McCain's Camp Releases Memo Attacking the LA Times Poll; or You know you're losing When...

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Wednesday June 25, 2008 · 10:19 AM PDT

2008/06/25 · 10:19

This is Incomprehensably laughable. The Schizophrenia Express rolls on another day, another Huh?

Essentially, McCain's campaign commissioned their "Ace" polling firm, Public Opinion Strategies, to Debunk the LA Times Poll. As you can see via Poblano, McCain's polling firm is among the worst polling firms nationally. To make matters worse, the campaign tries to stop the rising tide of Party ID by arguing that the poll is improperly balanced, and then goes on to Rebalance the poll.

If party identification on the L.A. Times survey is recalculated to just down by ten (29% GOP / 39% Dem / 27% Ind / 5% Don’t Know/Refused), the ballot would be 40% McCain – 47% Obama.

One big problem with this reweighting... it essentially throws the landscape out the window to favor McCain.

Within their own memo, they note that the GOP Party ID has consistently been showing up below 29%.

CBS: 24%
Hotline: 27%
NBC: 24%
AP: 23%

This is balanced by the poor weighting of even worse pollsters like Fox News (35%) and ABC News (37%).

McCain's campaign is trying in this memo to essentially call the media out on reporting bad news. A poll is a poll and any single given poll is just that, a poll. However, when polls start to pop up like LA Times and Newsweek a story is born.

Now the McCain campaign is seriously trying to attack individual polls to try and prevent the CW from portraying just how bad things are out there for the GOP. They're trying to plug the dam with bubblegum and arguing over which flavor to use.

Laughable. You know you're losing BAD when you start arguing over poll methodology.

For much more intelligent reading on historical contexts that this election year falls within, I urge you to consider Thomas Edsall's piece here

Barack Obama is riding the leading edge of a Democratic wave, benefiting from a potential -- although by no means certain -- cyclical shift in the partisanship of American voters which could last at least through 2016, if managed carefully.

Extensive studies of past elections by scholars show that there is an ebb and flow in patterns of partisan dominance, periods during which a majority of the public is inclined -- not guaranteed -- to vote for the more liberal Democratic Party, and then shift back to the more conservative Republican Party.

These cyclical shifts do not assure the election of a president of one party or the other, but they do reflect changing political climates favorable to one partisan coalition or the other.

By most accounts, the timing in 2008 is ripe for Democrats.

Camp McCain has just opened it self up to assault by the polling media and pollsters in general for questioning methods and weighting... This could get interesting.

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