Are Media Polls Criminally Bad?

Charles Franklin takes issue with Stan Greenberg's contention that media polls are "criminally bad" because of a variety of reasons, especially that "They are not carefully weighted and, as a result, show wide swings in voter preference that the media interpret wrongly as voter fickleness." I'd be curious what constitutes careless weighting. Almost all pollsters weight the data to demographic distributions ...

Obama Electoral Lead Widens as National Lead Shrinks

Radley Balko notes a "strange dichotomy" in the election polls:  Obama's lead in the national head-to-head polls is narrowing at the same time his Electoral College numbers based on state-by-state polls is widening. Sure enough, that's the case.   Here's the RealClearPolitics snapshot: Here's the current Electoral College map from electoralvote.com, which has the race at Obama 320 - McCain 204  - ...

Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama’s Cohones

Jesse Jackson's statement that Barack Obama's "talking down to black people" makes him so angry that he "wants to cut his nuts out" has caused quite the stir. Charles Hurt of the NY Post has the most concise report: In a vulgar tirade caught on tape by Fox News, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he wanted to "cut his [Barack Obama's] nuts ...

Obama, the South, and the Black Vote

Thomas Schaller,  the author of Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, argues that the notion that Barack Obama has a good chance of winning Southern states because he'll energize black turnout is based on fallacious reasoning. The first myth is that African-American turnout in the South is low. Black voters are actually well represented in the Southern ...

Appalachian Election?

Steve Tuttle takes to the pages of Newsweek to proclaim the ascendency of Appalachia as the decider of the next president. "Hick." "Hillbilly." "Redneck." "Inbred." "Cracker." "Ridge Runner." I heard and self-effacingly used them all when I left the mountains of Appalachia to attend college in the great metropolis of Williamsburg, Va., in the '80s. I was mercilessly ribbed as a ...

Millionaire Penalty Struck Down by Supreme Court

McCain-Feingold, the signature legislation of the presumptive Republican nominee for president, took another blow yesterday as the Supreme Court struck down the so-called "Millionaire's Amendment" in yet another 5-4 decision. “Supporters of reasonable campaign finance regulation are now zero for three in the Roberts court,” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “This is a ...

Obama Has Huge Lead in Another Poll

Barack Obama has a 12-point lead in the latest Bloomberg/LAT poll, giving those of us who thought the 15-point lead in last week's Newsweek poll was an outlier some pause. In a two-man race between the major-party candidates, registered voters chose Obama over McCain by 49% to 37% in the national poll, conducted Thursday through Monday. On a four-man ballot that ...

Obama 317, McCain 194

If the election were held today, Barack Obama would cruise to victory with 317 Electoral Votes to John McCain's 194, according to projections tabulated by Electoral-Vote.com. Florida, with its 27 electors, is too close to call. Again. Compared to 2004, Obama would pick up Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, and Virginia while McCain would pick up no states that ...

Obama Has 15 Point Lead in Newsweek Poll

A Newsweek poll of registered voters shows Barack Obama with a whopping 15-point lead over John McCain, 51 to 36. Newsweek's Michael Hirsh is stoked. Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, even after the Illinois senator ...

McCain Cuts Taxes More, Obama Cuts More Taxes

Megan Cerpentier observes that, "despite the stereotype that my taxes should go up under a Democratic tax plan and down under a Republican, it seems that Obama's tax plan is most likely to lower my tax bills and McCain's plan will do little or nothing at all for me." This, because Obama proposes giving self-employed Megan a "Making ...

Ireland Rejects Treaty of Lisbon

It's received precious little notice here in the States but Irish voters have rejected the Treaty of Lisbon, the EU's latest move towards reform and greater consolidation of power in Brussels: DUBLIN, Ireland - Ireland's voters have rejected the European Union reform treaty, a blueprint for modernizing the 27-nation bloc that cannot become law without Irish approval, electoral officials said Friday. In ...

Obama Gets His Bounce

Barack Obama has gotten his predictable (in the sense that I predicted it) bounce in the polls after having emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee and Hillary Clinton formally conceded and backed him, helping begin the healing process within the party. According to the latest Gallup poll, he's up 48-42 nationwide among registered voters. Indeed, Obama is at ...

Obama to Test 50-State Strategy

DNC Chairman Howard Dean's "50-state strategy" has been controversial but Barack Obama is going to attempt to test it this fall, Sam Stein reports. Obama will likely start the general election with 180 or so "reliably Democratic" electoral votes. With the goal of getting to 270, the DNC believes it could play a role in carrying the rest of the ...

This Day in History: Kerry Wins Presidency

Had the 2004 election been held on May 29th, John Kerry would have won handily: Five years later, it's Obama 266, McCain 248, Tie 24. Via Andrew Sullivan, who presumably is trying to illustrate that Obama doesn't have it wrapped up quite yet and needs to keep pushing on, who in turn got it via Ben Smith, who presumably is hoping to ...

Conservatism’s Safety Net

FDL's Thers is piling on the "has conservatism run out of ideas" bandwagon and inadvertently helped demonstrate why conservatism will never die. The piece is entitled "The Autumn of Wingnuttia" and doesn't disappoint. He dismisses "a belief in free markets, free people, and in the greatness of the American people and the American nation" as "fatuous slogans ...