While we won the big one in 2008, there were certainly a few disappointments. Prop 8 in California. Michelle Bachmann getting re-elected. And finally, the surprising near re-election of Ted Stevens over Mark Begich in Alaska. That was one I thought Begich had in the bag, especially since a recent poll had him up big after Steven's conviction. Well Alaska's best progressive blogger chimes in on some numbers that don't seem to add up....
http://mudflats.wordpress.com/...
Let’s look at the national numbers first. Keep in mind that Alaska’s very own Governor, and the new GOP golden girl, Sarah Palin, was on the ticket. And Barack Obama has excited progressive Alaskans like no candidate before. He had five field offices, great ground organization, and inspired the biggest candidate rally in Alaska history. Voter turnout here was expected to be through the roof and breaking all records.
In 2004, 66% of registered voters turned out to vote in the presidential election between George Bush and John Kerry.
In 2008, including the votes still outstanding, only 54% of registered voters turned out.
And the strangest part of all? Voter turnout in the primaries, before Palin was even on the ticket, was up 12% from 2004. We also had more than 20,000 new registered voters.
These numbers are referring to Alaska's turn out of course. And it's odd indeed. What possible explanation is there for turn out DROPPING when their governor was on the ticket?
The rest is no less odd...
As these strange numbers rolled in at Election Central, I was there watching. Here’s how it fell out over time.
With 36% of the precincts reporting:
61.76% for McCain
35.64% for Obama
With 81.3% reporting
61.54% for McCain
35.69% for Obama
With 96.1% reporting
61.29% for McCain
35.96% for Obama
Alaska, like many states, has blue areas and red areas. The Mat-Su Valley, home of Sarah Palin is very very red. Anchorage? Blue. The Kenai Penninsula? Red. Juneau? Blue. You get the idea. When I, and my fellow progressive celebrants watched the first numbers come in, we thought, "That must be the Valley", because the latest polls actually had the presidential race neck and neck with Obama only 2.7 points behind. We kept waiting for the progressive areas of the state to kick in, but they never did. No fluctuations one way or the other more than .3%. And George Bush won the 2004 election her by a margin of.....61-35.
Anyone following the election can recognize how odd this is. Take the early analysis of the Indiana vote... at one point Obama was behind but all the experts testified how well the numbers looked for Obama because the more urban districts had not yet been counted.
Ted Stevens vs. Mark Begich. The convicted felon is currently ahead by about 3300 votes, with about 60,000 absentee and early votes left to count. It’s a squeaker, and Begich may pull this one off. By why is it a squeaker when the last poll had Begich 22 points ahead? He’d been running at a dead heat in the polling before Ted’s conviction, but after the seven felony convictions came in, Begich’s lead widened considerably. Pretty stunning turnaround for Stevens.
Remarkable.
NONE of the other polls were this far off. Not even close.
What's going on in Alaska?
UPDATE: Nate Silver is also puzzled:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/...
Although Ted Stevens holds a small lead in Alaska and is the favorite to retain his seat, the outcome is not as inevitable as it might appear to be. Stevens currently holds a lead of 3,353 votes, or about 1.5 percent of the votes tallied so far. But, there are quite a large number of ballots yet to count. According to Roll Call, these include "at least 40,000 absentee ballot, 9,000 early voting ballots, and an undetermined number of questionable ballots".
Indeed, it seems possible that the number of "questionable" ballots could be quite high. So far, about 220 thousand votes have been processed in Alaska. This compares with 313 thousand votes cast in 2004. After adding back in the roughly 50,000 absentee and early ballots that Roll Call accounts for, that would get us to 270 thousand ballots, or about a 14 percent drop from 2004. It seems unlikely that turnout would drop by 14 percent in Alaska given the presence of both a high-profile senate race and Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket.
But even if Begich were to make up ground and win a narrow victory, this would seem to represent a catastrophic failure of polling, as three polls conducted following the guilty verdict in Stevens' corruption trial had Begich leading by margins of 7, 8 and 22 points, respectively.
The emerging conventional wisdom is that there was some sort of a Bradley Effect in this contest -- voters told pollsters that they weren't about to vote for that rascal Ted Stevens, when in fact they were perfectly happy to. Convicted felons are the new black, it would seem.
The problem with this theory is that the polling failures in Alaska weren't unique to Stevens. They also applied to the presidential race, as well as Alaska's at-large House seat. In each case, the Republican outperformed his pre-election polling by margins ranging from 12 to 14 points:
Contest Projection Result Delta
AL-ALL Berkowitz +6.4 (i) Young +7.7 GOP +14.1
AL-Sen Begich +12.9 (ii) Stevens +1.5 GOP +14.4
AL-Pres McCain +13.9 (iii) McCain +25.3 GOP +12.4
(i) Pollster.com Trend Estimate
(ii) FiveThirtyEight Polling Average
(iii) FiveThirtyEight Trend-Adjusted Estimate
There are three plausible explanations I can think of to explain this discrepancy. The first and most likely is that the Democratic vote became complacent and did not bother to turn out. The outcome of the presidential contest was not going to be close in Alaska, and Barack Obama's victory in the Electoral College was apparent as of about 4 PM local time. Begich supporters, moreover, may have looked at the polls and concluded that their candidate was far enough ahead that they didn't have to bother to vote. Meanwhile, the Republican base was going to turn out no matter what because of their enthusiasm for Sarah Palin. There seems to be a sort of danger zone at about 10 points wherein a candidate is far enough ahead that many of his supporters assume the race is in the bag, but not so far ahead that he is immune to poor turnout (a similar dynamic affected then-Governor Jim Blanchard of Michigan in his 1990 race against John Engler).
The second possibility is that a substantial percentage of the Democratic vote is tied up in the early and absentee ballots that have yet to be counted. We know that Barack Obama overperformed among early voters in many states, and Alaska may be no exception. (Although, I would guess that the absentee vote is predominately rural, whereas Begich's base is in Anchorage).
The third possibility is that a lot of those "questionable" ballots are Democratic ones, and that there have been irregularities in the voting tally. Although this is the least likely possibility, Alaska is a provincial state with some history of corruption, and Democrats ought to be making sure that too many of their ballots haven't been disqualified.