Sep 09 2008

In Race For The Middle Of America McCain/Palin Scoring Big

Published by at 8:16 am under 2008 Elections,All General Discussions

I have said all year this is the election for the moderate middle. Americans are fed up with the bickering and paralysis being foisted on us by the hyper-partisans left and right. This election boils down to who can impress the respect of the moderate middle. All those traitorous people in the middle who will not follow the ‘true’ liberals and conservatives into useless policy wars on the margins.

In this fight for the middle McCain/Palin have come out way ahead early, according to Gallup:

John McCain’s 6 percentage-point bounce in voter support spanning the Republican National Convention is largely explained by political independents shifting to him in fairly big numbers, from 40% pre-convention to 52% post-convention in Gallup Poll Daily tracking.

I have been pointing this out in polls for days now as the punditry on the left keep trying to believe the only thing happening is the GOP base coming home. The GOP base is coming hope and is fired up, but that is only half the story. A 12% shift in independents in a month is huge. As noted yesterday, the ABC News poll showed a 20% shift in women towards McCain/Palin. The internals are foretelling a story yet to come visible.

The bottom line numbers in these polls are not changing because statistical models based on historic trends (with no resemblance to this year’s race) actually resist detecting a large and rapid shift.  It is a defensive mechanism built right into the mathematics to protect against garbage samples. The same protection, however, also makes the polls fairly dumb to major upheavals. To detect those you have to look inside the details where they can become visible.

Is this just bad data? Since I am seeing the same pattern in the internals of every poll coming out I am very confident it is not. Since the trend is universal my guess is the wave is out there and will show up in a week or so, when the statistical models see the same thing a few more times and deem it worthy of being reflected in the bottom line results.

Of course pollster can tweak their models to open them up a bit – but that is a risk that could invalidate them and create the problem two sequential polls are not identical anymore. So hold folks, this wild ride is just beginning to pull us up to the first roller-coaster drop off.

3 responses so far

3 Responses to “In Race For The Middle Of America McCain/Palin Scoring Big”

  1. dave m says:

    This seems interesting

    Obama: The Mansourian Candidate

    Obama and Rezko – both tied to radical islam

    From Atlas Shrugs

    http://atlasshrugs.bustablog.com/rezko-we-hardly-knew-you/

    Who You Callin’ Deranged?

  2. MerlinOS2 says:

    Part of what is driving this is the perception by Dem women that Hill got a bum wrap in the primary.

    Thus you have the PUMAs out there upset already.

    Add to that the sexist remarks and nutroots bashing of Palin and women in general are making their get off the fence decisions.

    Obama worked the overloading of delegates per the Dem plan to get the nomination. The state distributions were all done in his favor thanks to Dean and Brazile.

    Trouble is a lot of the states he won are solid Rep states in the general.

    Another big factor is even with the food fight turnout for the primaries there still were the usual sit out of them by the seniors.

    When they chime in for the general there will be a big effect from that demographic.

    The Dems have been pointing out their new voter registration. The only problem is most of the gains are in states that are already well in their pocket.

    You win the state by one vote or a million votes for most states won’t effect the number of electoral votes you get.

    A while back the Dems were spinning new voters in Ca. Only trouble is when you looked at it their total numbers went up, but their percentage of the total registered voters was down.

  3. dhunter says:

    O’Bomba/Bibi

    A prediction as America sees more of these two dufus Senators compared to the good Governor from Alaska.
    Senators have been notoriously bad presidential candidates as they live in a world all their own insulated from real Americans.