I believe the polls

[alcibiades_mystery]

Let me tell you what. I'm a guy who believes that the polls, on balance, are probably about right. I've never believed that "Obama should be up by twenty" or any other such fantasies. A political scientist I know told me once that the most reliable predictor for how people will vote is how their parents vote. That's after mounds and mounds of research, data piled to the top of a skyscraper. Shit like that doesn't change in four years or even eight. Everything is decided by the mushy middle, and I like our chances A LOT when it comes to the mushy middle this time around. The polls showing it around tied (say 47%-47%) with some movement at either end of the margins seems accurate. I'm reminded of a line in Michael herr's great book on the Vietnam war, Dispatches. At the beginning of the Tet Offensive a bunch of the young reporters are bitching and moaning about how terible it all is, and some old time newsman who covered WWII and Korea says something like "You guys fucking kill me. What the fuck did you think war was gonna be?" Well, yeah, DUers. It's a fucking battle. What the fuck did you think it was gonna be?

A lot of the "Obama should be running away with it" are the most deluded cats I've ever run across. One could easily make an argument for the converse: McCain, a popular politician who has been in the public eye for decades, and has some uber-patriotic back story, is tied or losing to a BLACK guy that nobody heard of four years ago? The fact that it is tied IS the correction for the Bush years, people. That's the slack the Bush catastrophe has given us, right there. It's enough slack to win, and I think we're gonna win this time. But really, what the fuck did you think it was gonna be.

In any case, I believe the polling. What I DO NOT believe is the formula for likely voters. The polling outfits have only one real criteria for deteriming likely voters: historical voting patterns. I really do think the 18-28 year olds are gonna step up this time, and I think they're being excluded as likley voters in these numbers. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but the Gallup "likely voter" numbers were so ridiculous that they hardly bear mention. Ten points? C'mon, now. Only the hardest anti-Obama zealot could lend any credence to that number. here's where we stand: we're tied, in a tight race, with many points in our favor. Yeah. It's close. But what the fuck did you think it was gonna be?

[flamingdem]

1. It's not going to be easy, volunteers for phone banking and registering are needed!

Please consider helping out because "We are the People we've been waiting for" and every vote will count in this election.

[Frank Booth]

2. I believe them too, though I'm pretty sure the 10 point Gallup poll is an outlier.

The election's going to be very close, and if Obama's GOTV effort is all it's cracked up to be, he'll win. If not, we're in for another ugly four years.

[TheKentuckian]

4. I think people confuse what makes sense with reality

they are vastly different.

Sense-ANY Democrat should be up AT LEAST 30 points, a good Democrat 70/30. A 3rd party candidate should beat the Republicans.

Reality-No Democrat alive, except maybe Bill Clinton could approach 30 and that might be nuts to think too. Bush couldn't win but he'd sure as hell get more than 30% of the vote.


I think about 30% are bound and determined to live in Dumbasfuckistan, with at least another 10% that are perfectly willing to go that way but aren't as motivated.

That gives us at best 14% to work with because 6% are doing something protestish and only 1-2% would normally go along with the zombies.

Our main advantage is there are more of us than them. We need 89% of our own people and to split the rest. I think the split aspect is cool, the problem is we need our 90+%.

[justiceischeap]

3. MSNBC was saying the +10 poll is questionable because their 'group' was mostly Repugs (nt)

[RoyGBiv]

5. I'm iffy on polls ...

First, I thank you for posting this. It's some much needed sanity in this environment where people live or die on an overnight rolling average ... and that's just silly.

But, I am iffy in the sense of not really paying much attention unless there's some dramatic advantage to one side or the other. (In truth, for many reasons, I'd be more concerned if Obama had a huge lead.) I understand the underlying methodologies rather well, and I respect what reputable polling organizations do. I think they give a fairly accurate assessment of a target population's opinion at any given moment in time. There are two keys there, though, that make using a pre-election poll of any variety, even the well constructed ones, less definitive. Those keys are "opinion" and "moment in time."

Polls are excellent tools for gathering a picture of what people think on various issues. Analytical tools are then available that allow us to assess within a reasonable margin what those opinions mean within a broader framework. What's more difficult is using a poll to predict what people will do with their opinions. Future actions (and the farther out in the future we're talking about, the harder it is) increase the margin of error slightly beyond the one provided by statistical variation of the sampling pool. The pollster, as always, is relying on someone to tell the truth, which is less a problem for opinion than it is for future action, and that pollster is also having to wade through a sea of elements that can be affected by so many variables that, again, the time factor becomes a problem. And that brings us to the "moment in time" element. If you asked me today where I'm going to eat tomorrow, I might tell you Subway. I might change my mind in the morning and realize I need to save money and not eat out at all. By the time lunch gets here, my stomach may be grumbling, and I may decide to go eat a steak. Yes, this is a silly example with a different set of variables than those involved in a making decisions in an election, but the same fundamentals apply. Those of us who knew from the beginning we'd be voting for one party or the other are a minority. Who to vote for or whether even to vote at all are decisions people make that cannot be predicted with precision ... good guesses, yes, but not precision.

The day to day changes in polls don't mean much to me at all. I was there when Dukakis was up 18 points, and I was there when it looked like Mondale actually had a chance against Reagan, all according to polls attempting to predict a future action at a specific point in time. Postmortem analysis of the Dukakis polls especially showed that the methods being used that arrived at those huge numbers were flawed in many ways, indicating that the huge lead wasn't that huge after all, and many events between the time of those polls and the actual election made a lot of people reconsider their choice.

Yes, this is a war. What the fuck any of the pie-in-the-sky or doom-and-gloomers thought this was going to be, I don't know, but for as much as they can accurately tell us, I think the polls show this thing is exactly what it was destined to be.

And we're gonna win this fucking thing.

(typos are gonna be the death of me)