Prognostication

[babylonsister]

http://www.openleft.com/diary/20083/prognostication

Prognostication
by: Mike Lux
Wed Sep 08, 2010 at 18:00



It's after Labor Day in an even-numbered year, and that means two industries related to politics are running at full steam ahead: the campaign business and the prognostication industry.

Prognostication, though is a pretty dangerous business (assuming you actually care about being accurate, which is not true of many Beltway pundits). Because fundraising, polling, media, online strategies, and everything else on politics now happens full-time every season of every year, those of us in the political business sometimes forget the overwhelmingly obvious point that for most voters, the last two months before an election is the main time they actually focus in a serious way on politics. Polling, being an inexact science, bounces all over the place, as demonstrated by Gallup showing a 10-point edge for Republicans on the generic ballot test last week and a tied race this week. Most of the advertising and mail and field efforts have yet to be seen in the competitive districts and states.

There are also a ton of things we don't know. As Bob Creamer points out in his optimistic post today, John McCain was ahead of Barack Obama at this same moment in the 2008 race. No one can ever know how things will break the last few days of a campaign, and there have been plenty of surprises in modern American political history. The vast majority of predictions about an election 55 days away are destined to be wrong, so take every single one of the self-assured prognosticators with a large tablet of salt.

Here's the other thing to throw into the mix about the upcoming elections: as challenging as those elections are for Democrats, and they are, there is still a pretty clear strategy for giving ourselves a strong chance to do better than expected. There are two blocs of voters that are absolutely key to Democrats being able to avoid the worst scenarios for them in this election: the demographic groups that Obama not only carried by wide margins in 208 but that also turned out in record numbers (blacks, Hispanics, unmarried women, young people), and the white working-class swing voters who have been trending against Obama because they are in a foul mood about the economy. These two broad demographic groups have a lot of differences in terms of their life experience and views on the issues, but they have one thing in common: they understand that broad powerful corporations have helped wreck our economy, and that they have too much power over our government.

snip//

My advice to all my Democratic friends is to not get panicked by the headwinds or the bouncing poll numbers. There's a lot of time left. What Democratic candidates need to do is focus on turning out base voters, and showing both base and swing voters that they will fight their hearts out against the corporate special interests and for more jobs and a healthy economy. It's tough out there, but there is a path forward that works.

[mopinko]

1. bob creamer is a smart guy

i trust his instincts.

[Cognitive_Resonance]

2. It's actually a good thing that the polls have shown a supposed 10-point Republican advantage

It's not real, and the unraveling of that artificial lead is going to shift momentum toward the Democrats. Expectations of a Republican takeover have been sky high, and as that fantasy is dashed the GOP is going to tear itself apart.

[Bluenorthwest]

3. If you could really predict anything using polling

The world would be very different. And the world is not different, just look at it! Polls are a product that makes media fodder, and give political 'consultants' some hooks to hang their song and dance upon, and that is all they are.
What bothers me is that the same people who believe all the polls are nervous on election nights. How does that work?

[FBaggins]

4. Not all of that is entirely honest.

He points out that McCain was ahead at this point in '08.

That's true enough... But he surely knows that it's spin. McCain had been trailing in just about every poll and the got the convention bounce that everyone expected. Everyone ALSO expected that convention bounce to fade quickly (and it did) - and Obama returned to significant leads in mere days. Things didn't "break in the last few days of the campaign"