Here is cartoonist Dan Wasserman’s take on Senator Elect Elizbeth Warren and her potential assignment to the Senate Banking Committee. Of course, some of us think this is exactly why she needs to be appointed. Are you listening Harry Reid? (update: Looks like he listened!)
We all know that Mitt Romney was stunned when he lost. It is said that he didn’t even have a concession speech written thus accounting for the delay between everyone including Fox calling the election and his speech. And Logan Airport in Boston was crowded with private jets belonging to donors who were there to celebrate at Mitt’s cash bar. But the party was spoiled because his internal polls were not only wrong, they were garbage.
Last night on Hardball, John Brabender, the Republican campaign official, did not answer Chris Matthew’s direct question as to how the Romney polls could have been so wrong. This morning, Nate Silver, the man the Republicans trashed but who turned out to be correct, explains what happened.
In this morning’s FiveThirtyEight, Silver writes
Pollsters can expect to take their share of blame when their campaigns lose, and this year has been no exception. Not long after Barack Obama and Democrats had a strong night on Nov. 6, Republicans began to complain publicly that the polls conducted by their campaigns and by affiliated groups implied considerably more optimistic outcomes for them than actually occurred.
Perhaps these Republicans shouldn’t have been so surprised. When public polls conducted by independent organizations clash with the internal polls released by campaigns, the public polls usually prove more reliable.
Take, for example, the gubernatorial recall election in Wisconsin earlier this year. Independent polls had the Republican incumbent, Scott Walker, favored to retain his office by about six percentage points. A series of polls conducted for Democratic groups showed a roughly tied race instead.
Mr. Walker in fact won by seven points: the independent polls called the outcome almost exactly, while the internal polls were far from the mark.
Take note any Republicans reading this: This is a Democratic error. And, generally speaking, internal polls are not worth much as predictors of the outcome.
But when campaigns release internal polls to the public, their goal is usually not to provide the most accurate information. Instead, they are most likely trying to create a favorable news narrative – and they may fiddle with these assumptions until they get the desired result.
The Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman, who testified under oath in the federal case against John Edwards, put this bluntly, describing the release of internal polls to the news media as a form of “propaganda”:
Hickman testified that when circulating the polls, he didn’t much care if they were accurate. “I didn’t necessarily take any of these as for — as you would say, for the truth of the matter. I took them more as something that could be used as propaganda for the campaign,” the veteran pollster said.
Some reporters make the mistake of assuming that information is valuable simply because it is private or proprietary. But the information that makes it to the reporter’s ears, or into his in-box, may be something that the campaign wants him to hear or see.
During the campaign Republican polling data was released to the New Republic and subsequently to Silver.
Silver explains
In fact, Mr. Obama won all seven states, and by an average margin of 5.7 percentage points based on the ballots counted so far. (Several of the states have yet to certify their results.) Therefore, the polls were biased in Mr. Romney’s direction by nearly five percentage points, on average.
It should be mentioned that most of the independent polls this year were also slightly biased (in a statistical sense) toward Mr. Romney. In the same seven states, the final Real Clear Politics averages overrated Mr. Romney’s standing by 2.5 percentage points. The final FiveThirtyEight forecasts were less biased statistically, in part because our forecast model was designed to respond aggressively to movement in the polls in the closing days of the campaign, which favored Mr. Obama after Hurricane Sandy. Still, our forecasts in these seven states had a one-point bias toward Mr. Romney, on average, compared against the actual results.
The curious, but little known, thing about the Romney internal polls is that it appears they never projected him to win the Electoral College.
Further, the Romney campaign’s polls did not have him winning the Electoral College, as they had Mr. Romney behind in Ohio, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to Mr. Scheiber. Assuming that the campaign also had Mr. Romney trailing in Nevada and Michigan, but leading in Virginia, Florida and North Carolina, then Mr. Romney would have been leading in states containing 261 electoral votes, but trailing Mr. Obama in states containing 271. Mr. Romney’s internal polls implied better chances for him than the public polls did – but if Mr. Scheiber’s reporting is right, they still had him as the underdog.
My husband points out that Mitt the self-described data guy seems to have only looked at his internal polling data. Did he look at Real Clear Politics? Or the daily reporting of poll results from the Daily Kos? Or even FiveThirtyEight? These were sources readily available to him. He could just have had staff compile all the public polling these sources used each day in a special report just for him.
Internal polls are used for a lot a purposes other than showing a candidates standing in the race. They can be used to measure effectiveness of message or standing among a specific demographic. But they should be taken with caution by the candidate and certainly their public release can be dangerous. In this case, the campaign also sold all the folks on Fox. Silver concludes
But most important, campaigns would be wise not to have their pollsters serve as public spokesmen or spin doctors for the campaign. Campaigns have other personnel who specialize in those tasks.
The role of the pollster should be just the opposite of this, in fact: to provide a reality check such that the campaign does not begin to believe its own spin.
Mitt didn’t write a concession speech because he believed his own spin. And there will likely be only one picture of him in the Oval Office.
Photograph from the White House.
Senator John Kyl and Representative West are lame ducks. Scott Brown is a lame duck. President Obama is not a lame duck.
The second and third definitions in Merriam Webster are relevant here.
2: an elected official or group continuing to hold political office during the period between the election and the inauguration of a successor3: one whose position or term of office will soon end
Back in 2010, I wrote about the filibuster in a post called “Puppies, Cats and Filibusters“. In it I argued for the talking filibuster. It didn’t seem at the time that there was any real move to do away with it totally, but making someone actually show up and explain why while holding the floor and appearing on C-SPAN seemed reasonable. It has only taken a few years, but it looks like Harry Reid and a number of Senate democrats are moving toward a similar solution. I am still waiting, however, for a clear explanation of how exactly the change could be accomplished.
Here is what I understand so far. It usually takes 67 votes to change Senate rules, but there is a mysterious thing called the “nuclear option” where the rules could be changed with only 51 votes. We know there are 53 Democratic senators and 2 who will caucus with them at least one of whom (Saunders, VT) should be voting with Reid on this.) So there are probably enough votes if there is some party solidarity. But how does that “nuclear option” work? That is the question.
Senate Republicans have refused to let scores of bills go forward in recent years, often because Mr. Reid will not allow the party to put amendments on those bills. This practice is deplored by the minority in both chambers, but only in the Senate can bills be stopped through the minority protest. Mr. Reid would like to limit what procedural motions are subject to filibusters, and to force senators to return to the practice of standing around forever, reading the phone book or what have you, if they choose to filibuster a bill before its final passage.
“If a bare majority can proceed to any bill it chooses,” said Mr. McConnell, deeply angry, “and once on that bill the majority leader all by himself can shut out all the amendments that aren’t to his liking, then those who elected us to advocate for their views will have lost their voices in this legislative process.”
Mr. Reid countered that the filibuster was “not part of the Constitution.”
“It’s something we developed here to help get legislation passed,” he said. “Now it’s being used to stop legislation from passing.”
And Ezra Klein explained McConnell’s objections this way
McConnell is referring to the Democrats’ proposal to change Senate rules with 51 votes rather than 67. But his outrage isn’t particularly convincing. As Senate whip, McConnell was a key player in the GOP’s 2005 effort to change the filibuster rules using — you guessed it — 51 votes. As he said at the time, “This is not the first time a minority of Senators has upset a Senate tradition or practice, and the current Senate majority intends to do what the majority in the Senate has often done–use its constitutional authority under article I, section 5, to reform Senate procedure by a simple majority vote.”
Now, Reid, at the time, was steadfastly opposed to changing the rules with 51 votes. He condemned the idea as “breaking the rules to change the rules.” So McConnell isn’t the Senate’s only inconsistent member on this point. But the fact is that McConnell was right the first time: The reason that Republicans believed they could change the rules with 51 votes in 2005 and Democrats believe they can do the same today is that they can.
So I guess it really is a constitutional not nuclear option to change the rules by a simple majority. And the changes being proposed are pretty modest. Basically you could only filibuster final passage of a bill, not bringing it to the floor at all. The Republicans seem to want to amend bills and I think this is OK, but there has to be acaveat that any amendment must be related to the actual substance of the bill. Room for some compromise here?
But if you want to know what this is important at all think about all the judges being held up, all the bills that don’t come to the floor of the Senate because someone (and we currently don’t have to know who) decides they want something to come to a vote.
This is from the Washington Post.
In order to overcome a filibuster — when a political party attempts to block or
delay action on a bill — the Senate can invoke a procedure called cloture. Sixty
votes, or three-fifths of the Senate, is required for cloture regardless of
whether all senators are present and voting. If cloture is passed, a time limit
is placed on the debate, ultimately ending the filibuster. Read related article
Ruben Bolling has this wonderful take on Bill O’Reilly’s fear that “traditional” American is dying.
I have never shopped in a Walmart store. I admit I shop in other big box stores that are probably just as bad on a smaller scale. It is important that we remember that what happens at Walmart will influence what happens at other stores. The issue was not just working on Thanksgiving or Black Friday, it was about benefits and low wages. The Nation reported
For about twenty-four hours, Walmart workers, union members and a slew of other activists pulled off the largest-ever US strike against the largest employer in the world. According to organizers, strikes hit a hundred US cities, with hundreds of retail workers walking off the job (last month‘s strikes drew 160). Organizers say they also hit their goal of a thousand total protests, with all but four states holding at least one. In the process, they notched a further escalation against the corporation that’s done more than any other to frustrate the ambitions and undermine the achievements of organized labor in the United States.
Even though many state governments and particularly Republican governors are doing their best to kill unions, workers will still organize.
The Black Friday strike came a year and a half after retail workers announced the founding of the new employee group OUR Walmart, five months after guest workers struck a Walmart seafood supplier and seven weeks after the country’s first-ever coordinated Walmart store strikes. Walmart striker Cindy Murray, a veteran of the last decade’s unsuccessful union-backed campaign against Walmart, said that after the 2008 election, “I was like, we have to do something different.” (Strikes at Walmart certainly qualify.) Murray said OUR Walmart has had greater success because workers saw it “as our organization,” as so they “finally said, maybe we can be saved. Maybe we can speak out.”
…
Retaliation was an ever-present theme of the day: an outrage that drove some workers to strike, a threat that led many more to stay at work, a focus of workers’ demands, and a question hanging over next week. Allegations of illegal retaliation provided workers greater potential legal protection to strike; puncturing any sense of safety about striking may have been the motivation for Walmart’s Labor Board charge alleging that the strikes were themselves illegal. And Walmart’s tactics over the past week may have taken a toll: organizers said that 100 DC-area Walmart store workers struck this week, but maybe no more than a dozen on Black Friday itself (they chalked this up to workers’ desire to cause more disruption earlier in the week while products were still being unloaded). Paramount, California, striker Maria Elena Jefferson said that some of her co-workers wouldn’t strike because “they think we’ll never win” and “they didn’t want to lose their jobs.” She said she hoped today’s actions–including a rally of well over 1,000 supporters in Paramount–would change their minds.
And there was this tweet posted on the Daily Kos.
Wal-Mart’s poverty wages force employees to rely on $2.66 billion in government help every year, or about $420,000 per store.
— @ClintonMath via web
Think about how much better it would be if the workers got a living wage and benefits and paid taxes instead of getting government assistance.
It is mostly over. There are some Congressional races (most leaning Democratic right now) and Florida, but it is pretty much over. The question to ask now is are you suffering from Post-Election Stress? Brian McFadden has helpfully given us a list of the symptoms to watch out for.
To this I would add: Still compulsively checking Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.
If you are a sufferer, you are not alone. I’m planning on taking a long walk this weekend and resisting the compulsion I have right now to go turn on UP with Chris Hayes. (sorry Chris)
We all know that both are from Illinois, but did you know that both were elected on November 6?
Abraham Lincoln was first elected on November 6, 1860. Barack Obama was elected to his second term yesterday, November 6, 1012.
When my husband mentioned this yesterday, I thought this was another good omen and it, like the 7/Eleven, Nickelodeon, and Scholastic polls was correct.
From This Day in History
Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois.
People are still in line to vote here in the City of Boston, but my Roxbury precinct voted in record numbers. 617 ballots out of about 900 or so registered voter. Obama/Biden got 583 to Romney/Ryan’s 20. Elizabeth Warren got 576 votes to Scott Brown’s 35.
No winners called yet in Massachusetts, but in my neighborhood we have winners. It was worth the work.
More reports to come.
If you are like me and live in a state that has already an insurmountable lead for President Obama’s re-election you might be tempted to vote third party, but it is still important for you to vote for Obama. Why? The popular vote total. The pundits and headlines will continue to say the race is tied. Forget the electoral college which in most estimates have Obama now over the 279 mark with some headed to 300. No it is the popular vote where there is potential trouble.
Willard Mitt is too close for comfort. This morning Nate Silver puts it at 50.6 to 48.3 or a 2.3% margin for the President. The margin of error is 2.1. Much of the Romney vote comes from Red States and that is what is making it look close. Unless Obama wins both the popular vote and the electoral college, the Republicans can complain about the results. You know they will. They are already beginning to blame Hurricane Sandy for the loss.
Of course, we won’t know until the votes are counted how things will turn out. Polls can be wrong and folks like Nate depend on aggregating polls, but as an Obama supporter, I do feel hopeful.
Also it looks as if Elizabeth Warren will beat Senator Scott Brown. Let’s hope that’s the last time I have to call him that! And better yet, it is beginning to look like my old friend, Tim Kaine, will win in Virginia.
This shows President Clinton, President Obama and Tim Kaine. This is an important sign: The Democratic Senate candidate is not running from the President. In a purple state.
So if you live in a blue state, don’t be thinking your vote for Obama doesn’t matter because it does.
FortLeft 