At PP today, I wrote again about Mitt Romney's tax plan, how it doesn't add up, and misdirection.
And at Plum Line, I talked about the polling after the debate. My conclusion, as you might have guessed, is that it's too soon to know anything beyond the initial shift to Romney last Thursday through Saturday -- which at this point is pretty clear. There's a good chance that most or all of it dissipates, but we won't know until later.
In the meantime, I tweeted this out before, but I believe that all the polling-based models still have Obama as the likely winner. Let's see: first of all, HuffPollster's model (by Simon Jackman) currently has Obama slightly in the lead. That's not a forecast; that's their model's best estimate of where things are right now.
Let's see...Nate Silver has the president as a 71% favorite and with 297 electoral votes. Drew Linzer has Obama at a whopping 322 electoral votes. Sam Wang has Obama at 302 EVs. I'm not sure what else I should be looking at, but basically the polls as they are now, taken at face value and historical context, have Obama winning.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
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While it has no formal scientific value, I would argue the Great Andrew Sullivan Freakout of 2012 is good evidence this is a temporary "bounce" that will fade. If only because Sullivan freaking out in a public, bombastic way and then being shown to be wrong is kinda how the Universe works.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to see what would happen if Obama and Biden blew it on all the debates, while running an otherwise competent campaign, to see if the Election Day results still reverted to where the fundamental models pegged the race. I imagine that they would.
DeleteI'm sure it didn't help, and possibly there was some synergy involved, but I think it was the ridiculously over-the-top rending of garments by Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz on MSNBC that gave the 'both sides' Washington media a green light for the new "Dems in Disarray" narrative that ensued. (And is only now starting to recede)
DeleteConsidering both have professed political leanings, you don't have to go in the tank for the guy not to run around like idiots complaining that the guy didn't say what you would have said.
But yeah, Sullivan is still wearing the hair shirt with clown shoes ensemble. He's been more jester than pundit all cycle.
Thanks for this perfect analysis of Sullivan. The fact that his emotional punditry is given credence (if only in his own mind) is tiresome.
DeleteIs he done yet? I'm not clicking on him til he gets his %%%% back together.
Delete@Anonymous: I've been Sully-free for years and no complaints.
DeleteI love the Dish, but only for the posts Sullivan didn't write. Too bad they don't offer a Sully-free version of his blog.
DeleteThat Plum Line post was illuminating. Thanks, Jonathan. I think many supporters of Obama have been disconcerted because so many polling gurus and pundits have so heavily emphasized that this election's polling has been very stable with very very few undecided voters. It's simply surprising to see such strong swings. I guess the reasoning is that this is more about enthusiasm than vote-changing. But the gurus/pundits haven't really primed us to consider enthusiasm to be such a key volatile element by the time of October.
ReplyDeleteI think its still wait and see. The Obama Campaign needs an argument. If they don't find one that isn't laden with sarcasm and snide humor, you can get ready for President Romney.
ReplyDeleteI also liked the Plum Line post. It verbalizes my visceral reaction to debates and why I don't watch them. It's also nice to know that the reaction is supported by theory.
ReplyDeleteJonathan, you said that debate bounces typically fade away. But, looking at the Real Clear Politics graph from 2004, didn't Kerry's bounce in 2004 stick in place until the election? It sure looks like it to me-- it just wasn't quite big enough to win.
ReplyDeleteWatching that exquisitely awful Big Bird ad, I was reminded of something really smart that Colby said on the topic of "You Didn't Build That". Colby noted that the problem wasn't that Obama failed to clarify about infrastructure et al, it was that he was heckling entrepreneurs. The cringeworthy Big Bird ad (which at this point in the campaign must have Obama's fingerprints all over it) is more dreadful heckling from the Obama campaign.
ReplyDeleteColby was absolutely right in his assessment; I'd go further and say that the tendency to heckle is Obama's Achilles heel in an otherwise sterling political skill set. Heckling underlies "cling to guns and religion", and actually, heckling was the way Obama approached the math issue in the debate. No wonder it went over like a lead zeppelin; your high school trigonometry teacher was pretty ineffective when he heckled you too.
I went back and looked at a few clips of that debate, and I noticed that Romney, for all the flaws of his campaign, handled the heckling brilliantly. Look for yourself: Romney is usually looking at Obama with wide-eyed incredulousness, with a little smile on his face, speaking slowly, the way he would handle a heckler who slipped past security at one of his events. So when Romney says "I don't know how this guy can claim my tax plan adds $5 T to the deficit when even I don't know what's in it", because he's responding to a heckler, its Romney who looks sympathetic to the casual viewer. For all the terrible flaws in his campaign, Romney has found Obama's weakness and exploited the heck out of it at the first debate.
What now? The liberal commentariat is screaming that Obama was not "tough enough" with Romney. He needs to be tougher! When the team reads that, do they think "Heckle Romney some more"? If so, that's gonna be a total disaster. Epic. Just think about the difference between the aw-shucks "spreadsheets for Dummies" that was Clinton at the convention, vs. the sneering assertions of Romney mendacity by Obama at the first debate...do you partisan liberals really think more of the same will help Obama?
In conclusion, when liberals conclude that Andrew Sullivan's panic is overblown, that's based on the view that Obama will certainly right the ship in the next two debates and for the rest of the campaign. By becoming more Bubba-like? Heckling less? Maybe. I guess we'll see.
@CSH: Interesting. And, if you're right, pretty gosh-darned depressing.
DeleteWhy? Well, for one, as someone who has a tendency to mock, I resemble that remark. But, also, it speaks to a fundamental problem liberals have. I think liberals have a tendency to think the world is like the world in "The Emperor's New Clothes." Liberals, to me, seem to believe that if their cry of "no clothes" is heard, that everyone will realize that they are right. So, in a sense, the sarcasm/mocking tone of liberals towards others who don't "see" what we do is an attempt to shock others out of complacency.
Of course, this gets the story wrong. Everyone saw that there were no clothes, but only the child said something. It wasn't a story of conformism (a la Asch); it was a story where only social naivete allowed us to get past social reasons to deny the truth. But, what if Haley Joel Osment ACTUALLY sees dead people? Or, what if liberals are actually Cassandra? (OK, I've dropped WAY too many references in this paragraph). My point (too late!) is: what if liberals are just prone to talking down to people?
That's an interesting comment, Matt, since it puts me in mind of another potential dimension separating (some) liberals and (some) conservatives: a liberal is someone who thinks that a community can work together, with government, to make the world a better place, while a conservative wants government just "to make it (the problem) go away".
DeleteThe deficit is an easy illustration; another one that hops to mind is AGW, on the assumption that we all know its pretty damn hot outside, though many conservatives don't want to do anything about it. For some that might be economically rational, say if you're old or otherwise marginalized and fear addressing AGW will cost a ton of dough, which it probably will.
To our conversation, the problem with heckling is that, to the extent your audience is of the "make it go away" mentality, heckling is the very last thing they want to hear from you. This is why Clinton's aw-shucks approach works so well across partisan lines: if a big part of your audience doesn't want to hear it, its a great idea to start out half-apologizing for saying it. That's a big part of Clinton's power, it seems to me.
Also, its probably harmless, and even perhaps cathartic, to mock people/your opponents when you are among like-minded peers. By the frame of this post, if liberals are among liberals and frustrated at conservative efforts to thwart betterment, by all means, they should mock as much as they like. Just recognize that's a terrible way to sell progressiveness to a mixed/partially hostile audience.
BTW, I saw over at Arianna's place that Obama told a radio show this morning that he was too polite to Romney. So when Romney tries to claim that he can cut all these taxes without blowing up the deficit, the gloves are coming off, cognitive dissonance of the tv audience be damned!
I have no idea what will happen or how it will affect the election, but I must confess when I heard that "strategy" from Obama, I immediately thought of Al Gore sighing at Dubya, and how perhaps Obama may want to rethink that one just a bit....