Should the Republicans rejoice? Has their presidential candidate weathered the Obama storm? The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza flagged some national polls yesterday that suggest John McCain might be closer to Barack Obama than people realize, aided by a boost among Independent voters:
Take the most recent poll by Newsweek magazine on the presidential race. Obama takes 44 percent of the vote while McCain receives 41 percent, a statistically insignificant margin and a major change from the 15-point bulge for Obama in the same poll less than a month ago.
This follows news of solid June fundraising for the Republican nominee, which has allowed him to outspend Obama on the air in places like Missouri. While such news isn't encouraging for lefties, The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder and Sean at FiveThirtyEight.com both throw some water on the flames. First, here's Ambinder contextualizing the polling:
First, don't fall for the availability heuristic and obsess over just the latest poll, which comes courtesy of Newsweek. The poll of polls and internal campaign polling for both campaign gives Obama a lead of anywhere between four and nine points using a tight likely voter model.
It's almost an axiom of modern political polling that, depending on the question and the sample, surveyees extremely susceptible to daily, even hourly, shifts in elite opinion. Voters are paying attention to the big picture, but they're not paying attention to the details just yet. Methodological differences account for random fluctuations, as do random fluctuations. As both candidates have had rough weeks, it's entirely predictable that these polls would regress to a mean.
He suggests that state polling is a better indicator of each candidate's strength, and FiveThirtyEight's regression model currently gives Obama a 68.8 percent chance of winning the race, netting over 307 electoral votes. Pollster also shows Obama with sizeable leads in Ohio (a must-win for the GOP), Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan, and Iowa, to name a few.
With regards to campaign strategy and outreach, it's important to look beyond the headlines. Just as the Obama campaign's voter registration efforts slipped beneath the cracks, so to has the intensification of their paid organizer program:
In Missouri, Obama will have 150 paid organizers and maintain a 12-1 paid organizer edge in my native state. Show-me, indeed. In Michigan, Obama will put an unprecedented 150 field organizers on the ground. In Ohio, why not go for 300 field organizers? That sounds like a nice, absurdly large, round number. [...]
Those paid organizers are each recruiting underneath them volunteers and precinct captains (themselves responsible for recruitment and management of volunteers). As I’ve said before, it’s a pyramid scheme aimed at massive voter-to-voter contact. Millions and millions and millions of voter contacts, all knocked out 5, 10, 50 at a time by volunteers. The info gleaned from the contacts is re-looped into the voter file, and repeat contacts are thereby more informed (undecideds can be persuaded; supporters can be urged to early vote; banked early votes allow campaigns to use resources more efficiently in the closing days, etc.). The principle is: voters persuade other voters more personally and powerfully than a 30-second TV ad. Ads give impressions; real people close the sale.
Ambinder says the Obama campaign has a "preternatural self-confidence about their strategy." Given the success they've had in the field, I don't blame them. And I'm pretty confident November will be no exception.
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