Nov 04 2006
Some Early Indicators
Updates below
This is the season I avidly read TKS and look for the sage words from Geraghty’s source “Obiwan”, that source has insight and information us political addicts would die for. TKS has an update on what Obiwan predicted and what is happening. I for one have predicted a Steele win for over a year, so seeing that come in to reality sometimes makes me forget that the move towards Steele, like the support for Lieberman, is bucking the liberal media’s myth of a democrat, anti-iraq wave. Byron York highlights some concern from Kos on MT and his surrender on TN. More later if time permits.
Update: It seems this election will be a historic one for lots of reasons. One of which will be turn out, which means it will be a marker for future GOTV efforts. And I think the Democrats need to be worried because, like 2004, high turnout doesn’t translate into their side winning. In fact, the fallacy of the polls in 2004 was skewed turnout models which missed the surge of the GOP GOTV effort. More indications today for those interested.
Next up is the huge increase in absentee ballots in MD. My guess is a lot of people are crossing party lines to vote in Steele and Ehrlich since the MD black Dems are now in open revolt with the Dem party.
VA is also seeing immense increases in absentee ballots, sometimes double or triple the previous records. In this decidedly red state, those levels cannot be from Dems alone. And some regions seeing the highest increase (Northern VA, Norfolk) are heavy military areas. My guess is Kerry motivated the military vote (and that includes their families) like never before.
Same in Missouri. It’s happening everywhere.
Simply Google “absentee” and you will stories from every state where absentee voting is way, way up and reaching levels comparable to the 2004 elections (they seem to have already passed the 2002 midterm marks). What this does mean is all those polls we have been seeing, where Dems have been weighted because of the drop of in Rep responses are bogus. And I do mean bogus. Rassmussen and others have said they have seen a big ‘increase’ in Dem party responses. And with these massive absentee and early voting levels it is clear these were not changes in the electorate, but changes in the electorate’s participation in polls. That is why pollsters would have done better to show the two results based on heavy turn out for both sides of the partisan aisle, and one result for equal turnout.
The polls out now do not consider an equal or greater participation by Reps in the turnout models. And that is why they are getting wild results when you look across polls. This is a time where accurate measurements would be converging. They are not, so that means the measurement process is flawed.
The media is the biggest loser here. I am just stunned that any news organization is playing the Haggard or Rumsfeld stories as issues. It is a clear sign of how dumb the media thinks Americans are to let these two stories, which are not on any ballot anywhere, be part of the election debate. But they have their BDS to deal with, and they will have the destroyed reputations to live with after next Tuesday.
Anyway, the bottom line is this: The fact the absentee ballots are, at minimum, showing a surge of equal size on both sides of the aisle means the polls are garbage and seriously overestimating Democrat strength.
Addendum: Other indicators to watch. a couple of polls out showed the generic polls and the race polls are going to be wildly off because, while the generic shows huge leads for dems, when asked whether they will support their current congressman or not, it is 2-1 for the incumbents – meaning it is nearly opposite the generic question’s results. When faced with the real choice, voters aren’t moving to the Dems as much as the polls would indicate at a glance. That is why people who do not understand math (that would be you journalists out there) should not pretend to know how to interpret math results.
What Did John Kerry Do? Part 7…
I wrote a summary column about Kerry’s slander on the military here, and I discussed the column, and Kerry’s non-apology on Thursday’s program. I am certain that Mark Steyn did yesterday as he filled in for me. (The audio is here. My e-mails tell….
Can’t an increase in absentee ballot requests be seen as an increase in fraudulent voting?
LunatickFringe,
Not at these levels. These double and triple the rate of 2002 – when Reps really did some clobbering. Fraud, if it exists, is really minor.
Dean Barnett shares your optimism:
http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/g/30d4d9de-f94d-4c8b-a5f1-659139c85d9b
Today I started to think the polls are our #$%^ this year. We that in mind, I think the Republicans are going to gain a few seats both in the House and the Senate.
And I voted yesterday and I am 100% certain that I voted for the next Senator of MD – Michael Steele.
COme on–the pollsters are just de-saucing their earlier nonsense. They’ve done it before and need to get real before the ballots are counted if they plan to bilk their media and Dem sponsors yet again.
I am going to throw a little cold water on the party…
Some, not much since I concur in general.
If you spend some time waterboarding yourself at Air America Radio you will note that they are emphasizing ‘absentee voting’. They think that paper ballots (with an inherent 2.5% error rate – meaning about 2,500,000 errant ballot reads in 2000) are better and more secure than electronic voting machines. Greg Palast is on daily yakking up that nonsense…
So, there will be at least the six Error America listeners still remaining that will traipse over to early voting booths and absentee balloting to dlop their BDS drool on paper ballots.
These goobers… It has not cleared their three brain cells that the ‘Democratic Majority’ might have incorporated confused folks who voted thirty times and others who wake from the dead every two years on the first Tuesday in November.
Regardless – I think this post points to very good news. Republicans vote, Democrats really don’t.
Sad thing is, Boghie, that neither Republicans or Democrats have enough sway. It’s the independents who decide the vote. Assume that Republicans are going to vote Republican, Democrats are going to vote Democrat and you end up pretty much with a tie. It’s the remaining 25% or so, the independents, that decide who wins. So what the Republicans need to do is market stuff for non-Republican and non-Democrats. They need to reach out to people who aren’t members of the base of either party. That’s how you get elected these days. The party base is pretty firmly polorized. All you need to do with them is get ’em to the polls. Who you need to convince is the independents AND get them to the polls.
I voted absentee this year.
And I guess I should follow that statement up by saying that pollsters need to start including a much larger share of independent voters in their polls if they want to get an accurate view of an election.
Limiting it to Republicans and Democrats doesn’t mean a thing. All such a poll is going to produce is noise.
People understand that answering a poll is speech, but voting is action. They may be grumpy about a lot of things and tell someone on the phone that they want a change, but in the voting booth they will look at the national Democrats and think, better the devil you know.
Wild Cards?…
AJ Strata actually sees some things that may very well spell some surprises for election day. It seems absentee voting is very, very heavy (mokus, the artist formerly known as Black Jack, had noted the same thing in comments the other day). T…
C’MON DEAN! YOU’RE SPOILING OUR PITY PARTY…
Somebody better take that glass of kool aid away from Dean Barnett before he does irreperable damage to the synapses of his brain:
So what’s it all mean? In the tied races, the Republican will win. In the close races, the Republican will win…
Newsweek Poll…
Now it could be that independents have become that opposed to republicans in the past week, but a 20 percentage point swing in one week seems extreme Also, I would have expected to see significantly fewer undecided independents than in prior Newsweek …
Unintended consequences: at stake on Tuesday…
Did the Democrats truly consider the consequences of dismantling the Patriot Act… or preventing the NSA from wiretapping international telephone calls… or obstructing data-mining on phone-call records?…