October 08, 2012
— Ace Still behind -- but a ten point lead has become a three-point edge.
Margin of error.
ObamaÂ’s 10 percentage point lead (47%-37%) in a poll conducted last month by EPIC-MRA of Lansing dropped to 3 points (48% to 45%), according to the poll of 600 likely voters conducted by EPIC-MRA of Lansing. The gap between Romney and Obama was within the pollÂ’s margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.Undecided voters shrank from the September surveyÂ’s 16% to just 7%.
Meanwhile, the Susquehanna Poll has Romney within two in Pennsylvania, post-debate.
In a poll conducted just after the first presidential debate, from Oct. 4 to 6, 47 percent of respondents said they support Obama; 45 percent support Romney. 3 percent support Libertarian Gary Johnson.
Via @justkarl, liberals everywhere are suddenly very interested in partisan splits, after mocking conservatives for raising flags over D+8, D+9, D+10 polls.
In an earlier post, I noted @chucktodd tweeting the partisan splits in the Pew poll, when he previously insisted that You Takes the Partisan Splits As You'se Finds 'Em And You Don't Question Them.
The Washington Post's Chris Cilizza also is a sudden believer that partisan splits deserve scrutiny. Here's Cilizza a couple of weeks ago:
After the release of any — and every — swing state or national poll these days, the Fix Twitter feed and email inbox immediately fill up with messages that are some variation on this: “Party ID skewed! D+8!”That’s political shorthand for a belief that the party identification in the poll — the composition of the sample of people who are being polled — is misaligned to the actual partisan composition of either a state or the country and, therefore, is producing results that are not reflective of the actual state of the race.
The problem with that argument? ItÂ’s based on limited information and a series of false assumptions none bigger than that because the country has been virtually evenly divided on partisan lines for the past decade or so that the party identification question should result in something close to a 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans. ThatÂ’s not right.
Um, no, but not D+8, 9, 10 or 12, either.
...And, perhaps most importantly, remember that the exit poll captures the composition of the last electorate — not the composition of the next electorate. If pollsters had assumed that the 2008 electorate would have looked similar to the 2004 electorate, they would have badly missed the massive surge to Obama. Ditto if pollsters had used the 2006 midterm party composition (in which Democrats scored across the board victories) as the baseline for the 2010 midterm electorate, which much more strongly favored Republicans.
What all of the above points to is the reality that polling is equal parts art and science. The best of the best — like the folks at the Post — understand that putting together the sample for any poll involves weighing what we know the electorate looked like in the past with what it looks like today and what it will look like on Nov. 6.
...
Alleging bias is, of course, easier than digging deep into the realities of why party ID in polling looks the way it does. But that doesnÂ’t make it right.
Got that? Just because the voter turnout was such-and-such two, four, or eight years ago, does not mean pollsters should ponder whether the partisan ID found in polls mirrors any previous election.
We can't look to the past to determine tomorrow's electorate, after all.
The Washington Post's Chris Cilizza says so, so you should believe him.
Which makes me wonder why today, of all days, he immediately knocks down the Pew survey by comparing it to partisan splits in recent elections:
That pesky party ID question: The Pew sample for this poll was 36 percent Republican, 31 percent Democratic and 30 percent independent. ThatÂ’s a major shift from the organizationÂ’s September poll which was 29 percent Republican, 39 percent Democratic and 30 percent independent. In the 2010 election, the electorate was 36 percent Republican, 36 percent Democratic and 27 percent independent, according to exit polling. In 2008, 39 percent of the electorate identified as Democrats while 32 percent said they were Republicans and 29 percent said they were independents.
Ah! So suddenly it is important to compare a poll's partisan split to likely, plausible turnout figures, based on turnout from past elections!
But two weeks ago you told me we just goshdarn couldn't predict what the electorate would look like, so we shouldn't examine such things!
To steal a line from Barack Obama: Today I met an energetic young fellow named Chris Cilizza. But this couldn't be the real Chris Cilizza, because he reversed all of the positions he's been announcing for the past year!
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— CAC First Pennsylvania, Obama 47 Romney 45.
Now Michigan, Obama 49-Romney 46
MAKE THAT 2 MICHIGAN POLLS: EPIC MRA OBAMA 48 ROMNEY 45 (WAS OBAMA +10 LAST MONTH)
Go after them Mitt. You know you want to. At this point, spread the pain for Obama. Meanwhile I am pleased with the return of my white whales...
Added lulz: Markos now tweeting his sites' weekly poll (with SEIU) by PPP finds Romney up.
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— JohnE. It appears Newsweek spiked the story.
Update & Bumped: Newsweek Has Published. Link & excerpts at article's end.
There's a lot to digest, but there are a few fairly damning revelations here. It's not really what I was expecting.
This raised an immediate eyebrow:
Obama.com was a “parked” page with a small Japanese company that sold website names. In the last week of September 2008, Obama.com changed hands and was registered to “Roche, Robert.” The administrative email was registered to a Teruhiko Tshida at a Japanese company with the website oaklawn.com.jp. Oaklawn Marketing is a Japanese infomercial company started by Robert Roche. Roche is an American citizen (originally from Chicago) who has spent the bulk of his time in Shanghai since the late 90s. He has considerable business interests in China involving China state run television.Some more background on Roche:
In the early part of October 2010, the site registration was changed from “Roche, Robert” to an anonymous registration with a company called Domains By Proxy which is owned by GoDaddy. Server hosting was changed from Japan Global Media Online to Hostmonster/Bluehost. Almost immediately, Obama.com redirected to the donate page of the Obama campaign.There seems to be an abundance of smoke here.
...
He [Roche] serves as co-chair of the Technology Initiative for the Obama campaign, an effort designed to raise money from, and with the assistance of, the Technology and Information industry. In the first quarter of 2012, Roche bundled $500,000 for the Obama campaign. He has also contributed $50,000 thus far to the pro-Obama “Superpac” Priorities USA. In 2008, he bundled $282,359 for Obama. In the wake of 2008, Roche was made a member of the U.S. Trade Advisory Board for China. He is also a past president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.
There is some more evidence of foreign involvement here:
The report focuses on the website Obama.com, which used to be owned by a major Obama donation bundler. Type that site in and you are directed to the Obama donation site. The report said that 68 percent of the traffic to Obama.com comes from overseas.
It appears that "obama.com" routed a great many foreign visitors to Obama's donation pages. There is also evidence that the Obama campaign went out of their way to avoid using web-standard verification to confirm donations.
I think many are making too big a deal out of the CCV requirement, the real issue is the Address Verification System (AVS) which appears to have been set to an absurdly weak "match" setting on Obama's own campaign website. This should be what people are focusing on. The AVS system can be set to extremely strict settings, like say no typos. Or it can be very set to a very, ahem, liberal match setting, which appears to be the case here. The AVS system is also very tough on fraud because you actually have to match real address, not just punch some numbers in for "Mickey Mouse".
GAI also determined that the Obama re-election campaign has selected a particularly weak Address Verification System (AVS), a computerized means of comparing house numbers and ZIP codes provided by a donor with the corresponding numbers on file with a credit card issuer.The reason why this report is not what I was expecting, is that it stops here. Back when there were some whispers about this in May or June, I poked around Obama's site. What was odd was that there was verification for Obama's web store, but not to donate. Meaning, you had to verify your address if you wanted to buy a "Dogs for Obama" button, but not if you wanted to donate to his campaign. Most of us remember these types of shenanigans from Obama's 2008 campaign.
...
GAI notes that the Obama campaign’s failure to use such security measures in its online donation system likely costs it “millions of dollars in additional fees” because “card processors charge higher transaction fees for campaigns that fail to use the CVV.
So, when this story began leaking last week, I went back and checked on this again. The weird part? The campaign donation page had been moved from "donate.barackobama.com" to "contribute.barackobama.com". After poking around a little more, I found that donate.barackobama is being hosted by Blue State Digital. This is a firm founded by former Howard Dean 2004 staffers and they run Obama's digital operation.
Meanwhile, barackobama.com and contribute.barackobama.com are hosted by a company called Akamai Technologies out of Cambridge, Mass. As best I can tell through various caching sites, this change from "donate" to "contribute" was made sometime in the last month. The question becomes why? My suspicion is that, as the Washington Examiner claims, the White House knew this report was coming out (they actually claim the White House was trying to block it) and they were trying to fix some of these issues.
Furthermore, donate.barackobama.com is not universally forwarded to contribute.barackobama.com. You can still see some examples of old pages here:
https://donate.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gp2j9b
https://donate.barackobama.com/page/event/search_simple
https://donate.barackobama.com/page/event/create
https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/o2012-August1RaleighReception
https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/o2012-EastEndForObama
My best guess is they are running custom 301 redirect scripts through an htaccess file. They appear to have missed redirecting some of these older pages. You can even donate through this old site. Again, why? This is sloppy and leads me to believe this was a hastily-made change with only two months remaining in the campaign.
I'm still digging into this along with a few others to see what else we can find. If you notice something, shoot me a line on twitter.
More at the Daily Caller and and Breitbart.
Newsweek's Version [ace]: is now up.
They allowed themselves to be scooped -- why? Not sure. Maybe to bury it.
But now it's up.
But it isnÂ’t just foreign donations that are a concern. So are fraudulent donations. In the age of digital contributions, fraudsters can deploy so-called robo-donations, computer programs that use false names to spew hundreds of donations a day in small increments, in order to evade reporting requirements. According to an October 2008 Washington Post article, Mary Biskup of Missouri appeared to give more than $170,000 in small donations to the 2008 Obama campaign. Yet Biskup said she never gave any money to the campaign. Some other contributor gave the donations using her name, without her knowledge. (The Obama campaign explained to the Post that it caught the donations and returned them.)
This makes it all the more surprising that the Obama campaign does not use a standard security tool, the card verification value (CVV) system—the three- or four-digit number often imprinted on the back of a credit card, whose purpose is to verify that the person executing the purchase (or, in this case, donation) physically possesses the card. The Romney campaign, by contrast, does use the CVV—as has almost every other candidate who has run for president in recent years, from Hillary Clinton in 2008 to Ron Paul this year. (The Obama campaign says it doesn’t use the CVV because it can be an inhibiting factor for some small donors.)
What? This is what they always claim, including with voter fraud-- that very basic efforts to determine valid votes or, here, valid donations, will "frighten" law-abiding citizens.
Why are law-abiding citizens afraid of a CCV check that is common in their lives? Did they never order Domino's pizza?
Interestingly, the Obama campaignÂ’s online store requires the CVV to purchase items like hats or hoodies (the campaign points out that its merchandise vendor requires the tool).
Yes-- that's to prevent fraud. They don't want to send out merchandise and then have someone demand a refund due to his credit card being fraudulently used.
Obama has no problem with this scenario as far as donations, though!
What about all those Obama supporters who are "discouraged" from purchasing merchandise due to the CCV requirement? What about them?
We also focused on the Obama campaign because it is far more successful than Romney when it comes to small donors—which the Internet greatly helps to facilitate. In September the Obama campaign brought in its biggest fundraising haul—$181 million. Nearly all of that amount (98 percent) came from small donations, through 1.8 million transactions.
The Obama campaign says that it is rigorous in its self-regulation effort.
But not rigorous enough to add easy, automated, standard verification step in its accumulation of donations.
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— Ace Well, not really. Last time I posted this it was... erm, premature.
It still is premature. Still, we should have some fun.
I'm not in politics for the policy, or the Constitution, or the prosperity.
I'm in it, chiefly, for the gloating.
So:
I think the election is over. I think it is so over we need a new Latin tense to describe how over it is, the Past Pluperfect Noncontinuing Historical Past Tense.
So, what the hell are we going to do for a month?
That's where Romney and Ryan are going to have to step the hell up. To make this entertaining, and not just a snoozer of a blowout, they're going to have to deliberately make some bad choices. They're going to have to fight to keep this close, to keep it interesting.
They're going to have to schedule some gaffes.
I was spitballing last night about some of the things they could do for us. You might have your own ideas.
* Mitt Romney should start wearing a top hat, spats, and a monocle.
* Paul Ryan should announce his marital status is now "Swingle."
* Mitt Romney can reveal he subscribes to Poop Magazine. And in fact doesn't just subscribe, but invested Bain Capital funds in it. Bain Capital funds that otherwise would have gone towards Not Murdering People With Cancer.
* When citizens present their babies for Paul Ryan to kiss, he should say, "Sorry, lady, but I don't kiss garbage."
* Both candidates should pick a swing state we absolutely need and then begin insulting residents of that state for no good reason. Mitt Romney can start things off by referring to residents of Florida as "Floritards." Paul Ryan can walk into Ohio rallies and say, "What the crap smells so bad? Oh, right: dirty filthy Ohio dirt-mongrels."
* Mitt Romney should start using the word "choad" casually, in tv interviews. He should also say "sext" whenever he means "email," "text," "call," or "tell." As in: "I'll be sexting the public my plan for tax reform later."
* Mitt Romney should begin referring to Ann Romney as "My publicly-acknowledged sister-wife."
* Paul Ryan should arrange for himself to be photographed leaving an American Legion bathroom, with the American flag stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
* Whenever Ann and Mitt Romney appear in joint interviews, Ann should flinch at Mitt's slightest movement, and then whisper frantically to the interviewer: "Sometimes he gets so very angry with me."
* Paul Ryan should make frequent, cryptic references to "my side-piece in Madison."
* Mitt Romney should start saying things like "Joe Biden makes me so angry I want to punch him right in the wife."
* Whenever Paul Ryan doesn't like the premise of a reporter's question, he should sharply say "Zionist lies!!!," with sibilants a-crackin'.
* If asked about his Mormonism, and tensions with the evangelical community, Mitt Romney should get a cigar and start doing the Edward G. Robinson voice: "So where's your Messiah now, ay? See? Yeah. See? Yeaaahh."
* Mitt Romney should appear on Letterman, riding Rafalca. On the stage will be a makeshift, poorly-ventilated smithy where poor children are forced to make golden horseshoes for Rafalca. When the children, singed and sooty, are finished with their difficult, dangerous task, Mitt Romney should pay them in chicken bones and old, misprinted issues of Poop Magazine.
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— CAC National Likely Voter model per Pew's interviews: R+3.
I wouldn't usually step on my boss' post, but this demands its own discussion.
Please try to avoid hurting yourselves.
A few months back, a wild poll from Marist/NBC led me to challenge Chuck Todd on twitter. It showed an unbelievable # of Democrats in an Ohio poll, and resulted in a big Obama lead there. Todd was very quick to defend, and finished the exchange with this:
@conartcritic I'm on that side only that it is more explanatory of the political climate in the moment rather than what we think it will be
— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) March 4, 2012
So, I can't see a problem he could have with Pew. After all, it's "in the moment", and Romney is rockin' that right now.
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Battleground Poll: Romney Up Sixteen Points With Independents;
Among Those Most Likely to Vote, Leads 52-46 In Swing States
— Ace
Breaking: Pew Poll has Romney ahead 49-45.
That's a twelve point net shift from three weeks ago, when it was Obama 51 Romney 43.
More: via @jaketapper, Obama had enjoyed a +18 advantage with women. Now: Tied.
Via @fixaaron,
Romney has also closed the gap on Medicare in this Pew poll: Trails 46-43 after trailing 51-38 last month.Pew shows same numbers on debate as Gallup: 72% say Romney won, 20% say Obama.
In the Battleground poll, Romney has a sixteen point lead among independents.
Sixteen!
Among a swing group that makes up around 30% of the population.
And yet they have Obama ahead 49-48...?
Despite lower Democratic enthusiasm?
How many Democrats, exactly, are they expecting to show up on November 6th?
One baziollion or like two bazillion?
Now: That enthusiasm gap shows up big-time when you look at those "extremely likely to vote." Via Politico:
Only 73 percent who support Obama say they are “extremely likely” to vote, compared to 86 percent who back Romney. Likewise, 84 percent of Republicans say they are extremely likely to vote, compared to 76 percent of Democrats.Among those extremely likely to vote, Romney actually leads Obama 52 percent to 46 percent. That’s up from a 2-point lead last week. Obama led 50 percent to 47 percent among this group three weeks ago.
Note the massive directionality: Three weeks ago, it was 50-47, advantage Obama; now it's 52-46, advantage Romney.
That is a swing of nine net points (+3 to -6, or -3 to +6-- works either way. Math is a wonderful thing!)
Heh: All of a sudden @chucktodd is a big fan of checking partisan splits. In the Pew Poll, it's R+1 (registered voters) and R+3 (likely voters).
After a season of mocking the right for questioning absurd splits (D+9, etc.), now he's Mr. Let's Check The Splits.
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— andy Lies by Obama and the media (BIRM).
See, that's the spin about the "$5 trillion in taxes" that the despicable Obama campaign came out with after Mitt Romney hit their strawman version of his tax plan like Curtis LeMay over Tokyo during last week's debate: Romney was just lying.
To set up the original talking point, which Obama repeated no fewer than three times in the debate, the Obama campaign represented a hacktastic, left-leaning study on Romney's plan as "independent" and "non-partisan". Of course their media mouthpieces dutifully repeated these claims ... one instance of which is now being used in an ad that's too shameless for even NBC to stomach. And that's saying a lot.
In the clip used by the Obama campaign, [Andrea] Mitchell quotes a liberal groupÂ’s claim that RomneyÂ’s tax plan will cost $4.8 trillion and will therefore raise taxes on the middle class, a charge that other, more credible analysts, have debunked. This is a point on which even liberal fact checkers have concluded that the DemocratsÂ’ pants are on fire, but Mitchell loyally spouted the allegation on the air as if it were objective fact.
And, never to be deterred when called out on these low tactics, they're continuing to misrepresent the plan in fundraising emails.
"Even the studies that Romney has cited to claim his plan adds up still show he would need to raise middle-class taxes," said the Obama campaign press release. "In fact, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein and Princeton economist Harvey Rosen both concede that paying for RomneyÂ’s tax cuts would require large tax increases on families making between $100,000 and $200,000."But that's not true. Princeton professor Harvey Rosen tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting his paper on Romney's tax plan ...
So don't forget, Mitt Romney lies.
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— Ace 43% say the weather's fine on Mars.
Fifty-seven percent of likely voters believe that tax increases will fund further spending, according to a new Public Notice survey conducted by a Republican-leaning pollster, The Tarrance Group. That number is even higher among independents, as 60 percent of that voting bloc think Obama wants tax hikes for to increase spending. Obama has convinced a majority (58 percent) of Democrats, though, that he will use taxes to lower the deficit.
This seems pretty important to me. I would say that raising taxes is the centerpiece of Obama's agenda, but that's not quite right -- a centerpiece implies there are other pieces around the periphery.
I don't think Obama really has any other policy -- he's just about increasing taxes.
That's a bad strategy in any campaign, but it seems he's losing big on his only real plan for a next term.
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— Ace The highlights are in the beginning and then at 6:00, though I don't know what video game features a horse. more...
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— Ace Key quotes: I know the president hopes for peace, and I do too, but "hope is not a strategy."
On Afghanistan: "I will affirm that my duty is not to my political prospects, but to the security of the nation."
Overall, he did not announce any surprise new commitment or policy. He instead asserted what could be called classic Reaganite principles -- moral clarity in our thinking, verbal clarity in our words. Military clarity in our resolve, should it come to that.
The thrust was that Obama's policy was ambiguous; our allies are undermined, our enemies emboldened.
He stressed free trade. Although he did not directly state this, he implicitly argued that free trade acts as a sort of evangelist for other freedoms, for openness, for prosperity, for friendship.
He reaffirmed that he planned a withdrawal from Afghanistan, but implicitly caveated this by noting he did not believe in "pre-announced timetables" and that he would be guided by "facts on the ground" as well as the advice of his military advisers.
I had hoped for something stronger than this. Like-- we either fight to win or we withdraw on a much faster pace (that is, as soon as militarily possible). My sense is that we have soldiers dying over nothing except politics at the moment.
He repeatedly attacked Obama on his defense cuts, and argued that weakness would inevitably lead to war, as it usually does.
I think it was a strong speech, within the usual contours of a Reaganite/Republican foreign policy. The man gives a good speech. At least to my ear, he speaks in a near-optimum number of words per minute -- he speaks sort of quickly, thus keeping it punchy, but slows down within that quick-delivery framework to add a bit of subtle emphasis.
Much of his language is admirably old-fashioned in the best of ways -- the vocabulary is not much different from what you'd find in a Churchill address. There's a reassuring quality in that; the mind naturally associates timeless words with stability and solemnity.
A good speech, certainly presidential, well-written and very well delivered. It did not contain any bold pronouncement, but reflected the basics of the standard Reagan foreign policy, as modified post-9/11.
More: Subtle but important distinction from Obama on preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons (Obama) or preventing them from even having nuclear wapon capability (Romney).
Full prepared remarks here. He never seemed to go off-script, but it's possible he changed a few things before speaking.
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