Fountry Cirst

We're under one week to go --- aaannnddd not much has changed since last week.


The new line from the pundits is that "THE RACE IS TIGHTENING." Not really. Instead of an 8 point lead, we might have a 5-6 point lead on our hands, but Barack Obama hasn't lost any support. The national tracking polls have shown a slight rise for McCain, which, let's face

it, was pretty much inevitable when McCain was polling between 42 and 44 percent for the past seven months.

Nate Silver pointed out recently that the IBD/TIPP polling company -- their 18-29 year-old subsample was suspicious -- in that one day, the poll showed that age group choosing John McCain over Barack Obama by a 75-25 margin. Hmmm. Simple margin of error is not enough to cause that kind of a swing, so there had to be something wrong with their methodology.

Today, IBD/TIPP has --- uh, 'corrected' their process, I suppose. Here's a statement from the company itself:

"Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica, told me he was equally surprised by the results, saying the widespread perception that Obama is leading by a large margin in that group “is my perception, too.” He blamed the result on a small sample size. Each daily tracking poll includes about 1,000 interviews spread over the prior five days; each day a new set of survey respondents is added and the oldest set is discarded.

Ideally, Mayur would like to have 75 of all those respondents fall into the youngest age range. Some pollsters would have preferred more; this age group makes up 13% of the adult population, though its voting rate historically has been lower than average. His sample fell far short even of his lower goal, typically including just 25 to 30 respondents from age 18 to 24 — meaning just five or six new interviews with these young voters were being conducted each day. “We are not able to get to speak to as many as we would like to in that group,” he said.

He blamed that on several factors. For one thing, nearly one-third of adults in that age range lack landline phones, and Mayur’s pollsters don’t dial cellphones. (He points out that when calling cellphones, the chance that the person who picks up lacks a landline and is in the relevant age range is quite low.) Furthermore, among those who do live in households with landlines, young people may be away at school or in the military, Mayur said.

This small sample size at first didn’t trouble Mayur, as Obama led among these voters in the first three tracking polls. But when the results started to break McCain’s way as suddenly and dramatically as they did, Mayur began to question his own methodology. On the day McCain’s lead widened in this group to 52 points, Mayur added a footnote to the 18-to-24-year-old group: “Age 18-24 has much fluctuation due to small sample size.” He says he didn’t add a similar one to the Jewish subgroup, with just half the sample size as the young voters, because the Jews in his sample consistently stated a preference for Obama, as he expected."

The bigger problem is his solution:

"This week Mayur took two steps to expand the sample size of young voters. His pollsters are asking those who answer the phone to put the youngest member of the household on. They are also dialing households expected to have young voters, found by cross-listing white-pages listings with drivers’ registration data. “We have always preferred using random-digit dialing sample,” Mayur said. “I am adapting to this new challenge with these modified tactics.” In the two polls since the change, the trend has reversed itself: Obama now leads by double digits. "

The first step is fine, but its flaw is that it's not a random person under 30, it's just the youngest in the household. If I live in a home with two folks under 30, it's not random. You might think this is minor, but it matters. Soooo --- we can conclude the guy's sampling was suspiciously low on voters aged 18-29, his new weighting is still lower than the youth vote will probably be, he didn't technically fix his sample size at all.

And the worst of all, he didn't fix anything until a suspicous sample forced him to. And the way he fixed it is error-ridden and un-transparent. More new problems could emerge from it, and it certainly doesn't address whatever sampling error caused the problem in the first place.

Death by a thousand papercuts. Don't look at the IBD/TIPP poll anymore.

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Barack Obama had a nice soft-lens, inoffensive 30 minute infomercial tonight that has little (probably zero) potential for backlash that was clearly aimed at uncommitted voters who were already leaning towards Obama. The hardliners against Obama are pretty much set in stone -- they're feeding off every possible attack they can get on the guy.

Today, WBEN Right-Wing Demagogue Tom Bauerle just went off -- calling Obama a--- and I quote ---- "Radical Kenyan-Born Marxist." He then proceeded to equate Obama and his followers to HITLER. Yes, he went there.

My point is -- the constant attacks from the right-wing, from Palin and McCain about Obama's associations, and all of the Republican surrogates calling Obama a Marxist -- these are not attacks that can make undecided and independent voters more likely to vote for McCain. They are attacks that will do nothing but fire up the anti-Obama base, which isn't enough to carry the election.


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Finally, regarding undecided voters waiting until the last few days: McCain will likely win this group, but not by any significant margin like 2 to 1. At best, McCain could win this group 60-40, and gain 2 points on election day. But among late deciders, history shows that they rarely go to one candidate by any huge margin.

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More to come this weekend. Election day on Tuesday -- if you live in a state which allows early voting, I highly recommend doing it. Waiting 2 hours in line to vote is better than waiting 5.