ELECTIONATE OCTOBER 8, 2012
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Right when it looked like there was a moment of clarity, Pew comes out with a new poll showing Romney ahead by 4 points among likely voters. The new data has conservatives celebrating and liberals in a panic, but here are three important pieces of context:
1) Throughout the entire cycle, Pew has had a strong Obama-lean, making the result particularly surprising. And Pew Research has irreproachable credentials, both in terms of past results and methodology, so this is a very important and powerful data point in the direction of a Romney bounce.
2) The Pew poll swung 12 points in Romney's direction, from Obama plus-8 to Romney plus-4—that kind of a swing is not especially plausible. In fact, every other poll has shown a swing of 6 points or less since the first debate. That doesn't mean, though, that the new poll is necessarily out-of-whack. The first poll, and not the second, may have been the inaccurate one. But while it's not especially productive to dig into the weights to guess which poll is most representative (party-ID! party-ID!), it is important to recall that there can be outliers: remember the vaunted Ann Seltzer showing Obama leading by 13 in June? And although Pew's last poll was certainly good for Obama, it was not necessarily an outlier.
3) Analysts and horserace watchers face a choice between trying to reconcile Pew with the available data or waiting for more information. In my view, the Pew poll is largely irreconcilable with the other information, which now shows everything from no change to a 12 point shift in Romney's direction. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, but whether it's 3 or 6 makes a huge difference. Given the extent to which the data conflicts, the right choice is probably to wait a few days before drawing conclusions. By later this week, the Pew poll will probably appear as an outlier—or, it might be the first sign of a new race, with Romney in the lead. Either way, it's more evidence that Romney is making gains.
23 comments
can I be put into a comatose state for the next month or, if the worst happens, for the next 4 plus years and brought out of it when I never have to hear that wretched sociopath Romney again?
- blackton
October 8, 2012 at 6:54pm
Interesting. There's no Romney buzz anywhere here. None. Usually, with poll results like this, there's someone that feels brazen enough to chat it up somewhere, but I'm not hearing it. I guess time will tell.
- jet
October 8, 2012 at 7:47pm
blackton: I got through the Bush43 years watching re-runs of "The West Wing". And, I admit I was less depressed when I stopped ALL news in February 2012 and switched to House&GardenTV. Since I started reading the news again a few weeks ago, I am even more depressed. The only good news is that the Arctic icemelt is going to destroy the world faster than Obama or Romney can :)
- K2K
October 8, 2012 at 8:07pm
Sorry, Blackton, if Romney wins, when you wake again we could be in the depths of the second dip of the Great Recession. You really don't want to be awakened then. I surely hope the Pew result is an outlier. Or a side-effect of Romney strutting around with a lead gained through falsehoods and lies, most of which can be corrected in the next three weeks.
- AllanL5
October 8, 2012 at 9:41pm
PEOPLE! Pew polled the country and found that 2/3 of it watched the debate. Really? Nielsen, which tabulates these things somewhat better, says it was 67.2 million. (Current pop: ~310 mil.) I know that some people will round up from the minute they saw on the evening news, but does this sound like a representative poll?
- chaitless
October 8, 2012 at 9:51pm
Thank you chaitless I was about to shoot myself.
- Sophia
October 8, 2012 at 10:06pm
I didn't believe Pew when they said Obama was up by 8 and I don't believe them now when they say that Romney is up by 4. Does anyone really believe that public opinion is that volatile?
- timteeter
October 8, 2012 at 10:35pm
The last few days have reminded me of how I felt during Obama's distrastrous attempts to negotiate with the Republicans by announcing concessions before even getting to the bargaining table. Obama has many great qualities, but let's be honest: He is not a born fighter. When attacked, his first impulse is to give ground and hope that makes him appear reasonable. All that does it make him appear weak and/or make his opponents appear correct.
- NateG
October 8, 2012 at 10:51pm
Tim: Sullivan does. He also notes that Obama has wiped out his 18 point lead among women. He also thought that the Bain attacks would backfire (they did not) and that Obama lost the election in the "we built that" episode (he evidently did not). Typical liberal panic at this stage. If debates matter, there are three left. Not to mention that Romney's little foreign policy speech has already cost him the last debate. Obama's ads on Romney's lies are out - and the impact of the ads is not reflected in the polls. Let us not forget how wonderful Ryan looked in the immediate aftermath of his speech, and lo and behold, once Obama was done with him, he was lying in a pool of his own lies. Take a chill pill.
- icarus-r
October 8, 2012 at 10:54pm
Nate: have we been watching the same President and campaigner? Remember what he did to Bill Clinton after the "Jesse Jackson" comment? How the timing of the birth certificate release eviscerated Trump? He is not a fighter? Really? :)
- icarus-r
October 8, 2012 at 10:57pm
Sullivan is, to be charitable, an idiot. More to the point, he is too mercurial--he went from praising Obama as the next Reagan and almost fully endorsing his re-election in the national press to saying today that because Obama was "obliterated on substance" in the debate (don't fall out of your chair yet!), this election is now Romney's to lose. OK, you can fall out of your chair. Even more to the point, Sullivan fetishizes being in the middle. Calling himself a conservative evangelizing to liberals, even though he doesn't have great justifications for why conservatism (even David Cameron's conservatism) is better than liberalism. I said that Sullivan's endorsement was only almost full-throated because his major hang-up when it comes to Obama is--not drone strikes, like it would be for a more principled civil libertarian--but Bowles-Simpson. [Now, I should note that Friedersdorf's refusal to vote for Obama is just Conor preening like a diva to show that Obama is so wrong on one iota of policy and Gary Johnson is so right on it that an immediate depression (balancing the budget immediately, growth and seniors be damned) or, much more likely, the election of a man so shameless he's actually pandering to out-hawk the neocons who caused us a decade of grief and international shame when it comes to civil liberties.] Returning to Sullivan, Bowles-Simpson?! You'd almost think it was the second engraving of the Ten Commandments given how keen Sullivan is to quote chapter and verse. Let's just get it out of the way, but Sullivan has been chiding Obama over this since . . . it's less embarrassing if we just set an arbitrary start date and say the deadlock in December 2010. I mean, it's overly obvious that BS was bad politics. It was the cap-and-trade of budgeting. Unpopular, innately bipartisan, capable of being supported by almost all Democrats if absolutely required, and certain to be spurned by every single Republican simply because Obama was willing to support it. Intelligently (!), since Obama saw the writing on the wall, he pocketed BS for another day, because it's better not to let something get demagogued but to preserve the memory and allow both parties to return to it when tempers cooled. Yet somehow, Republicans completely cynically turned it into a cause celebre, even though they were pretty obviously the reason it went nowhere. It became an empty attack line only invested meaning and significance because of the shadowy deficit scold community in powerful places in Washington, in spite of the fact that it was a political dead letter precisely because Republicans preferred petulant style to bipartisan substance. And this was actually a bipartisan plan biased towards Republicans! There's no real need for the retirement age to increase, since the people it's designed for aren't living much longer beyond the age of 65, but since Bowles and Simpson (and apparently Sullivan) have it in for the olds, then WTF, why not? I mean, it's not like we couldn't just raise the SS payroll cap and end the discussion without any significant "pain", right? I really could go on against Sullivan for quite some time, but it's not going to turn back the clock and resurrect Hillarycare, so I'll just stop now.
- chaitless
October 8, 2012 at 11:28pm
fwiw, "...Nielsen, which tabulates these things somewhat better, says it was 67.2 million. (Current pop: ~310 mil.) ..." does not include anyone who watched on PBS (me), C-Span (seems every journalist watched the side-by-side C-Span), or afterwards. I thought Pew got to 90 million, which seems reasonable. Any percentage would be of likely voters, which would exclude everyone < 18, most convicted felons (USA!), and immigrants not yet naturalized citizens.
- K2K
October 8, 2012 at 11:44pm
I looked into it further and Pew is counting people who watched any part of it (although Nielsen tends to do the same, too). Just note that the number of registered voters is around 150 million. Assuming everyone who watched the debate was a registered voter (a rich assumption, if there ever was one), Nielsen would say that a maximum of 45% of registered voters watched. The Pew debate stats are for registered voters, and they say that 73% of RVs watched the debate. Nielsen tends to sample about 25K households who are used to reporting their habits. Pew sampled ~1500 to converge on 1201 RVs.
- chaitless
October 8, 2012 at 11:56pm
OK, this is pertinent: this poll oversampled Republicans by several percentage points. I also don't believe for a minute that Obama has lost his lead among women. That doesn't make any sense. Finally, deep down I think Sullivan is a right winger. He was before this election then he got a big crush on Obama. Plus, Sarah Palin scared him, he being a normal human being and all. But still, when push comes to shove I don't think he's any king of left, period. Bowles/Simpson sure isn't and people need to point out where it's amiss, Jonathan Cohn has already, maybe he should go over it again.
- Sophia
October 9, 2012 at 2:04am
In his defense, Sullivan admits that he tends to be over-excitable. I'm pretty sure his standard "Sorry for hyperventilating" follow-up post is programmed as a macro on his keyboard.
- Jeff_Smith
October 9, 2012 at 3:51am
It's really, really stupid that the headline blogger who's bragging about his more than 1 million readers is actually a hyperexcitable, hyperventilating mess who has no real through line to interpret what's going on in the medium-term. You can almost say that people like Andrew Sullivan are part of the problem with the media, since he's regularly chiding the media and liberals for covering the campaign like it's a horse race while ignoring the deep chess that Obama is supposedly playing.
- chaitless
October 9, 2012 at 8:25am
It's not just Sullivan. You remember Toobin - was it? - who declared Obamacare dead following the SolGen's performance before the Court - and proceeded to criticise the litigation strategy? As if any argument - including an Eleventh Commandment - could have got the four oiks to side with Obama on this one ... On poll reading, I am inclined to go with the analysts of the American Conservative (not Dreher, but Galupo, Millman and Larison). Far more level headed, truly "conservative" and not generally partisan. Even Rasmussen does not show a Romney lead right now, so I am not sure what Sullivan is all about. I still think - given the ads that are running right now - that Obama meant to draw Romney in, but overdid it. I do think he (Obama) is deeply conscious of two things: not appearing an ABM - no insight here - and now, combined with that an exacerbating it, the dignity of the office. Sure, Nixon could lie and Reagan could allow treason out of his office, Clinton liked cigars and W outsourced the Oval Office to Cheney - but Obama simply has no margin for error on the dignity issue - a slip, and you will not see another Black candidate for a generation. In this sense, he cannot personally go on the attack as his supporters expect him to. I think he is counting on the innate good sense of the American voter, along with his advertising team, to see through the web of lies ....
- icarus-r
October 9, 2012 at 9:09am
Am I correctly reading the populations such that this poll predicts that 5% of likely voters will be Hispanic? What caught my eye is that they could not report a cross-tab for this population in a poll of over 1000 respondents, which seemed very odd. In the 2008 exits, 9% of voters were Hispanic. This is a different argument from the party affiliations, as it would envision a ~50% drop in Latino voters, who overwhelmingly support Obama.
- PRNOONAN@GMAIL.COM-old
October 9, 2012 at 10:03am
"I also don't believe for a minute that Obama has lost his lead among women. That doesn't make any sense." Sophia beat me to it. That is the one statistic I absolutely cannot believe is true, not after what we've seen from the gop vis-a-vis women's issues. No way.
- Tristan
October 9, 2012 at 10:29am
Tristan: well, that is what drove Sullivan to the brink. For my part, Romney's boorish behaviour during the debate was, I should have thought, precisely the kind of thing that would drive women away from him, rather than the other way around. Certainly, the instant trackers - and, this, again, from Sullivan - showed that Romney did well with white males, while Obama's measured policy responses resonated with women. This, during the debate. How could it be that a day after there would be an 18 point swing away from Obama among women? I mean, possible, but how likely?
- icarus-r
October 9, 2012 at 10:38am
Do you think that people like Sullivan and Toobin are in the business of over-reacting to the news because they know it will drive news traffic, and hence improve their respective bottom lines? Or, if they don't conciously know it, they have so internalized it that the act as if they do?
- wildboy
October 9, 2012 at 10:49am
Wild: certainly, that was Sullivan's take on Toobin :) ... With Sullivan, I don't think it's conscious: he really does hyperventilate and exaggerate. Look, one day before Obama came out on SSM, Sullivan wrote a scathing post on how all them fags thar should get over their daddy complexes and forget about Daddy Obama's approval. Then Obama speaks, and Sullivan has tears in his eyes - proclaim he did not have any idea how important Obama's words would be. Then there was the whole "we built that" business. Whatever. I read him for the entertainment value, more than anything, but I think on Obamney his heart is in the right place.
- icarus-r
October 9, 2012 at 10:53am
Tristan, et.al., I believe you're right about Romney's behavior at the debate. I felt personally abused. I'll bet a lot of women did. Probably, minorities too, anybody who's felt weak or been made weak, in the workplace for example probably felt threatened. The reaction to that is fight or flight and you can't really do a full on hissy fit on the national stage. Also, R looked like he was bullying both Obama and Lehrer and that made both of us mad, hubby though had a different reaction. He was much more mad at Obama, said he looked like a black man being beaten by Massa and shouldn't have taken it. My response having been, well he can't afford the ABM thing, he must maintain the dignity of the office. However he probably WAS feeling beaten up at the moment, I sure was (plus it is kind of hard to argue with a person who's telling a lie a minute as loudly as possible!) And, as it is they've been accusing him of "rage" and also speaking Black from time to time, indeed there is a great piece in Slate about racism and the Republican Party. It's hard, given the Red State map, the reliably Republican Civil War states and the "Southern Strategy" to overlook that. As to Pew's demographics, 5% Latino makes NO sense. None, nor does presuming a Republican majority. Maybe nobody was home that day? Finally as to certain media figures and THEIR hissy fits: please would they stop already?
- Sophia
October 9, 2012 at 1:18pm