Complete for today's releases from the four daily polls, which I think is the only way to do this properly, despite the fact that it would be a few hours later than those which only have the early morning releases and yesterday's from the others. This is my first daily update that includes polling done on a Saturday, so I'm not sure if the fact that the news cycle is slower makes the polls a little softer; I hope not, given that they're three-day running totals. A fractional dropoff in R2K, a one point move towards McCain in Gallup, stability in Diageo and Rasmussen. All in all, nothing that looks more than random noise right now, but let's see what happens over the course of a few days.
So away we go....
Diageo/Hotline Obama 45 McCain 44 (45-44)
Gallup Obama 49 McCain 45 (50-44)
R2K Obama 49 McCain 42 (50-42)
Rasmussen Obama 48 McCain 47 (48-47)
Gallup has the most significant move, which is pretty insignificant. Their daily consumer confidence numbers have also moved less negative by a point, though that must means it goes from 81% negative to 80%, and the positives drop from 5% to 4% at the same time. R2K looks like Obama loses the point in various demographics he gained yesterday, which means absolutely nothing unless he continues to slip; just quite literally a couple people checking one box instead of another. What I'd watch for is how direct the correlation is between bad news on the economy and gains for Obama vs stability and gains for McCain. There probably is some sort of correlation, and in fact more than there should be, which would raise the specter of the Bradley Effect--my personal opinion is that it continues to exist, but can be overridden by disasters in the financial markets and overall economy. An AP/Yahoo News poll shows some alarming--though hardly surprising--racial attitudes among white voters, and suggest a 6 point "racial cost" to Obama in the polls. I want to believe this is nonsense, but if I think about it, I suppose there's more to it than I wish there were (that story can be found at http://news.yahoo.com/... ). This poll shows a much lower figure of support for Obama among non-Hispanic Whites than Gallup, roughly 70% vs 77%.
Also, if a day goes by without someone from the McCain campaign saying something breathtakingly idiotic, does that increase his polling? It would appear to.
Rasmussen, which has a much smaller weighting in favor of Democratic ID than R2K, although interestingly MORE independents, remains flat day to day. Rasmussen has also announced changes in weighting which tilt the polling slightly more Democratic:
Rasmussen Weightings Old New Change
Democratic 38.7 39.0 +0.3
Republican 33.6 33.5 -0.1
Unaffiliated 27.7 27.5 -0.2
While this is a move from +5.1% Democratic to +5.5%, it remains to be seen if this is still too conservative.
There's been some very interesting state polling in the last few days, the results of which are just coming out today. R2K for two Florida newspapers shows that race is now a tossup, with South Florida going 58% Obama. Whether this reflects unease regarding aspects of Sarah Palin's background can't be established, I would think, but her affiliation with millenarian Christian groups and the campaign of Pat Buchanan will not serve the ticket well in areas with a significant Jewish population. Only a third of voters in that poll suggested the economy was the most important issue, compared with totals closer to 50% nationwide. McCain, however, does quite well in more rural and military Northwest Florida, which comes as no surprise.
Nate Silver at www.fivethirtyeight.com has corrected his cellphone bias survey from yesterday; it turns out that one of the polling agencies that he had been led to believe included cellphone only voters yet was the most GOP-oriented of the ones in the study in fact does NOT poll people with no landline. Taking them out of the survey moves his estimate of the unreported advantage to Obama from 2.2% to 2.8%. While anyone on the Democratic side in this campaign should be cheered by those numbers, I still have trouble, despite the extremely high quality of his work (which I followed for years at baseballprospectus.com too), getting past my back of the envelope concept that it's more like a point and a half. Either way, it's a big deal in a very close race.
Blowback on the Treasury's bailout plan is louder and harder than I had expected, as voices are raised in opposition to the idea that the government may buy $700 billion in mortgages at what some consider above-market prices. The question for me comes down to whether the prices are high because it's really a bailout for mortgage speculators or they seem high because when you mark to market at a time when there's really no market, values look artificially low. If the public perception becomes that this is either more welfare for bankers or, as Paul Krugman put it, "Commissar Paulson [seizing] the means of production" the uproar from both left and right could scuttle the plan. Personally I'm not nuts about it, but I'm even less nuts about Great Depression 2: Electric Boogaloo. Besides, the overweening irony in all this is that should disaster be averted, round about year 3 of the next administration, the government could start turning massive profits on what it owns. The nature of the administration will, of course, ominously, determine how those profits are used. So right now, it only looks like the biggest piece of central planning socialism inflicted on the world since the last Five Year Plan, but there's always a chance it'll be a good buy-and-hold (remember those? the equity markets don't) investment.
I also feel a moment of vindication here. Not that i want to spend all my time picking on the elderly, but I fell off the Alan-Greenspan-Is-God bandwagon around the time of, ohhh, the Russian Debt Crisis 10 years ago. My gosh, did I get a lot of funny looks from people when I would suggest that his last term as Fed Supremo was somewhere between a mitigated and unmitigated disaster or even just that, "well, he's OK on a good day, but he's no Paul Volcker." Now, all of a sudden, he's carrying the water for everything that's going on here, and despite not changing my opinion on him one iota, I sound like the voice of moderation. He messed up badly and on a long-term basis, by putting the market cart before the economy horse for a decade, but everyone who signed on for the ride bears his fair share of the blame.
Signing off on my last overcast Sunday morning before heading back to the Nutmeg State (TM) on Tuesday night,
John
Herbert Hoover Quote Of The Day
About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.