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Batman Dark Knight action figure
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This Batman action figure has moving arms and legs with bending knees, as well as a black fabric cape.
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tedster - 5:41 am on Jun 29, 2012 (gmt 0)
while we think your site is spam (panda update hits)
Please be clear about this. It's Penguin that is about SEO tricks (spam). Panda is described identifying and demoting weak or shallow content - not spam.
In fact, it was clearly stated that this kind of content falls in between the spam team's responsibility and the regular team. Addressing it forces them to work with each other more closely than they did before.

subset: commoncrawl


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Senate Polling Weekly Update, 7/7
There's been very little in the way of Senate polling this week (Presidential polling, as you may have noticed, also slowed to a crawl over the weekend). But the handful of exceptions are as follows:
- In Louisiana, a Southern Media & Opinion Research poll shows Mary Landrieu's lead tightening to 6 points, down from 12 points in early April. We still think the fundamentals of this race look fairly good for Landrieu: she remains relatively popular, and is running against a largely undefined opponent with marginal fundraising numbers.
- Public Policy Polling has polled North Carolina again, and shows Elizabeth Dole expanding her lead to 14 points, up from 8 points last month. It looks like Kay Hagan might have gotten a bit of a bounce surrounding her primary victory which is now receding, and the Democrats are in danger of seeing this one downgraded to the Kansas/Idaho tier of pickup opportunities.
- Rhode Island has been polled for the first time, with Rasmussen showing incumbent Jack Reed with a huge 72-20 over Bob Tingle, who is a Pit Boss at Foxwoods Casino. Tingle would probably be a pretty fun guy to get a beer with, but this race will not be competitive.
And that's pretty much it. There are also Rasmussen numbers out in states like Massachusetts, Alabama and Georgia, but nothing that would lead us to change our characterization of those races as being non-competitive.
There are, however, a couple of small methodological refinements. Per the rule that we instituted on the Presidential side of things last week, the most recent poll of a state is now guaranteed a minimum weighting of 0.25. This brings a November Idaho poll into play. There was also an internal Idaho poll released last week by Democratic candidate Larry LaRocco that showed very similar numbers, but we do not include it because it violates our ban on internal polls.
Speaking of which, I have delisted the three Public Opinion Strategies that were included before, which had been conducted on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Our rule will be to exclude any polls conducted on behalf of (i) candidates for office, or (ii) registered Political Action Committees (which things like the DNC and USCC are, but something like Daily Kos isn't) unless they are conducted with a bipartisan partner or the organization has a long and demonstrable history of reporting all its polling to the public record.
Finally, a state's partisan ID index (based on 2004 exit polling) is now showing up as statistically significant and has been added to the regression model.
Overall, we now project the Democrats to hold 55.5 seats after the election (not counting Sanders and Lieberman), down slightly from 55.7 last week.
The Virtue of Vetting
I recently had a friend who applied for a job -- unlike many jobs these days, the materials had to be submitted by snail mail. This was a job in the design industry meaning that a portfolio is required, making the process relatively cumbersome.
To set up a hurdle where you require some minimum level of seriousness such that people need to get up off their lazy asses and go to Kinko's ... you'd think this would not be too much to ask of someone applying for a very good job in a down economy. But a few days later, the company mentioned that the application deadline had been extended by two weeks.
I'll bet that they get a better hire as a result, though. If you skip directly to the interview process after some loose scan of resumes, the excitement of the moment can take over, and it almost becomes a matter of luck as to who catches you in the right mood on the right day.
Where I'm going with this is that the purpose of making it be known that you'll have an onerous vetting process is not necessarily to prevent another Thomas Eagleton; many of these candidates have been exceptionally well vetted, including Webb, who survived one of the nastiest and most expensive Senate campaigns of the last cycle. Rather, it's to prevent another John Edwards, whose lukewarmness toward the ticket was unhelpful to John Kerry's chances. You want to make a candidate jump through hoops for you now, because that's what they're going to need to do for you for four months on the campaign trail and then four years in the White House. Jim Webb ain't that kind of guy, apparently, which should surprise absolutely nobody who knows anything about him -- but better to discover that a moment too soon than a moment too late.
Webb Out; Who's Up? [UPDATED]
Virginia Sen. Jim Webb just issued a statement from his Senate office saying that -- "[u]nder no circumstances" -- does he want to be considered as Obama's veep. "Last week I communicated to Sen. Obama and his presidential campaign my firm intention to remain in the United States Senate, where I believe I am best equipped to serve the people of Virginia and this country. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for vice president.But it's interesting to see whose stock is trading upward at Intrade as a result of Jim Webb's Sherman Statement today. These people have gained ground:
Bayh +2.0
Schweitzer +1.9
Reid +1.9
Warner +1.7
Hagel +1.7
Biden +1.3
Kaine +1.3
Edwards +1.0
Sebelius +0.6
Clinton +0.5
...about an even mix of Moderate White Dude and Foreign Policy Tough Dude, with a few Virginia Is For Lovers candidates thrown in. Webb crossed over all three constituencies, which is why he seemed like such an obvious name for the short list.And yes, that's Harry Reid, which ought to put to bed any notion about the efficiency of betting markets. Maybe some overseas punters heard some buzz about Jack Reed and got the two confused? I cannot explain this one away.
The overall favorites for the Democrats' VP slot according to Intrade, translated loosely to Vegas-style odds, are as follows:
Clinton 9-2
Sebelius 9-1
Bayh 10-1
Hagel 10-1
Rendell 12-1
Richardson 12-1
Biden 12-1
McCaskill 15-1
Edwards 15-1
Kaine 15-1
Reed (RI) 20-1
Schweitzer 20-1
Clark 20-1
Gephardt 20-1
Gore 20-1
Nunn 20-1
Bloomberg 25-1
Webb 30-1
Zinni 30-1
Warner 35-1
Reid (NV) 50-1
Jones 60-1
Wexler 80-1
Nelson 100-1
Napolitano 100-1
Daschle 100-1
Easley 100-1
Field 40-1
Has a VP field ever been so completely wide open? And I don't have too many betting tips for you, but in general find it easier to identify people who I'd want to short (Gore, Hagel) than long (Bill Nelson is intriguing at those odds, and Tim Kaine probably is too).Update: You know who else I might long? Evan Bayh. Bayh would certainly not be my first choice, but that's not what matters here. I'm trying to think about this from the standpoint of the Obama campaign's paradigm, and in general the Obama campaign has tended to be very risk-averse. Bayh is polished, if not overly articulate; he's a brand name, but not one that will overshadow the nominee, and he would be acceptable to most moderates as well as most ex-Clinton supporters. There's a bit of an always-a-bridesmaid concern about Bayh that can become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy -- if he wasn't good enough for Bill Clinton, Al Gore or John Kerry, what makes him good enough now? -- but then again, Indiana has never before been a swing state, nor has the Midwest in general been so important.
State Similarity Scores
What factors go into the similarity score? There are quite a few, which are weighted in rough proportion to their importance in determining the Kerry-Bush result in 2004 and the McCain-Obama polling this year according to an analysis of variance.
Specifically, those variables are: (1) Partisan ID index; (2) Likert liberal-conservative score; (3) Average years of completed schooling per adult; (4) Per Capita Income; (5) 18-29 year old population; (6) senior population; (7) African-American population; (8) Hispanic population; (9) percentage of white evangelicals; (10) Catholic population; (11) Mormon/LDS population; (12) percentage of military veterans; (13) percentage of same-sex partner households; (14) gun ownership rate; (15) percentage of adults identifying ancestry as 'American'; (16) percentage suburban; (17) percentage of state jobs in manufacturing sector; (18) current unemployment rate, and (19) latitude and longitude (e.g. geographic distance).
The highest score theoretically achievable is 100, for two states that are exactly identical along each of these 19 dimensions. The highest score in practice is 71 between North and South Carolina. A score of 0 represents states that are as dissimilar as similar, and negative scores are both possible and quite common (though I list them as zeroes in the table above).
Note that some states really aren't like any other states at all, including big ones like Florida and Texas and small ones like Alaska, Utah, and New Mexico. Then there are other states that are sort of within the main sequence but need to pull from different regions -- like Indiana, whose three most similar states span the Midwest (Ohio), South (North Carolina) and the Prairies (Kansas).
And yes, this does have implications for our model, which will become clear at some point soon.
Nuclear Deterrence?
This is not a terrifically effective spot. It makes McCain's platform seem haphazard and contradictory. (Conservation. Drill! Drill! Drill! Alternative Fuels. Oil! Oil! Oil!).
Nevertheless, I do tend to agree with Larry Kudlow that the offshore drilling debate could be a wedge issue if framed effectively. Kudlow's framing, which rah-rahs the profit motive and calls for deregulation, is precisely 180 degrees removed from where the Republicans want to go with this one. But by couching their argument in more populist, Hillary Clintonesque tones, they might be able to portray Obama as being overvague and out of touch.
To that end, it is interesting that both this commercial and Kudlow's column call Obama anti-nuclear. Obama's position on nuclear power has been a little amorphous, but it is not clear that he is anti-nuclear. On the contrary, he took some flack from progressives on the nuclear power issue during the primaries, and his position -- sometimes hedged more than others -- has generally been that nuclear power is "worth considering".
It seems to me, then, that the Republicans are trying to preempt Obama from getting behind nuclear power more seriously. The problem with offshore drilling -- apart from its environmental impacts -- is that it will likely take at least 20 years before it adds materially to our refinement capacity. By contrast, although it depends significantly on reactor design, a nuclear power facility could come online in perhaps half that time. So nuclear power is a pretty interesting trump card to the offshore drilling issue: greener, faster, and for the first time in a while, supported by pluralities or majorities of the public.
The Republicans seem interested in taking the nuclear card off the table. That does not necessarily mean that Obama should play it. But I do think he'll need a little more substance on this issue, be it by embracing nuclear power, engineering some sort of targeted transportation tax credit that helps lower-income families with long commutes to work but also incentivizes mass transit, embracing RFK Jr.'s plan, or simply deciding that this will be the issue where he takes a tough love stance and uses that as a branding parlay. The Republicans will eventually put together a better commercial on the issue, and Obama will need some kind of reply.
Today's Polls, 7/5
I can't scrutinize the internals on the InsiderAdvantage poll because they haven't provided them. Nor for that matter did Rasmussen (which showed McCain with a 10-point lead) break its results down by race. But here is a little bit of a hint -- Rasmussen had Obama trailing 65-32 among Georgians who attend church weekly, and since African-Americans are quite churchgoing in the South, that must mean that he's getting absolutely clobbered with the white persons in this category. There are probably fewer true swing voters in Georgia than in almost any other state, and while Obama has a floor on his numbers that is better than the Democrats have done recently, he probably also has a ceiling.
The Obama campaign's argument, of course, is that it doesn't need swing voters: it just needs to turn out the black vote. But it's not clear that there's a ton of room for improvement. In 2004, African-Americans made up 27.2 percent of Georgia's voting-age citizen population, versus 27.4 percent of its registered voters, and 27.6 percent of people who actually voted (all this data is taken from the US Census Bureau -- exit polling showed a slightly lower share of African-Americans voting in Georgia, about 25 percent).
Georgia is unusual for having not only a substantial black population, but also an especially well-educated and upwardly-mobile black population, and it is entirely plausible that African-Americans voters will turn out in greater proportion than their white counterparts. But I don't see Obama improving his standing with white evangelicals enough to win. Both foreign policy conservatives and fiscal conservatives can probably find enough to like about Obama to consider voting for him. But for religious conservatives, who are voting on a series of issues on which less nuance is possible, I'm not sure that's the case. Sure, you can be for publicly-financed faith-based initiatives and also for gay marriage remaining legal in California, but I don't think the two things cancel out in the same way that you can moderate your position on NAFTA or be hawkish on some elements of national security.
The 50-state Strategy, as well as the nation's changing demographics and the problems in Iraq and with the economy, are slowly beginning to neutralize these issues even in the Deep South, which is why Obama might lose Georgia by 6 or 8 or 10 points rather than John Kerry's 16. Even so, Southern religious conservatives remain the voters that Republicans are most used to reaching out to -- including McCain's chief strategist, who used to do work with the Jesse Helms campaign. Change is inevitable, but it's going to hit Virginia before it hits the Carolinas, and the Carolinas before it hits Georgia.
Why are New Jersey Politicians Always Rich? An Analysis of TV Markets.
There is, however, one peculiarity to advertising for political campaigns, which is that states differ in their electoral importance, and that some fraction of Americans -- I would guess about 10 percent -- have their TV originate from a different state. To reach Northern New Jersey, for instance, you'd have to run advertisements in New York, wasting money on viewers whose votes will make no difference in the electoral math. It's these bleeds and overlaps in the nation's 210 Designated Market Areas that account for most of the difference in the de facto cost of targeting voters in particular states.
With that in mind, let's review the advertising situation in the 22 most important states as according to our tipping point ratings. I have assigned each state an 'Efficiency Rating' from 0 to 10 based on the forgivingness of its particular geography. You can also view maps of each state's media markets by clicking on that state's name.
1. Ohio. A great state to advertise in. Ohio's markets generally bleed into other states rather than the other way around, and the bleeding isn't much. Also, the number of markets is a plus: there are 12 different ones covering every corner of the state, making it easier to target swing voters. Efficiency Rating: 9.
2. Michigan. Another pretty clean state; about 98 percent of Michiganders get their TV from markets originating within the state. The biggest logistical annoyance is that the Detroit market covers both the very poor inner city, and the very wealthy collar suburbs; you'll generally be more interested in reaching the former than the latter, but will have to pay to do both. But advertising time in Detroit is quite cheap, rendering this somewhat moot. Efficiency Rating: 8.
3. Pennsylvania. The problematic market is Philadelphia, which also covers about half of New Jersey's geography and most of Delaware's. There are also six counties on the periphery of the map that get their TV from a neighboring state. Efficiency Rating: 6.
4. Colorado. Extremely straightforward, although the Denver market reaches substantial portions of Wyoming and Nebraska. Efficiency Rating: 9.
5. Virginia. Total mess. To reach Northern Virginia, you absolutely have to buy up Washington DC (only ABC has a subregional station in Virginia proper). But then you're also paying to reach eyeballs in Maryland and in DC itself, which you have no interest in whatsoever. Washington DC is the most problematic market in the country in this sense, since Maryland and Virginia will rarely be competitive in the same election. Also, the panhandle area in Western Virginia gets its TV from Tennessee, but TV is so cheap there that that isn't really a problem. Efficiency Rating: 3.
6. Iowa. Some overlaps, but not bad. The main issue is the Council Bluffs region in the southwest corner of the state, which gets its TV from Omaha. However, since the electoral vote in Omaha's congressional district is up for grabs this year, that is not really a problem at all. Efficiency Rating: 8.
7. Wisconsin. Another very good state -- importantly, the Chicago market does not bleed into Wisconsin at all. You do lose a few counties to Minneapolis and Duluth, but they are not very populous. Efficiency Rating: 9.
8. Indiana. About 20-25 percent of the state gets its TV from Chicago. It's hard to imagine that purchase being worth it, and I certainly do not recall seeing any Obama or Clinton ads here in Chicago in the run-up to the primaries (although I also do not watch a lot of local TV). Cincinnati and Louisville also present problems in the Southern portion of the state, although since you'll be advertising in Cincinnati anyway, the latter isn't such a issue. Efficiency Rating: 4.
9. New Mexico. Most of it is just one huge market covering Albuquerque and Santa Fe. A handful of counties are covered by Texas, but this is not a major problem. Efficiency Rating: 8.
10. Florida. Pretty favorable terrain, although TV time tends to be quite expensive in Florida. The only real challenge from a geographical standpoint is that Pensacola overlaps with Mobile, AL. Efficiency Rating: 8.
11. Oregon. Extremely straightforward, and smaller cities like Bend and Eugene have their own markets, making targeting easier. You do lose one county apiece to Boise, ID and Spokane, WA, but that's easy enough to live with either way. Efficiency Rating: 9.
12. New Jersey. Why does it seem like politicians from New Jersey -- like Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg -- are always rich? Because it's completely impossible to advertise in New Jersey cheaply. The top half of the state is covered by New York and the bottom half by Philadelphia. That's it -- there are no markets that are native to the state, and both New York and Philly are horrifically expensive. For this reason, I would not expect the McCain campaign to make any sort of cute play for New Jersey. Efficiency Rating: 0.
13. Missouri. All but two counties get their TV from inside Missouri, but the St. Louis market bleeds quite a bit into southern Illinois, and naturally Kansas City bleeds into Kansas. Efficiency Rating: 7.
14. New Hampshire. Looks worse than it is. Technically speaking, 84 percent of New Hampshire's population is covered by the Boston market, and the rest by Maine or Vermont. But there is a bit of a market-within-a-market, as both ABC and NBC have New Hampshire-based affiliates, whose very existence might owe itself to New Hampshire's importance in presidential politics. Efficiency Rating: 4.
15. Nevada. Almost perfect. Three eastern counties get their TV from Salt Lake City, but nobody lives out there. Efficiency Rating: 9.
16. Minnesota. Only minor problems; parts of the state get their TV from North Dakota, South Dakota or Wisconsin, whereas the Minneapolis market bleeds into Wisconsin. However, since both Wisconsin and North Dakota should also be in play this year, you don't mind reaching those eyeballs. Efficiency Rating: 8.
17. North Carolina. The western quarter of the state shares its TV with South Carolina, Tennessee or Georgia, and much of the Inner Banks from Virginia. But these are manageable concerns. Efficiency Rating: 7.
18. North Dakota. Couldn't be much simpler, as the state's population is about evenly divided between the Bismarck and Fargo markets. Fargo overlaps a bit into Minnesota and Bismarck into Montana, which are the only things preventing a perfect score. Efficiency Rating: 9.
19. Montana. Not only is TV time very cheap out here, but you can be picky and choosy, with six distinct markets originating in Montana, and just a few tiny overlaps to worry about. Efficiency Rating: 9.
20. Delaware. It's a little odd that Delaware is showing up on the swing state list, but it hasn't been polled in forever, producing more uncertainty around our estimate. But the fact is that if the campaigns are advertising in Philadelphia, they are covering two of Delaware's three counties anyway. The third Delaware county, Sussex, gets its TV from Maryland. Efficiency Rating: 2.
21.Washington. Very simple. Five counties are covered by Portland, Oregon, but if you're advertising in Washington, you're probably advertising in Oregon anyway. Efficiency Rating: 9.
22. Alaska. Finally, our first perfect score. Because of its geographic isolation, there is no overlap between markets in Alaska and those in any other state. Efficiency Rating: 10.
So to sum up, the big problem is in New Jersey, where the lack of native TV markets completely alter the political dynamics of the state. Other challenges are presented by Indiana, Virginia, and New Hampshire. Oh, and Delaware, if you ever felt the need to target it.
No Fireworks, But A Few Small Changes
As I hinted yesterday, the amount of variance in each simulation run now differs from state to state. There are actually two different components to this. The first is how responsive a state is to national trends. We had already figured out a way how to estimate this. However, we now apply it specifically to each simulation. For example, let's say that New Hampshire polls move 120 percent as much as national polls. If in simulation #3,268, Obama's national trend has moved downward by 5 points, New Hampshire's polls will move 120 percent that much, or down 6 points. If in simulation #7,008, Obama's national trend has moved upward by 10 points, New Hampshire's polls will move up by12 points. It's as simple (or as complicated) as that.
Separately, however, there is also a question of how much variation there is within a given state's polling, period. You could have a state where the polls are relatively uncorrelated with national trends, but where the polls nevertheless seem to fluctuate wildly, marching somewhat to their own drummer. The way we account for this type of variance is to take the standard deviation across all polls conducted in a state after having stripped out the national trendline. Then, we run our demographic regression against these standard deviations to see whether anything systematic seems to be driving the amount of volatility in a given state's polling. It turns out that there are a few such things: variance tends to be lower in states with large numbers of African-Americans, for instance, but higher in states with large numbers of elderly voters.
The most important implication of this is that the polls are liable to be more stubborn in the Deep South (excluding Florida) than they are elsewhere in the country. So even though Obama has whittled down McCain's lead to the single digits in states like Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, those are going to be tough points for him to make up. On the other hand, the polls have been quite volatile in Appalachia, where you have a lot of conflicted, downscale voters who are not particularly fond of either of these candidates. So, even though we show McCain with the same 8-point lead in both Georgia and West Virginia, our model gives him a 91 percent chance of hanging on to win Georgia, but just a 75 percent chance of winning West Virginia.
You will notice, by the way, that this second adjustment doesn't distinguish between cases where the polls vary a lot over time, and cases where they vary a lot at the *same* time (as they do in Florida right now, for instance). That's perfectly okay, because both things increase our degree of uncertainty about exactly what's going to happen in November.
Lastly, I have swapped out a couple of variables in the 538 regression analysis. The 'partisan' variable has been replaced by a liberal-conservative Likert scale for each state drawn from 2004 exit polling. This seems to provide slightly more unique information to the model than the partisan ID index, particularly as partisan identification tends to change more quickly over time than one's political philosophy. I have also added a variable for Hillary Clinton's performance in the primaries (the results from caucus states are adjusted). Yes, all else being equal, Obama does worse where Hillary had done better.
p.s. Happy 232nd birthday, America!
Fall Edwards-Rove Debates Mean No Edwards VP?
Let's agree up front that if Edwards were offered the #2 slot and took it, the notion of canceling the event with Rove would not be any big deal. Telling the university and obviously interested media that he regretfully needs to focus on VP stuff, and perhaps finding a stand-in to keep the event(s) viable, is an excuse everyone would obviously accept. And it seems highly unlikely Obama would want Rove getting clean shots at his VP, so the cancellation of said debate(s) would seem automatic.
Still, Republicans would carpet the airwaves for a day, asking, "What's John Edwards afraid of? Just because he's the VP candidate he can't still debate Karl Rove? Why are Obama and Edwards afraid? (Blah blah blah "Democrat Party" national security here)." Why give away cheap, freebie points like this? Why even waste the energy having surrogates point out how silly it is and even one day of controlling the message?
If you're standing in John Edwards' shoes, and let's say you want the #2 offer, is accepting this kind of commitment five weeks before the general election more or less an indication that you're clearing your schedule for the fall? It can be argued that if the unwritten rules require you to appear publicly disinterested in the post, this commitment signals excellent blasé-itude.
But what to make of the snippet that this may not be an individual event, but part of a series?
As surrogates for the parties' standard bearers, the two also could square off more than once at other locations around the nation.Committing to a series of high-profile and sure to be much-discussed debates with Karl Rove is a great way to stay important in the Democratic Party; it's also a telegraphed sign that Edwards knows the answer to whether he'll be the pick."We're working on something like that for our Distinguished Speakers Series," said Bill Regan, UB's director of special events. "We're not really sure of the format yet. But we do think they are scheduled to do it at least once together before they come to UB."
Have a safe and happy 4th!
Return on Investment
'Tipping Point States' are those states that tip the outcome of the election from one candidate to the other. In each simulation run, the states are lined up from best to worst for each candidate. The states are marked off sequentially until the candidate reaches 270 electroal votes. The state responsible for putting the candidate over the top to 270 electoral votes is the tipping point state for that simulation run.Naturally, Tipping Point States are usually going to be those associated with large electoral vote counts. It's much more likely that a state like Pennsylvania, which has 21 electoral votes, will make the difference between winning and losing the election than something like Montana, which has 3. The goal of the Tipping Point States metric is to balance which states are closest to the median of the electorate with the value of each state in the Electoral College -- and it generally comes up with pretty intuitive results.
However, it is not necessarily the case that the states with the highest Tipping Point number will represent the best return on investment for the candidate. While Pennsylvania is more likely to swing the election than Montana, it is also many times more expensive. Of course, a campaign will still want to invest more in Pennsylvania than it does in Montana in the aggregate. But which state is better on a dollar-per-dollar basis?
To get at this, what we can do is divide a state's Tipping Point percentage by its population (more specifically, it's eligible voter population). What this implicitly assumes is that the expense of competing in a state is proportional to its eligible voter population. Strictly speaking, this is not true, especially when it comes to television buys, where there are a lot of idiosyncrasies related to the geography of different TV markets (something I'll be writing more about in the near future). But it's a reasonably safe and neutral assumption for our purposes here.
This calculation produces a ratio, whose value is meaningless in the abstract, but which can be compared to the ratio in the country as a whole (in other words, we're taking the ratio of the ratios). The ratio figures, for instance, that a dollar spent in Pennsylvania is about 3.5 times more likely to influence the outcome of the election than one spent in the nation as a whole. This is what we call the "Return on Investment Index". Which states have the highest ROIs?
The top state is New Mexico, which produces an ROI almost 6 times higher than the nation at large. Why New Mexico? We project it to be very close to the median of the electorate. Right now, we are predicting a 2.7-point victory for Barack Obama in New Mexico, versus a 3.7-point victory in the national popular vote. Strictly speaking, the states that deserve the most attention are not those that are closest at any given moment, but rather those that are closest to the national average. If, say, Barack Obama has built a 12-point lead in August, you will probably start to see some weird things like Mississippi being a toss-up. But that doesn't mean the Obama campaign should at that point begin to invest heavily in Mississippi, because the only time the decision to invest in an individual state matters is when the election is close. If that hypothetical 12-point lead in August reverted back to a 1-point lead in October -- the only contingency that matters, it is very likely that Mississippi would no longer be one of the closer states. Likewise, even though Obama has a "safe" lead in Pennsylvania now, he cannot stop campaigning there (nor can McCain), because if the election tightens, Pennsylvania is liable to be within a couple of points.
The other small advantage in an investment in New Mexico is that small states have more electoral votes per eligible voter: New Mexico offers one electoral vote for every 274,000 eligible voters, whereas Pennsylvania offers one per 449,000.
Overall, the map suggests a slightly more defensive-minded resource allocation strategy than the one that the Obama campaign is employing currently. It doesn't look like states like Oregon and Iowa are going to be all that close now, for instance, but it also doesn't look like the election is going to be all that close; if the polls tighten, they may be vulnerable. At the same time, the calculation validates the Obama campaign's decision to put resources into states like North Dakota (which ranks 10th by this metric), Montana (14th) and Alaska (17th). By contrast, Florida ranks just 25th. It's running about 6 points behind Obama's national averages, and it's extremely expensive to compete in.
Flip-Flopping: As American as Apple Pie
Sixty-one percent of voters believe that McCain has changed his mind for political reasons; 37 percent do not. Fifty-nine percent of voters believe that Obama also shifts positions with the political winds; 38 percent do not.I'm moderately surprised that McCain's number is as high as it is, since the media has tended not to highlight his flip-flops. I'm not one of those people, by the way, that thinks the media is constantly biased in John McCain's direction. I think Obama gets more of the bad from the media, but also more of the good.
That's a change from 2004, according to Holland. "One of the reasons President Bush won reelection in 2004 was that only one-third of voters believed he would change his policy positions because of changing political dynamics. Most voters, on the other hand, believed that John Kerry was a flip-flopper."
But in any event, this underscores one of the points I had made before: John McCain is not seen as having the higher ground on the flip-flops issue in the same way that George W. Bush was. Nor is it clear that being labeled as a flip-flopper is necessarily some kind of death-knell for Obama (or McCain for that matter): both candidates were regarded favorably in this poll overall.
That's not to say there isn't any danger on this point to Barack Obama. I think his flip-flop numbers will go up some, and I think that might harm his approval numbers by a point or two. On balance, however, I tend to side with Noam Schieber: John Kerry's problem wasn't that people saw him as a flip-flopper, it's that people saw him as sort of a poseur. Likewise, with Mitt Romney, the flip-flop label really stuck in the primaries -- partly because Romney has changed his positioning on a lot of issues (there's a fascinating argument that Romney could have won the primaries if he'd run as a competent, moderate reformer) -- but also because people just don't like the guy.
Another difference with John Kerry is that he committed a gaffe that compounded his reputation for flip-flopping: namely, by saying the words "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it". A flip-flop is not a gaffe; it is the opposite of a gaffe, something done intentionally with an eye toward improving one's electoral standing. But Kerry's sloppy phrasing was a gaffe, and one of the more damaging utterances since "Read My Lips: No New Taxes".
Finally, Kerry's alleged flip-flop on the Iraq War was not toward the center, but toward the left. It's harder to criticize a candidate when they're taking on a position that is more in line with your own. Moreover, it appeared as though Kerry had been opportunistic twice over: first in voting for the war in the first place, when most of the mainline liberals in the Senate hadn't --and then by reversing his position later on.
Today's Polls, 7/3
It would, obviously, be premature to conclude that Obama is the favorite in Montana. Our regression model still thinks that the state ought to favor McCain by about 6 points, and will probably maintain that opinion until we see some other good results for Obama in (i) traditionally red states or (ii) states out West. Thus far, Obama's bounce had come mostly in blue and purple states east of the Mississippi, which is why this result is surprising.
But there are two things I think we can make of it. Firstly, it certainly validates Obama'a decision to campaign in North Dakota today. If you'll recall, Obama has already spent several days in Montana. Yes, that was nominally in connection with the state's Democratic primary, but at that point Obama was already 80 percent of the way to general election mode. While I don't think Obama is the odds-on favorite to win Montana, he very probably is the favorite if he runs a campaign there and McCain doesn't.
Secondly, we're seeing a bit of a cultural divide in Montana between cultural conservatives who have resided there for a long time, more libertarianish folks who have resided there for a long time, and new migrants who like the cheap land and beautiful scenery and bring more of a West Coast mentality to the state. In this poll, Obama leads by 27 points among Montanans who rarely or never attend church, and by 20 points among people who attend occasionally, but trails by roughly the same margins among people that go to church at least a few times a month.
A couple other polls out today too. In Rhode Island, which also hadn't been polled in a long time, Obama leads by 28 points in a Rhode Island College survey. This is not a surprise considering his recent results in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Speaking of which, there is yet another poll out in Connecticut, this one by Research 2000 on behalf of Daily Kos, which shows a 22-point lead for Obama (and suggests that Joe Lieberman would lose to Ned Lamont if that matchup were held today). Finally, a Strategies 360 poll in Washington has Obama ahead by 8.
n.b. Edited for maturity.
Speaking of North Dakota...
From among this group, the most annoying omission is North Dakota, which Obama is visiting today and may actually hope to compete in. For good measure, it's probably also worth polling South Dakota. As to the rest of these states -- it's fairly obvious in which direction they're going to go, although Maryland is very bourgie and would therefore be helpful for calibrating demographics, and it's surprising that Illinois, which has the fifth-largest population in the country, has been polled so little when California and New York have been polled so much.
For the time being, however, what we're going to do is establish a requirement that the highest-rated poll in each state will be assigned a minimum weight of 0.25, with any other polls in that state calibrated to that number. This is admittedly a little ad-hoc, but all it's doing is affecting the extent to which we weight the polling as opposed to the regression, which was an ad-hoc decision to begin with. It doesn't feel right to completely ignore polling that has taken place in a state when that polling is the best thing we have, even if that polling is a little (or a lot) out of date.
This precedent will also be applied to our Senate polling numbers, where it is somewhat more consequential, as some Senate races are polled quite rarely.
Energy Gap: Following Campaign News "Very Closely"
Courtesy of Pew, we learn that Democrats are following news about this presidential race much more closely than Republicans. Since the start of the campaign, Pew has tracked the percentage of partisans and independents following campaign news "very closely." As July 2008 opens, this index shows its widest gap since Pew began tracking: 52% (of Ds) to 28% (of Rs), a near double-up.
This is a fascinating chart. Three things jump out. One, the intensely competitive race began to climax interest-wise in late February with the onset of "Shame on You Barack Obama!" and Clinton's drama-laden Kitchen Sink Strategy.
Two, for all of the initial hit from Kitchen Sink Strategy drama, for all the Jeremiah Wright and Bittergate controversies that began in mid-March and which captured the media's collective breath, the "very close" public interest dropped sharply (10-15% across the board).
Three, the single most interesting time for Republican voters, to date, occurred not when John McCain won the nomination battle but when Obama and Clinton were going at it hot and heavy in the roughly ten-day runup to the March 4 primaries.
This final point has to be troubling and underscores the rationale behind the shakeup in the McCain camp yesterday. Whichever guilty party you want to blame it on – historic and dynamic Obama/Clinton campaigns, the "liberal media" obstinately refusing to report on McCain, lack of enthusiasm among Republicans for what their own party hath wrought, McCain himself for his gruntychucklish "that's not change you can believe in!" lime-green delivery – the fact that the window of McCain's own nomination win (mid-30s) was far less attention-capturing for Republicans than Obama v. Clinton for the March 4 runup (mid-40s) cannot be spun both positively and persuasively.
To win, McCain needs big Republican turnout to compete with the expected big Democratic turnout. He can't rely solely on antipathy toward Obama. He has to inspire his own base, and he can't do that if his base finds Democratic drama is 25-30% more riveting than him winning the nomination. For a game-changing move in the numbers, McCain needs game-changing messaging.
If there is any comfort for McCain partisans out of the chart, maybe it's that there's still room for Obama to be defined in the minds of less-attentive Republicans (and independents, who generally track with Republicans by this measure), particularly if the Republican base is not yet tuned into "campaign news." Underground smears, though not officially owned by the campaign, will certainly be a part of it. Just the other day an otherwise sweet girl solemnly informed me that Obama was secretly only "8.25% black." (Yes, that is one-12.1212121212th black, for those scoring at home.) But something tells me the dissatisfied public right track/wrong track mood is going to dwarf the traction of smears. If I were a Republican, I wouldn't feel comfortable betting on the smears.
Perhaps the most significant lesson Pew's chart teaches us is that Kitchen Sink attacks and "controversy" depress "very close" attention across the board. Counterintuitively for those who voraciously consume political news and have an emotional investment in the outcome, just when it seems like everything is becoming Urgent with a capital U because of some particular story, that very well may be when the aggregate of millions are tuning out.
Something You Probably Never Expected to See
But a quick sampling of what visiting a state like North Dakota can do for you: check out this editorial from the Fargo Forum, which endorsed George W. Bush in 2004:
[North Dakota] hasn't gone for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. It's been reliably "red" in presidential contests for 40 years. The suggestion that the state is taking on a shade of purple – it could go either way – seems ludicrous, especially to Republican faithful who can't conceive of North Dakotans tilting blue.
Well, that's what Republicans thought about New Hampshire, where Bill Clinton won twice, where Sen. John Kerry won in 2004 and where George W. Bush won by a thin single point in 2000 over Al Gore. The state's Democratic governor won re-election in 2006 with a whopping 74 percent of the vote.
Political winds change.
North Dakota is not New Hampshire, but at least one public poll and several "internal" polls suggest Obama has a chance to beat McCain in the Peace Garden State. The polls are intriguing because they are the first indications that North Dakota's 40-year Republican grip on presidential politics is not as strong as it once was. Not weak, mind you, but not a guarantee.
If Obama can challenge in a state that's gone for the Republican candidate since 1964, he can challenge anywhere.
State Republican Party officials tend to dismiss Obama's appeal to North Dakotans. But remember, these are the same people who endorse congressional candidates [...] who rarely get an anemic 30 percent of the vote against Democratic incumbents. These are the same people who grudgingly support Gov. John Hoeven only because he's wildly popular; some of them believe he's not "Republican enough." Their analysis of Obama's chances is partisan boilerplate.
No one should conclude that Obama has a lock on North Dakota. He certainly does not. But given the surprises in this year's presidential campaign, it would be unwise to assume McCain has the lock. That's the dynamic the Obama campaign senses, and that's one reason he's in North Dakota today.
They're almost daring McCain: Go ahead. Take us for granted. See what happens. Also, note the reference to internal polls showing a competitive race.
Steve Schmidt Gets It
"Suggests the McCain camp could be worried Obama has a shot in the historically Red state"The McCain camp could be worried that Obama has a shot? I could be worried that I'll have to pay taxes next year. Obama leads in all three recent public polls of the state (albeit by tiny margins). The state has a popular Democratic governor and a popular Democratic senator, and will soon have a second, because the best candidate the GOP could recruit against Mark Warner was Jim Gilmore, who was last seen sitting at the Tancredo/Brownback table at the Republican Debate afterparty. The good thing about a staff shake-up is that it can give you an excuse to swallow your pride and do some things that an underdog needs to do -- like playing defense in Virginia.
EDIT: After reading Jonathan Martin's description of the McCain campaign's shake-up, it's a bit harder to attribute this decision specifically to Schmidt, since the official line out of Crystral City is that Schmidt is responsible for communications and message control, while Rick Davis retains responsibility for strategy. That may be being said out of politeness to Davis, though. At the very least, there was a certain nonchalance in the way that Davis had been handling the campaign that this decision marks a reversal from.
Today's Polls, 7/2
There are two new polls out in Connecticut. Quinnipaic has Obama leading by 21 points, and Rasmussen has him ahead by 17. In the previous editions of those polls, Obama held leads of 17 and 3 points, respectively. The 3-pointer from Rasmussen might have been partially responsible for The McCain campaign's insistence that Connecticut was a toss-up, but it was the only poll conducted since the new year to have shown McCain within single digits of Obama in Connecticut.
Perhaps the more important news out of the state, however, is that Joe Liberman's approval ratings have fallen to 45 percent. A rating that low is relatively unprecedented for a Senator who was just re-elected 20 months ago and has not had a major scandal befall him. The piece of longer-term fallout from this is that we might now expect Liberman to try and make good with the Democrats if Barack Obama becomes President, figuring that he'll have four years to rehabilitate his reputation. Whether the Democrats would welcome him back is another question, but frankly I'd expect them to be so giddy if they won the Presidency that they might be in a generous mood. If John McCain becomes President, on the other hand, Lieberman had better hope that McCain has a 60 percent or better approval rating by the time they both come up for reelection in 2012.
In Massachusetts, Rasmussen has Barack Obama up by 20; that's up from 13 a month ago. And in New York, Rasmussen has his lead reaching 31 points -- it was a 19-point lead in late May.
So what's that little something these polls tell us? Whatever else the consequences of Obama's perceived shift to the center, it certainly hasn't cost him among the Democratic base.
A Small Change
Henceforth, we will be accounting for population growth, by using the current Voting Eligible Population estimates determined by George Mason University, and assuming that the same proportion of the eligible population will turn out in each state as did in 2004.
This is by no means the fanciest assumption we could make. There seems to be a pretty clear relationship, for instance, between how close a state is, and what turnout winds up being. We'll likely see much better turnout in Indiana this year, for example, since whether or not the state remains a dead-heat in the polling, it will certainly be much closer than it was in 2004.
But whereas those things are somewhat speculative, the basic demographic reality on the ground is not. States like Texas and Arizona have gained substantially in population since 2004, whereas Louisiana has lost it as a result of Hurricane Katrina. It is straightforward to account for these things.
As most of the population growth is concentrated in red states, this change winds up boosting John McCain's projected share of the popular vote by about four-tenths of a percentage point. However, the way the model is designed, it should not really change the projected electoral vote much at all. It does though reinforce the idea that John McCain is more likely to win the popular vote and lose the election rather than the other way around.
Irresponsible Journalism Alert
The culprit is this piece from the Washington Post, which alleges that Barack Obama received a "discount" on his 30-year home mortgage when he purchased his house in Hyde Park in 2005. Obama's mortgage rate was 5.625 percent; the Washington Post cites databases stating that the average rate on comparable properties was 5.93 percent.
So Obama's rate was 30 basis points better than the average. However, the amount of the loan and the nature of the property are not the only factors that determine a mortgage rate. Another major consideration is the creditworthiness of the borrower. According to current rate quotes from myFICO.com, a borrower with very good credit can expect a mortgage rate about 30 basis points better than someone with pretty good credit, and a borrower with excellent credit can expect about a 50 basis point discount.
Unless the Washington Post has access to Obama's FICO score -- and unless it has rented an apartment to him, it probably doesn't -- it is missing a pretty important piece of information on what Obama's mortgage rate ought to have been. What was Obama's FICO score? I don't know, but considering that...
* Obama had just gotten a $2.27 million book deal from Random House -- about $1 million more than the value of the mortgage.
* The Obamas each had exceptionally secure jobs that paid them a combined annual salary of about $500,000 per year.
* The Obamas had just sold their condo, on which they had realized a $137,500 profit.
* The Obamas were prominent public figures whose political futures depended in part on maintaining a reputation for responsibility and trustworthiness.
* The Obamas are known to be relatively thrifty and have no credit card debt but substantial savings.
...I would think that the Obamas were exceptionally creditworthy. So indeed, Obama received a "discount" -- the same discount that any borrower in his position would have received.
And, yes, I apologize for being a little off-subject (and running three media-bashing pieces in a row), but one of the things that ties together my work over here and my work at Baseball Prospectus is that I want the media to be smarter and more accountable when they cite statistical information, be it mortgage rates or polling numbers or batting averages. This article was neither smart nor accountable. It's the equivalent of noting that Alex Rodriguez has a batting average 40 points better than the league average, and using that to infer that the umpires were biased in his favor.
And Here I Thought John Kerry Lost...
From the National Council On Public Polls:
Certainly, if the gap between the two candidates is less than the sampling error margin, you should not say that one candidate is ahead of the other. You can say the race is "close," the race is "roughly even," or there is "little difference between the candidates." But it should not be called a "dead heat" unless the candidates are tied with the same percentages. And it certainly is not a "statistical tie" unless both candidates have the same exact percentages.From CNN:
And just as certainly, when the gap between the two candidates is equal to or more than twice the error margin – 6 percentage points in our example – and if there are only two candidates and no undecided voters, you can say with confidence that the poll says Candidate A is clearly leading Candidate B.
When the gap between the two candidates is more than the error margin but less than twice the error margin, you should say that Candidate A "is ahead," "has an advantage" or "holds an edge." The story should mention that there is a small possibility that Candidate B is ahead of Candidate A.
(CNN) — With the dust having finally settled after the prolonged Democratic presidential primary, a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll shows Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama locked in a statistical dead heat in the race for the White House.p.s. Yes, I was being being slightly facetious with the headline.With just over four months remaining until voters weigh in at the polls, the new survey out Tuesday indicates Obama holds a narrow 5-point advantage among registered voters nationwide over the Arizona senator, 50 percent to 45 percent. That represents little change from a similar poll one month ago, when the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee held a 46-43 percent edge over McCain.
CNN Polling Director Keating Holland notes Tuesday's survey confirms what a string of national polls released this month have shown: Obama holds a slight advantage over McCain, though not a big enough one to constitute a statistical lead.
"Every standard telephone poll taken in June has shown Obama ahead of McCain, with nearly all of them showing Obama's margin somewhere between three and six points," Holland said. "In most of them, that margin is not enough to give him a lead in a statistical sense, but it appears that June has been a good month for Obama."
The poll, conducted June 26-29, surveyed 906 registered voters and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Lanny Davis: Still a Hack After All These Years
Two quick points. Firstly, Davis is flat wrong that John Kerry held a national lead of the magnitude that Obama has now. Kerry flirted with a 2-point lead in the Real Clear Politics average at various points over the summer, but he never had the 6-point lead that Obama presently has in the RCP number. Al Gore, for that matter, trailed significantly for most of the summer (Bush led by an average of 5.3 points over 34 polls conducted in June and July 2000) before making a comeback after the Democrats held their convention.What is pretty clear, however, is that Sen. Obama leads Sen. McCain as of now nationally by a relatively small margin — and about the same margin that John Kerry led George Bush in June of 2004.
That is the good news.
The reason for continuing concern for the Obama campaign, with which I am sure they would agree, is that the Gallup tracking polls (and virtually every other mainstream national general election poll) continue to show that the two are still so close — even with all the bad news on the McCain side of the political equation, from Bush's below-30% approval ratings, to more than two-to-one wrong direction-right direction ratios, to the self-identified Democrats and leaners (who are at the highest gap over Republican identifiers in decades), fuel prices skyrocketing, and McCain himself conveying neither coherent themes nor projecting positively in the daily TV sound bites.
Yet, over the last six months, really ever since Iowa and up to the present, Sen. Obama has rarely, if ever, won more than 47% or 48% of the general electorate. That apparent ceiling, at least so far, should be worrisome to the Obama senior strategists and probably has been noted. It is reminiscent of both John Kerry and Al Gore's polling numbers vs. George Bush.
Secondly, is Davis really still at it with that whole Hillary Clinton racket? At the time she abandoned her nomination bid, Clinton held about a 3-point lead over McCain in the national averages, which was pretty much her high-water mark all year. That's still three points less than the lead that Obama holds now. And Obama's gains appear to have come precisely in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida that appeared to make up the core of Clinton's electoral argument (and also in Michigan, where Clinton never polled especially well), while he continues to poll strongly in places like Virginia and Colorado that Clinton might have had difficulty competing in. I would guess that, if you polled the 49 Democratic Senators on Capitol Hill, you wouldn't find more than a dozen who would want to replace Obama with Clinton on the ticket right now. But hell hath no fury like a surrogate scorned.
Today's Polls, 7/1
Nevertheless, I do tend to agree with Schaller's conclusion: the South (again excluding Florida and Virginia) is fairly likely to disappoint the Democrats again. We have a number of polls today to back that up.
Let's focus first on the results in Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina. Obama did get a bounce from Strategic Vision's last poll of Georgia, where he had previously trailed by 14 points. But he remains 8 points behind, and while Bob Barr is pulling 3 percent of the vote away from McCain in Georgia, it doesn't appear to me that Barr will have the resources to improve that number significantly. In North Carolina, Obama has been stuck at 3-5 points behind John McCain for quite a long time; the PPP poll today confirms that conclusion. And in Louisiana, Southern Media & Opinion Research has Obama 16 points behind, just as it did in April.
It seems to me that Obama's numbers in states like North Carolina and Georgia are liable to come in within a relatively narrow range. He'll do better than a Democrat like John Kerry did there, with substantial support from blacks (although Schaller is right that African-American turnout has not been particularly low), students, information-sector workers, and new migrants to the region -- as PPP notes, Obama is leading by 6 points among people who have moved to North Carolina from outside the state, but trails by 13 among people who were born and raised there. But where Obama is disliked in the South, he tends to be disliked a lot; his "very unfavorables" tend to be pretty high in the region. There just aren't that many swing voters in the South, and the Democrats are left watching the paint dry and the demographics gradually become more favorable to them in states like North Carolina and Georgia. North Carolina could be 2012's Virginia, and Georgia could be 2016's, but it's probably too soon for a non-Southern Democrat to be winning states in the interior of the region.
Florida, however, remains its own demographic entity, and there an Obama win is more plausible. PPP has him leading by 2 there -- a big move upward from their only previous poll of the state, which had Obama 11 points behind in March -- although Strategic Vision has him trailing by 6. The fact is that Florida remains something like Obama's Plan C or Plan D for winning the election, but any state with 27 electoral votes and where the polling appears to be this volatile will need to be closely monitored.
And once we move entirely outside of the South, Obama appears to be doing quite well. SurveyUSA now has him 20 points ahead in New York -- up from 10 points before -- and he's holding onto a 5-point advantage in both major national tracking polls. From everything we can tell, Obama's post-primary bounce has plateaued, but not peaked, though it does appear to be concentrated in particular regions, some of which (like the Rust Belt states of Ohio and Michigan) have been quite helpful to Obama, and others of which (like New York and California) are fairly superfluous.
Finally, one quick methodological aside: the Strategic Vision polls were "leaked" today by Political Wire with a limited number of details. I have filled in my guesstimates of survey dates and sample sizes based on their typical patterns, but we will correct those tomorrow as needed.
Senate Projections Methodology Primer, Part I
Building a regression model for the Senate is inherently more challenging than doing so for the Presidential race. Rather than 50 manifestations of one race between the same two candidates, we instead have 35 different races and 70 different candidates to deal with. At the same time, having a regression model is arguably a more important feature of doing Senate projections than Presidential projections, as the polling data tends to be much sparser -- many races, in fact, have not been polled at all.
Fortunately, I was able -- not before extensive trial-and-error -- to design a relatively simple four-variable model that does a pretty darn good job, with an r-squared in the high 70s. As a quick reminder, this regression model is not formally speaking trying to predict the outcome of the race. Rather, it's attempting to predict what the polling results "should" be in a given state. In this respect, it's the same as our general election regression model, but not the same as our model from the primaries, which was attempting to regress against actual voting results. The four variables are as follows:
1. Incumbency. Well, duh. This is a dummy variable that takes on the value 1 if the Democratic candidate is an incumbent, -1 if the Republican candidate is an incumbent, and 0 if there is no incumbent.
2. Incumbent Standardized Approval Rating. The good thing about approval ratings are that they are extremely abundant, including for races where there is little or no head-to-head polling. The bad thing about approval ratings is ... pretty much everything else. They are extremely dependent on question wording, and therefore vary significantly from source to source. So, we work from a standardized versionthat attempts to account for these house effects.
The first step in this process is simply to gather a Senator's approval scores. Actually, there are (at least) two familair forms of this question -- approve/disapprove and favorable/unfavorable. The dataset includes the most recent numbers for all organizations that have released approve/disapprove or favorable/unfavorable ratings for a Senator at some point in the calendar year 2008. This is typically somewhere between 2-4 ratings for each incumbent; in cases where no data has been released on the candidate in 2008, we take the most recent approval poll avaialble. . The scores are then standardized to a 0-to-100 scale by reallocating all neutral/undecided/don't know responses evenly between approve and disapprove. So, a Senator whose ratings are 50 percent approve, 40 percent disapprove, 10 percent neutral will have a standardized score of 55 (taking his all of his 'approves' and half of his neutrals).
The next step is the tricky part. The vast majority of our approval scores come from one of three organizations: Rasmussen Reports, SurveyUSA, and Research 2000; everything else can be lumped together into an "other" category. It turns out that if you look at cases where the same Senator is tested by more than one of these organizations, there are some very substantial systematic differences from agency to agency. In particular, SurveyUSA and Research 2000 tend to produce low approval scores, and Rasmussen Reports and "other" tend to produce high ones. The differences are not trivial: a Senator who polls at 50-50 in a Research 2000 favorability question can expect to poll at about a 57-43 in Rasmussen.
Nobody is right or wrong on this, by the way; the difference arises because Rasmussen's categories allow people on the fence to hedge with a 'Somewhat Favorable' rating, whereas Research 2000 provides only 'Favorable' and 'Very Favorable'. In any event, the process is to translate the approval scores to a neutral standard. So SurveyUS and Research 2000 scores are bumped up a bit, and Rasmussen and 'Other' scores bumped downward.
Standardized approval ratings for all incumbent senators running for re-election this year are as follows:
Pryor AR 74.9
Johnson SD 71.8
Cochran MS 70.3
Sessions AL 69.5
Rockefeller WV 68.7
Alexander TN 67.8
Enzi WY 67.4
Collins ME 63.8
Wicker MS 63.8
Landrieu LA 62.6
Baucus MT 61.9
Reed RI 61.9
Durbin IL 61.8
Roberts KS 60.7
Harkin IA 60.1
Graham SC 59.7
Cornyn TX 59.5
Biden DE 59.4
Dole NC 59.3
Levin MI 59.3
Kerry MA 59.0
McConnell KY 58.7
Chambliss GA 58.1
Smith OR 55.5
Inhofe OK 55.3
Coleman MN 52.2
Lautenberg NJ 49.8
Stevens AK 48.0
Sununu NH 47.0
Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, who took over for Craig Thomas last year, has never had an approval poll conducted on him, and so what we do is to assign him Roger Wicker's score of 63.8, as the two candidates are in somewhat analogous positions (noncontroversial but reliably conservative senator taking over a reliably conservative seat in mid-term). The standardized approval ratings are used for incumbents only. To make the math work properly, Republican incumbents are assigned the negative of whatever their score is, and Democrats the positive.3. Fundraising Share. Fundraising data, somewhat annoyingly, is only available on a quarterly basis for Senate candidates, and so we are using figured from the FEC's last filing on 3/31. On the other hand, we aren't trying to learn anything all that sophisticated from this metric. Basically, we want to know: (i) in a race against an incumbent, does a challenger have the resources to put up a serious fight, and (ii) in a race without an incumbent, who is winning the money race? The specific version of this metric I prefer is the percentage of funds raised by the Democrat out of the total funds raised by both candidates. This formulation produced more statistically significant results than any other variant.
4. Highest Elected Office Achieved. As recently as the first version of the Senate ratings that went up this morning, I had been attempting to use a variable for ideology, designed by building my own liberal-conservative scores for each candidate. The idea was to find out which candidate was closest to the median point of the electorate in his state, and assign him some bonus points as a result. This actually turned out to produce a statistically significant result -- understanding ideology is a very important part of understanding Senate races. But it introduced an awful lot of work and an awful lot of subjectivity into the model.
One reason why ideology is important is because not all candidates are particularly serious, and a good litmus test for whether a candidate is running a serious race is whether he is somewhere reasonably close to the middle of the state's electorate. Someone like Bob Tuke in Tennessee, for instance, looks like a serious enough candidate until you realize that he's trying to run as a strong progressive in a not-so-progressive state; Christopher Reed in Iowa does not strike one as a particularly serious candidate, but even less so when you see his platform. By contrast, someone like Ronnie Musgrove in Mississippi or Dick Zimmer in New Jersey have platforms that will be tolerated by most of their state. So one thing we are trying to do here is to filter out the wackos.
Another way to vet the candidates, however, is to see the highest elected office they have achieved; if you have been elected by some large number of constituents, odds are that you will have at least some feeling for the popular will in your state. The metric we use to evaluate this is the size of the population governed:
(i) A candidate whose highest elected office is governor gets credit for the entire population of his state;
(ii) A candidate whose highest elected office is senator gets credit for half the population of his state (since each state has two senators);
(iii) A candidate whose highest elected office is the U.S. House of Representatives gets credit for the population in his Congressional District;
(iv) A candidate whose highest elected office is mayor gets credit for the population of his city;
(v) A candidate whose highest elected office is in the state house or state senate gets credit for his state's population, divided by the number of legislators in that particular body. For example, since Iowa has 50 state senators, a candidate whose highest elected office was serving in that chamber would get credit for one-fiftieth of Iowa's population (about 59,000 persons).
This system tends to produce fairly intuitive results. The one square peg is John N. Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican whose only elected office is State Treasurer. We treat him as equal in influence to a typical member of the U.S. House and assign an average-sized Congressional District as his population base.
Then, just as we did with the fundraising numbers, we take the share of the total jurisdiction governed by the Democrat as a fraction of the Democrat + Republican total. So, for example, in New Jersey, Frank Lautenberg's highest elected office is Senate, where he is given credit for governing 4.2 million people (half of New Jersey's office), whereas Dick Zimmer's highest eleted office was as a member of the U.S. House in a Congressional District of about 650,000 persons. So Lautenberg's share of the highest-elected-office variable is
(4,200,000 / (4,200,000 + 650,000).
This works out to about .867; Lautenberg holds about 87 percent of the experience points in his election against Zimmer.
And that's it. Those four variables account for the entire regression analysis that you see reflected here. A couple of stray notes on particular states:
Minnesota: The regression model sees this race tightening -- Norm Coleman is not popular, and Al Franken has nearly matched him in fundraising -- but one way to look at why Franken hasn't quite taken off is that he's never held elected office before. If he had run for the House before stepping up to the Senate, for instance, he might have emerged as a more vetted candidate, and something like his tax return issue would have been less likely to distract him.
Maine: This is the one state where I think giving up on the ideological variable somewhat hurts the model, as in spite of Maine being a fairly liberal state, Susan Collins is much closer to the median of the electorate than Tom Allen.
South Carolina and Montana: On the other hand, these states were causing problems with the ideological variables because the opposition candidates hold a series of idiosyncratic positions that don't fit neatly onto the political spectrum but might give the appearance of centrism if averaged together. Bob Conley in South Carolina, for instance, is running as a sort of family values version of Ron Paul; he is quite conservative by the standards of a Democratic candidate, but not in such a way that is really designed to cater to South Carolina's electorate. Bob Kelleher in Montana, meanwhile, is running as a Republican this year, but has previously run as a member of the Green Party and is strongly in favor of single-payer health care; this might be one of the first cases in history where the Republican candidate was demonstrably more liberal than the Democrat (the relatively centrist Max Baucus). Niether Kelleher nor Conley has ever held elected office, however, so our model is able to recognize them as not-very-serious candidates.
Alaska: Mark Begich's highest elected office is as the mayor of Anchorage, but almost 40 percent of Alaska's population is contained within Anchorage's city limits. So Begich is not actually not very far behind Ted Stevens in this metric, as Stevens is given credit for presiding over half of a very small state.
That should helpfully give everybody some idea of how all of this is working. We'll follow up and cover the other parts of the projection model at some point later this week.
Today's Polls, 6/30
In Florida, on the other hand, Rasmussen has John McCain holding steady with a 7-point lead. Rasmussen had surveyed Florida barely a week ago, then showing McCain ahead by 8 points. The main problem that Rasmussen seems to be detecting for Obama in Florida is that the Democratic defection rate remains relatively high -- he's losing 20 percent of Democrats to McCain, and 4 percent to "some other candidate". The puma is native to Florida, I would point out. Nevertheless, since Quinnipiac and ARG seem to feel differently about the state, it might be time to get a Mason-Dixon or a SurveyUSA on the case. Hell, I'll even take an Insider Advantage poll.
Rasmussen also sees no movement toward Obama in Georgia, where he trails in their survey by 10 points, just as he did a month ago. Unlike Insider Advantage, which found Bob Barr polling in the mid-single digits, Rasmussen gives him just 1 percent support. I have been a little inconsistent in my treatment of Georgia. It is a state that Obama could win if a number of things go right, but then again, that's true of probably 40 of the 50 states on the map this year.
Lastly, SurveyUSA has Obama ahead by 2 points in Virginia. This brings SurveyUSA into line with Rasmussen and PPP, each of which show nearly identical numbers, but is a step backward for Obama from SurveyUSA's May poll, which had Obama up 7 points in Virginia. As I argued yesterday, if you see a result that looked aberrant before -- and a 7-point lead for Obama pre-unity bounce definitely looked a little weird -- you sometimes have to ignore the trendlines and take the result on its own merits. Virginia is perhaps the closest state on the map at the moment -- the state whose county names we might all learn by heart staying up late on Election Night -- and all the polling is reflecting that.
Internal Polls
There have been an increasing number of surveys, however, particularly on the Senate side of things, that somewhat test our definition of an "internal poll". Where would you draw the line on the following spectrum?
1. Polls commissioned by the candidate himself.
2. Polls commissioned by another candidate for office in that state.
3. Polls conducted by a national campaign committee (e.g. RNC, DSCC)
4. Polls conducted by an interest group (Emily's List, US Chamber of Commerce), but formally unassociated with the candidate.
5. Polls that are private, but conducted on behalf of someone with no direct interest in the campaign, such as an outside lobbying group.
Presently, I have been drawing the line between #3 and #4. But I'm not sure that there's a major philosophical difference between, for instance, Emily's List commissioning a poll, and the DNC doing so. I'm also not so sure that I necessarily have things in the right order.
Anyway, I've come to very much trust in the wisdom of the 538 crowd -- so opinions are solicited and appreciated.
Senate Projections are Live
We give the Democrats about a 20 percent chance of reaching 60 seats counting Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders, and a 13 percent chance counting Sanders but not Lieberman. The Democrats are nearly certain to hold on to an outright majority of seats, whether or not Lieberman's seat is counted.
There is, obviously, a lot of explanation required for what goes into all of this, which will come in doses over the next day or two.
Senate Polling Permathread (Updated 6/30)
(Note: revised at 5:45 PM)
Senate polling detail follows below the jump.


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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
So, are the Nax achievs still in the game? Are they safe until 403?
If so, does anyone know what happens if you clear all but one boss on 10m, then switch to 25m and finish that last boss? I know you don't have to be present for every boss kill. Its just on the raid lockout "Has anyone died? Nope! The Immortal!"
But, seriously, anyone know if this was tested on the PTR?


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Bangladesh Cricket Players Salary
10 Jan 2013 . View Poll Results: Should PCB allow Pakistani cricket players to participate in BPL ? . LAHORE - The Bangladesh Cricket Board chief Nazimul Hassan .. relatively very low salaries from their board and lingering conflicts . 30 Oct 2011 . "What is the salary of a cricketer of Bangladesh National Cricket Team?" . (3 answers); Who was the youngest player of test cricket match? 10 Nov 2012 . On a winter morning 12 years ago, Bangladesh realised a dream: their .. When these players stopped playing first-class cricket against each other even . be paid a monthly salary, which would vary based on their first-class . The team is administered by the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB). ... when a pay dispute between the West Indian players and the West Indies Cricket Board . 14 Jan 2013 . Four Bangladesh cricketers who made their international debut last year . All fifteen players have also been given a 10% increase in salary for . 12 Jul 2012 . 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Star player Shakib judged man of the match for his all-round performance against . A meeting to exchange views on Bangladesh cricket was held today at . Bangladesh / Players / Javed Omar . Bangladesh Cricket League .. One-day cricket never suited Javed, whose batting was of the Trevor Bailey class in . Sylhet pay for indiscretion (Nov 2, 2008); Omar and Mashud not handed new contracts . Bangladesh Cricket Players Gallery. View: Playing | Retired · Next Page >>. Al Amin. View Player Stats. Abdur Razzak. View Player Stats. Aftab Ahmed . A broken toe prevented Hossain from playing for Bangladesh in July 2011, but after . Born in Narayanganj, Hossain began playing cricket during his teenage . the West Indies Cricket Board and the West Indies Players' Association over pay. 7 Jul 2012 . Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) has earlier declared that 120 . players playing at least for 3 years will be in C category and the salary will be . 'Federation Of International Cricketers Association' - 12 News Result(s). Players go under hammer in Bangladesh amid pay row. Agence France-Presse . 16 Jan 2013 . Pictures gallery of cricket player team Indian Cricket Players Profiles Live India . . records, captain, india cricket tournament , rankings, salaries, india . Cricwaves provides comprehensive list of Bangladesh cricket team . 14h · Cricket Bangladesh @CricBangladesh. Today (Tuesday) Dhaka Gladiators handed over their 25% (3 core) players advanced salary to the BCB Council . 2 Nov 2010 . The technical committee of Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) has recommended a fifteen percent salary increase for all contracted players. Latest news and comment on Bangladesh Cricket Team from . 19 Mar 2009 . The Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) has increased salaries by 30% in a bid to prevent its players from joining the rebel Indian Cricket League . 26 Dec 2012 . The The Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) is a high profile national . 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Fifty-four players, including six foreigners, who played the first season of the Bangladesh Premier League are still without full payments from the . 8 Oct 2012 . Six umpires from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh were ready to be bribed for T20 . had earlier exposed five Indian players involved in spot-fixing in the domestic . Low salary behind fixing temptation: Akhtar; 19 Sep 2012 . 18 Mar 2009 . The Bangladesh Cricket Board's board of directors has increased the salary of the national players and local staff in the team management by . 2h · Bangladesh Cricket @BdBCL. Except DG, no other franchise pay 25% players salary in advanced. To solve this problem, BCB has called a urgent meeting . Bangladesh Cricket Team. Ruling Body: Bangladesh Cricket Board ... when a pay dispute between the West Indian players and the West Indies Cricket Board . 28 Aug 2012 . The Bangladesh Cricket Board has offered annual contracts to 105 . These salaries will be in addition to the match fees that the players will . Nasir Hossain:How he grew up to be a Cricketer. April 14, 2012. Eddie Barlow-A person who will always be remembered in Bangladesh Cricket. June 01, 2012 . 16 Oct 2012 . Bangladesh Cricket League . News : BPL yet to pay 54 players . players, on a case-by-case basis, as to what the icon salary should be . 10 Nov 2012. and other peaks and valleys in Bangladesh's 12 years in Test cricket. . a pay dispute resulted in the frontline West Indies players boycotting . [Archive] salary of Bangladeshi players Bangladesh Cricket. 19 Mar 2009 . Bangladesh's national cricketers and support staff have been given a 30 per . Reading topic/Thread Bangladesh players receive salary hike . 3 Sep 2010 . Cricket has been rocked by an alleged betting scam but how much do top . less, at around £22,500 a year, while Bangladesh's players get £12,000. . such as Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, earn a basic salary of more . This is a list of cricketers who have captained the Bangladesh cricket team for at least one Test .. "Bangladesh Captains' Playing Record in Test Matches". 25 Oct 2012 . Check out list of Bangladeshi-an Cricketers Salary / Income. . New York Yankees Players Income · Philadelphia Phillies players Salary . He left the ICL in 2009; the Bangladesh Cricket Board responded by rescinding its ban. Nazimuddin . ESPNcricinfo. http://www.espncricinfo.com/bangladesh/ content/player/56059.html. Retrieved . "Pakistan make reckless Bangladesh pay ". 26 May 2012 . Players' long wait for an increase in salaries has finally bore fruit with the central contracts due to . Cricket: Bangladesh cricketers get pay raise . 29 Aug 2012 . Bangladesh Cricket Team . The annual contract, which begins on January 1, 2013, includes monthly salary packages and health / medical coverage . Believe that this initiative brings major changes because the players will . 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Madara Uchiha vs Morgoth Bauglir
Morgoth from the Lord of the Rings-verse vs. Madara Uchiha. Battlefield is where Morgoth fought Fingolfin. If Madara stomps Morgoth then he gets to fight him as Melkor from the time of Arda's creation.
Re: Madara Uchiha vs Morgoth Bauglir
Melkor prison rapes him and we both know that
as to Madara morgoth smushes him into jelly |
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the stapler the whiteboard the fax machine
I never beed in any Asian country. But I want visit Japan.
I don't eat regular fish or seafood. But I like so much cod and prawns.
the first course the coffee the waiter
In this photo I see aubergine, leek, and pumpkin.


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A state district judge has refused to reduce the bond of a local man, charged with aggravated robbery in connection with the reported armed hold-up of a Greenville convenience store.
Courtney Dewayne Jackson, 24, of Greenville, remains in custody at the Hunt County Jail in lieu of $150,000 bond on a charge of aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Jackson had filed a writ of habeas corpus from the jail and 196th District Court Judge Steve Tittle had previously appointed an attorney to represent Jackson on the writ.
During a hearing in the court Wednesday morning, Tittle declined any reduction in the bond.
Officers with the Green-ville Police Department were dispatched shortly before 10 p.m. January 24 to a report of a robbery in progress at the store in the 2500 block of Wellington Street.
The clerk on duty offered a description of the suspect, who was wearing a mask, and the handgun used in the robbery.
Officers later found Jackson at a residence on Barling Street, and recovered a 9 mm handgun, a mask and cash believed taken during the hold-up.
Aggravated robbery is a first degree felony, punishable upon conviction by a maximum sentence of from five to 99 years to life in prison and an optional fine of up to $10,000.
Local News
Bond reduction denied in convenience store robbery case
- Local News
County jobless rate dips again
The local unemployment rate dipped again in January, even though Hunt County lost more than 260 jobs to start the year.
Court reporter leading the way in preventing child abuse
Cher Perry is leading an initiative to end child sexual abuse in Hunt County.
Council expected to cancel Place 3 election
The Greenville City Council intends Tuesday to confirm Place 3 Council member Jeff Dailey has been re-elected.
Council set to hear from department heads
The Greenville City Council is continuing efforts to prepare next year's city budget well in advance.
- Commerce man indicted for 10th felony offense
Carver hosts LP Waters students again due to odor
Students at LP Waters Early Childhood Center had classes at a different campus for the second time in two weeks, due to odor issues stemming from a sewage leak last week.
Operation Cold Spell freezes alleged drug rings
Almost two dozen individuals were arrested Thursday in Commerce after the Commerce Police Department — along with Texas A&M University-Commerce, Sulphur Springs Police Departments and Hopkins County Sheriff's Office — conducted busts after a four-month-long investigation into drug rings in the city.
Severe drought over half of county
Despite another brush with ice and snow this week, portions of Hunt County remain listed under a severe drought.
More I-30 repairs planned
Motorists traveling along Interstate 30 in Hunt County should get used to the idea of potential delays and lane closures, starting next week.
City receives only one bid to rebuild street
It may not take that long to determine who will get the job of rebuilding a portion of one of Greenville's busiest streets.
- More Local News Headlines
County jobless rate dips again


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Maine Mutant Reporter Honored
Posted by: Loren Coleman on October 10th, 2006
The "Maine Mutant" by Mike Lemos.
Remember the origins of the Maine Mutant, from the words of a beat journalist?
Recall all the buzz from the initial stories written by reporter Mark LaFlamme, who brought the beast to everyone's attention?
Guess what? Mark was just named the "Journalist of the Year" for the State of Maine!
Here's part of what the Lewiston Sun Journal had to say about this shocking news in their Sunday, October 8, 2006, issue:
The Maine Press Association has chosen Sun Journal crime reporter Mark LaFlamme as Journalist of the Year….[and] announced [the award] at the association's annual banquet Saturday night at the The Atlantic Oakes Resort and Conference Center [in Bar Harbor, Maine].
"I was completely taken by surprise," said LaFlamme after the banquet. "I did not see that coming. It's the only time in my journalistic career when I felt like crying. I was thrilled, and I still haven't come down off that high. It was remarkable. A very strange and satisfying moment."
When his name was announced there was a standing ovation, said Sun Journal staffer Mari Maxwell.
LaFlamme seemed overwhelmed, she said. "He was blinking his eyes pretty rapidly." LaFlamme was speechless, something out of character.
City Editor Karen Kreworuka classifies LaFlamme as an adept juggler.
"When Mark is on the cop beat, we are confident that whatever happens, he can handle it with aplomb," she said.
In addition to spot news, LaFlamme writes features, enterprise stories and a column, "Street Talk," in which he shows us what it is like to be human in any walk of life. "His depth of feeling for his subjects and his fertile imagination give us a glimpse into street life that is not all grit and gloom," Kreworuka said.
In his nomination letter to the judges, co-worker Christopher Williams described LaFlamme's Street Talk columns as a collection of weird, usually side-splitting and always riveting observations about cops, firefighters, EMTs, street people, transients, bad guys and alien sightseers.
"We've all have heard stories about people who live their jobs. Mark is that person," Williams wrote. "I can't think of a single person working at a newspaper in Maine who defines the role of reporter the way LaFlamme does. He deserves this honor."
Cryptomundo sends out well-deserved congratulations to Mark LaFlamme for his great contributions to reporting and investigative journalism!.
Please click on image for full-size version
Photograph by Michelle O'Donnell. Used by permission.
Loren Coleman – has written 5489 posts on this site.
Loren Coleman no longer writes for Cryptomundo. His archived posts remain here at Cryptomundo.


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In 1988, President George Bush shared his vision of a "thousand points of light," describing how community organizations, spread like stars throughout the nation, can work to better the country. Rabbi Shmuley urges listeners to become "points of light" and make a difference in their homes and communities. On his final show, he talks about how to make change happen in your world.
Published on December 21, 2008


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It was good to be together yesterday, to celebrate God's love for His church and to be challenged from God's word to love each other, and others.
In case you're looking for love in all the wrong places – looking to love and not knowing who to love, I have some hook-ups for you. As I said yesterday (1) everybody needs to be loved, and (2) there are some people in our church that have been missing out on the love boat.
If you're looking for some ways to apply what we heard in I John 3 yesterday by loving some people please let me know and I would be very glad to pass on some ones that I know could surely benefit from some good gospel-centered love.
You've been loved by God through the story of Jesus. Because of this love with which you have been loved and because God has given you a new heart – with new capacities to love selflessly – and because God, greater than your heart, taking – even – residence in your heart…therefore, we can love as we've been recreated to, as we ought to, as we want to.
The church is DeKalb is about one thing: The story of Jesus colliding with the story of us.
Gospel means "Good News." The Good News of the story of Jesus is that He has lived a perfect life in our place, He has died a terrible death in our place, He has been buried, and He has been risen from the dead.
As the story of Jesus collides with our story we find ourselves responding in Worship, Love, and Mission.
This is what our church is about, one thing, the gospel moving in us, transforming us to worship our God, love each other, and tell this Good News.
Join this church on The City »


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The Rev. Jack Davis conducts a mission orientation session June 15, 2011, in Chimbote, with a newly arrived group of volunteers from the Grand Forks area including Jonathon and Vonna Tweed from Reynolds, N.D., who traveled there with their teenage daughter.
Read the article: Robin Huebner reports: North Dakota priest aims to stay closer to his South American parish


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La La Anthony, who has teamed up with Loren Ridinger to create her own line of cosmetics called "Motives for La La", celebrated the launch of the line last night on Ridinger's yacht in Miami.
Peep more pics below!
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