Sunday, September 2, 2012

Fooling with Numbers

++Sam Wang may be telling us to ignore the polls until the end of the months but he is busy cleaning up the brush on the issues of polling bias, undecideds, bounces and Citizens United.

++He suggests that with such intense voter polarization, the undecided is a whopping 2%.

++He also laments the Pew finding that the response rate on polling is now only 9%, a dramatic fall-off from 2009.

++He believes the Romney bounce when everything is said and done will be about 1%. 

++He believes the Citizens United case will have much more effect on congressional races where money has real leverage.

++While concerned about Voter ID laws for the future participation of citizens in a democracy, he thinks they will play a marginal role in this year's presidential election because states like Pennsylvania are out of play anyway.

++Sam Wang also dealt with the issue of Rasmussen type polling, the complaint that a pollster is perpetually "biased". Nate Silver and he deal with aggregate polling so this eliminates political leans.

++Over at Crystal Ball, Larry Sabato reminds everyone that McCain's convention bounce didn't come until 4 days afterwards propelling him to his highest level during the campaign. Sabato remarks how rare it is for party conventions to be back to back and this might mute a traditional bounce.

++In Iowa yesterday, President Obama managed to keep the Clint Eastwood image alive by saying what a big fan he is of Clint Eastwood.

++And the Sunday news shows were as blah as usual. David Axelrod managed to hit home some points on how horrible the GOP Convention was. Unfortunately, that assessment is true no matter what your politics are. The whole Convention stepped on Romney's message--whatever that is--and was a mishmash of 2016 contenders with terrible stagecraft which raises questions about the basic competence of the Romney team.

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