Rasmussen and Survey USA are responsible for the vast majority of polling data that we've seen so far on the general election. Fortunately for us, they also happen to be two of the historically most accurate pollsters.

However, as I've alluded to a couple of times, there have come to be some systematic differences in the numbers each Democrat has received from each agency. The difference is particularly notable for Hillary Clinton.

Authenticity is a rather subjective concept.  Attempts to define it usually wind up running around in circles:

This eye-opening but muddled volume tells companies to remain true to self or, at least, to appear genuine, arguing that in a world increasingly filled with deliberately and sensationally staged experiences... consumers choose to buy or not buy based on how real they perceive an offering to be. Everything that forms a company's identity—from its name and practices to its product details—affects consumers' perceptions of its authenticity. Juggling philosophical concepts, in-depth case studies and ad slogans, Gilmore and Pine (The Experience Economy) run into trouble with a chapter called Fake, Fake, It's All Fake, which eviscerates the entire idea of authenticity: Despite claims of 'real' and 'authentic' in product packaging, nothing from businesses is really authentic. Everything is artificial, manmade, fake. The argument is unexpected and perhaps brilliant—yet rather confusing, since most of Authenticity argues that businesses should strive to not only appear authentic but to be so.

Quite honestly, I've been getting annoyed with certain kinds of diaries around here.  These are the diaries that insist that Hillary Clinton should withdraw from the Presidential race.  Hillary has every right to continue her campaign for as long as she pleases.  

(Cross-posted at fivethirtyeight.com)

One of the many nice things about Survey USA is the extensive set of interactive cross-tabulations that they release with every poll.  Survey USA has now released polls in fifteen states that were taken at the height of the Jeremiah Wright controversy (this past Friday through Sunday).  We can compare the demographic groups in these polls to Survey USA's previous set of polls, which were conducted in the last couple days of February.

(cross-posted at fivethirtyeight.com)

Although the story hasn't quite yet broken through to the dead-tree media, some influential online writers are starting to pick up upon the fact that strength in the primaries is not necessarily so strongly related to strength in the general election.  Noam Schieber noticed that the same Strategic Vision poll that had Clinton leading by 18 points in the Pennsyvania primary had Obama performing a couple of points better against McCain in the general election.  MSNBC's First Read discovered this too.

It occurs to me that there is more to the controversy over Jeremiah Wright's remarks than meets the eye -- but not in the dark ways that bloggers like Jerome Armstrong would opportunistically seem to imply.  Rather, I think it touches upon a number of questions about the role of faith and the institution of the Church in both public and private live, questions that many Americans of all faiths and on all sides of the political spectrum are uncomfortable talking about.

Perhaps the best and most nuanced treatment of the Wright issue so far has been from Andrew Sullivan.  I suspect that this is because Sullivan, as a gay man and an intellectual but also a practicing Roman Catholic, is a man who is used to wrestling with a complexity of beliefs, and reconciling the cognitive dissonance these tend to entail.

(From Friday's Philadelphia Inquirer:)

Gov. Rendell, Mayor Nutter and two of Hillary Rodham Clinton's top aides yesterday blasted Barack Obama's campaign for allegedly diminishing and disrespecting Pennsylvania's presidential primary.

In a national conference call with reporters, the foursome pointed to a memorandum written by Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, that referred to Pennsylvania as "only one of ten remaining contests."

Rendell predicted that the description would be "off-putting" to the state's Democratic voters. Nutter called it "one of the silliest things I've seen in recent times."

There have been a couple of good diaries lately on the so-called Limbaugh Effect on the most recent set of Democratic primaries. I would particularly recommend John K. Wilson's work.  I find his data fairly compelling, and it's evident to me that tactical GOP crossover votes have cost Obama somewhere between 2-5% in his margins against Hillary in the last couple of primaries.

Cross-posted at fivethirtyeight.com, which is my new, semi-continually updated blog on polling and electoral math for the 2008 general election.

For at least eight years now, Democrats have told themselves that they couldn't win the White House without carrying at least two of of the three "Big Three" states: Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. And how has that strategy fared? Needless to say, it hasn't fared all that well: Democrats carried Pennsylvania in both 2000 and 2004, but lost each of Ohio and Florida both times, and thereby lost the election.

One of the advantages of my simulation model is that we can do some scenario testing. And today, the scenario I want to test is pretty simple. How do the two Democrats fare -- Clinton and Obama -- in a world where they never carry any electors from Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania?

One of my diary drafts is entitled "The Florida/Michigan Revote Card, and the State of the Race".  The diary was going to argue that holding fresh primary votes in both Florida and Michigan was unambiguously in the interests of the Clintons.  Moreover, the diary was going to predict that we were going to begin to see some Clinton surrogates start to send out trial balloons about potential Florida and Michigan votes at about the time of the Ohio and Texas primaries.

I never finished the diary, and I can't really take credit for a prediction that I never got onto the public record.  But, indeed, this is exactly what has happened.  I want to at least complete the second part of the diary, and explain why the Clintons are doing this.  In fact, I would argue that Florida and Michigan revotes are an essential part of any potential Clinton path to the nomination.

I do have a couple of leftover diary ideas about the primaries -- hint: I think the Clintons are bluffing if they say they don't want revotes in Florida and Michigan -- but in the meantime, there's no way I'm going to let something like Survey USA's comprehensive set of general election polls pass without providing an update to my general election projections.

It occurs to me that, over the course of the past several weeks, we have been engaged in asymmetrical warfare in the Democratic Primary.  Obama has the stronger position by most of the conventional metrics that we would use to evaluate a primary campaign, such as money, prospective advantages in a general election matchup, and -- most importantly -- pledged delegates.  At the same time, he is bound by the norms of the Democratic community, which means to keep the Party's long-term best interests in mind.  Therefore, while he has been able to defend himself from attacks by Clinton -- and he has usually defended himself admirably -- he has not been able to launch any sort of preemptive attack, e.g. a negative campaign.

So, I've been a fair amount of work on how to weight polls from different pollsters and from different periods of time.  It beats what I consider to the the depressing tenor of the Democratic campaign in recent days, and it's part of a project I'm working on to build some prediction models for the general election, which I hope will turn into an off-site project with frequent updates to Daily Kos.  You ever wanted a version of the RCP averages that is smart enough to weight a Survey USA poll more than an ARG poll?  That's what I'm going to try and do.

This is going to be a cut-and-paste job.

McClatchy Newspapers' Jay Root is reporting in the Kansas City Star that the Clinton campaign may have threatened to pursue legal action against the Texas Democratic Party to block or dispute the results of the Texas caucus.

Sorry in advance for the relatively substance-less diary, but I came across something interesting in my daily scan for general election polls.  It is a poll from the Mason-Dixon polling agency asking Florida Democrats what they think should be done with the results of the state's unsanctioned January primary:

Hi all,

This will be the first of what I hope will become a semi-regular installment of electoral projections for the general election.  For the time being, I am including matchups of John McCain against both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

I have a couple of goals in mind with these projections, but the basic idea is to assess state-by-state general election polls in a probabilistic manner.  For example, right now there are three recent Wisconsin polls that show Obama beating McCain by an average of 4 points.  How does this translate in terms of the general election, which is still more than 250 days away?  Is Obama a massive favorite over McCain -- or is it closer to a toss-up?  What about states for which we do not have any polling data -- can we extrapolate projections for them somehow?  And what about states where we have polling data, but it might be an outlier -- for example, the Rasmussen poll that shows Hillary losing Maryland to McCain, or the Survey USA poll that shows Obama winning Massachusetts by just 2 points?  These are the sorts of things this exercise is intended to address.

Cut to scene of Hillary Clinton (Meryl Streep) debating furiously with advisers Mandy Grunwald (Parker Posey) and Mark Penn (Oliver Platt) before the Big State Debate.  

Penn/Platt, urging a "nuclear" strategy, win the argument -- and Grunwald/Posey walks out in a huff and quits the campaign.  Penn and Hillary practice their attack lines over and over again before the debate, including Penn's big zinger ("The Big Z"): Change you can Ricoh (product placement, people).

My friends, I don't know what media you're consuming with your morning coffee, but if you're looking at anything even vaguely on the conservative side of the ledger, you'll find that the New York Times story is having the effect of rallying the conservative base around John McCain.

The headline over at RedState is not atypical: