McCain wants to change DC, Obama wants to change America!

Major Update: Seems we have more proof of how bad the polls really are for Obama:

As I mentioned yesterday, my brother is paid staff with the McCain campaign. Two nights ago there was a conference call, where they released internals on GA, VA, and OH.

McCain was up HUGE in those states. They are not worried about those states.

If McCain is not worried about VA and OH, the PA is probably in play and has Obama and the Dems in a near panic. I said it weeks ago, but the race will be determined by PA and VA, and if either candidate can take both it means a lot of states will swing as well and this will be an electoral landslide. H/T Kim Priestap – end update

It seems we have a tightening race, if one looks at the daily tracking polls out there today. But first I want to focus on a couple of polls out recently for what they indicate about the lack of quality in the polls. First is the Newsweek poll which Jim Geraghty, over at The Campaign Spot, assessed and determined was pure BS:

You have McCain winning Republicans, 89 to 7. You have Obama winning Democrats, 91 to 5. …  You have McCain winning independents by 2 percent, 45 to 43.

And this adds up to an 11-percent Obama lead in your latest poll.

Of course this doesn’t add up. The only way to create an 11% lead with a tie like this is to assume Obama gets an enormous surge of support and no Hillary supporters defect to McCain. It is that last assumption that kills most polls and makes them garbage. But even the first assumption is way off. Independents will select the winner, and there are many independents truly excited over Governor Palin. Her crowds rival Obama’s, her debate audience surpassed that of Obama’s by millions. And then there are the angry, populists crowds out there railing against Obama. I see the intensity factor rapidly becoming a draw.

I have to laugh at all the idiots crying foul about a populist uprising against Obama headed by Governor Palin. After decades of the left claiming the GOP was responsible for the dragging deaths of gays, and would starve children and old people to feed corporate coffers, the idea that a woman has come out of the Northwest and called out the politicians for being elitist, cliquish, snobs who have no connection to the American People (but sure find time to hang around the terrorists like Bill Ayers) has the Political Industrial Complex stumped. The more they wail, the more Americans realize the best punishment for DC is to send in Sarah to kick some butt.

Victor Davis Hanson dissects the wailing of the elitists left and right best – so I won’t go into it in detail. The point is the temperature is rising because the anti-Obama forces are starting to roil. Which makes optimistic turnout models for Obama very risky. The folks fed up with DC are fed up with pollsters, the news media, the talking heads, the deal makers, the lobbyists, the power brokers and the politicians. They realize a power hungry clique has taken hold of the country’s levers of power and have been feeding them BS and keeping them in the dark for years now. But Americans are not mushrooms and they can make their displeasure known.

With a 90% wrong track numbers, historic lows for Congress, historic lows for the news media there is more of a chance there is a quiet and determined wave about to smash DC than there is a wave to anoint DC’s “chosen one”. And this is Obama’s Achilles Heel coming into the final stretch as the leader in the race. Everyone in the dungheap of DC is rooting for Obama now. Conservatives like Brooks are calling the lady from the backbone of America a ‘cancer’. Well, America sees Brooks and his cronies in DC as the cancer. The way to excise that cancer is to bring in what the cancer fears most.

So let me get to the next poll out recently, the newly schizoid Gallup Daily Tracking Poll. I am being very cheeky here because Gallup is doing what I have been asking pollster to do for a while now – show us a range of turnout model predictions. Just like a storm track cone, different turnout model assumptions give different trajectories. So Gallup as done the nation a favor here and shown how turnout assumptions are driving Obama’s tilted numbers in many polls. Here’s their data:

Now we can see as fact how turnout models are twisting the polls (like the Newsweek joke we discussed above). First, note how Obama’s support is very large in the general pool of ‘registered’ voters. This is the standard tilt to the left of the general population, who don’t all vote. When you focus down on ‘likely’ voters we see the classic 3-5% shift to the right (which will be there all the way to the final voting day). Obama’s lead goes from +7% down to +4% using the classic polling model. 

Now Gallup tries to inject some momentum in the race by attempting to relate the willingness to talk to pollsters as momentum for one side. As long as the willingness to talk to pollsters is directly tied to willingness to get out and vote, this is could measure any momentum for Obama. But given the fact Palin attracts the same or bigger crowds, even on national TV, I seriously doubt Obama has the edge in momentum anymore. Sarah Palin was a risky gamble, but she may well prove decisive. If you look the Gallup Numbers related to ‘intensity’, Obama jumps back to a +6% lead.

The Gallup Internals show a different race. The party affiliation numbers show a tie race, and maybe a McCain lead because he is winning the middle (Obama takes +3 for the middle left-right groups, but McCain takes +9 from the hardcore independents). I would not be doing what RCP is doing and even factor in the Gallup ‘intensity’ numbers, because if this was a complete analysis there would be a scenario that would have reasonable assumptions that favor McCain. Like the fact Palin and anger at Obama’s liberal leanings will offset any Obama surge – just as Hillary supporters kept Obama from winning the primaries outright. There is a model that should be run where McCain’s supporters are grossly under measured due to the fact the will not participate in the polls. And that could mean the third possible trajectory is a +5% lead for McCain. 

In my mind that makes the +4% lead from the conventional poll model the middle of the spectrum of possible outcomes, not the most pro-McCain scenario.

Newsweek did the same thing but without telling their readers. They took what would be a historically tied race and gave a huge (and unproven) boost to Obama, basically deciding he would bring out 11% more voters to the polls.  And he will do this relying on the most unreliable of voters, the young.  

I have seen and documented this tilt in poll internals for weeks now, as I did with the Morning Call PA Poll. That poll hillariously has a 15% difference in voter turnout between Dems and Reps, even though that state was won by George W Bush by only 2.5% in 2004.  I don’t for a minute believe McCain-Palin is down by 15%, I am not even sure they are down 5%. This poll is why the PA numbers are so far off and you will find Obama in that state trying to hold on to any lead he may have.

As of today Obama’s one time +8% lead in the Rasmussen poll has shrunk down to +5% in the last week. At this rate of decline (if held steady and there is no reason to assume it will hold steady) McCain would win easily three weeks from now.

The Gallup numbers are even more stunning, going from +11% to +4-6% (depending on which model you want to rely on) in a week. Even the more optimistic models show that this rate of decline would result in a McCain win by the time we go to vote.

We may be about to see the next President Dewey.

Update: I want to agree with Hanson about why so many are jumping ship on Palin to save their careers in the Political Industrial Complex.

Second, with Obama now with an 6-8 point lead, some in the DC/NY corridor these last three weeks figure it’s time now to jump or at least sort of jump, since the train they think is leaving the station and there might be still be some space at the dinner table on the caboose. They also believe as intellectuals that the similarly astute Obamians may on occasion inspire, or admire them as the like-minded who cultivate the life of the mind-in contrast to the “cancer” Sarah Palin, who, with her husband Todd, could hardly discuss Proust with them or could offer little if any sophisticated table-talk other than the proper chokes on shotguns or optimum RPMs on snow-machines.

Not to mention keeping their mugs in front of the TV cameras and thus their paychecks nice and fat.

McCain wants to change DC, Obama wants to change America!

Tags: Obama, Palin, Political Industrial Complex, Polls