What You Should Worry About

The election is close and so everyone is nervous. Well, everyone except Dick Morris who is convinced that Romney will win in a landslide as Oregon is now in play (I'm not kidding).

Obama is leading according to the polls. It is roughly tied in the national poll averages and Obama has clear leads in the polling averages in enough swing states to put him over the top for re-election.

So, if you're supporting the President, you have just two things to worry about:

1) Something changes
2) The polls are wrong

Are either or both of these things possible? Absolutely. Are they likely? No. But let's take a closer look at each possibility.

Something changes. What could change in the final days? Some argue that nothing is going to change. Sam Wang, for instance, points out that the cake is now fully baked. He provides statistical proof for this and I find the phrase oddly compelling so I figured I'd repeat it. But it is always possible something could change. For one, a jobs report is going to be released in a few hours. Economists expect that the unemployment rate will tick up to 7.9%. That's probably not enough to damage Obama significantly. But it is an awfully close race and what if it ticks up to 8.0%? Are the optics of that sufficiently bad to do damage? Doubtful, but possible. (UPDATE: The jobs report was better than expected with 171,000 jobs added but the unemployment rate did tick up to 7.9% as more workers re-entered the workforce). What about the so-called incumbency effect? Many (mostly Republicans) argue that most of the undecided voters will break for Mitt Rommey because if they were voting for the President, they'd have been with him already. Is this likely? No. Mark Blumenthal picks that argument apart pretty well.

What about some other wildcard? Hurricane Sandy seems like the last, biggest wildcard and that does not seem to have done any damage to President Obama. Arguably, it has made him look good. Mitt Romney seems to think Pennsylvania is in play and he's headed there for a campaign stop on Sunday. Don't get me started on that. Overall, I think the jobs report is Romney's best bet in this category.

The polls are wrong. The polling data is much more clear than it appears to the naked eye. Sam Wang, Simon Jackman, Nate Silver, Drew Linzer, and others have modeled the probability that Obama does, in fact, have a lead according to the polls and the general consensus is ... "YEAH." But the key phrase in all that is "according to the polls." If the polls are all systematically biased in some similar kind of way, that lead would be a mirage. How often does this happen? Not often. But it is important to remember that polling is at least partially an art. In this era of low response rates, it is not quite as easy as before to ensure you have an unbiased sample. If Obama's lead (and he DOES lead in the key state of Ohio in the polls) were bigger, this would be less of a concern. But it is a small lead.

Of course, the possibility of error goes in both directions. If you watched the video of Stan Greenberg I posted a few days ago, you know there are those who believe the pollsters are undersampling Obama voters. In addition, the Obama campaign claims their superior ground game will help them out-perform the polls. Of course, the Romney campaign claims the same things. The reality is that pollsters are smart people and have staked their reputation on what they're doing. The odds are they are right. Systemic polling failure is possible ... but unlikely.

In the end, there is enough uncertainty to worry about both of these things: Something could change. The polls could be wrong. How much should you worry? As of tonight, Nate Silver has Obama as an 81% bet to win.

That's a high point in the post-Denver (first debate) campaign for Obama. And as Nate points out, you'd rather be holding Obama's cards right now than Romney's.

Rasmussen, Systemic Polling Failure, and "Truth"

There's quite a brouhaha spinning around the interwebs with conservatives complaining that Nate Silver is cooking the books in his polling model because he's a liberal shill. Here's the argument in its original full form. It is pure drivel. Silver himself had this brilliant retort today ...

But, anyway, the whole thing got me to thinking about the state of the polls and the state of the race. Conservatives are reading Rasmussen and Gravis and Gallup and celebrating what is sure to be a big victory for Romney next Tuesday. Liberals are reading ... well, everything else and are sweating the national vote polls that have it close (actually, if you take Gallup and Rasmussen out of the naional poll averages, Obama is very slightly ahead) but feeling pretty comfortable about the state-level polls that show Obama leading in more than enough states to win a majority in the Electoral College.

What is the state of the race and whose polls are right? The truth is we don't really know for sure which set of polls is right. But, if I had to bet, I'd say Rasmussen and Gallup are wrong (for different reasons). Let me lay out the case for each side and explain why I think Rasmussen has it wrong but it is important to acknowledge that ...

Rasmussen could be right. Rasmussen has been identified as a pollster that has a "Republican lean" but this is really a mislabeling of what they are doing. It suggests that the pollster is just putting his thumb on the scale and cooking the books. That's not what Rasmussen is doing. At least I'm pretty sure they're not. What Rasmussen does is to use "dynamic party weighting." They weight their sample of voters so that they get to a designated number of Republicans and Democrats in their sample. The party weighting is "dynamic" because Rasmussen comes up with the relative weights of Republicans and Democrats based on some recent previous period of polling. Effectively, Rasmussen is making an educated guess about what the partisan makeup of the electorate will be (nationally or in a state) and then they make sure their sample looks like that.

So is it possible Rasmussen is right? Absolutely, it is possible. If their dynamic weights are accurate, then their polls will be accurate. And the flipside is also true. If their weights are wrong, they'll be wrong.

So what's the case against Rasmussen? A couple of days ago, Nate Cohn wrote that, if the polls stay where they are up to Election Day, Mitt Romney's only hope will be "systemic polling failure." This means that the vast majority of polls must have done something (question wording, poor sampling, etc.) that led them all to the wrong answer. Nate Cohn is right about this.

Systemic polling failure does happen. To understand why it is unlikely, we have to understand what other pollsters are doing differently than Rasmussen to get such systematically different results. First, other pollsters are not weighting by party ID at all. To most pollsters, party ID is something to be discovered in a poll, not something to use to weight the sample. This is because party ID is a fluid construct. People tend to change their response to a party ID question based on how they feel about the competing presidential candidates or based on how enthused they are to vote for their preferred candidate. Other pollsters simply ask respondents who they are planning to vote for and then use likely voter screens (of different varieties) to determine who is likely to vote and who is a non-voter.

It is entirely possible that this methodology will lead to a sample that is not reflective of the population as a whole. One reason is simply statistical variation. Maybe you just happened to get a disproportionate number of Romney supporters in your sample. This happens but we know the precise likelihood it will happen and this problem is corrected for by the various polling averages out there. Only a very small number of polls will be outliers for this reason and, when they are averaged into the rest, they will not have a substantial effect on the overall average number. A second problem is some kind of problem with the way we are sampling. One problem along these lines is the undersampling of certain kinds of populations like cell phone users or Hispanic voters who do not speak English, either of which may not be called by pollsters for different reasons. Some pollsters do call cell phones and some call Spanish-only voters. Here's Stan Greenberg talking about why undersampling of cell phone voters is causing Obama voters to be under-represented in the public polls we see:



Other pollsters who are good at what they do, use some kind of weighting mechanism to try to get a representative sample without calling them. This is increasingly problematic but is done well by some pollsters (like PPP in my view).

The point is that these pollsters are either getting a truly representative sample or they are using demographic weighting (not partisan ID weighting) to make sure they don't have a problem with their sample. The fact that so many pollsters are coming to basically the same conclusions (for instance, that Barack Obama has a small lead in Ohio) is evidence that they are likely right.

Could Ohio (and other states) still shift? Yes, but it is getting very late.

Could Rasmussen be right and the other polls wrong? Yes. I don't think so but it could happen and, if it did, it would be exactly the kind of "systemic polling failure" Nate Cohn was talking about.

We'll know next Wednesday morning.

Why Aren't Obama's Numbers Dropping?

There has been a lot of bad news for the President recently. The jobs numbers were very bad. The President compounded the problem with a bad gaffe. Karen Tumulty reports Democrats are starting to panic. Global opinion of Obama has started to slip. Carville and Greenberg are convinced Obama has the wrong message on the economy. Indeed, independent voters do not like what Obama is saying on the economy. Meanwhile, Eric Holder is under renewed fire and Obama's Secretary of the Commerce had a strange health episode over the weekend that led to several hit-and-run accidents.

It's been a rough patch ... and yet,



What's going on here? Some possibilities:

1) Maybe the bad news for Obama is just not yet reflected in these polls. Perhaps, but there are several polls out in the past couple of days that do take most all of these stories into account. If this is the best explanation, we should see Obama's numbers decline in the next few days at the latest.

2) People dislike Romney too much to turn to him. Possible, but that would at least cause Obama's numbers to drop a little more than they have with some voters moving into the undecided category.

3) What I think is going on here is that there are just fewer voters than usual that are "persuadable." There just aren't very many people who have not already made up their minds about the November election. Most voters have very clear, fixed views of the Democratic and Republican brands, Obama personally, his leadership, etc. If there is one area where at least some voters are still movable, it is focused on Mitt Romney. Some voters (a small number) do not yet know enough about him to render a final verdict.

Because of that last point, the campaigns are now going to spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars defining who Mitt Romney is, what his policy proposals mean, and what a Romney presidency would look like. Sure, Romney will spend a lot of money explaining how Obama has done a very bad job. Most of this spending is a waste. The vast majority of voters have already come to their own conclusions on that and the few that might change their minds will change their minds based on events (the economy, etc.). They will not be moved by Romney's ads.

UPDATE: Nate Cohn makes virtually the same point.