Did Obama Just Throw The Entire Election Away?

[brotherplanet]

Did Obama Just Throw The Entire Election Away?


The Pew poll is devastating, just devastating. Before the debate, Obama had a 51 - 43 lead; now, Romney has a 49 - 45 lead. That's a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama's performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing.

Romney's favorables are above Obama's now. Yes, you read that right. Romney's favorables are higher than Obama's right now. That gender gap that was Obama's firewall? Over in one night:

Currently, women are evenly divided (47% Obama, 47% Romney). Last month, Obama led Romney by 18 points (56% to 38%) among women likely voters.

Seriously: has that kind of swing ever happened this late in a campaign? Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever? And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That's terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion. He still has some personal advantages over Romney - even though they are all much diminished. Obama still has an edge on Medicare, scores much higher on relating to ordinary people, is ahead on foreign policy, and on being moderate, consistent and honest (only 14 percent of swing voters believe Romney is honest). But on the core issues of the economy and the deficit, Romney is now kicking the president's ass:

By a 37% to 24% margin, more swing voters say Romney would improve the job situation. Swing voters favor Romney on the deficit by a two-to-one (41% vs. 20%) margin.... Romney has gained ground on several of these measures since earlier in the campaign. Most notably, Obama and Romney now run even (44% each) in terms of which candidate is the stronger leader. Obama held a 13-point advantage on this a month ago. And Obama’s 14-point edge as the more honest and truthful candidate has narrowed to just five points. In June, Obama held a 17-point lead as the candidate voters thought was more willing to work with leaders from the other party. Today, the candidates run about even on this (45% say Obama, 42% Romney).

Lies work when they are unrebutted live on stage. And momentum counts at this point in the election.


The Mod doesn't like charts... There's one at the link below.


Look: I'm trying to rally some morale, but I've never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week - throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement? And after Romney's convincing Etch-A-Sketch, convincing because Obama was incapable of exposing it, Romney is now the centrist candidate, even as he is running to head up the most radical party in the modern era.

How can Obama come back? By ensuring people know that Romney was and is a shameless liar and opportunist? That doesn't work for a sitting president. He always needed a clear positive proposal - tax reform, a Grand Bargain on S-B lines - as well as a sterling defense of his admirable record. Bill Clinton did the former for him. Everyone imaginable did what they could for him. And his response? Well, let's look back a bit:

With President Obama holed up in a Nevada resort for debate practice, things can get pretty boring on the White House beat right now. Pretty boring for Obama too, apparently. "Basically they're keeping me indoors all the time," Obama told a supporter on the phone during a visit to a Las Vegas area field office. "It's a drag," he added. "They're making me do my homework."

Too arrogant to take a core campaign responsibility seriously. Too arrogant to give his supporters what they deserve. If he now came out and said he supports Simpson-Bowles in its entirety, it would look desperate, but now that Romney has junked every proposal he ever told his base, and we're in mid-October, it's Obama's only chance on the economy.

Or maybe, just maybe, Obama can regain our trust and confidence somehow in the next debate. Maybe he can begin to give us a positive vision of what he wants to do (amazing that it's October and some of us are still trying to help him, but he cannot). Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it. A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I've never seen a candidate self-destruct for no external reason this late in a campaign before. Gore was better in his first debate - and he threw a solid lead into the trash that night. Even Bush was better in 2004 than Obama last week. Even Reagan's meandering mess in 1984 was better - and he had approaching Alzheimer's to blame.

I'm trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it's hard to see how a president and his party recover. I'm not giving up. If the lies and propaganda of the last four years work even after Obama had managed to fight back solidly against them to get a clear and solid lead in critical states, then reality-based government is over in this country again. We're back to Bush-Cheney, but more extreme. We have to find a way to avoid that. Much, much more than Obama's vanity is at stake.



http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com ... -away.html

[DEATH ROW JOE]

Oct. 8: A Great Poll for Romney, in Perspective
By NATE SILVER
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.co ... more-35748
Mitt Romney gained further ground in the FiveThirtyEight forecast on Monday, with his chances of winning the Electoral College increasing to 25.2 percent from 21.6 percent on Sunday.

The change represents a continuation of the recent trend: Mr. Romney’s chances were down to just 13.9 percent immediately in advance of last week’s debate in Denver. He has nearly doubled his chances since then.

But the gains that he made on Monday in particular were all because of a single poll.

We’ll talk about that poll — a Pew Research poll that gave Mr. Romney a 4-point lead among likely voters — in a moment. But let’s first consider the day’s worth of polling without it, which was pretty mixed for Mr. Romney.

The most unfavorable numbers for Mr. Romney came in the national tracking polls published by Gallup and Rasmussen Reports. Both showed the race trending slightly toward President Obama, who increased his lead from 3 points to 5 points in the Gallup poll, and pulled into a tie after having trailed by 2 points in the Rasmussen survey.

In both cases, the numbers looked more like pre-debate data than the stronger numbers that Mr. Romney has been receiving since then. On average between the Democratic convention and the debate, the Rasmussen poll showed Mr. Obama with a 0.7-point lead (the Rasmussen poll is Republican-leaning relative to the consensus), while the Gallup poll had Mr. Obama ahead by an average of 3.4 points.

A third national tracking poll, an online tracking poll published by the RAND Corporation, showed essentially no change from Sunday. All of this seemed to be consistent with a story in which Mr. Romney’s debate bounce was receding some. (A fourth tracking poll, from Ipsos, had not been published as of the time we ran our forecast on Monday.)

The swing state polls published on Monday might best be described as being OK for Mr. Obama. He led in polls of Colorado, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and in two polls of Michigan. In all cases, Mr. Obama’s lead was small. However, this particular group of pollsters had shown reasonably unfavorable numbers for Mr. Obama in the same states before. Three of the polls actually moved toward Mr. Obama from the numbers that the same polling firms had published before the debates.


There are a few polls that I’ve left out of the discussion here — a George Washington University survey for Politico, for example, showed just a 1-point lead for Mr. Obama, even though most of its interviews were conducted before the debate. That was a strong poll for Mr. Romney.

But were it not for the Pew poll, our forecast would have been unchanged from Monday, with Mr. Romney’s chances holding at 21.6 percent.

The Pew poll, however, may well be the single best polling result that Mr. Romney has seen all year. It comes from a strong polling firm, and had a reasonably large sample size. Just as important is the trendline. Pew’s polls have been Democratic-leaning relative to the consensus this year; its last poll, for instance, had Mr. Obama 8 points ahead among likely voters. So this represents a very sharp reversal.

One line of complaint about the poll has come from Democrats, who noted that the poll showed more Republicans than Democrats in its sample — unlike most other recent surveys.

I feel the same way about this critique that I do when it comes from Republicans — which is to say I don’t think very much of it. As The Washington Post’s Jon Cohen notes, party identification is fluid rather than fixed. and can change in reaction to political and news events. If voters are feeling better about Mr. Romney after the debates, they might also be inclined to identify themselves to pollsters as Republicans.

It is probably also the case that Republicans won’t actually have a 5-point party identification advantage in the exit poll on Election Day. But it isn’t the pollster’s job to project what will happen on Nov. 6. (That’s my job, instead!) Rather, the pollster’s job is to take the most accurate snapshot of the electorate at the time the poll is conducted. Note that the Rasmussen Reports polls, which (improperly, in my view) adjust for party identification, show very little bounce for Mr. Romney. The party-identification adjustment is causing them to miss the story of the election — just as they were largely missing the story of Mr. Obama’s bounce following his convention.

There are two smarter questions to ask about the Pew poll. First, is it really likely that Mr. Romney leads the race by 4 points right now? The consensus of the evidence, particularly the national tracking polls, would suggest otherwise. Instead, the forecast model’s conclusion is that the whole of the data is still consistent with a very narrow lead for Mr. Obama, albeit one that is considerably diminished since Denver.

It might be granted that the situation is more ambiguous than usual right now. But our forecast model looks at literally all of the polls; it estimates Mr. Romney’s post-debate bounce as being 2.5 percentage points, not quite enough to erase Mr. Obama’s pre-debate advantage.

The other valid line of inquiry concerns the timing of the poll. The Pew poll was conducted from Thursday through Sunday, although more of the interviews were conducted in the earlier part of that period. There’s nothing in the poll that really refutes the story that Mr. Romney initially received a very large bounce after the debate (perhaps somewhere on the order of 4 or 5 points, if not quite as large as Pew shows it), which has since faded some between the news cycle turning over and the favorable jobs report on Friday.

The evidence that Mr. Romney’s bounce is receding some is only modestly strong — as opposed to the evidence that he got a significant bounce in the first place, which is very strong. Still, the order in which polls are published does not exactly match the order in which they were actually conducted — and at turning points in the race, these details can make a difference.

The last thing to consider is that the fundamentals of the race aren’t consistent with a 4-point lead for Mr. Romney. Instead, the most recent economic numbers, and Mr. Obama’s approval ratings, would seem to point to an election in which he is the slight favorite. We don’t use approval ratings in our forecast, but we do use the economic data, and both the monthly payrolls report and the broader FiveThirtyEight economic index would point toward an election in which Mr. Obama is favored in the popular vote by around 2.5 percentage points.

There is a fair amount of uncertainty in this calculation: models that claim to achieve exceptionally precise results based on economic data alone have not always lived up to their billing — so a forecast based on the economic index alone would have Mr. Obama as only a 60 or 65 percent favorite, hardly a sure thing. (In Mr. Obama’s case, much of the downside risk would come from the potential for a poor Democratic turnout.) And our forecast model weights the economic factors less and less as time goes on.

Still, the economic component of the model still has some influence on the model (it accounts for about 25 percent of the forecast for the time being). Just as the economic component was causing the model to adjust Mr. Obama’s numbers downward during the height of his convention bounce, the same consideration will help Mr. Obama slightly if he starts to see more results like the Pew poll.

This technique has produced a very stable forecast over the whole of the year: since we began to publish the model in the spring, the projected Nov. 6 result has varied only between a 1.6-point win for Mr. Obama in the national popular vote and a 4.3-point edge.

That’s not to say the model weights all the polls equally: high-quality national polls have an especially big influence on the trendlines that we estimate. Hence, Mr. Romney’s odds of winning the Electoral College increased by more than 3 percent on the basis of the Pew poll alone; I doubt that any other individual poll has had as much influence on the forecast.

But it’s one thing to give a poll a lot of weight, and another to become so enthralled with it that you dismiss all other evidence. If you can trust yourself to take the polls in stride, then I would encourage you to do so. If your impression of the race is changing radically every few minutes, however, then you’re best off looking at the forecasts and projections that we and our competitors publish, along with Vegas betting lines and prediction markets.

All of these methods have slightly different ways of accounting for new information, but they do involve people who are risking either money or reputation to get it right, and who have systematic ways to weigh the evidence rather than doing so on an ad hoc basis.

========
538 Forecast:

Electoral College:
Obama 302.5
Romney 235.5

Popular Vote:
Obama 74.8% chance of winning the popular vote
Romney 25.2% chance of winning the popular vote

========
Intrade:

Barack Obama
63.7% chance of winning the popular vote
Today's Change: +0.2
Shares Traded: 1,503,856


Mitt Romney
36.7% chance of winning th popular vote
Today's Change: -0.2
Shares Traded: 1,618,185


Democratic nominee to win 270 or more Electoral College votes in 2012 Presidential Election = 64.2%

[brotherplanet]

You should go argue with the guy who wrote the article. He's a liberal who disagrees with you. Go show em' what you know!

Let us know how that works out for you.

[DEATH ROW JOE]

You should go argue with the guy who wrote the article. He's a liberal who disagrees with you. Go show em' what you know!

Let us know how that works out for you.

Andrew Michael Sullivan describes himself as a political conservative. He is not a liberal.

If he had a comments section on that blog I would correct his weak analysis and point him towards Nate Silver's article which explains the significance of the Pew poll that his entire article is based on.

Why can't you defend the article you posted? You saw a sensational headline, and cut and pasted the article to this board without questioning it. You're a silly child.

Oct 6, Romney had a 2 point lead on the GOP leaning Rasmussen poll. Today he is tied with Obama which is consistent with Nate Silver's analysis in yesterday's article. So it does not look like Obama "threw the entire election away" with a bad debate. Start trying to think and question before mindlessly cutting and pasting articles to this site.

Sat Oct 06, 2012
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows Mitt Romney attracting support from 49% of voters nationwide, while President Obama earns the vote from 47%.

Tuesday, October 09, 2012
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows Mitt Romney and President Obama each attracting support from 48% of voters nationwide.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... cking_poll

[brotherplanet]

That's all very sweet. You should still go argue with him. I mean I appreciate you replying like my personal lap dog, which just makes this all the more fun, but you should also let him know what you think.

[DEATH ROW JOE]

You should still go argue with him.

I have no problem doing that but what you don't realize is he knows the Pew poll does not suggest that Obama "just threw the election away." He wrote an article with a sensational headline because that attracts attention to his article and his blog. You're very naive and extremely stupid. It's amusing that you would think I would have a problem arguing with Andrew Michael Sullivan. In your world he is a grown up who should go unchallenged. You're a child.

[DEATH ROW JOE]

Election Results
Candidate----------Popular vote--Percentage-----Electoral votes (270 to win)
Barack Obama ------62088847 ------51% ------------332
Mitt Romney ---------58783137------48%-------------206

[RATTdrools]

Election Results
Candidate----------Popular vote--Percentage-----Electoral votes (270 to win)
Barack Obama ------62088847 ------51% ------------332
Mitt Romney ---------58783137------48%-------------206

Obama really threw that election away!!