Coldheartedtruth

Opened becasue Bill Ayers makes me sick, maybe it was that ball game last night?

Meet the new Strib pollster. Same as the old Strib pollster.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, better known as the Strib, has a history of conducting outrageously slanted polls that show Democrats of all stripes doing about 15%-20% better on the margin than other pollsters find or that voters report on election day. After the 2006 election the Strib acknowledged that there were some problems with their polling and dumped their old pollster in favor of a new one, and the first results provided by that pollster last month gave hope that the Strib had found a competent, or at least reasonably unbiased, pollster. But alas, this weekend's releases of polls in the Minnesota Senate race and the presidential race are classic Strib polls.

For the record, the Strib finds Obama leading McCain by 18 points, with a 55%-37% lead. Most polling over the last two weeks has shown this race to be within 3 points, although a 9/28-30 CNN/Time poll that itself appeared to be an outlier showed Obama ahead by 11 points. The Senate polling results are equally out of line with other recent polls of that race.

The Strib also found that 1,084 of the 1,205 Minnesota adults sampled were likely voters, a 90% turnout. Either Minnesotans are an utter aberration in the U.S. and only a tiny few do in fact choose not to vote in fall elections or there's something wrong with the Strib's polling methods. I'll let you guess which explanation I think is correct.

The Rasmussen results are out (but yet to be released to the public). I stated after the debates that I would be surprised if Palin's numbers were not higher than McCains... and technically they were.

The Presidential debate:

36% Obama
33% McCain
31% unsure

The Vice Presidential debate:

45% Biden
37% Palin
18% unsure

Now as it turns out McCain's numbers were actually probably better overall in that he was only 3% under the Obama numbers, but yet Palin was favored by a slightly higher margin than McCain was (37%-33%). The 45% favoring Biden doesn't "shock" me as he also brought his "A game" to the event. The biggest difference is that there was very few who saw this debate as tied. I think you made a decision one way or the other. The oddest part of this poll in my mind?

Middle class earners, those making between $40,000 and $100,000 annually, narrowly favored Palin as the victor.

Interesting...

Rasmussen this morning released the results of its latest survey in Maine which show Obama with a 5-point lead over McCain. This result combines with the only two non-Rasmussen polls in the state, a SurveyUSA poll showing Obama ahead by 5 and an ARG poll showing Obama ahead by 10, to shift the state's rating from Slight Lean Democratic to Leans Democratic.

I haven't been paying much attention to the national polls in the presidential race, since the real battle is the state by state competition for electoral votes. However, this morning I checked in with Rasmussen's daily tracking poll update and read the following:

With one month to go until Election Day, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows Barack Obama attracting 51% of the vote while John McCain earns 45%. For each of the past nine days, Obama has been at 50% or 51% and McCain has been at 44% or 45% (see trends). The stability of these results suggests that the McCain campaign faces a the very steep challenge in the remaining few weeks of Election 2008.

Intrigued by the second sentence, I opened the link to Rasmussen's trends page to see for myself what was going on in that other world of national polling I so frequently ignore. I noticed that Obama has been at 51% for five days now, and was at 50% for four days before that. Scrolling down the page, I saw that prior to that Obama had been at 49% for two days, then at 48% for the six days before that, at 47% for the four days before that, and at 46% the two days before that. In fact, the last time Obama's support in Rasmussen's daily tracking poll dropped was in their 9/11 release, which covered polling from 9/8-10, when it dropped from 48% to 46%. That makes 22 straight days (and counting) that Obama's support has either held steady or risen.

Twenty-two days without a single day of polling decline is a pretty impressive feat. It's more than double the longest such streak that McCain has had, a 10-day run begining with the July 27 release and running through the August 5 release. McCain's convention and post-convention streak lasted only seven days, from September 3-9.

My guess is that the slow but steady movement of voters towards Obama over the past 3+ weeks is more indicative of the "very steep challenge" that McCain faces in the last month of the campaign than the relative stability of the past week.

Four states have ratings changes due to polls added today, although one of those changes, in Colorado, actually is a reversal of an earlier ratings change due to a delayed poll release. The other states with ratings changes today are Nevada, New Hampshire, and Washington. NH and NV both move onto Obama's side of the chart, and together with New Mexico, which moved yesterday, presently give Obama 35 more EVs than the minimum needed to win the presidency. That means McCain must win at least two of the states presently on the Obama side of the chart to win (I'm presuming CA is out of reach for McCain).

Polling histories for Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Washington are included below the fold.

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I just had a couple of follow up thoughts...

The first is that I actually do believe Sarah Palin when she claims (in oh so many ways) that up until she was asked to be added to the ticket, that National politics was not something she spent alot of time on. Apparently it was considered an issue when she suggested in one interview that she didn't really "read up" on national politics or even world views for that matter, or that she couldn't or wouldn't mention the publications she read. That hit different people in different ways. Some see it as a weakness from not being up to speed on many issues, while others see it as the strength that comes from truly being a Washinging outsider.

The fact is that she was a Governor of a state that is actually closer in border to Russia than to the rest of the continential United States. She obviously had a lot of focus on what was happening in Alaska, rather than what was happening here. As a mother of five who recently gave birth to a special needs child, went through a pregnancy, and has a teen daughter who is pregnant, she had some other important family issues on her plate. Throw in an investigation of her family and her administration and it seems obvious that there really is a strong possibility that she simply didn't have any time to become the political junkie that many of us are.

So what does this have to do with the debate?

Well... consider that this was a woman who was debating a 6th term Senator who has run for President multiple times and had competed in 15 different Presidential debates. This was her first national debate. One that she had about five weeks to prepare for in and around her other campaign duties. Obviously she was being brought up to speed on subjects that she probably had only a passing knowledge of 35 days ago. Add to all of this the fact that she was being raked over the coals in the MSM since becoming the nominee and having it escalate after the media interviews, and it was obviously she was under a lot of pressure. A bad performance could have sunk the McCain/Palin ticket on the spot. Based on these circumstances, the fact that she did as well as she did against Joe Biden last night is remarkable. Heck, give her another couple of weeks and a tape of the debate to watch and learn from... and hold a second debate. You think anyone would bet against her not mopping up the floor with him? I know I wouldn't. Of the two debates, she was easily the most interesting and easily drew the most attention of any of the contestants. This "VP" debate was the highest rated political debate since 1992. You think anyone tuned in to watch Joe Biden?

A bit more polish and a bit more cramming and not many would want to get on stage with her.

The reality is that maybe she would be ready to be CIC from day one or maybe she wouldn't be. But for her to get to where she has gotten in five weeks, I think it's a safe bet to say that she would be a considerably fast learner. Biden made the point last night that he was an old dog who was not about to learn new tricks. Sarah Palin is a young gun who's star is rising. You know she is going to be learning a bunch of new tricks and I for one feel confident that she would be more than ready to step in if the situation called for it.

On Monday, the House of Representatives stunned the political and economic world by rejecting the proposed $700 billion economic rescue package (billed as a 'bail-out' of Wall Street) by a 228-205 vote. 94 Democrats joined more than two thirds of the Republican caucus in voting against the bill. Because it has been cast as bailing out fat cats who made risky decisions, it is unpopular with many people who are worried about their own financial security but don't see anyone coming to bail them out.

Of course the members of Congress who voted against it likely knew they'd get another chance later in the week. So now, two bank failures later they get another chance. Sort of.

They will be voting on the bill that passed the Senate yesterday. And you know what? It's the same bill, with two major changes. The first came after the Senate accepted a suggestion proposed by Barack Obama (!) that they increase the deposit insurance limit from $100,000 per individual to $250,000 (double that for couples.)

The second change is that the Senate loaded this up with pork. The $700 billion bill is now quite a bit more than that. Still $700 billion for Wall Street but with several billion more than that in various flavors of pork. An example is a tax exemption given to manufacturers of 'toy, wooden arrows' for bow-and arrow playsets. The manufacturer in question is in Roseburg, Oregon. Incidentally, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) who wrote that one in before voting for the bill is in a tough re-election fight this fall. Beyond that there are billions more in Federal spending on construction projects, libraries, schools and grants to non-profits and research institutions along with other tax breaks for various manufacturers and institutions.

The problem is that members will have a tough time voting against this one because if it doesn't pass then Congress will likely adjourn with nothing. If that happens there is a good chance that the so-called overnight credit markets (the ones banks tap into to make sure they have enough cash on hand every day) will seize up. If that happened it would be felt quickly on Main Street as people might not be able to get their money out of their bank (or be limited in how much they could withdraw), businesses might not be able to make payroll dates and other similar catastrophes that they would certainly not want to be trying to explain in the days just ahead of an election.

At the same time, members who change their vote (and there will have to be some in order for it to pass) will have an even tougher time explaining how essentially the same bill, covered over with a ton of pork, is an improvement. They may seize on the new deposit insurance limit for political cover but if they do I doubt if you will see many, especially Republicans, crediting the guy who suggested writing it into the Senate bill.

I would argue though that the wooden arrow subsidy notwithstanding, some of this pork isn't such a bad thing. What is often termed 'pork' represents and investment in communities all over America. And if you're going to make it then it could even be argued that this is a better time than any to spend billions in Federal dollars on projects since it will give a boost to the presently nearly moribund construction industry. I've never met a builder yet, even a conservative one, who would turn down a contract to build a new post Federal post office, and even more so this year when there isn't much else going on in construction.