Presidential Race – Page 12

Illinois NOW, the Essence of Hypocrisy

ArchPundit January 14, 2008 3 Comments

How cute, Clinton’s campaign keeps up on the present votes including the most hypocritical pile of shit in a campaign:

Illinois Now on Obama’s Present Votes On Choice:

During Sen. Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign, the Illinois NOW PAC did not recommend the endorsement of Obama for U.S. Senate because he refused to stand up for a woman’s right to choose and repeatedly voted ‘present’ on important legislation.As a State Senator, Barack Obama voted ‘present’ on seven abortion bills, including a ban on ‘partial birth abortion,’ two parental notification laws and three ‘born alive’ bills. In each case, the right vote was clear, but Sen. Obama chose political cover over standing and fighting for his convictions. “When we needed someone to take a stand, Sen. Obama took a pass,” said Grabenhofer. “He wasn’t there for us then and we don’t expect him to be now.”

Yet, Lisa Madigan did the same thing. What did Illinois Now do about her refusal to take a stand?

Yep, they endorsed her:

Who else voted Present?Lisa Madigan on at least one vote:

ENDORSED BY IL NOW PAC

Statewide

Rod Blagojevich D-Governor

Alexi Giannoulias D-Treasurer

Dan Hynes D-State Comptroller

Lisa Madigan – Attorney General

Illinois NOW also stood by Blair Hull when information came out about domestic violence in his divorce dispute.

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Since Barack is a White Sox Fan

ArchPundit January 10, 2008 4 Comments

He may not understand the concept of “Throw it back!”

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Oops…

ArchPundit January 10, 2008 4 Comments

Clyburn in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, said he was rethinking his neutral stance in his state’s presidential primary out of disappointment at comments by Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton that he saw as diminishing the historic role of civil rights activists.

Mr. Clyburn, a veteran of the civil rights movement and a power in state Democratic politics, put himself on the sidelines more than a year ago to help secure an early primary for South Carolina, saying he wanted to encourage all candidates to take part. But he said recent remarks by the Clintons that he saw as distorting civil rights history could change his mind.

“We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,” said Mr. Clyburn, who was shaped by his searing experiences as a youth in the segregated South and his own activism in those days. “It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone’s motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those. That bothered me a great deal.”

I haven’t been listening to black talk radio–has the Clinton line been getting much play?

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The Way To Analyze the Polling

ArchPundit January 10, 2008 No Comments

Is to analyze the polling—Charles Franklin has long called for more transparency in polling and uses this is an excellent example of where it could be positive.

If the polls were systematically flawed methodologically, then we’d expect similar errors with both parties. Almost all the pollsters did simultaneous Democratic and Republican polls, with the same interviewers using the same questions with the only difference being screening for which primary a voter would participate in. So if the turnout model was bad for the Democrats, why wasn’t it also bad for the Republicans? If the demographics were “off” for the Dems, why not for the Reps?

This is the best reason to think that the failure of polling in New Hampshire was tied to swiftly changing politics rather than to failures of methodology. However, we can’t know until much more analysis is done, and more data about the polls themselves become available.

A good starting point would be for each New Hampshire pollster to release their demographic and cross tab data. This would allow sample composition to be compared and for voter preferences within demographic groups to be compared. Another valuable bit of information would be voter preference by day of interview.

In 1948 the polling industry suffered its worst failure when confidently predicting Truman’s defeat. In the wake of that polling disaster, the profession responded positively by appointing a review committee which produced a book-length report on what went wrong, how it could have been avoided and what “best practices” should be adopted. The polling profession was much the better for that examination and report.

I won’t contradict Charles because he has forgotten more about public opinion than I’ve ever known, but one thing to keep in mind is that polls don’t necessarily fail when the results are different from the latest polling. If there is an intervening event between the final poll and the election, polling may have been right on the money, but an event caused public opinion to change. Charles says this is some sense above, but the notion that polling is wrong in this case is far from certain to me.
The problem is more how we interpret the polling. Polling is a snapshot in time and as such when the context changes, the underlying phenomenon is changing, not the earlier measure of it.

Whether this is exactly what happened in New Hampshire is rightfully an empirical question and the steps Charles is recommending are exactly the best way to address it. However, it isn’t just about addressing the methodology, but how people interpret polls in the first place.

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No Evidence of Racial Slippage

ArchPundit January 10, 2008 1 Comment

One thing that everyone is overlooking in the New Hampshire polls is that they were largely correct--No really:

Pollster.com is run by two academic pollsters with Charles Franklin creating estimates of the polling based on aggregating the different polls. Obama estimate 36.7% from Pollster.com Obama actual vote: 36% Edwards estimate: 18.4% Edwards actual vote: 17% There are several reasons to think racial slippage didn't happen in New Hampshire. That the polls nailed the two other major candidates should tell us that what happened wasn't strange in terms of the polling, but what happened after the polling was complete. We had a significant event after most of the polling was done with the Hillary moment that was covered on all the national media including the top three national newscasts on the networks.

There are rules of thumbs about how undecideds break and while those rules of thumbs were not accurate this time, there's a very good reason that may be the case--a flurry of coverage over Clinton that was unsympathetic, but at the same time created a sympathetic backlash.

On top of that, we are talking about a Northern State in a Democratic Primary where the effect is the least likely to be observed. And it is far from a universal effect with the opposite generally being observed in Illinois even during general elections. Obama and Moseley Braun have done better in primaries than the final polls demonstrate and I believe Jesse White has as well, but I don’t have the numbers handy.

Then again, the national media is still howling about the polling being so off by talking about the gap between Clinton and Obama when the support for Obama was dead on.

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