It's all about John McCain

nobody@vox.com(Oleg Dulin) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:30:31 +0000

Kevin Smith, a spokesman for House Republican Leader John Boehner, said the speed with which Dodd's plan was put together was designed ``to deny Senator McCain a role in trying to craft a bipartisan solution.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087

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FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right: Estimating the Cellphone Effect: 2.8 Points

nobody@vox.com(eliz. s.) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:47:12 +0000

Mark Blumenthal has a rundown of the pollsters that are including cellphone numbers in their samples. Apparently, Pew, Gallup, USA Today/Gallup (which I consider a separate survey), CBS/NYT and Time/SRBI have been polling cellphones all year. NBC/WSJ, ABC/Washington Post and the AP/GfK poll have also recently initiated the practice. So too does the Field Poll in California, PPIC, also based in California, and Ann Selzer. There may be some others too but those are the ones that I am aware of. (EDIT: A representative of the PPIC survey in California has kindly written to let me know that, while they use a cellphone supplement for some of their public policy surveys, they have not done so thus far this year for most of their Presidential trial heats (they did do so in July). The remainder of this article has been corrected accordingly.Let's look at the house effects for these polls -- that is, how much the polls have tended to lean toward one candidate or another. These are fairly straightforward to calculate, via the process described here. Essentially, we take the average result from the poll and compare it to other polls of that state (treating the US as a 'state') after adjusting the result based on the national trendline.Since ABC, NBC/WSJ and AP/GfK all just recently began using cellphones, we will ignore their data for now. We will also throw out the data from three Internet-based pollsters, Zogby Interactive, Economist/YouGov, and Harris Interactive. This leaves us with a control group of 36 37 pollsters that have conducted at least three general election polls this year, either at the state or national level.Pollster n Lean========= ====Selzer 5 D +7.8CBS/NYT 14 D +3.7Pew 7 D +3.4Field Poll 4 D +2.8Time/SRBI 3 D +2.4USA Today/Gallup 11 D +0.4Gallup 184 R +0.6PPIC 4 R +1.3AVERAGE D +2.8 +2.3CONTROL GROUP (37 Pollsters) D +0.0 +0.1Six of the seven eight cellphone-friendly pollsters have had a Democratic (Obama) lean, and in several cases it has been substantial. On average, they had a house effect of Obama +2.8 +2.3. By comparison, the control group had essentially zero house effect a house effect of Obama +0.1 (**), so this would imply that including a cellphone sample improves Obama's numbers by 2.8 points. (Or, framed more properly, failing to include cellphones hurts Obama's numbers by approximately 2 2-3 points).The difference is statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gallup, Pew and ABC/WaPo have each found a cellphone effect of between 1-3 points when they have conducted experiments involving polling with and without a cellphone supplement.A difference of 2-3 points may not be a big deal in certain survey applications such as market research, but in polling a tight presidential race it makes a big difference. If I re-run today's numbers but add 2.2 points to Obama's margin in each non-cellphone poll, his win percentage shoots up from 71.5 percent to 78.5 percent, and he goes from 303.1 electoral votes to 318.5 (EDIT: I have not changed this part of the analysis in reflection of the new numbers, as it should still get the general point across). The difference would be more pronounced still if Obama hadn't already moved ahead of McCain by a decent margin on our projections.So this is my plea to pollsters: let's get it right. Perhaps the cellphone effect will prove to be a mirage after all, but that's something for the data to determine on its own, rather than the pollster.(**) Keen observers will wonder why the average house effect is greater than zero. This is because in determining our house effect coefficients, we weight based on how many polls each pollster has conducted. A couple of pollsters that account for a large proportion of our data, like Rasmussen and ARG, have had slight (very slight, but enough to skew the numbers) GOP leans.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/estimating-cellphone-effect-22-points.html

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Palin’s Gov’t Fix To Prevent Social Ills, Mayor's Rationale Sounds More Obama Than Conservative

nobody@vox.com(Oleg Dulin) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:19:19 +0000

But in fact, the way the hockey rink was built was by raising taxes. Palin funded the project by pushing a special referendum that raised the sales tax by 25 percent. City hall records show the referendum was passed by twenty votes.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/08/cbsnews_investigates/main4427776.shtml

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Politics And American Pie

nobody@vox.com(politichick) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 13:32:35 +0000

Statistics say the 50% of Americans won’t vote come November. With this being one of the most crucial elections in recent memory, I find that percentage staggering. What possible reason could someone find for not voting? “My dog ate my permission slip?” The Onion takes a more slanted view on not taking a more active role in the electoral process.

http://www.politicsandamericanpie.com/

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Talk Show America

nobody@vox.com(TalkShowAmerica) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:19:04 +0000

Political conservative news and commentary

http://talkshowamerica.com/

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CPORTER2: Home: Zazzle.com Gallery

nobody@vox.com(Chantelle) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:16:37 +0000

Great gifts for folks of all ages. T-shirts, mugs, shoes, and gifts galore.

http://www.zazzle.com/cporter2

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Vox’s links tagged elections

It's all about John McCain

FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right: Estimating the Cellphone Effect: 2.8 Points

Palin’s Gov’t Fix To Prevent Social Ills, Mayor's Rationale Sounds More Obama Than Conservative

Politics And American Pie

Talk Show America

CPORTER2: Home: Zazzle.com Gallery