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Must Read From the Nation Online
I came across an excellent piece from The Nation today. Check it out. www.nation.co.ke/News/world/-/1068/469652/-/rxnf86/-/ It confirms one of the things I have long suspected- that our advantage in registration is not reflected in the current polls. Gallup and USA Today are specifically listed as using roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans in their polls. This is a problem because there are currently 11 million more Democrats than Republicans registered to vote in the country. But it goes much deeper than that. What exactly has led to the current state of panic in blogistan? These very polls. The media pursuing McCain's asinine "lipstick" story is not to blame. Neither is his blatant skullduggery in the latest ads. It's these polls, leading us to believe that once again the forces of darkness have enveloped our brightest hopes. THEY HAVE NOT. I believe if this election were held today we would still win (with Colorado, New Mexico and New Hampshire.) We will win if we don't fall for another massive psych-out. Deflating us is how they win. Don't be beaten down. If we knock on more doors, register more voters, and make more phone calls, we will win. Hook up with the campaign now.
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I have no beef with keeping the polls close because it will keep folks motivated and will motivate folks to vote on Nov. 4th.
I'd worry if polls were artificially inflating Obama's lead because then folks might not donate, volunteer or rationalize not needing to vote.
If there was 100% turnout at the polls, Obama would win - he and his volunteers are doing all they can. If folks are not motivated to in the very least vote, then they're a lost cause and get the government they deserve should McCain win.
September 14, 2008 9:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes! Stay motivated! Precisely. Perhaps in a way, these polls are a wake up call to the complacent ones out there. Perhaps they'll fear so much for a McCain administration that they'll finally do everything they can to see it doesn't happen. We can't ride a wave to victory, much as we want to. We need to fight our way there. And at the end of the day, we certainly shall prevail.
September 14, 2008 10:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree. I have stopped fretting about these polls. Jonze is right, if it looks like a close race that is just upside for Obama.
September 15, 2008 1:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
I fourth the notion.
September 15, 2008 8:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
I dissent a bit. At a certain point, there is such a thing as a bandwagon effect. Further, in 2004, we most definitely lost momentum, time and energy because of the many occaisions the campaign had to circle back and calm down the Emocrats were acting like a room full of ADHD kindergartners over every dip in the polls.
Plus, I can't help it. Most people seem to define a good basketball game as a nail-biting seesaw that their team wins with a three pointer at the buzzer. I however, and a genetic Kentucky fan, and, accordingly, my definition of "a good game" is a twenty-five point blowout. That last minute bucket at the buzzer thing? We hate that.
September 15, 2008 11:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
As Butthead would say, "If I wanted to hear a motivational speech, I'd go to work!"
September 14, 2008 10:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Also...
"If you play this stuff backwards, it says 'This sucks!'"
September 15, 2008 7:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
You don't want to be motivated!? Why do Democrats so underestimate themselves and their power?
September 14, 2008 10:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Speaking of motivated: my wife and I are planning on going to Grand Rapids, MI to volunteer at the beginning of Nov. and thru the election. We have family there (she grew up in Detroit) and the polls show Michigan as being too close for comfort. Apparently also, the western side of the state tends to be more Republican...
September 14, 2008 11:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
The polls are meant to cover the stealing of the election. If the poles say the race is close then the Republicans can steal the election again.
I live in Florida and Florida will do its part again in getting the Republicans elected. The media misleads the Citizens of the US.
What fools we are to trust any media to give us any truth or news for the good of the Citizens.
The French Revolution put their heads in the right place. :)
September 14, 2008 11:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
"The polls are meant to cover the stealing of the election."
Maybe, but how do you explain the fact that the Dems took over control of the Senate, something IIRC was not predicted by most of the polls before the election in 2006?
September 15, 2008 1:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Zentrails, your query confirms that the election was stolen!! How do the Dems win the down ticket race but lose the top of the ticket is the real question. Just like in NH, when Obama was leading in the polls, but Hillary claimed the most votes. The records showed that in the areas where there were paper ballots Obama won them by the margin of the polls but in the areas where their were electronic ballots HRC won by a greater margin. There is no way that the vote should have varied like that based on the type of ballot cast.
Dems, know how to steal elections too...they simply have not been prepared to do so seemingly or either Gore and Kerry are wusses. I do think that all the grace and statesmanship is done as far as the Dems are concerned. This election will be fought in the courts, if need be...the only problem is that we know the Supreme Court is already in the pocket of the GOP. Maybe, that will create anarchy, the collapse of the democracy, our military power as well as financial collapse. Or will the people be so concerned about food and housing that they cannot protest the stolen elections thanks to the GOP and Bush deregulation environment?
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Thinking, I agree with you.
The only way the GOP gets to steal the election is by saying the polls are close. The tightness of the race makes it plausible that they could have won. In addition, the media is complicit in pushing the fraudulent polls because it increases their ratings. For the media it is all about the ratings game.
No one would watch if either candidate had a significant lead.
The ability of the GOP to steal the election is very much in place as it was a part of the DOJ scandal and the firing of Inglesias as well as the placement of Griffith and Paulouse as AG's in AK and MN, respectively. The GOP has targeted specific states to pursue election 'fraud'. Those cases are all about 'prosecutorial discretion' thus the need for them to put idealogues in place who had to pass the 'Goodling' test.
Americans have no interest in the politicization of the DOJ and this enables the GOP to do their dirty work.
Obama knows that he has to expand the voter base in order to win and he is doing an awesome GOTV job in swing states as well as numerous others.
As for the question about why did the Dems take back the Senate, by
September 15, 2008 12:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Motivation??
Hell, the newly registered won't go to the polls for a guy who, it turns out, is just another Dukakis-Gore-Kerry.
I watched Obama act like a big pussy to Bill O'Reilly... I felt personally humiliated that I had worked so hard for such a wimp! I had to cancel my canvassing and telephone shifts because I could not work up any sense of belief that the guy is anything more than another wishy-washy liberal who is more interested in being polite than in winning.
I guess the truth is that I've come to conclusion that the electoral game is loaded against the people.
Time for revolution.
FTP !
September 15, 2008 12:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, please. We are supposed to believe you were going to canvass and phone bank (something only hard-core supporters do) and then turned on him over one interview. You are a worse liar than your bosses at the RNC. Go back to RedState, troll.
September 15, 2008 1:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
"You are a worse liar than your bosses at the RNC. Go back to RedState, troll."
Exactly right. Obama has a nice grass roots organization helping people to register, getting the word out, etc.
McBush has a not so nice grass roots organization that does nothing except troll on "liberal" computer boards leaving lying, nasty, mean spirited comments.
Which approach is a better way to run the country?
September 15, 2008 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
You are not even a convincing republican infiltrator pretending to be a democrat who is worried. If you are the best they can do, no wonder they are losing.
September 15, 2008 8:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'd work on your troll technique, Olaf. You're just not convincing or persuasive in the least.
Keep at it, though. Maybe you'll get better.
September 15, 2008 12:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Whattsa matta, troll? Your favorite porn site down today?
September 15, 2008 1:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good Heavens to Murgatroyd Olaf - get a life! What an moron.
September 15, 2008 7:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
One thing that can help as we move along is to keep our sense of humor. The McCain/Palin thing is really a hoot. And they will not be able to sustain the lies in the present economy. Too much serious stuff going down.
"Palin/McCain: Cows, Good Old Boys (and Gals), and the Daily Show"
http://msa4.wordpress.com/
September 15, 2008 3:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would throw out there that this is from the Nation (Kenya), not the Nation we U.S.-based readers might be more familiar with...
September 15, 2008 10:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, I was just going to mention that. While I agree with the author's conclusion that new voters are not being represented by the polls (and I don't have a problem with that), this is hardly a major news source.
This is going to be a landslide. Obama's November Surprise will be millions of new voters who have been flying completely under the radar. The only hint of their existence is Obama's fundraising numbers. While $66 million is a massively impressive figure, it's the 500,000 new donors I'm excited about. That's the REAL poll.
September 15, 2008 10:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
I quite agree with you. I recall early on in the primaries when Obama was trailing in the polls vs. HRC. He was trailing in all groups, men, women as well as blacks. That is all the news media focused on was HRC winning. Folks on this site were primarily in HRC's game, but there was a core group of us who were Obama supporters from day one.
At that time when folks were whinning about the polls I said that I was not interested in what the polls said because they were not reflecting what was going on with the masses based purely on the magnitude of the crowds Obama was drawing.
Obama had throngs of 18K, 20K, 16K in Atlanta, NYC, and TX...there were unprecedented numbers of people coming out to support him. The media completely ignored that phenomena. The only tbing that was talked about was how Hillary had experience and how he was up against the most powerful political machine in the last 2 decades.
I was steadfast in my believe and assert several times in posts. I would beleive my eyes and what I was seeing and that was that HRC was getting trounced from sea to shining sea.
During the primaries also, folks were hang wringing and anxious about the HRC attacks and they wanted Obama to come out swinging in Philadelphia and he declined. Obama paces himself. He lets the outrage build so that when he does attack, no one can say, he is 'defensive' or 'angry' or 'overreacting'.
We are seeing the same remarkable consistency and pacing now in the general.
America has not seen leadership in so long that they are unable to recognize it. The only thing they understand are pit bulls and pugnacious saber rattling swagger coupled with fearmongering.
Obama is the best thing that has happened to America in a looooong time. If this country can be set on track, he has the acumen, compassion and strategic brillance to do it. He is the only one that can inspire Americans to put their shoulder to the wheel to do the hard work and sacrifice it is going to take to right this ship again.
September 15, 2008 12:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
didn't White Rose become Kansas?
September 15, 2008 4:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
NO can't say that I have ever been KS.
September 15, 2008 4:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, I was a little puzzled (if also amused) by the domain name ending in '.co.ke' Because of that, I can't recommend this post - especially when it refers to the source as "The Nation Online"
Also, the skewed sampling of the polls discussed in the link is pretty old news at this point as new rounds of polls have come out since then.
September 15, 2008 3:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good article, but it is not The Nation (a liberal nonprofit magazine) but Daily Nation - a national newspaper from Kenya that was founded by Aga Khan. I make this clarification just in case anyone wonders why a popup ad for an anti-Democratic Party book pops up anytime you hover over the word Democrat.
September 15, 2008 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sadly, Republican vote suppression efforts in Wisconsin and other states -- aided and abetted by the State Attorney General in the case of WI -- aren't reflected in the polls either!
September 15, 2008 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Schrepf!
fancy seeing you on here. not sure if you read all the comments on here, but hello from Bloomington. Keep up the good fight.
J. Block
September 15, 2008 2:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jeff-
Miss you on the court man! Creech is keeping up the elbows. Kick some ass down there.
September 15, 2008 4:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for this post!
I had the same thoughts as many of you here that this is actually to our advantage because people may work that much harder to register voters, donate, and help in other ways. And it also explains why the Obama camp has suggested that we not pay attention to the polls.
However, I have a caveat. The elephant in the room is that the republicans will try to steal this election. As long as the polls appear to be close, it will be easier for them to get away with. The only answer I can think of to fight voter supression and abuse is to register ever person possible and overwhelm them with numbers not just to win but for that margin of 'cheating' that we assume will be attempted.
So this makes me wonder if we shouldn't push on the pollsters to get more accurate as soon as we cross some of the voter registration deadlines so that they will become more reflective of the reality of registered voters so there won't be a 'tight-race smokescreen' for the republicans to hide behind?
September 15, 2008 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
A friend of mine is a political consultant. She said today that polls don't mean all that much, in general, unless you know the methodology. I just read a post on dailykos revealing that Gallup manipulates what they release and when they release it.
Polls today aren't going to matter much anyway if the economy continues to slide into a 1930s style meltdown. Then even the Republicans will be looking for an alternative.
September 15, 2008 5:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Accepting that the polls( well some of them) are biassed because designed to include too few registered democratic voters,those still reflect a McCain trend. As does the trend report in
Pollster.com.
In today's FT Clive Crook-who had expected Palin to self distruct- attributes this trend to the Obama campaign. arguing saying not that it is has been too slow to take her on, but the opposite. "...the Democratic talking heads had to exult in their disdain for Ms. Palin and all that she represents-namely a good part of the electorate whose support Mr.Obama needs.....many voters ..find this whole spectacle disgusting , so on top of everything else Ms. Palin is now getting a sympathy vote......they still seem intent on driving signficant numbers of women and moderates over to the other side."
Look, he may be wrong and those of you who are begging for a harder hitting campaign may be right. And maybe you catch more flies with vinegar than with honey.
McCain set a trap for us and we(not Obama or Biden)but we here have gleefully stepped in to it.
However sexist this may sound, it's still not a winning strategy in this country to insult a woman.
September 15, 2008 8:55 PM | Reply | Permalink