Call It A Comeback
Don’t Bother with Laesch. Really. Don’t.
I won’t link to some of what I can’t confirm, but I can confirm he’s an idiot of the first order. One is his bizarre bit on the blogs a while back. Two, will be public soon enough. Three-Seven may or may not come out.
At Daily Kos
Video of Debate—having had David as a professor, this is one of his better performances
Repeat of 2002, Leach asks Party to stop independent expenditures
Pretty much using Pavich’s words:
If voters in the 11th Congressional District believe in holding politicians accountable for their promises, they won’t re-elect Republican incumbent Jerry Weller, who got swept into Congress with the legendary Contract With America class of 1994.
Instead, they should vote for Democrat John Pavich, says the 30-year-old attorney from Beecher. Weller and others who signed the contract that launched the historic GOP takeover of the House have not kept their end of the bargain, Pavich says. They haven’t returned fiscal discipline to Capitol Hill – see record deficits – haven’t restored ethics to government – see Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, Mark Foley, etc. – haven’t imposed term limits – see Weller seeking his seventh term. Meanwhile, the GOP Congress has allowed itself to be steamrolled by the executive branch into little more than a rubber stamp.
Before the election, I’d say it’s a safe bet that Judy should be running ahead of him there, or we had entered the Twilight Zone.
What if I were to tell you that she is running behind in favorability to George Bush in one such area by nearly 20 points? Mind you, Bush is between 30% and 35% favorability in most polls I’ve seen in Illinois.
No, you aren’t getting any more details, but the polling is legit.
You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension – a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.
Both the Trib and a poll Rich will lead with in the morning show Judy at real low levels of voter support. What catches my eye is the effect of Rasmussen on the graph that Pollster does
Rasmussen not only shows a tighter race, but a race in which Judy is over 40%.
The difference between Rasmussen and most other polling firms is that Rasmussen adjusts for voter identification. IOW, it tracks previous voter ID and tries to use the standard breakdown to then sample voters from that sort of breakdown.
Most other polling is done allowing the sample to be random and allow Voter ID to vary.
For several reasons then in a typical election, you’ll tend to see Rasmussen not vary as much and tend to have good results especially towards the end of the race.
Where the system is weak is in a year when the typical isn’t occurring. When things are going so good or so bad that people change their Voter ID. So if normally a person identifies as Democrat, Independent or Republican, they change that self Identification because of the effect of the external events. This doesn’t happen with everyone, but you saw it somewhat in the Keyes election here where some people who were essentially Republicans stopped identifying that way because of the fiasco.
There is a lot of evidence this is happenting this year on a national scale. When it occurs and you have a system like Rasmussen, the pollster then is selecting the most hardcore party members and it tends to prop up the numbers of the party that is tanking–this year that be Republicans, though Democrats could have the same situation and did in 1994. Of course, in 1994 there were far fewer polls and little access to those that did exist.
It’ll ultimately be an empirical question as to what model is correct, but given the tendency of other polls to be agreeing with each other and not Rasmussen, the smart bet is that Rasmussen’s system won’t work as well this year. It doesn’t make them a bad pollster, it just points out that an assumption they are working on may not be true this particular time.
Part of the reason Rahm’s got the bad edge of the publicity in the fight with Dean over the 50 State Project versus winning now is simply because Rahm’s not as good with the public relations with the base.
Quite simply, the 50 state project is great in the long term, but despite claims to the contrary, it’s simply not going to produce this quickly. If we see big wins in unexpected places, it doesn’t mean we built up the infrastructure there, it means a wave hit and we rode it.
Now, building that infrastructure is a good thing for holding those seats and taking other seats in not so friendly years, but one doesn’t build infrastructure in 18 months and declare it to be working. It’s running people for school board, it’s running people for town council, and it’s simply having meetings.
However, Rahm and Schumer saw something else in the polling–a true wave election and want to throw everything at the candidates in the field because as of right now, DCCC and DSCC can’t even tell you what races it will be funding in a week because the playing field is expanding so fast.
You can’t ignore the long term, but you also can’t ignore an election like this being different than any other chance we’ll have for years.
As every prognosticator is pointing out things can change in three weeks, but the Republicans are in a free fall as of this moment. Survey USA has four new polls demonstrating how deep the problem is for Republicans with even Hayworth (AZ) and Kline (MN) in potential trouble. Also, over at Pollster you can see the new numbers for CT-4 and CT-5, both of which have Dems ahead.
Bush’s numbers are worsening, though I want to see Charles’ trend line with the newest poll before making a pronouncement of how much.
The trend will eventually calm and we’ll see some tightening I imagine, but right now everything is trending against the Republicans to the point that there don’t appear to be any likely Dem held seats (w/ an incumbent or open) likely to go Republican right now.
Cook’s latest update isn’t overstating the current situation
As George Will said the other day, if Democrats can’t win this year, they need to find another line of work.
I’m real glad that we have such serious people covering the news.
If you watch the movie–compare it to Daley Sr. who laid it out that of course he helped his son.
I wanted to keep Dusty since it’s not his fault Hendry gave him a half ass team, but hey, I could live with A-Rod
It’s all so clear now.
ArchPundit