The Turnout Model Doesn't Always Turn Out Like That

With Labor Day weekend approaching, we're starting to see pollsters switch from registered voters to likely voters, that is raw numbers of voters to weighing those numbers based upon who pollsters think will actually turn out to vote in November.

Traditionally this switch greatly favors the Republican candidate, as polling outfits eliminate more of the younger, more liberal, Democratic-leaning voters from their likely voter models as they are less likely to actually vote than older, more conservative Republican voters.  In presidential election years, this switch usually happens around Labor Day, where the campaign season's home stretch begins.

But a lot of those turnout models haven't done so well recently.  Remember four years ago when Gallup was predicting a Romney win, and Obama won by 5 points instead?  Many likely voter models are heavily weighted against black and Latino turnout, and yet black voters came out in record numbers in 2008 and 2012.

It looks like the pollsters are making the same mistake this year as well.  Let's start with the latest IBD/TIPP poll, showing Trump now tied with Clinton at 39% in a 4-way race.

In a sharp turnaround in an already volatile election season, support for Hillary Clinton tumbled as Donald Trump made gains over the past month, leaving the race a virtual tie.

The latest IBD/TIPP Poll shows that Clinton is now ahead of Trump by just one percentage point, 44% to 43% among likely voters. Last month, Clinton had a seven-point lead over Trump — 46% to 39% -- among registered voters.

Clinton and Trump are tied at 39% each in a four-way matchup that includes Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who gets 12% support, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who gets 3%.

As the election nears, IBD/TIPP is narrowing the horse-race results from registered to likely voters. This month's survey included a total of 934 respondents, 887 of whom were registered voters and 861 were deemed likely voters. The margin of error for the horse-race results is +/‐3.4 percentage points. The IBD/TIPP Poll has been cited as the most accurate in the past three presidential elections.

Now IBD/TIPP has traditionally been pretty accurate when it comes to the final poll of the presidential campaign, they called 2008 right on the nose.  But the jump from registered to likely is always jarring and is almost always the likely voter model from four years previous, without any adjustments.  We're seeing that now.

Reuters/Ipsos too has made the jump to their first real likely voter model, and it now finds Trump leading.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has pulled into an effective tie with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, erasing a substantial deficit as he consolidated support among his party’s likely voters in recent weeks, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos national tracking poll released Friday.

The poll showed 40 percent of likely voters supporting Trump and 39 percent backing Clinton for the week of Aug. 26 to Sept. 1. Clinton's support has dropped steadily in the weekly tracking poll since Aug. 25, eliminating what had been a eight-point lead for her.

Trump's gains came as Republican support for their party’s candidate jumped by six percentage points over the past two weeks, to about 78 percent. That is still below the 85 percent support Republican nominee Mitt Romney enjoyed in the summer of 2012, but the improvement helps explain Trump’s rise in the poll.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll is conducted online in English in all 50 states. The latest poll surveyed 1,804 likely voters over the course of the week; it had a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of three percent.

Different polls have produced widely different results over the course of the campaign. In part that's because some, like Reuters/Ipsos, have attempted to measure the preferences of who's likely to vote, while others have surveyed the larger pool of all registered voters. And even those that survey likely voters have different ways of estimating who is likely to cast a ballot.

Again, a very, very similar outcome to IBD/TIPP.  Rasmussen too has made the jump to the likely voter model this week.

Hillary Clinton’s post-convention lead has disappeared, putting her behind Donald Trump for the first time nationally since mid-July.

The latest weekly Rasmussen Reports White House Watch national telephone and online survey shows Trump with 40% support to Clinton’s 39% among Likely U.S. Voters, after Clinton led 42% to 38% a week ago. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson now earns seven percent (7%) of the vote, down from nine percent (9%) the previous two weeks, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein picks up three percent (3%) support. Three percent (3%) like some other candidate, and seven percent (7%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording,click here.)

Clinton's support has been trending down from a high of 44% in early August just after the Democratic National Convention. This is her lowest level of support since mid-July. Trump's support has been eroding, too, from his high of 44% at that time. A one-point lead is statistically insignificant in a survey with a +/- 3 percentage point of margin of error. It highlights, however, that this remains a very close race.

Again, a nearly identical outcome.  All three polls show Hillary Clinton at just 39% among likely voters in a 4-way race, tied with Trump, and frankly I don't believe that for a second. Once again these likely voter models almost always underestimate black and Latino voters, and those are the groups that Hillary is polling the best with.

So expect to see adjustments in these likely voter models that favor Clinton as we move ahead as these models start accounting for the changes in the electorate from four years ago (some will do this better than others, which is why Gallup was so badly off four years ago in late October, having Romney up by 7 two weeks before the election.)

Shorter article: relax.  Then go vote.

Deadbeat Newt

I guess if your political career is already over, and has been for years, it's okay if you decide to welsh on you campaign debt (if you're a Republican, that is.)

Newt Gingrich apparently has no plans to pay back dozens of small businesses that made yard signs and TV ads for his 2012 presidential campaign.

Gingrich filed a document with the Federal Election Commission this week detailing a debt settlement plan to finally terminate his 2012 presidential campaign committee. The document shows that “Newt 2012” plans to stiff 114 businesses and consultants that are altogether owed $4.6 million.

The former House speaker, failed presidential candidate and Donald Trump vice president runner-up was forced to file the debt settlement plan with the FEC as part of its alternative dispute resolution process. Gingrich was the subject of a complaint alleging that his campaign had illegally commingled campaign funds with corporate funds from a company controlled by Gingrich and his wife Callista.

While the FEC general counsel found reason to believe the allegations in the complaint, the six commissioners split along ideological lines in a 3-3 vote, it did not penalize Gingrich. Instead, the campaign agreed to file a debt settlement plan and terminate in 2016. The plan was originally due on May 23, but Gingrich was granted an extension until August 1.

The debt settlement plan document indicates the “total amount to be paid to creditors” is zero dollars.

Gingrich did not respond to a request for comment made through two spokespeople.

So that's how Republicans really feel about America's small businesses. Hoocoodanode, right?

Berning Bridges With The Southern Vote

I do not understand why Bernie Sanders keeps saying stuff like this when he's supposedly trying to convince voters to join him.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — who has run off an impressive string of primary victories — dismissed actual vote totals that show former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a commanding lead, saying those votes “came from the South.”
Host George Stephanopoulos noted Clinton’s lead in delegates and asked the senator if he would take his fight for the nomination to the floor of the convention.

“Well, here’s what I think,” Sanders replied. “I think at the end of the day, what Democrats all over this country want to make sure is that somebody like a Donald Trump or a Ted Cruz does not end up in the White House. And I think what more and more Democrats are seeing is that Bernie Sanders is the stronger candidate.”

“She’s getting more votes,” the host pressed.

“Well, she is getting more votes. A lot of that came from the South,” Sanders parried. “But if you look at the polling out there, we do a lot better against Trump and the other Republicans in almost every instance — not every one — than she does. And the reason is that we both get a lot of Democrats, but I get a lot more independents than she does.”

Sanders comments fall in line with statements made by his own campaign that Clinton is doing well in states that might not fall into the Democratic column in the November election despite inroads made by President Obama in 2012.

I just do not understand this constant antagonistic attitude towards red state Democrats, the vast majority of which are black voters, voters that Sanders admits he has trouble reaching.  If you know you have trouble reaching black Democrats, and you're trying to unite the party behind you, then why keep dismissing them?

Sanders also addressed the controversy from earlier in the week when he claimed Clinton is not “qualified” to be president, blaming his response on her campaign questioning his competency.

“Well, she didn’t quite say that. But her surrogates implied that,” he responded. “And all that I meant by that is that if you vote for the war in Iraq, which turned out to be the worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of America, if you take, through your super PAC, tens and tens of millions of dollars from Wall Street and other special interests, if you support almost every disastrous trade agreement in this last 30 years…”

“Well, President Obama supported that,” the host interrupted. “Is he not qualified?”

“No, he is very qualified. But my point is, it is a question of judgment. It is a question of judgment,” Sanders replied.

That is also a cop out, and really, really bothers me.

Last Call For The Con-Man-Servative

The New York Times is hitting Sen. Ted Cruz on financial disclosure laws, it seems as Cruz is gaining in the polls against Donald Trump, there are new questions about Cruz's loan from Goldman Sachs for his Senate campaign four years ago.

Those reports show that in the critical weeks before the May 2012 Republican primary, Mr. Cruz — currently a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination — put “personal funds” totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” as Mr. Cruz described it in an interview with The New York Times several years ago.

A review of personal financial disclosures that Mr. Cruz filed later with the Senate does not find a liquidation of assets that would have accounted for all the money he spent on his campaign. What it does show, however, is that in the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before being paid down later that year. There is no explanation of their purpose.

Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns. Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders. There is no evidence that the Cruzes got a break on their loans.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz’s presidential campaign, Catherine Frazier, acknowledged that the loan from Goldman Sachs, drawn against the value of the Cruzes’ brokerage account, was a source of money for the Senate race. Ms. Frazier added that Mr. Cruz also sold stocks and liquidated savings, but she did not address whether the Citibank loan was used.

The failure to report the Goldman Sachs loan, for as much as $500,000, was “inadvertent,” she said, adding that the campaign would file corrected reports as necessary. Ms. Frazier said there had been no attempt to hide anything.

The Cruz campaign is claiming that the failure to report is an oversight (an oversight that just happened to allow Cruz to get $1.2 million from two of the largest banks in the country that helped to crash the economy in 2008 without admitting it.)

It's not even close to being illegal, but it's just another example of how Cruz can't maintain both his outsider maverick status without taking GOP establishment cash without lying to everyone he can.

Welcome Back, Mr. Silver

The new FiveThirtyEight has launched this week, now with ESPN (let's remember they started out modeling baseball stats), and Prognosticator Supreme Nate Silver explains his site's take on what he calls "data journalism" and what it means for the media landscape.  He starts out confessing that his modeling for the 2012 elections was in fact overrated because other folks came to very similar conclusions about Obama vs Romney, and for one other reason:

The other reason I say our election forecasts were overrated is because they didn’t represent the totality, or even the most important part, of our journalism at FiveThirtyEight. We also covered topics ranging from the increasing acceptance of gay marriage to the election of the new pope, along with subjects in sports, science, lifestyle and economics. Relatively little of this coverage entailed making predictions. Instead, it usually involved more preliminary steps in the data journalism process: collecting data, organizing data, exploring data for meaningful relationships, and so forth. Data journalists have the potential to add value in each of these ways, just as other types of journalists can add value by gathering evidence and writing stories.

The breadth of our coverage will be much clearer at this new version of FiveThirtyEight, which is launching Monday under the auspices of ESPN. We’ve expanded our staff from two full-time journalists to 20 and counting. Few of them will focus on politics exclusively; instead, our coverage will span five major subject areas — politics, economics, science, life and sports.

So here's where we are in 2014:  fact-driven journalism is shiny and new, as opposed to endless punditry, opining, spin, and agenda-driven lying.  I can't think of a better person to fill this "niche" than Nate Silver.  Here's wishing him luck.

It's a pretty high bar, and judgement is so far reserved.

The Proles Are Required To Consume More Confectioneries

Ann Romney feels sorry for you, America.  You didn't elect her husband, after all, and now, well....

Ann Romney isn't sad her husband lost the presidency for her sake — she's sad on behalf of America. And she still regularly runs into people who are sad Romney lost in 2012, probably at the country club. 

The coulda-been-First Lady appeared on Fox News Friday morning to talk Mitt the movie (which is good) and, of course, Mitt the man who, his wife says, is "a pretty independent, wonderful guy." 

Romney ("Best-selling author," per the chyron) "always believed [Mitt] was going to be the president of the United States," she tells Fox's Bill Hemmer. When he didn't: "We lost, but truly the country lost, by not having Mitt as president." Then she decides that she'll "be polite and nice and not comment" on how she actually thinks Obama's second term is going. We tried to guess her opinion on the topic and were unable to do so. 

Responding to reports that Mitt leads in a early 2016 New Hampshire poll (despite his not running), Ann said she wasn't surprised. "I run across people all the time and they're still really upset about the election," Romney says. "They're still really sad." Then she left the studio, perhaps destined for one of the Romney family's various houses scattered around the country.

Marie Antoin-nutjob here doesn't understand why you unwashed troglodytes didn't crown her husband as our new glorious master of America, Inc. and stuff.  She feels only sadness of the one percent who matter, and confusion that the grunting, pissing yokels we so graciously allow to vote didn't discharge their duty and toss the Mulatto-In-Chief from the aptly named abode he resided in.

Which makes sense.  The "conservative intellectual" chattering class likes to entertain themselves by pretending they are super-intelligent and that anyone who pulls the level for a Democrat is a "low-information voter".  After all, if we were all as smart as Ann Romney, not only would we have elected Mitt in a landslide, but we'd all be fabulously wealthy, too, like the Romneys.  Which obviously makes them smarter than all of us.

Just not smart enough to think down to our poop-throwing level in order to convince us to vote for the guy.

I'm betting one of the most sad people she's met is this guy.

Dinesh D'Indictment

I've talked about professional right-wing hack and "movie auteur" Dinesh D'Souza before (he's the clown behind the failed 2012 winger anti-Obama "documentary 2016: Obama's America) but it seems his political activities in 2012 got him in more than a bit of trouble as the Department of Justice rang him up on campaign finance violations today.

Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative commentator and best-selling author, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for arranging excessive campaign contributions to a candidate for the U.S. Senate. 

According to an indictment made public on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, D'Souza around August 2012 reimbursed people who he had directed to contribute $20,000 to the candidate's campaign. The candidate was not named in the indictment. 

Attempts to reach D'Souza and a lawyer representing him were unsuccessful. 

D'Souza was charged in the indictment with one count of making illegal contributions in the names of others, and one count of causing false statements to be made. 

Federal law in 2012 limited primary and general election campaign contributions to $2,500 each, for a total of $5,000, from any individual to any one candidate.

Supposedly, the candidate in question was New York Republican Wendy Long, who D'Souza donated to in 2012, only to have her get stomped by Kirsten Gillibrand's wildly successful re-election campaign.

FEC campaign finance records show Mr. D’Souza made two $2,500 contributions to long-shot Republican New York U.S. Senate candidate Wendy Long in March 2012—the maximum allowed. Mr. D’Souza’s wife at the time, Dixie D’Souza, also gave $5,000 that March, records show. The indictment says the candidate in question was unaware of Mr. D’Souza’s allegedly illicit activities. Ms. Long was handily defeated in the general election by Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand.

So not only did he apparently get caught, but it looks like he basically risked breaking the law backing a candidate that lost by 44 points.

But totally worth it, right?

Kingmaker Of Wishful Thinking

If you thought FOX News chairman Roger Ailes's job was to run a news channel, well, somebody forgot to tell Roger Ailes as a new biography by Gabriel Sherman tells all:

Roger Ailes was so eager to influence national politics that in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, he told fellow Fox News executives point-blank: “I want to elect the next president.”

Imagine the endless winger uproar, multiple GOP House hearings, and constant screaming about "biased liberal media" if anyone at MSNBC, CNN, or the other three news networks said the same.  FOX News is the propaganda arm of the GOP.  Period.

The book describes in detail Mr. Ailes’s professional ambition, his desire to influence American politics through a conservative prism, and his status as a visionary who possessed an intuitive understanding of the power of television to shape public opinion. Before entering the corporate world, Mr. Ailes was a political consultant, and Mr. Sherman’s book credits him with being a pioneer in using television during election campaigns.

Again, FOX News is not a news agency.  It is a propaganda mill for the Republican Party, and that is Ailes's stated goal, to use the network to promote Republicans and trash Democrats.

So why is it treated as a serious news outlet and not a political entity?

Despite being unsatisfied with many of the Republican candidates for president in 2012, Mr. Ailes endeavored to promote Mitt Romney on Fox News programs, the book says. Before the Wisconsin congressman Paul D. Ryan was chosen as Mr. Romney’s running mate, Mr. Ailes advised Mr. Ryan that his television skills needed work and recommended a speech coach.

You can thank Roger Ailes for Mitt Romney.  Ailes thought his network could make him your President and tried to do so.  Nobody should be surprised by this, but now that the biggest non-secret in political journalism has been broken wide open, what now?

Maybe somebody in Congress should be asking Roger Ailes why he's working for the GOP, yes?

Stuck In The Past, Romney-Style

It's nice to know that if America had elected Mitt Romney, he'd still be arguing over whether or not he made that famous 47 percent quote.  You know, the one on tape.  Apparently, he thinks we forget or something (or that Google disintegrates after 200 days.)  David Corn:

Poor Mitt Romney. He seems unable to come to terms with one of the most significant episodes in his public life: the 47 percent video that undercut his chance of becoming president of the United States.

Sunday's Washington Post featured an article adapted from reporter Dan Balz's new 2012 campaign book, Collision 2012, and the excerpt focused on Romney's take on why he entered the race and why he lost. Toward the end of the article, which was based on a series of interviews Balz conducted with Romney, the twice-failed Republican presidential candidate was forced to confront his 47-percent remarks, and he just couldn't do so forthrightly.

There's a shocker.

[Romney] was in California and said at first he couldn’t get a look at the video. His advisers were pushing him to respond as quickly as he could. "As I understood it, and as they described it to me, not having heard it, it was saying, 'Look, the Democrats have 47 percent, we’ve got 45 percent, my job is to get the people in the middle, and I’ve got to get the people in the middle,'" he said. "And I thought, 'Well, that’s a reasonable thing.'... It's not a topic I talk about in public, but there's nothing wrong with it. They've got a bloc of voters, we've got a bloc of voters, I've got to get the ones in the middle. And I thought that that would be how it would be perceived—as a candidate talking about the process of focusing on the people in the middle who can either vote Republican or Democrat. As it turned out, down the road, it became perceived as being something very different."

In other words, he tried to pull one over on Dan Balz.  What Romney actually said of course, was:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what… These are people who pay no income tax..."[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

David Corn should know, he was the guy that got the tape and broke the story...and most likely ended Mitt Romney's 2012 run cold.  But he's outright lying to the DC press, because they figure they still won't hold him accountable for his own actions.  They figured we forgot.  We did...we just didn't forget why he lost.

Last Call

David Corn tells the story of the man who taped Mitt Romney's fundraising speech with the infamous "47%" comments, a man who has chosen to reveal himself as a Florida bartender named Scott Prouty.

The fellow on the other end of the phone call pronounced his name with hesitation. For nearly a fortnight, he and I had been building a long-distance rapport via private tweets, emails, and phone conversations as we discussed how best to make public the secret video he had shot of Mitt Romney talking at a private, $50,000-per-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida. Now I was almost ready to break the story at Mother Jones. I had verified the video, confirming when and where it had been shot, and my colleagues and I had selected eight clips—including Romney's now-infamous remarks about the 47 percent of Americans he characterized as "victims" unwilling to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives"—to embed in two articles. We had blurred these clips, at the source's request, to make it difficult to tell where Romney had uttered these revealing comments, while clearly showing that it was Romney speaking. The goal was to afford the source a modicum of protection.

The source was justifiably worried about repercussions. Once the video was posted, he might lose his job. He might face criminal prosecution or a civil lawsuit. Months earlier, he had anonymously posted a snippet from the video, in which Romney nonchalantly described the work-camp-like living conditions at a Chinese factory he had visited. The source, offended by these comments, had hoped that the short clip would catch fire in the political-media world. But it hadn't, partly because its context and origins were unknown. The source's desire to remain in the shadows had hindered his ability to bring the story to the public.

And Prouty was right (and remains right) on his healthy fear of the Right Wing Noise Machine.  It's guaranteed now that they will try very hard to destroy him, his loved ones, and his entire life.   It takes real courage to stand up to the evil and speak out into the night.

Then James Carter IV, a freelance researcher (and, though I didn't know it then, the grandson of Jimmy Carter) who had been sending me public documents regarding Romney's prior business investments, had, at my request, tracked the anonymous poster down. I subsequently persuaded him to send me the full video of the fundraiser and to allow me to release portions of it, under the strict condition that I'd do whatever was possible to keep his identity hidden. He did not want to become the story. He hoped the public would focus only on Romney's words. And through all this, he had not told me who he was, though he disclosed that he had worked at the fundraiser and insisted that he was no political partisan and had filmed Romney more out of curiosity than as part of a plan to trap the GOP candidate.

I respected his desire for privacy. He was about to commit a courageous and unprecedented act of whistle-blowing. But as we neared publication, I said I had to know his name. Do you really need it? he asked. Yes, I replied, explaining I could not publish the stories without knowing his identity. I vowed I would keep it a secret.

And to David Corn's real credit, he did.   Scott Prouty told his story this evening on MSNBC's The Ed Show, with an hour;long interview with Ed Schultz.   I wish the man luck, because he's going to need it.  The Breitbart crew will go straight for him now, because that's what happens to people who stand up and do the right thing around America.

Godspeed, sir.

Even More Mitten-freude

The Boston Globe gives their version of how the Romney campaign blew it:

To this day, Romney’s aides wonder how it all went so wrong.

They console each other with claims that the election was much closer than realized, saying that Romney would be president if roughly 370,000 people in swing states had voted differently. Romney himself blamed demographic shifts and Obama’s “gifts”: ­federal largesse targeted to Democratic constituencies.

But a reconstruction by the Globe of how the campaign unfolded shows that Romney’s problems went deeper than is widely understood. His campaign made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation.

One of the gravest errors, many say, was the Romney team’s failure, until too late in the campaign, to sell voters on the candidate’s personal qualities and leadership gifts. The effect was to open the way for Obama to define Romney through an early blitz of negative advertising. Election Day polls showed that the vast majority of voters concluded that Romney did not really care about average people.

These failures are now the subject of scrutiny by national GOP ­officials who say they plan to “reverse engineer” the ­Romney effort to understand what went wrong. A number of Romney’s top aides stressed in interviews that, while they ­remain proud of their work, they feel an obligation to ­acknowledge their numerous mistakes so lessons are learned.

And yet we all know that if Team Romney had gotten those 370,000 votes and put the country into recount hell, or 500,000 votes and won the electoral college, we'd all be reading from our Village betters about how the Obama campaign was the largest failure in human history, and that despite these deeper problems in the Romney campaign, the Obama campaign must have been worse because after all, they still lost to the guy.  And the Romney campaign would have been "right all along".

So no, knowing how close the country came to abject disaster, knowing that Mitt Romney could have won the presidency and lost the popular vote by 3% and 4 million votes, I choose not to dance the dance of Loser Mitt, but to remember that despite every dirty trick in the book and a few new ones, it was only the Romney camp's massive incompetence that saved our country, and that 61 million Americans, less than 20% of the country, could have doomed us all.

They were close.  They needed but four states:  Florida, Ohio, Virginia and New Hampshire.  They almost got them.  We'd be wise to remember how close they were.

Merry Christmas.  We've still got a lot of work ahead.  Take the 2012 election as the warning it was.  Savor the victory, but stay vigilant.

Early In The Iowa Morning

If you want to know why Republicans did everything they could to end early voting in Ohio and Florida, take a look at the results from Iowa, where President Obama lost the vote on Election Day, but won the state due to early voting.

Overall, more than two in five Iowa voters (43%) cast early ballots. The figure was up sharply from the 31% who cast early votes in the state in 2008.

Michael McDonald, a George Mason University political scientist who studies early voting, said in an interview that when all the 2012 votes are finally counted, the share of votes cast early will rise to a record 35%, from about 30% in 2008.

The larger jump in Iowa is due primarily to the ferocity of early-vote competition between the campaigns there.

But there’s another potential factor:  Iowans have been spared a recent trend in American politics: a concerted effort by Republicans at the state level to restrict voting.

Unlike some other key states, government is divided in Iowa; Democrats control the state Senate; the GOP holds the House and the governorship. That split makes it impossible for Republicans to enact legislation that might undermine early voting, assuming they wanted to.

In Florida, they did. The Republican Legislature and governor succeeded in shrinking the early-vote window, and the number of early in-person votes fell this year from 2008 (even though the total number of votes cast increased). In Ohio, courts blocked a similar GOP effort to limit early voting.

In the end President Obama built up too much of a lead for Romney to catch up.

This time, the Republican “win” in ballots cast on election day (51% for Romney to 46% for Obama) wasn’t enough.  Obama took the early vote by 20 points (59% to 39%). And thanks to the size of the early vote, a state that many thought could go either way went for the president by a comfortable margin of nearly 6 percentage points.

That's the difference early voting makes for Democrats.  That's why Republicans will now work as hard as they can to end the practice in every state possible.  Republicans can't win on ideas, they have to win by limiting who can and cannot get to vote.

Always keep that in mind when you hear a GOP politician talk.

Existential Polling, You're Doing It Wrong

Nate Silver is rather brutal with his assessment of the Romney campaign's complicit effects in wrecking a number of key firms through their ludicrously incorrect internal polls.

Campaigns should foster organizational cultures in which their pollsters are enabled to provide the most value.

Campaigns might consider how pollsters are compensated; they could tie some of the pollster’s compensation to the accuracy of its final polls, for instance.

Some campaigns have had success with hiring more than one pollster and having them work relatively autonomously from one another. This can serve as a check against groupthink — and may increase the likelihood the different assumptions that the pollsters might introduce will be thought over and debated.

But most important, campaigns would be wise not to have their pollsters serve as public spokesmen or spin doctors for the campaign. Campaigns have other personnel who specialize in those tasks.

The role of the pollster should be just the opposite of this, in fact: to provide a reality check such that the campaign does not begin to believe its own spin.

Ouch.  And yes, he's talking to you, Gallup.

More Dems Versus Better Dems

There are two schools of thought on how to recover the Speaker of the House position for the Democrats:  one says that we need to have the numbers first and then get real liberal legislation passed as a result of mass, the other says we have to have true liberals in the House first to build a power base and then the numbers will flow from there.  The first has the advantage of short term gains that can lead to longer ones but at the risk of a GOP backlash, the latter means a longer time in control but requires more time to come to power, and perhaps never coming to power until the Republicans have made it impossible to do so.

One of the key House Dems in the "More Dems versus Better Dems" argument right now is Patrick Murphy, the Florida businessman who beat out the repugnant Allen West.  Howie Klein over at Down With Tyranny reminds us that Patrick Murphy is at best a Blue Dog, and at worst, a full-blown Republican.  Coming from Kentucky (where our last Congressional Democrat, Blue Dog Ben Chandler, was roundly defeated) I can certainly relate:

I was more than a little shocked when Keith Ellison, one of the most progressive stalwarts in the House, endorsed Patrick Murphy. Murphy, a rich spoiled brat, a Romney donor, and a lifelong Republican who just switched parties, had exactly one thing going for him (aside from his father's personal attack PAC): he ran against hated war criminal Allen West. Many Members of Congress were especially eager to see West defeated-- and not just because he's a loudmouthed teabagger. Alan Grayson argued that there was no one else in the House like West because West is a war criminal. His presence brought a sense of infamy on the whole joint. Most progressives agree with Grayson on that one but they didn't rush to endorse Murphy. New Dems and other corrupt conservatives with blue t-shirts did. Ellison, of course, had an even more personal grudge against West, who isn't just a raving McCarthyite but is also a vicious Islamophobe who hate personally baited Ellison. I had never talked with Ellison when he called me to tell me his thoughts on why he had endorsed Murphy; that was also our last conversation (at least so far).

One thing Ellison said that I liked-- and liked a lot-- was an indication that he would take Murphy under his wing and help him understand the progressive prospective. It's a shame he can't time travel back to when Murphy was 5 or 6 years old... but it's worth a try. And he needs to get started quickly. Yesterday MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell asked Murphy a typically loaded Villager kind of question: "How much are you willing to cut entitlements if you get the tax increases you want?" Could you imagine anything like that coming out of Rachel Maddow's mouth? And Murphy's response-- well just the exact New Dem line: "Everything should be on the table." Boehner's gonna love this boy! And Ellison better get busy.

Democrats retook the House in 2006 because of Blue Dogs.  The response 4 years later was the Tea Party, and now in 2012, the Blue Dogs have almost all been replaced with Tea Party whackaloons.  The problem is with district gerrymandered they way they are, the choices for a lot of liberals who live in red districts are Allen West vs Patrick Murphy, Tea Party vs Blue Dog.

Is one really better than the other?  I'd rather have a dozen Patrick Murphys than any Allen Wests...but voters certainly didn't think so in 2010.

We'll see.  Keep an eye on Patrick.

Last Days Of The Wild Wild West

Allen West, the last guy in America to figure out that Allen West lost his bid for reelection, has finally admitted that he lost his bid for reelection.

After two weeks of battle with St. Lucie County elections officials — and a recount of early votes that wound up extending Murphy’s lead — West acknowledged that he couldn’t surmount his 1,904-vote, or 0.58 percent, deficit. That difference was just outside the 0.5 percent threshold to automatically trigger a recount of all votes.

So the brash conservative opted to bow out rather than wage a long and costly court battle he was unlikely to win.

“For two weeks since Election Day, we have been working to ensure every vote is counted accurately and fairly. We have made progress towards that goal, thanks to the dedication of our supporters and their unrelenting efforts to protect the integrity of the democratic process,” West said in a statement to POLITICO. “While many questions remain unanswered, today I am announcing that I will take no further action to contest the outcome of this election.”

West congratulated Murphy, saying, “I pray he will serve his constituents with honor and integrity, and put the interests of our nation before his own.”

Oh, I fully expect Allen West to be the first person to sign up for Murphy's job in 2014.  He's not done, folks, not by a long shot...just ask Alan Grayson what it means to be an unapologetic partisan House member from Florida voted out of a job, only to come roaring back two years later.

We'll see, but for now, I expect West to end up on FOX or some other wingnut welfare operation until he can get back to running to make Florida safe from socialist Kenyan Muslim Marxist everythings, or whatever he does.

Something tells me I'm going to continue to get use out of the tag as I will Grayson's (which is still true, guy has a spine, he paid for it, he came back.)

Election Spoiler Alerts

Matt Welch over at Reason Magazine is usually a complete jackass whom I vociferously disagree with, but today he serves a useful purpose for once and admits that there were several Congressional races in 2012 where the Libertarian candidate cost the Republican candidate the election and handed over the seat to the Democrats.

On Friday, Garrett Quinn pointed out two congressional races in which a Libertarian Party candidate received considerably more votes than the margin separating a winning Democrat from a losing Republican: Massachusetts' 6th District (49.3%-48.1%-2.6% for Rep. John Tierney over Richard Tisei and Daniel Fishman), and Utah's 4th District (48.3%-47.3%-4.5% for Rep. Jim Matheson over Mia Love and Jim Vein).

Last Wednesday, Brian Doherty also flagged Montana's race for U.S. Senate, where incumbent Sen. John Tester defeated the Ron Paul-endorsed Denny Rehberg 48.7% to 44.8%, while LP nominee Dan Cox received 6.5% of the vote. All three losing Republicans had significantly more libertarian credibility than maybe 90% of elected GOPers on the national level.

So are there any other "spoiler" accusations out there? At least four, probably more:

Two of the races he points out are two of the three black Tea Party Republicans defeated in House races I pointed out yesterday:  Mia Love in Utah and Vernon Parker in Arizona. In Utah, Jim Wein got 4.5% of the vote allowing Jim Matheson to keep his seat, and in Arizona, Krysten Sinema won in part because Libertarian Powell Gammill got more than 6% of the vote.

Considering about the only difference between the Libertarian candidates and the tea party ones were the Libertarian view of "live and let live" on social issues and pot legalization, it's notable that we're looking at a situation where social issues burned Republicans badly.

It's also notable that Libertarians put up significant numbers against black Republicans in two states not known for having a high African-American population.  If Love and Parker were white, would they still have lost?

That's a question worth asking among Republicans.

Last Call

There are still a few House races left being decided at this hour, but one of them was called this afternoon:  in the newly created Arizona's 9th, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema knocked off Republican Vernon Parker to become the country's first openly bisexual member of Congress.

Former Democratic state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has been elected to represent a new Phoenix-area congressional district, emerging victorious after a bitterly fought race that featured millions of dollars in attack ads.

Sinema becomes the first openly bisexual member of Congress. Her victory came in a year when three states approved gay marriage, and at least five openly gay Democrats were elected to House seats. A Wisconsin congresswoman also became the first openly gay person elected to the Senate.

Sinema had a narrow lead on election night that made the race too close to call. But she slowly improved that advantage as more ballots were tallied in recent days, and now has a nearly 6,000-vote edge that is too much for Republican Vernon Parker to overcome.

Sinema, 36, said Monday she was “honored and ready to start working for the people of Arizona.”

It also means that out of three high-profile House races featuring black Tea Party Republicans, (Allen West, Mia Love, and Vernon Parker) all three of them lost. They were close races, but they lost nonetheless.  There's a lesson there for Republicans, and especially for black Tea Party Republicans, but I don't think they'll learn it unless it's applied with a sledgehammer.

From outer space.

Buckeye Blanked

How badly did Mitt Romney lose in East Cleveland, Ohio?  Entire precincts gave him zero votes.

The vote, incredibly, was unanimous in Obama's favor in nine Cleveland precincts.

The largest of those voted 542-0 in favor of Obama. In seven other Cleveland precincts and one in East Cleveland, Romney didn't pick up a single vote, though votes for third-party candidates stopped the president short of unanimous victories.

On Cleveland's West Side, Obama won 76 percent. And he carried 69 percent countywide.

In the suburbs, Obama won 62 percent of the vote. This was helped, in part, by winning 98 percent in both Warrensville Heights and East Cleveland, but those towns and Cleveland alone did not provide the countywide margin.

Cities where Obama won every precinct stretched from Lakewood and Brook Park to Cleveland Heights and Orange.

Meanwhile, the only citywide precinct sweeps for Romney were in Brecksville, Highland Heights and Independence, though Romney also did so in a handful of villages on the eastern side of the county. 

Entire.  Precincts, folks.  Talk about a shutout, damn.

Podcast Versus The Stupid!

Episode 20 is up, Aftermath Of The Math, in which Bon and I cover the Republican freakout over the lost election, which pollsters were correct and which lost what little credibility they had left, as well as the surprise resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus over an affair with his biographer, SCOTUS versus Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.'s plea bargain deal.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on Blog Talk Radio

As usual, you can download the episode here and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

Republican Pollsters Know Why They Lost

Alex Burns reviews the political epitaph for GOP pollsters filled with apparent dopes who "didn't see it coming", who "didn't think the electorate would vote" for Obama or at all, and "can't figure out what happened."

Let me clear this up.  Republican pollsters knew exactly why they lost.

The crux of the party’s challenge in 2012, said Republican pollster David Winston, was figuring out whether the electorate would look more like the 2004 voting population, when Republicans and Democrats turned out in equal numbers, or the 2008 electorate, which was more Democratic than Republican by 7 points.

Winston questioned how rigorously some campaigns tested their assumptions about who would show up.

“The results fell within the 2004 result and the 2008 result, obviously closer to 2008,” said Winston, who advises the House GOP leaders — who fared well on Tuesday. “That was clearly how everybody had been describing what the potential range was. The question is, as people were assessing their individual campaigns, whether it be the presidential or down ballot for that, was how were they working through the potential scenarios as far as what could happen.”

One top GOP pollster expressed dismay at the ultimate composition of the electorate: “I had no expectation that Democratic advantage on party ID would be the same as it was in 2008. I thought there would be more Democrats than Republicans, but I didn’t think it would be equal to 2008."

Bull.  They knew it was over after the Democratic National Convention.  But unless the race was close, no more polling.  Hence the insanity that Romney had tied the race or even taken the lead after the first debate.  We had to have the horse race mentality so the pollsters would keep getting paid to poll.

This race was never close.  Keep that in mind that they told you it was anyway.