The newest drone to the forum, WillCz, likes to contiuously through up the projected electoral map that is based on the latest state-by-state polls. Fact is, if you take the polls at face value, it is looking like an Obama landslide; like he could win by the widest margin of any Democrat since 1964. Fact is, there's no reason why those polls should be right.
On the one hand, a lot of folks have pointed out this summer (myself included) that given where we're at as a nation (Republicans in power for 8 years, pendulum swinging left, more folks identifying themselves as Democrat than Republican, news media in the tank for Obama), Obama should be leading this thing by a bunch rather than it being neck-and-neck. So, maybe he's finally meeting expectations. I saw an interesting analysis earlier today that suggested that folks were somewhat enamored by Obama but didn't really trust him, but after seeing him speak at the convention and in the 1st debate, they've been convinced.
On the other hand, debates rarely do much to change the landscape of an election, and that debate came nowhere close to meeting expectations as far as television viewership is concerned. Folks hardly dropped what they were doing to watch Obama and McCain debate.
My thinking is that the polls are oversampling Democrats. I'm not an expert on the internals of these polls, but I'm thinking they determine sampling by a combination of currently party affiliation polls and voter turnout in the '06 midterm election. And I think that is a mistake. In '06, Republicans had no reason to get out and vote. They were lazy because of their party's success, they were apathetic because of their party's shortcomings. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that many Republicans felt disenfranchized with the GOP. On the other side, the Democrats realized an opportunity to seize Congress and worked feverishly to accomplish that.
Does anyone really think Republicans aren't going to get out and vote in 2008? Just because voter turnout was 40/30 Democrat/Republican in a certain geographic area in '06 is a much more piss-poor indication than usual, IMO, of what turnout will be in '08. Maybe in '04 you could look a little more closely at the '02 midterm turnout. But '04 was an ordinary election. This election is far from ordinary, and as a nation we are very polarized. The right is going to vote for their man, the left is going to vote for their man.
I just have a hard time believing that Republicans aren't going to get out and vote in November, UNLESS they become convinced that Obama is going to win and they decide to sit it out. Maybe if the Democrats had nominated a less polarizing candidate -- a Bill Richardson, even a John Edwards -- Republican turnout would be similar to '06, but with Obama? I'm not buying it. Look around. When it became obvious that McCain would be the GOP nominee, you had a LOT of bickering from different factions on the right. James Dobson said that he could not "in good conscience" vote for McCain. Other groups said they wouldn't vote for McCain. Folks on this board said they wouldn't vote for McCain. I was one of 'em. When's the last time you heard anyone say that? People have united around McCain not because they're enamored with his campaign, but out of what they feel is necessity.
A case in point is a survey I saw earlier from one of the campuses of U of Va. They found Obama up +12 in Virginia. Their sampling was something like 43% Democrats, 31% Republicans. Does anyone really think that's what the turnout will be in Virginia, a state Bush won by 9 points, on Nov. 4? I don't.
Something else that confuses me with these polls is that Obama is pulling more Republican votes than McCain is pulling Democrat votes. I find that very hard to believe also.
Of course, the polls were using the same samplings when they were finding McCain even with Obama, so maybe they really are a good reflection of the electorate's mood.
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Politics, it seems to me, all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong. ~Richard Armour
I think the biggest impact are the new voters that are so peeded off that the are all registering Democrat. PA had a 486,000 growth in Democrats while the Rep's lost 38,000 voters that switched. State after state is turning to Democrat based upon new voter registrations. The hard core dem & rep states are staying that way,but the battleground states are all falling to the Dems.
The site has so many different sources, even the Fox News (700 CLub) Rasmussen polls are pointing toward a big obama win. Too much data to say they are polling democrats only.
The country is fed up and waking up to the republican conservative thieves that have made their lifes soo soo much worse over the past 8 years. In times like these we need leadership, and our Republican President couldn't be doing less. He is hiding so he doesn't hurt Mccain. Great choice you guys made back in 2004.
Since the last federal election in 2006, volunteers like Graham combined with the enthusiasm generated by the Obama-Clinton struggle to add more than 2 million Democrats to voter rolls in the 28 states that register voters according to party affiliation. The Republicans have lost nearly 344,000 thousand voters in the same states.
This was an article from a month ago before the financial crisis and Sarah was picked. Millions more democrats since.
Yeah, It was a bad trick he tried to pull that backfired. He got a woman as a slick trick to nab some votes, the problem is he can't trick the people with anything. I think most people know better than to trust the SAME stuff.
Polls are becoming more and more misleading. There could actually be an even bigger lead for Obama or a much closer race for McCain. The problem is that more and more people are using cell phones as their primary contact and pollsters are not allowed to call those numbers. And even if a person does have a land line many people don't bother answering their phones due to the popularity of caller ID. I never really bought into the notion that you can sample 1,000 or 2,000 people and get an accurate number that would represent the entire country.
Jeramy, you can get a pretty accurate poll with a sample size of 2000 to 5000 voters. The problem is with the polling itself. You can write a bad question that will alter your accuracy. Or worse, you hire polling people with an agenda of their own who manipulate the result. Even worse than that, the whole operation is corrupt and pushing an agenda. Scientific polls used to predict the outcome of elections within 3%. Now look what their actual margin for error is today. Compare the poll with the actual outcome. Anything over 5% means something is wrong with the poll. Lots of polls now miss the mark by even more than 5%.
I agree on individual polling numbers but this site shows all of them. Statistically they always work out. The loser always says they aren't right, but in the end they are darn close.
About these polls . . .
Its about time that Americans step up to the plate and stop this Republican Policy!!!!
