Polls (and lack thereof) be damned, Kaplan has spoken:
Let’s be clear, in layman’s terms: there is not very much polling data yet, but what little there is indicates an average-to-above-average bounce for Obama in the wake of the convention.
What Kaplan has printed is an outright lie.
Villago Delenda Est
Dan Balz and Phillip Ruckner.
Two utter wastes of skin.
Bring on the meteor. Aim it at the Village.
Give Greg Sargent and Eugene Robinson a heads up first, of course. The rest? No notice.
balconesfault
They sooooo want this to be a horse race down to the wire.
beltane
That is a very Balzy lie. One that is contradicted by even liberal Rassmussen polling.
Chris T.
All the players in the game have incentive to call it a “close race”, regardless of reality.
For the newspapers and other media, it’s obvious why: a “close race” is exciting and attracts eyeballs.
For either campaign, it’s also obvious why: a “close race” requires more people Get Out And Vote. If it’s an obvious slam dunk, some will stay home.
Those with a chosen side, but also invested in the “horse race” mentality, are the only one with a direct conflict: people like winners, so being able to say “we’re ahead” is good, but they don’t want to say “we’re a sure thing” because that detracts from the interest.
MattF
I was actually surprised when I saw that headline. Stupid MattF.
burnspbesq
It’s deeply and profoundly silly to expect truth from these people. Their business is selling eyeballs to advertisers. Truth is irrelevant.
Mike in NC
But what do Jennifer Rubin and Charles Krauthammer have to say?
Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker
I now declare myself a Very Serious Fact Checker, I give Balz and his sidekick four Tommy Flanagans.
mistermix
This is going down the same line as Chuck Todd on MTP who was mumbling about the “robo polls” that are showing a bounce – denial because they want a tighter race.
Redneck Jesus
That’s a Balzy article.
BGinCHI
With a name like
SmuckersBalz, it’s gotta be good.Frankensteinbeck
@Chris T.:
I disagree on one point. Obama’s team does not want a close race. The side that is winning is energized and votes well. A side that believes they have no chance goes through despair and their turnout is depressed. Still, I can’t imagine they’d argue with this. You can only influence the narrative so much. Better to focus on making Black Metrosexual Abe Lincoln look good (as if you could look better than that description) and Romney look bad (by not letting him sweep his own mistakes under the rug).
General Stuck
I don’t think there is likely a chance of calling a lead, a “breakthrough”. Political polling since the beginning of GWB’s second term, has become more and more hardened to basic ideology, right around the 50/50 mark, to the point where a relative handful of voters will decide the election. While that is not much comfort, it does make even a small lead more probable as the final outcome, and we only need 270 EV’s to win. I don’t know how this uber polarization will play out via senate races, but I expect they will go, as goes the POTUS state to state vote.
Seanly
Five thirty eight is good, but lately I’ve been going to Princeton Election Consortium (a fellow BJ commenter had recommended the place). They keep things quite a bit simpler than five thirty eight.
PEC has actually identified that Romney got a negative bounce from his convention. Maybe Chris Christie yelling at America we all need to diet & Eastwood yelling at an empty chair weren’t too effective. Read their post about why 538 & other aggregators are incorrect about an RNC bounce.
WaterGirl
I had to laugh when I saw your image that shows the headline and the first sentence of the article. That’s exactly how far I got yesterday when I started to read that article – then I called “bullshit” and closed the tab without reading the rest of the article.
SP
Waffle word, sizable. Reagan got a 30 point bounce so they can say 10 for Obama isn’t “sizable.” It’s like how “some say”- some is at least one, so as long as you preface with that it could be true.
lamh35
@Mike in NC: JRubin is busy on twitter calling Obama “slovenly inside and out” for wearing jeans in Oval office. Never mind that people have already posted pic of Reagan wearing, you guessed it, jeans in the Oval office
Chris T.
@Frankensteinbeck: I didn’t say they want a close race, I said they have incentive to call it close, in the “get out and vote, your vote may be the deciding vote!” sense.
scav
pish, they knew (and said!) there wouldn’t be a bounce before the convention had been finished or the speeches had been uttered. It’s akin to the Dem’s knowing what the weather was going to be 100 days in advance: they KNOW the future in their bubble elite world. ChiTrib has picked up the expectation of a (“the”!) Sept gaffe being the next event lined up. After that I think we’ve got the spinning windmill and then I think we need to get the ball into the dinosaur’s mouth and out his tail on the wiggly putting green.
SiubhanDuinne
@beltane:
Saw what you did there.
@Redneck Jesus:
Saw what you did, too.
Villago Delenda Est
@mistermix:
Yup.
The Narrative is sacred. The Narrative pays our bloated salaries, and provides us with cocktail weenies. The Narrative makes our corporate overlords happy, because it’s the most profitable approach for them, and the laziest way for journamalists to pretend to do their phoney baloney jobs.
The Narrative must be perpetuated no matter what reality happens to be.
Baghdad Bob is the patron saint of those who follow the ways of the Narrative.
BGinCHI
I would love for someone to tape an editorial meeting where the brass at WaPo (or somewhere like it) are caught saying, “Look, we have to sell this as a horse race or we are going to take a hit in profits.”
If that would play on the news or online and go viral maybe we could kill these fucking dinosaurs.
Violet
Aww…don’t be too hard on the poor old WaPoPo. Grifter’s gotta grift, after all. Who would buy the paper if they didn’t sell a horse race? No one’s gonna buy tickets to a race between a stallion and a beat up old nag.
lamh35
Oh and Ann on MTP said that they “didn’t suffer financially”…NO SHIT SHERLOCK! So now ya’ll are ready to admit the “tuna and pasta” and “ironing on the table” shmaltz was exaggerating a bit?
Oh and she says the media is “demonizing” her husband. I sure Michelle O would never say it, but I sure in her head she’s like “bitch please”
here’s the funny thing, Dancin’ Dave basically licked Romney u know what and Norah O’Donnell on Face The Nation actually carved Ryan up in comparison.
See this why you always need a woman to do shit (see Katie Couric & Sarah Palin) dude get all into the “gentlemanly bromances” and don’t get shit done!
beltane
@lamh35: This is a sure sign that Rubin, and therefore Romney, is flailing. Remember how in 2008 she claimed that Jewish women hated Palin because they are dumpy, frumpy, and jealous? Well, now it’s Obama himself who gets to be called dumpy and frumpy.
dmsilev
On the other hand, we have Politico this morning:
Suffern Ace
@lamh35: but those are cowboy jeans not thug jeans.
BGinCHI
@scav: I fucking hate the Trib.
Violet
@Villago Delenda Est:
What was The Narrative in, say, the 1960’s? Or when FDR was President? I know the Village has leaned Republican at least since Reagan. Have they always? What’s the story there? Have they always been Both Sides Do It?
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris T.:
Yup, that’s it. I get four or five emails a day from Barack, Michelle, Joe, and/or some staffer telling me how we could still lose this election if I don’t send them money right now! It’s just too close to call, my effort is needed, badly, to insure that Birther Boy gets reinstalled in the White House!
And they’ve got a point. Overconfidence is bad, it leads to downfalls. I was a history major, I’ve seen this story before. Many times!
Today they asked me to commit to vote in November. Like I’ve ever missed a Presidential election since my first one in ’76. My parents drummed into me that it’s not just my right, it’s my duty to vote.
BGinCHI
@Suffern Ace: In Chicago, jeans steal you!
Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker
@SiubhanDuinne: Brass Balz?
Steve
@lamh35: Reagan never wore jeans in the Oval Office while black, though.
Seanly
I love how everything in the media is so obviously twisted wrt Republicans & Democrats.
Republican events – have Republican henchmen on to sing hosannas
Democratic events – have Republican henchmen on to tell us how terrible it is
RNC bounce? – we have to wait a week for polls to come in to get a true picture of the glorious bounce of all bounces
DNC bounce? – it ended 5 minutes ago, so now we can tell you what a miserable failure it was.
Roger Moore
@Chris T.:
They have some short-term interest in doing so, but there are good reasons for most of the players to want to be honest. The press may like the excitement of a close race, but they have to worry about their credibility if the race turns out radically different from the way they called it. And partisans on the winning side have a reason to want people to think it’s going to be a landslide, because voters want to support a winner and the depressed turnout of a foregone conclusion hits the losing side more than the winning side.
Maybe the press thinks they can call a sudden swing for Obama at the end of the race, and maybe Obama is trying to get the Republicans to throw bad money after good supporting a lost cause Romney instead of working on down-ticket races, but I think you’re going way overboard in ascribing bad motives. The plain fact is that the poling has been consistently close for the whole election season, to the point that to this point it has made sense to call the election close. Maybe that’s changing now, but it’s at least reasonable to be skeptical of a sudden change in an election that’s been very close until now.
BGinCHI
@Violet: In the past, at least in urban markets, there were several newspapers. Most had their partisan leanings (or outright support) and didn’t claim faux objectivity. There was plenty of bullshit but at least people knew what they were getting into.
lamh35
BTW, Meet The Press staff got hosed by Romney staff. David Gregory should be ashamed.
https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/244811127400325121
dmsilev
@lamh35: Yes, yes, but we all know that the rules don’t apply to Ronaldus Magnus.
Besides that, I’m not sure why I should care what a President is wearing when he’s in the office. Is he going to get written up by HR or something?
scav
@BGinCHI: Isn’t being hated the Trib’s teleological purpose?
beltane
@lamh35: David Gregory and the MTP staff should be grateful that the Romneys let them in the bus instead of tying them to the roof of the bus.
Villago Delenda Est
@Violet:
The most exciting horse race I’ve ever seen, far and away, was the ’73 Belmont Stakes.
Most awesome performance by a thoroughbred, ever.
Suffern Ace
@dmsilev: When you hang with religious nuts, everything becomes a sacred shrine.
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris T.:
And I’m sayin’ they’d rather have it called a clear and inevitable victory for Obama. Hopelessness produces apathy. GOP voters would stay home and our downticket races would benefit.
GregB
The bottom line is that Ann Romney and Mitt Romney are both acting like whining losers.
We all know that the chest thumping wingnuts hate losers.
The Democrats were partying like it was 1999 at the convention.
They looked like the future was bright and delightful.
The Romney’s convention looked like the band from the Titanic.
Now Romney and his money fools think that swamping the airwaves during football games is going to buy them votes instead of pissing money away into the old media vortex.
Like I said, they are acting like the caveman losers that Clint Eastwood embodied.
BGinCHI
@scav: If so it’s succeeding brilliantly.
Violet
@lamh35:
Yes, he should. About so many, many things.
I get the impression he knows he’s out of his depth. There’s just something in the way he carries himself. There’s a light hangdog look about him or something. I think he knows he’s not good at his job, but he’s also very defensive about it, and so his demeanor is this mix between ass kissing (“please don’t beat me, sir!”) and defensiveness (“Back off! I’m the host of MTP and you’re not!”). It’s incredibly off-putting. No wonder his guests recognize they can roll right over him.
General Stuck
Something I just don’t get, and have genuinely tried to understand, is the wingnut meme that Obama is a failed presidency and the worst president ever. I can understand their bashing the economic woes not being better, as a line of attack, as well as general ideological disagreement. But not this mindless scorched earth mindset of abject failure from this president. That killed OBL, and rescued the right wings vaunted free market at a political cost to Obama pissing off part of his base. It is unhinged in about every way, and impossible to even engage in a sane debate. It’s like Obama just doesn’t exist for them as the current president, other than some kind of abstract afterthought borne of total rejection of reality.
“historically” abysmal? Dear lard.
Steve
@Chris T.: You want your own team’s voters to think it’s close; you want the other team’s voters to think it’s hopeless. Both of these things are useful, but you generally have to choose one or the other.
Ben Franklin
@mistermix:
Chuck Todd on MTP who was mumbling about the “robo polls” that are showing a bounce
They trot out all their available denialisms re; poll biases, registered voter measurements, out of sheer panic.
Dennis SGMM
@Violet:
My recollection, from long ago (Kennedy, Nixon, etc) is that while the editorial pages of the print media had their proudly worn biases, the news reporting was pretty much “Just the facts, ma’am.” The pieces rarely informed us of how the reporter felt and even more rarely told us how we should feel.
Villago Delenda Est
@General Stuck:
History began in 2009. So naturally, it’s “historically” abysmal.
Duh.
Steve
@lamh35: Actually, I clicked Rubin’s pic, and it’s not even Obama who was wearing jeans, it was one of his advisors. So the unpardonable sin is Obama’s failure to enforce a dress code! Oh, and he had his black butt on JFK’s desk, how outrageous.
lamh35
oh, and BTW:
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-approval-rating-50-percent-dnc-convention-2012-9#ixzz25zIs49ya
Ben Franklin
@Roger Moore:
Maybe the press thinks they can call a sudden swing for Obama at the end of the race, and maybe Obama is trying to get the Republicans to throw bad money after good supporting a lost cause Romney instead of working on down-ticket races
The Press has already beaten the horse race to death and they are bored. They want to move on to ‘Why he Won’, post-haste, and Obama is reading their transparency well.
Dennis SGMM
@General Stuck:
From the linked article:
General, I thank you for finding and linking these things. You are, and I mean this with admiration, the Ed Norton of our “Honeymooners.”
MattF
@Steve: As a matter of fact, GWB did enforce a dress code, so Rubin is dinging Obama for not being like Bush. If you were looking for a political ‘can you top that’ moment, you’re welcome.
kuvasz
Dont let up! Don’t make it close enough to steal LIKE IN 2000! Beat these Republicans down to protoplasm then burn the residue to dust.
burnspbesq
This is pretty sweet: Saletan, of all people, goes off on Ryan.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2012/08/paul_ryan_s_medicare_flip_flop_is_a_betrayal_of_conservatism_.html?wpisrc=obinsite
Dennis SGMM
@Villago Delenda Est:
Shucks, don’t you remember? I do. In December of 2008 I owned three Maybachs and my dog drove a Porsche Carrera. I had a house so high on a hill in Los Angeles that I could see Hawaii on a clear day. I had a pound of weed on the coffee table and a 22 year old UCLA co-ed as a part time mistress.
Then that guy with a funny name, dark skin, and kinky hair was sworn in and I found myself an old guy, driving a beat up Miata and living on early SS and a very modest pension.
I know exactly whom to blame.
Linda Featheringill
@kuvasz: #57
Good point.
I just read 538 and Nate essentially said in his last paragraph that Mitt needs an act of God to intervene so he can win. Barring that, he’s toast.
HOWEVER, Nate assumes that elections are run honestly and I don’t share that faith. kuvasz is quite right in that a close election can be stolen. If the margin is big enough, we are probably safe from Republican shenanigans.
Can’t stop now.
Villago Delenda Est
@Dennis SGMM:
That entire article is such a bottomless pit of wingtard stupid it’s truly a thing to behold.
Frankensteinbeck
@General Stuck:
Clint Eastwood has defined our zeitgeist. The hallmark of Obama’s presidency has been narratives of an imaginary Obama. On both sides of the aisle hardly anyone knows how much he’s accomplished, and most have swallowed rumors and wild misrepresentations.
Anya
He’s not conservative enough meme starts. Here’s Scarborough (not linking to Hufpo):
And the predictable Reagan and Thatcher name drop (does he understand there are differences between American elections and British elections):
dmsilev
@Anya: That’s been in the cards for months now. Romney will have lost because he wasn’t conservative enough. Remember, like communism, conservatism can be failed but cannot itself fail.
Linda Featheringill
@GregB: #44
Hee-hee.
And yes, the folks at and around the Democratic convention had a gooood time. They were happy to be there, they were happy to be together, they were happy to be.
Dennis SGMM
@Villago Delenda Est:
I have this kind of left-handed philosophical bent that suggests that the projection in that piece is a way of attempting to make liberals the scapegoats for their own asshole views.
Probably read too much Jung.
Jay in Oregon
@Villago Delenda Est:
From John Scalzi’s book Redshirts
Cacti
@Frankensteinbeck:
Octagenarian white dude rants at an Obama that only exists in his imagination.
The Tea Party in a nutshell.
And in the follow up interview, he added a dollop of that famous GOP-style projection: Guy who played male fantasy figures for 6 decades accuses Obama of being a “hoax”.
Roger Moore
@General Stuck:
Any understanding of wingnut behavior must start with projection. George W Bush was actually a historically miserable president, so wingnuts feel obligated to project that failure onto the next available Democrat. Also, too, it’s very helpful to shift the blame for specific Bush failures, like the financial crisis, onto Obama. If you stick Obama with the blame for Bush’s failures, he’s going to look very bad.
Roger Moore
@Anya:
Wow, that’s 10 tons of stupid in a 5 pound can. I’m sure that Romney would balance the budget in exactly the Reagan way, i.e. not at all.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
They’ve done this with the entire budget deficit thing. The deserting coward, borrowing a page from his vile sire’s playbook, put his glorious Asian adventures “off budget”. Obama came into office, said “the lie ends now”, the budget deficit skyrocketed as a result, and the wingtards scream about how Obama was spending like a poet on payday. All Obama did was put the deserting coward’s borrowing and spending on the same balance sheet. For doing that, Obama is the one who spent all that blood and treasure on a totally pointless war. Well, not totally pointless. The Dark Lord’s personal fortune skyrocketed, as it’s based on Halliburton shares.
Chris
@Violet:
The villain leans towards the dominant party, I think. But it can take them awhile to catch on when that party changes.
KoolEarl
What I am getting from workplace Dittoheads is that they don’t care if RMoney loses and that as long as they don’t get swamped in downticket races the Repubs can continue to obstruct during a 2nd Obama term and by 2016 it will be their turn.
Chris
@Linda Featheringill:
That and a potential last minute spoiler in the form of Bibi starting a war with Iran.
Ben Franklin
@Chris:
The other Barack is sucker-punching BiBi.
Chris
@GregB:
This.
Voters in general and conservatives in particular loathe weakness, far more than crime and corruption, and whining makes Mitt look weak. He looks like there’s a capital L stapled on his forehead, specifically, and much as they love to blame the media, it’s pretty hard not to directly at least some blame at the Ovenmitt.
Roger Moore
@KoolEarl:
That’s the argument of a loser who doesn’t want to admit he’s been beaten. When you’re more worried about minimizing your losses than maximizing your gains, you’ve already admitted defeat.
KoolEarl
Roger, you are correct. These folks were never too juiced on RMoney to start with, grudgingly got behind him solely because he was Obamas opponent, got a bit of a spark when Ryan was announced, but at this point they instinctively are realizing that RMoney reeks of “loser”. They can look ahead to 2016, but outside of perhaps Ryan, I am not seeing anybody on the bench that might pull all factions behind them.
Cervantes
@GregB:
Actually, the band on the Titanic played on while the ship was sinking in order to help prevent full-scale panic while the lifeboats were loaded and other passengers rescued. (I say “other passengers” because band members were not technically part of the crew; they had boarded as passengers and were fully eligible for spots on the lifeboats.) The band-members knew they were going to die and kept on playing — it was the ultimate act of self-sacrifice.
Please do not confuse the band on the Titanic with the cowards you saw in Tampa. There are no similarities.
Tractarian
@Seanly:
Yep. 538 has lost the plot this year. He’s tinkered with his model too much. Princeton gives a much more straightforward interpretation of the polls.
Nate Silver : 2008 :: Sam Wang :: 2012
Donut
@Violet:
,,,and then there’s Mr. Romney to consider….
Ok, ok, sorry, cheap shot. I just really loathe Ann Romney. She strikes me as another Nancy Reagan type, as in all roads to Mitt lead through her. And she seems like she will control an awful lot of the agenda, in her own way, like Nancy did. Mitt is obviously way more comfortable when he has her to lean on. Now, I certainly dont have a problem with a strong, opinionated first lady who has her own interests and goals, a la Hillary – but if Ann wants to be in the White House that bad, she should run her own self, not hide behind her husband. I guess what I’m getting at is I have the impression sometimes that she wants this more than Mitt really does.
BC
The conventional wisdom does not lie, and the conventional wisdom is that Friday’s job numbers kept Obama from having any bounce from the convention so you can just take your fancy-shmancy polls and numbers away because the conventional wisdom is that the numbers are flat. Reality sucks.
Chris
@Donut:
Ditto on the loathing, and it’s not even her actions. It’s the fact that every time she opens her mouth you get to hear the whine of a yet another entitled POS who’s never had to live like the 99% in her life and is upset that these people have the audacity to question her and her husband’s right to the throne. An even more tone-deaf and stuck up version of the Ovenmitt, if that’s even possible.
Steve
@BC: Spot-on. The Village truly believes that folks out there in Middle America all read the Wall Street Journal and eagerly await the latest job numbers to find out how things are going. It’s like expecting a homeless person to find out if it’s raining by turning on the Weather Channel.
xian
@Villago Delenda Est: and dogwhistle racism mustn’t be covered because it’s not part of the Narrative, per Brokaw.
xian
@Chris: useta be. now they lean toward money, plutocracy, and wealth.
Roger Moore
@Tractarian:
There’s some truth to that. I think he’s trying too hard to account for stuff outside the polls- convention bounce, the economy, etc.- rather than just trying to straighten out what the polls are saying. IMO, all those extra factors are now introducing more noise into the projection than they’re reducing. The only redeeming feature is that you can get the simpler model by looking at his “now-cast” rather than the more complex election day forecast.
xian
@Seanly: that may have been me, as I’ve been kinda pimping him nonstop. also at politicalwire, so i kinda wonder if that led to teagan front-paging him there this weekend. sully’s probably promoting him the most, these days, though.
Violet
@Donut: I can’t stand Ann Romney either. She looks and sounds like the entitle, rich white lady she is. Zero idea what it’s like for any of the rest of us outside that rarefied circle. Can’t stand her. She’s certainly not a secret weapon for Mitt. She makes me hate him more.
WaterGirl
@Violet: Does that make Ann Romney Obama’s secret weapon?
Todd Dugdale
I think that Democratic complacency is a myth.
That’s based on ten years of door-knocking for campaigns to drum up the vote for Democrats — thousands of people.
Now, however, I take the conservative areas that nobody else wants. It’s better for my sanity to have doors slammed in my face and expletives hurled at me, than in it is to see the unrelenting, dismal horror of Democrat after Democrat telling me that they won’t vote because they think that the candidate won’t win.
It’s an endless parade of whimpering, hand-wringing, cringing victims who “just don’t believe that they can win”. I can give them polling data, issues, positions, etc. but absolutely nothing can change their mind because voting for a loser is apparently some kind of horrible fate that they won’t even contemplate risking. Democrats are the most easily frightened, easily discouraged voters that there are. Overconfidence is a joke.
The best GOTV message is, “We are going to win. You want to be part of that”.
In my experience, “complacent Democrats” are usually not voters at all, and seldom even Democrats. The only Democrats motivated by fear are the hard-core partisans. If you’re having trouble motivating them, then you’re screwed from the start.
Central Planning
@GregB:
“Media Stimulus,” please.
grandpa john
@General Stuck: sounds more like a description of Shrubs first term
El Cid
@Todd Dugdale:
I’ve long been thinking that the average person’s desire to be on the winning team would mean that a positive outlook for an Obama victory could be better for turnout.