kerry 46.9%, a 2% lead for Bush.

Right now, the national McCain vs. Obama polling average is Obama 48.8%, McCain 44%, a 4.8% lead for Obama.

That was written on October 1st.  Today, that lead has grown to 6.8%.

Andrew Romano from Newsweek explains how Obama/McCain 2008 differs from Kerry/Bush 2004.

Right now, Obama is outperforming Kerry (and beating McCain) in six Bush-won battlegrounds–any one of which could put him over 270 electoral votes. At this point in 2004, Bush was ahead by 3.3 percent in Florida; Obama currently leads McCain by three points. In Ohio, Bush was ahead by 2.7 percent; Obama currently leads by 3.8. In Missouri, it was Bush by four percent; now it’s Obama by 0.3. And in three states where Bush was averaging leads of five points or more on Oct. 10–Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina–Obama is now winning by notable margins (four percent, 4.8 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively). On Election Day 2004, Bush managed to maintain his lead in each and every one of these states. If Obama can keep just one of them in his column–say, Virginia–he’ll be the next president of the United States.

As they say, read the whole thing.