Call It A Comeback
H/T Rich again.
Virtually identical to the Survey USA. So natural tightening, but not a lot of movement. Third party candidates almost always lose support from their polling, but that’s also when they are down low around 3-5 %. I’m expect Whitney will lose some probably hitting around 10 with the difference splitting between Topinka and Blagojevich.
To a certain point I understand the human response to getting caught in situation that throws your family into chaos, but he bought the meth, but threw it out?
One doesn’t get up one morning and think, I’m going to buy some meth!
VFW endorsed Roskam. A while ago.
Roskam tried to bill the endorsement as a major boost to his campaign in the final days, but found himself admitting he sat on the endorsement until the end for maximum attention. The VFW representative was unable to give much of a reason for the endorsement or explain how it happened, and Roskam looked stunned at the harsh questioning from reporters.
H/T Rich
he latest Rothenberg Political Report ratings are out. Here are exclusive excerpts provided to Political Wire:
The Senate: “While Senate control is in doubt, with Democrats most likely to win from 5 to 7 seats, we do not think the two sides have an equal chance of winning a majority in the Senate. Instead, we believe that state and national dynamics favor Democrats netting six seats and winning control of the United States Senate.”
The House: “Going into the final days before the 2006 midterm elections, we believe the most likely outcome in the House of Representatives is a Democratic gain of 34 to 40 seats, with slightly larger gains not impossible. This would put Democrats at between 237 and 243 seats, if not a handful more, giving them a majority in the next House that is slightly larger than the one the Republicans currently hold. If these numbers are generally correct, we would expect a period of GOP finger-pointing and self-flagellation after the elections, followed by a considerable number of Republican House retirements over the next two years.”
Governors: “With Republican seats like Idaho, Alaska, and Nevada in play for state-specific reasons, and Minnesota vulnerable to a Democratic wave, the ceiling for possible Democratic gains is high. We have narrowed our earlier projection from Democratic gains of 6-10 to 7-9.”
New Survey USA for Illinois Governor. A little bit closer to previous polls with her up 3 and him up 1. Whitney stable at 14. This would be consistent with late race tightening, but no fundamental shift in the race. We’ll need another poll to give us an idea if Copley or SUSA is more on target. Both are pretty close to each other even then.
Democracy Corps has a new poll out:
It is very hard to look at the most recent Democracy Corps survey in the 50 most competitive Republican-held districts finished last night and not conclude that we are headed toward a 1994 election – with the Democratic majority approaching that of the ‘Gingrich Congress’. The named Democratic vote for Congress has moved up from a 3-point lead to 7-point margin since Sunday, with the named Democrat for the first time moving over 50 percent (51 to 44 percent). For the first time, the Democratic candidate is ahead on average in the bottom tier of least competitive races. The generic congressional ballot has moved up to 11 points – up 3 points from Sunday and another 3 points from the week before.
The gap in interest in the election (those ranking their interest as “10” on 1-to-10 point scale) between Democratic and Republican voters has grown from 7 to 14 this week.
The trend in the final week on most factors, as we will elaborate below, favors the Democrats, including independents’ support, enthusiasm, and handling key issues, including taxes, and above all, the Iraq war. The 2006 election is rapidly moving toward being a referendum on Iraq.
We do want to underscore in this last survey conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps some reasons why you should believe this is real:
This survey, unlike any other public survey, asks the congressional vote using the actual names of each candidate, meaning this survey fully reflects any advantages for incumbency. We also ask the generic ballot for a read of overall partisan sentiment, but named vote is more likely to tell us what happens. This survey is based on a 1,200 sample of likely voters conducted over three nights in the real battleground districts and will likely provide a more reliable read on the state of the race in the battleground. This survey was not conducted on Halloween, which is a notoriously inaccurate night for polling. The survey asks job approval and the thermometer rating for the incumbent by name, which produces a very disturbing result for the Republicans. Both measures are net negative, despite the power of incumbency. Incumbent approval is only 43 percent, with more disapproving, and indeed only at 44 percent in the tier 3 races. While the survey shows a shift to the Democrats in the congressional ballot (named and generic) this week, the respondents have not shifted a point on party affiliation or recall of their 2004 vote. That should emphasize that this is a real, rather than a too-Democratic, sample. These voters identify with the Republicans by 2 points, but in the generic, want to vote Democratic for Congress by 11 points. We conducted 400 interviews last night after two news cycles of Kerry stories. While the story clearly broke through – over 20 percent of respondents in an open-ended question on what is happening in the campaign mentioned him – the story has not helped Republicans, and the calling on the last night was no different than the results from the first two nights. It is the highest recall for the partisans, those identifying as Democrats or Republicans, yet independents show no interest in it. The shifts in this final week are almost entirely among independents who are giving the Democratic candidates landslide margins.
House members of both parties pay dues based on their committee assignments. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, whose district is next to Emanuels’, did not want to pay his $250,000 invoice. “What Rahm does is he keeps billing you. I hate it,” Gutierrez said. After a nudge from Pelosi, he started sending checks, with another $10,000 dispatched Tuesday.
It’s a little hard to figure how the Tribune is letting Byrne get away with simply false assertions in his last column, but it’s also hard to figure the Kass column didn’t get toned down
The fact is the Obamas and the Rezkos bought property in a fashionable South Side neighborhood next to each other on the same day, from the same lot, and the Obamas came out the winners.
Obama bought his home at a $300,000 discount. Rezko bought the adjoining lot from the same sellers at full price. One got a juicy bargain. The other overpaid. Legend has it that Rezko never paid full price for anything in his life, so he starts with Obama?
I don’t dispute that Rezko was trying to get in with Obama, that’s his style, but there’s a simple point the original story made:
In the past, the two lots had been sold as a single estate. But in 2005, the owners listed the two parcels for sale separately.
The plots were for sale separately from the beginning before Obama would have even known of the property.
Later, it occurs to the senator that he’d like a slice of Rezko’s acreage to enlarge his estate. Obama’s appraiser told him the fair market value of that slice was $40,500.
Since that’s one-sixth of the Rezko side, it means Rezko paid $625,000 for property that was actually worth $243,000. That would make Rezko a complete fool. But he’s no fool.
Obama then offers to pay more than $100,000 for a slice of land that wasn’t worth that much, because he wanted to be fair to Rezko.
Hmm.
Hmmm…John Kass, unlike Zorn just a few days ago, didn’t call anyone to discuss how real estate assessments are done. Zorn did a good job describing the confusing world of assessments by, ta-da, asking someone who knows. A strip of land like was sold to Obama isn’t worth just one-sixth of the value of the land because it cannot be used for anything by itself–and so appraisers use formulas to figure out what the value of that land is. Obama paid nearly 2 1/2 times that value to Rezko. The sum of the parts of a property don’t simply add up to the value of the property. Anyone who has ever dealt with an easement or similar situation to Obama would know this and any property assessor could give you an answer as to whether the initial assessment was reasonable. Kass didn’t do that. Instead he just tried to “raise questions.”
That’s the other thing, the fence. Obama says his engineer and architect planned it, and then Rezko put it up for him.
And what if Rezko had put up a fence that didn’t meet Landmarks standard–what would Kass be saying? I have an idea and so did Obama. In this case Obama worked to ensure the fence would fit Landmarks requirements–a situation which also affects the value of his property whether it resides on his property or not. Who got the benefit of that–Rezko.
Rezko already had to fence in the yard–that’s a city requirement to combat illegal dumping.
I don’t have any question that Rezko was trying to do favors for Obama, the thing is Obama did everything to make sure no favors were done. He could have asked him not to buy the property and probably wishes he did.
All that said, Obama responded to a property for sale, bought it and had someone else buy the adjoining property probably to get a good in with Obama. And Obama has done everything above board including paying more than the estimated value of the land he bought.
If I wasn’t involved in a couple other projects I’d actually like to do some research on this. The Republicans have sold the operation as a magic bullet and people have bought it because they’ve done better than expected in 2 elections in a row. Reporters buy into the myth more than the reality because they aren’t much better at numbers than the average voter.
The thing is I’m not sure it’s really the key. It’s a good system and they do a decent job with it, but like all turnout operations, personal contact is more important than mail and most micro-targeting is by mail or phone. And I think this is the story everyone misses. What really got the GOP over the hump in 2002 was national security. In 2004 though, it was something related, but not the same as the 72 hour project–it was that people organized themselves. People from churches got together and canvassed on their own (someone tell Dennis Byrne-it’s a scandal). The self-organizing realized one of the aspects of the Dean campaign that the Dean campaign never fully realized.
How much difference can turnout really make? Consider the punishing arithmetic. Take a House race that this year would otherwise be 52-48 Democratic. What would turnout efforts have to achieve to overturn the putative victory?
Use white evangelical Protestants as an example. They comprised 23 percent of the national electorate in both 2000 and 2004, so let’s say they are the same proportion of our imaginary Congressional District. Say the 72-hour program was spectacularly — increasing their turnout by 20 percent while every other segment of the electorate held constant. In that case, evangelicals would constitute 26.4 percent of the electorate.
Assume for the sake of argument they continued to give the GOP the same 78 percent of their votes they gave to George Bush in 2004. Such heroic efforts would still result in a Democratic victory. And if white evangelical Protestants only offered 68 percent of their votes to Republicans, all that work would result in less than a 1-point shift in the vote. And that calculation makes the very unlikely assumption that one side enjoys great success while the other does nothing.
How likely is a 20 percent increase in turnout based on a GOTV effort? The best serious academic estimate is that all the GOTV work in the presidential campaign of 2004 increased turnout not by 20 percent, but by about 3 percent.
If you go back to 1994 the polling wasn’t so horrible in some respects–it didn’t look like Democrats were all going to stay home, but what it did show was some small differences in motivation that over the country led to a big trend in terms of seats. Democrats didn’t all stay home, but a small, but higher than usual did stay home more than usual and a small, but higher number of Republicans came out that year than usual and that led to what looked like a landslide. And in one sense it was.
With the advent of modern databases and easy to merge demographic information, micro-targeting can be done in a number of ways and from what I understand the Republican system is a bit different from most of the Democratic micro-targeting, but not necessarily much more effective. The biggest advantage comes from having it done relatively broadly.
I bet the biggest thing in 2004 was the self-organization and I think Karl Rove knows that too. That’s one reason he plays to the base so heartily is he knows that motivated volunteers can often do more by personal contact than the 30th mailer one receives in a campaign season.
I just had someone try and pass themselves off as another poster. Don’t do that or I will ban you. Seriously, it’s not funny.
Update: Okay, so I overreactied perhaps–there appears to be some bug in the system where the last posters name is showing up in the comment box–so before posting make sure it’s either your handle or empty. Thanks.
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