Best. Headline. Ever.

Article here.

Seven weeks left, update on polls

The last week has generally not been a good one for humanity, poll-wise, but the trend over the last day or two is moving back towards Obama. Regardless, here's this morning's snapshot of the polls. See here for last week's analysis and an explanation of what I'm trying to do here.

Italicized states have trended (changed categories) towards McCain, bolded (if there were any this week) towards Obama.

McCain win: Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Idaho, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, South Carolina, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, West Virginia, Missouri, South Dakota, North Dakota, North Carolina, Montana, Florida. Total: 216 EV (+54).

McCain likely: Indiana. Total: 11 EV (-6).

Obama likely: Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington. Total: 28 EV (-21).

Obama win: DC, Vermont, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Maine, California, Delaware, New Jersey, Iowa. Total: 179 EV (-32).

Tossup: Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire. Total: 104 EV (+8).

The net trend since last week is McCain put 45 EV in his column, while Obama lost 53 (and the tossup column gained 8). Combining the "win" and "likely" for each, we'd be at 227 for McCain and 207 for Obama. Not quite a dead heat, but close. PA and MI are still critical.

I'm looking forward to next week's data, when we're post-conventions more and leading up to the debates.

Sorry for the absence

Work, always there. Family, always there. Now, recovering from minor surgery (minor, but ouchy) but my absence has been inexcusable.

Long time, no see

I'm always amused by how Republican politicians LOVE laws that are over 200 years old (constitutional "original intent," which is more BS than you will find on a dairy farm) but hate 75-year old laws. You know, those pesky banking and securities laws that were passed after a meltdown to limit the chances of another one?

And gosh, who was it that led the way for the federal legislation that eliminated the regulatory barriers between banks and brokerage, deregulation that allowed a lot of these catastrophes to happen. Good ol' Phil Gramm. He's not tied to any political candidate, is he?

I don't know much about money

but the news sounds awfully not good. Can someone with a greater knowledge of these things fill me in?

Nine innings, zero hits

Phrase of the day

“We will take no lectures from John McCain who is cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern Presidential campaign history. His discredited ads with disgusting lies are running all over the country today. He runs a campaign not worthy of the office he is seeking,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

h/t The Politico

LHC status

In case you want to check on the status of the LHC.

Holy catfuck, Batman!

h/t Think Progress:
Q But Osama bin Laden is the one that — you keep talking about his lieutenants, and, yes, they are very important, but Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11 –

PERINO: No, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11, and he’s sitting in jail right now.

Well, that's good.

Oh, and

I know Pete asked this one before too, but how are we supposed to greet each other today? "Happy Patriot Day?" December 7 has the much less jingoistic appellation of "Pearl Harbor Day," (which, btw, I found on a list of "Fundays" on a page for home schoolers, meaning that the people who help others home school are just as bright and aware as those who choose to screw up their own kids themselves).

Oh, wait. I can send a card. A google search of the phrase "patriot day" cards turned up 75,600 hits, with the ones on the front page, yes, from companies who supply a set of just-too-patriotic for words cards, some with soul-punishing flash animation. Peruse at your own risk.

Seven

Olbermann says it pretty well here, using big words and sentences and stuff. And I've written about 9/11 in this space before. I have neither the energy nor the interest in dragging up all that venom again. There's an eight week old boy who drains the energy from me (no, he's not a vampire) and who is far more interesting than anything the giggling murderer or any of his band of merry Constitution-raping war criminals can do. On the other hand, I cannot let another year of exploiting tragedy for personal gain and squandering an unasked-for but nonetheless real opportunity to actually make the world a better place without delivering this message to those who have spent the last seven years driving this country into the abyss, and to those who cheer on the insane, cackling Bus Driver of Doom, and to those who sit by passively and do nothing:

Fuck You.

Oh, and to Johnny Boy, who knows how to get Bin Laden but is apparently waiting until he's president so that he can get the glory? I hope President Barack Obama sends you overseas so that you can get freedom tickled by our operatives in Albania until you give up your secret on how to defend this country, you sick lying pathetic bastard.

end venom

Suck it, end-timers

The LHC is on, it's working, and we're still here.

Eight weeks out

One thing I've been rolling around in my mind is taking a weekly look at where the election stands, not from the minutiae of daily polls, but in a more comprehensive view. Clearly, we know that the national polling data is irrelevant except in how it frames the story of the election process. Right now, the GOP is riding on the crest of it's post-convention bounce (the democratic bounce got squished by the compression of the conventions as well as the Palin announcement, as McCain knew it would), and the scenarios are looking better for them now than they once did. We will see if that continues after the bounce settles next week.

What I've done is look at two websites doing projections - fivethirtyeight.com and electoral-vote.com. (Incidentally, 538 is run by Nate Silver, one of the wizards behind baseballprospectus.com, my favorite baseball analysis site.) E-V compiles polls and comes up with a composite spread (using a rather straightforward system). 538 is more complex, with a model they're still tweaking, and they assign not only a weighted average of polls (in part based on which ones tend to be reliable) but also a percentage likelihood of victory.

For example, right now, E-V gives Obama a 7 point win in Oregon, while 538 gives him a 7.4 point win and an 88% chance of winning. I put this data together and sorted it into five categories:

1. McCain will win barring something bizarre - McCain has a polling lead of at least 5 points in both models as well as a greater than 80% chance of winning.

2. McCain is likely to win - at least one of the three criteria above is met, but not all 3.

3. Obama is likely to win - at least one of the three criteria above is met, but not all 3.

4. Obama will win barring something bizarre - Obama has a polling lead of at least 5 points in both models as well as a greater than 80% chance of winning.

5. Tossup - the other ones.

To see if this makes any sense, let's first look at which states fall in which categories:

McCain win (in descending order of certainty): Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Idaho, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, South Carolina, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, West Virginia, Missouri. Total: 165 EV.

McCain likely: South Dakota, North Dakota, Indiana. Total: 17 EV.

Obama likely: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington. Total: 49 EV.

Obama win: DC, Vermont, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Maine, California, Delaware, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, New Mexico. Total: 211 EV.

Tossup: North Carolina, Montana, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire. Total: 96 EV.

So, what do we think? It looks pretty good to me. It's a little odd seeing New Mexico in Obama's column, but that state has evolved recently, and other than that, there's nothing on the Dem side that surprises me. Obama will do very well in Iowa (where he has an excellent ground game) and states like Wisconsin and Minnesota, where they're sick of Bush, and despite McCain's efforts, aren't really in play. I also don't see a chance that Washington goes for McCain.

I'm going to work through two scenarios - one pretty balanced and one heavily tilted towards McCain.

Scenario 1: All the "likely" or "win" states go in the expected direction. Before the toss-ups, it's Obama 260, McCain 182, meaning that Obama needs 10 more for the win. What are the odds of that? Treating all the toss-up states as 50-50 to go each way, there are 2^8=256 possible combinations. The only combinations where Obama doesn't get to 10 EV's are as follows:

Obama wins 0 of the tossup states (1)
Obama wins only one of the following: MT, NH, NV, or CO (4)
Obama wins two of the following three: MT, NH, or NV (6)

That gives Obama a likelihood of winning of 245/256 = 95.7%.

Scenario 2: McCain gets all his likely states, plus stealing Michigan and Pennsylvania (and getting Ohio in the process). Obama does hold on to Washington. McCain 237, Obama 222. In this model, there are 128 combinations, and Obama would need 48 EV (of the available 76), and since Florida is worth 27, the only way he can win without Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania is to win NC, MT, NV, VA, CO, and NH. Putting it all together, he'd have a 34/128 = 26.5% chance.

What does that tell us? At this point, McCain should be hitting the PA, MI, OH, and FL hard. Very hard. If he can grab all 4, or even 3 of 4, he's got a real shot. If he only takes two out of the 4 (say Florida and Ohio, two pretty big prizes), Obama needs only 10 more EV to win, and winning NH and CO (which would both be in his column right now, even with the GOP bounce) would put him over the top.

A new look for the election

Thought I'd change things up for the last 58 days. There's also some new links - check 'em out.

Good point

The GOP hypocrisy continues to be stunning at times. I tried to watch some of the proceedings last night, but since every time I flipped over something nauseating was going on, I stopped. But I did see the stories and read some of the excerpts. The SCLM and (obviously) the right wing loved that she didn't throw up on herself, that she can read a speech from a teleprompter and do a credible job at it, and that she can deliver attack lines. Of course, she fell short of actually either telling thr truth or having something to say regarding policy, but we all know that it's really the democrats who have no policies, right, Senator John (this campaign isn't about issues) McCain?

Anyway, over at Sadly, No!, they raised a good point: "They overplayed the ‘community organizer’ slam. The party that wants to shrink government says service outside of government is worthless? The only service worth anything is as an agent of the state? The Dems need to start talking up community work, church work, charity work, volunteering to coach youth sports, etc. Palin and McCain say Little League coaches and scout leaders and food drive volunteers aren’t doing anything useful?"

On the one hand, everything the government does is screwed up, and we should depend on ourselves, each other, and local resources to fix any problems, but on the other, anyone doing that has no responsibilities and is worthy of ridicule? It's good that the Bush presidency set the precedent of never answering questions that weren't pre-screened, because that would doom these clowns.

Ready from Day One?

Nate over at fivethirtyeight.com has a great post up today about one essential difference between presidents and vice-presidents: In a perfect world, we would all like a president who is Ready on Day One (TM); it is not uncommon for a newly-elected president to face a major crisis almost immediately upon taking office. But more commonly, a president takes the Oath of Office under relatively calm waters, allowing them something of a learning curve.

On the other hand, when a vice president takes over for a president, the nation is necessarily undergoing a crisis, because the death (or resignation) of a president is perhaps as traumatic an event as can reasonably be imagined (in the "best" case resulting from a slowly-developing illness, and the worst, an attack by terrorists or foreign adversaries).

Comparing 2008 and 2004

There's been a lot of talk lately about Obama slipping in the polls, and what that will mean come November. Now, I still think he's in the driver's seat, especially given that McCain has never really been anywhere near 50%. Reading some stuff at electoral-vote.com backs that up some. Here's a graph showing their electoral college numbers, assuming the polling data accurately reflects what's going on:



Clearly, you see Obama losing a lead there. And that's pretty comparable to what happened to Kerry in 2004:



That's scary, right? But there's a huge difference. Let's look at the same data, but get rid of the leaners, the states where the polling is within 5%:




What do we see here? Obama continues to widen his lead on McCain, while McCain stagnates almost 100 votes short. Obama needs a lot fewer things to break his way to get over the top. Again comparing that to 2004, we see that the situation there was fundamentally different:


http://electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Pres/ec_graph-2004-solid.png

By this time relative to the election (which was well after the swiftboating), Kerry wasn't anywhere near 270 when looking at the states he was doing well in, and Bush actually held the lead for a good chunk of the time as we got closer to the election.

The Speech

During Obama's acceptance speech last night, I liked it, but wasn't as blown away as I usually am. But in pondering it overnight, I think it was much better than I gave it credit for at the time. He kicked McCain's ass up one side of the stadium and down the other, was effective at not shying away from being a liberal, called McCain and the GOP out on their campaign tactics (I absolutely loved the line about making big elections about small things), laid out policy specifics, and didn't fucking smirk or giggle every time he delivered a good line. What was missing was the beautiful language and inspiring oratory that was, for example, the hallmark of his 2004 convention speech. However, while that stuff gets me going, and is the oratorical stuff dreams are made of for us liberal elite intellectuals, he needed to put his feet a little more on the ground and show those simpering moderates and undecideds that he had a real ground game. And, boy, does he.

Thank goodness that's over

Illinois yields to New York and Hillary moved that Obama be appointed the nominee by acclamation, and then they'll count all the delegates. Now they're playing "Love Train", for some silly reason.

So, John McCain doesn't know what rich is

Here's a clue - if you don't know how many houses you own, you're rich.