The 2014 Midterm Elections

The 2014 midterm elections will soon be upon us.  Whether you are buoyed the President's fall in popularity and failure to panic the public with dire predictions of consequences of a 3% cut in the growth of spending, or you are just raising your head above the depressing waters that inundated you last Fall, you need to consider the ground on which the battle for the House and Senate will be fought next year.

The evil lord of collectivism even now musters his dark forces for this, his final battle.  Here is a look at those craggy heights, rugged canyons, rolling hills, and expansive plains where the armies of freedom must this time triumph or face decades of oppression.

A Tale of Two Electorates (Part IV)

Here Niall Stanage of The Hill tells us about two different data sets reporting on the ethnic makeup of the 2008 electorate.  The first and most often quoted is a set from 18,000 interviews by media polling organizations at the exit door of the polls presumably on election day.  The second is a set from 60,000 interviews by the Census Bureau, presumably weeks or months later.  About the first, note that election day voters were about 40% of the total in New Mexico in 2008, while regarding the second, voters memories are notoriously faulty.

Here are the two ethnic breakdowns compared:

A Tale of Two Electorates (Part III)

My son Matt got wound up on the national vs. state poll question reading Dan McLaughlin, who writes the Baseball Crank blog.  If you are a baseball fan, a fan of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, or you've ever heard of the baseball uber-statistical methods known as Sabermetrics, you'll like this almost as much as Matt does.

It was number four with a bullet -- as Variety used to say -- on today's late edition of RCP.

A Two of Two Electorates (Part II)

The picture is becoming clearer.

Here is Jay Cost -- once an election analyst with RCP, now with The Weekly Standard -- pointing out what should have been obvious weeks ago: that the two different kinds of poll results for Romney v. Obama, whether in individual states for incorporation into an electoral vote model, or nationally for estimating the popular vote, are the result of sampling different populations.

[Oops!] A Tale of Two Electorates

Out of lack of familiarity with Rasmussen's site -- I've not been following it -- I picked up Pennsylvania's numbers instead of Ohio's and concluded that Ohio wasn't leaning Romney.

Rasmussen's national and state numbers are much more consistent than the RealClearPolitics national and swing state averages are, just as they should be, having been drawn from the same data sets and analyzed by the same techniques.

More to follow.

A Tale of Two Electorates

The national horse race polls show Romney up an average of a point or so, while the state polls show Obama winning the key swing states.

The question from my elder son Matt this weekend was "How can both be right?"  He argued at length that there simply weren't enough votes to push toward Romney without changing the result in any of the larger states.

Some Encouragement

With this election's final act only a week from tomorrow, individual state polls and electoral analyses seem stuck.  Romney's surge in the popular vote doesn't seem to be reflected in the swing states that will determine the winner in the electoral college.  That could be because the pollsters doing those state polls aren't all that competent -- many are not national polling organizations with reputations to protect -- because they are tweaking the results to push their agenda, or because those polled are just not willing to give up their personal decision.