What a Fool Believes

You know that is flat-out the best Michael McDonald song.



Now that you're in a Michael McDonald mood, let's get to his latest work. The "other" Michael McDonald is the foremost expert on early voting and posted this fantastic review of early voting around the country.

There is a lot of discussion of early voting and its impact among pundits and media folks, not to mention pollsters. A lot of the polling, particularly in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ohio, has found that early-vote respondents are telling pollsters that they are voting very heavily for Obama. This has led some to think the President is running away with the election. It isn't that simple. If you're one of those Obama supporters who thinks early voting is going to singlehandedly crush Romney, McDonald's data is going to disappoint you. But, there is a lot of good news in what McDonald has to say.

His work is worth a full, careful read. But, the summary is this:

Everyone wants to know who is winning. In my commentary below I explain why I conclude Obama has narrow leads in Iowa and Nevada, Romney has a narrow lead in North Carolina, and in the remainder the early vote is not providing a clear direction yet. There is still ample time for conditions to change, but it will be increasingly difficult to do so as more votes pour in.

There are instructive patterns other than the horse race. The patterns of early voting in Florida and Ohio suggest that Obama supporters are successfully overcoming limitations in early voting enacted by those states' Republican governments.

To translate that, there just isn't any clear evidence yet that early voting is helping the Obama campaign in Ohio. BUT, there is clear evidence that the early voting is really hurting Romney in Iowa and Nevada. It is frankly very hard for me to see how Romney wins Nevada at this point and Iowa is looking like a very difficult state for him.

What that means is that, while Romney CANNOT win without Ohio, there are paths to victory for Obama that don't include Ohio. Wisconsin is likely going for the President if the polls are to be believed. On cue, the Romney campaign is trying to make a play in Wisconsin ... which is brilliant because, ya know, Mike Dukakis won Wisconsin so why couldn't another Massachusetts Governor do it? Adding Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nevada to the President's "solid" 237 electoral votes means he's at 259 with Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire still in play (we'll assume North Carolina is going for Romney for simplicity's sake). At that point, Obama would only need Florida OR Ohio OR Virginia OR the combination of Colorado and New Hampshire. The only state in that list where Obama is not currently ahead in the pollster.com average is Florida.

Polls can be wrong. But, as we get closer to the election, the Romney campaign's hopes are increasingly pinned on that thin thread - hoping the state polls are wrong.

Take us home Michael McDonald ...

Watching Likely Voters

I've argued that the first debate did not so much convince any voters to vote differently as it charged up Republican voters and depressed Democratic voters. This shift has been reflected in the polling as the composition of likely voters has changed just slightly. Of course, slight changes in the composition of likely voters are huge. So, I don't mean to downplay the shift. But I do want to point out that there are two things that potentially work in the President's favor if Romney is banking on a favorable likely voter pool to put him over the top:

1) The difference between likely voters and registered voters is unusually large right now and I think it is likely to shrink. It won't be zero. Romney will get a boost mainly because of demographics. Older people support Romney and younger people support Obama. Older people are more likely to vote. This is the biggest reason for Romney's advantage among likely voters but there are others. But likely voter numbers are a prediction that can change, especially if the President is able to un-do some of the damage done by the first debate. I think Democrats are a bit more enthused after the VP debate. If the President has a better night on Tuesday night, there is every chance the media narrative will be about how Obama "came back," etc. That will fire up the Democratic base and those likely voter numbers might get better.

2) The Obama campaign has been banking on their GOTV operation and they argue it will translate into a real advantage in a close race on Election Night. Nobody knows for sure whether this is real. But we're starting to see some very limited evidence consistent with the Obama narrative. Michael McDonald, who is the authoritative word on early voting, breaks down some of the early voting numbers here. The short version is that it does appear the Obama campaign is outperforming the Romney campaign on early voting, at least in some battleground states. This evidence is supplemented, of course, by the early voting numbers in a couple of polls in Ohio. NBC/WSJ and PPP have both polled Ohio in recent days and both break out early voting numbers. As of yesterday, PPP found that 19% of respondents said they had already voted and these respondents reported going for Obama by a staggering 76/24 margin. Just a few days earlier, NBC/WSJ found that 18% of respondents in Ohio said they had already voted and this group broke for the President 63/37.

Nate Silver finds this mix of early voting data and likely voter findings in polls to be difficult to reconcile and I agree. Silver tweeted this out yesterday:

There's too little data at this point to tell whether the early voting data or the likely voter polling data paints more of an accurate picture of the two campaigns' GOTV efforts. But, as Silver points out, if the gap between likely voters and registered voters closes some, Obama will win.

Minority Voter Registration Redux

The other day, I mentioned the Washington Post's story about the "decline" in minority voter registration and some problems that I saw with the argument being made there. I argued that the Post story should not worry Obama supporters as much as it appears because the Obama campaign has advantages in the ground game, because the data showed registration down across all categories and because the lack of a competitive Democratic primary is one reason Democratic voters (and, by extension, many Black and Hispanic voters) are not yet engaged.

Yesterday, Michael McDonald pointed out a better reason to be skeptical of the Washington Post story. The data they are using treats non-responses or "I don't know" as voters who are not registered. When these responses are excluded from all years, registration among minority voters does not appear to have dropped. Indeed, McDonald finds

The corrected data show that Hispanics are registered at a statistically-indistinguishably slightly higher rate than 2006 and Blacks have experienced a significant registration increase. The Obama campaign appears better situated in terms of registering of Blacks and Hispanics in the wake of the 2010 election than in the wake of the 2006 election. That these minority populations are also growing in size relative to the non-Hispanic White population should give more worry to the Romney campaign than to the Obama campaign.

The bottom line is that the 2012 electorate is likely to look a lot more like the 2008 electorate than the 2010 electorate and that is a problem for the Romney campaign.

We're Number 1 ... or Number 2!!!

Mitt Romney got absolutely shellacked in Missouri, is getting shellacked in Minnesota, and he may even lose Colorado. From TPM:

Romney thanked all his supporters, including those who have gone out caucusing tonight in Colorado. "The race is too close to call in Colorado at this point, but I'm pretty confident we'll come in Number 1 or Number 2."

That's right ... he's "pretty confident" that he'll come in "Number 1 or Number 2." As Andrew Sullivan pointed out tonight, it appears that if he doesn't have a week and millions of dollars of negative ads to pound his opponent with negative ads, he can't seem to win.

We've now had 7 contests (IA, NH, SC, FL, NV, MN, MO) with one more pending. Romney has won 3 with CO pending. Santorum has won 3 ... with CO pending. Rick Santorum is pushing Mitt Romney. Really.

UPDATE: Yeah, Romney lost Colorado too. Something really bad has happened with Mitt Romney tonight. The bottom really dropped out. In talking about the low turnout in Florida, I had said Michael McDonald was actually understating what a major potential problem this was for Romney. Nate Silver points out that this pattern has finally cost Romney ... big-time:

We have repeatedly noted the pattern in which Mr. Romney's stronger states and counties have been associated with lower Republican turnout.

So far, it was not clear that this had lost Mr. Romney a state -- save perhaps Iowa, when virtually anything might have altered the result.

But in Colorado, where the demographics were reasonably favorable to Mr. Romney -- he won 60 percent of the vote there in 2008 -- it may have made the difference. Mr. Romney's stronger areas in the state were associated with turnout declines of about 20 percent. But turnout was steady or slightly up in places where Rick Santorum did well.

Among other problems for Mr. Romney, this suggests that suggests that the caucus states could be problematic rather than advantageous to Mr. Romney, with his superior organization being outmatched by very conservative voters who have low levels of enthusiasm for him.

So, we've now had 8 contests, Santorum has won 4 and Romney has won just 3. That's a pretty poor resume for Mr. Inevitable.

Del Boca Vista Turnout Low

As I mentioned the other day, turnout was quite low in Florida compared with 2008. So reports Michael McDonald and he plots turnout by county compared with 2008 against Gingrich's share of the vote. What he finds is that turnout was particularly low in the places where Romney did well and particularly high where Gingrich did well.

What do these data mean? McDonald says:

What will happen in the general election if Romney is the nominee is anyone's guess. I suspect that Republican conservatives will line up behind Romney, but they will not do so enthusiastically. And while Romney does well among moderate, urban and suburban voters, the lack of enthusiasm exhibited by these voters should caution Romney that he may not continue to do as well among these voters when his opponent is Barack Obama. This would not matter in deep red states, but could matter in some battlegrounds like Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia -- states where the Obama campaign appears to be targeting and where he can rely on enthusiastic African-American voters.

I think McDonald is understating the importance of what we're seeing here. Independent voters are not liking what they are seeing from Romney so far. Today's jobs report is not going to sour them on Obama further ... at least not right now.

Romney will get conservative voters to turn out for him. We've known that. What has been unclear is what price he'll pay among independents for getting them to show up. If Newt Gingrich can hold on to conservative support until Super Tuesday, he can do some damage there and force Romney to do some more pandering to the right. It is already a good bet that Romney will have to pick a running mate who is Palin-esque. DeMint anyone?

It seems to me the low turnout in Del Boca Vista and the surrounding communities is a bad sign for Mitt and his hair. Getting on stage with the Donald isn't helping any.