Tag Archives: Polls

Mitt the ‘Milquetoast Massachusetts Moderate’ May Not Be Nominee Material

For those who want a quick and easy re-election for Barack Obama, the ideal outcome of the Republican primary race is to see the president’s supposedly most formidable rival, Mitt Romney, suffer a slow and painful (and scandalized and mortifying) defeat at the pudgy hands of the GOP’s “pneumatically overstuffed” chief narcissist, Newt Gingrich.

#romneystumpspeechfail

And don’t act like you haven’t pictured it: Newt on stage at the GOP convention in Tampa Bay, swiveling his tractor-tire hips as only a fat man can as “Dancing Queen” blares over the loud speaker; his wife, Jackie Battley Marianne Ginther Callista Gingrich standing next to him, the skin on her face stretched back and tucked neatly under her bullet-proof platinum blonde helmet, eyes aglow like polished silver dollars placed over the shrunken sockets of a corpse bride, bleached teeth clenched around an invisible key to her husband’s glitchy chastity belt loving heart in a smile that only the editors of Cosmetic Surgery Magazine could say with a straight face was “natural.”

Hanging behind the podium, a red, white, and blue banner spells out the core of this estranged congressman’s presidential platform—“Big Ideas, Child Slavery, No Blacks”—as Gingrich humbly accepts the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nomination, his supporters cheering like drunk pedophiles at a “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant.

Is it that impossible a scenario?

If you look at each candidate’s pros and cons, it’s more than possible.

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Running The Numbers Wrong: Nate Silver Gives POTUS A 50-50 Chance

And as much as I respect Nate’s analysis, he’s got serious problems here.

I’m not sure if Nate Silver is incorporating way too much beltway conventional wisdom into his analysis or if he’s just decided to move into Firebagger Country, but his latest 35,000 feet analysis of President Obama’s re-election is that he loses unless the economy improves and his chances are 50-50 overall.

The problem is with the input parameters on Nate’s model:

Obama does indeed have a “Jewish problem.” Polls find that his standing among Jews has deteriorated: only about 54 percent of them approved of his performance in the most recent Gallup survey. But this is to be expected when a president has a 40-something approval rating. He also has a Hispanic problem and a problem among the white working class. He has a problem in Ohio and a problem in Florida and a problem in New Hampshire. He even has, to a mild extent, an African-American problem: Obama’s approval ratings among black voters are still high, but down to about 80 percent from 90 percent. Continue reading

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President Obama positively SURGES in most recent PPP poll

Welly, well, well, well. Who whoulda thunk it?

Favorability rating: UP 11 points

Job approval rating: UP 6 points

Poor David Nir at Daily Kos just can’t explain it. “I can tell you what changed in our cross-tabs,” he says, “but I can’t tell you why things changed.” It’s a complete mystery why the president could possibly be surging to him? I’ma go out on a limb and say four simple words:

The. American. Jobs. Act.

Pass it now.

Cross-posted from Eclectablog.

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Dick Morris Is A Liar And Also The Sun Is Hot And On Fire

He’s lying on purpose about black support for the President.

Shocking, I know.  But Dick Morris is lying through his teeth when he says President Obama has lost support among African-Americans.

According to a Washington Post/ABC News survey, his favorability rating among African-Americans has dropped off a cliff, plunging from 83 percent five months ago to a mere 58 percent today — a drop of 25 points, a bit more than a point per week!

Nothing is more crucial to the president’s reelection strategy than a super-strong showing among black voters. In the election of 2008, he was able to increase African-American participation from 11 percent of the total vote in 2004 to 14 percent. He carried 98 percent of them. This swing accounted for fully half of his gain over the showing of John Kerry. Now his ability to repeat that performance is in doubt.

 

The bolded part is an outright lie.  I will repeat this and call Mr. Morris out:  he is a liar and is lying on purpose to make President Obama look bad.  Here is what the poll actually said:

 

New cracks have begun to show in President Obama’s support amongst African Americans, who have been his strongest supporters. Five months ago, 83 percent of African Americans held “strongly favorable” views of Obama, but in a new Washington Post-ABC news poll that number has dropped to 58 percent. That drop is similar to slipping support for Obama among all groups.

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New Poll Shows A Surge For President Obama!

What Ever Happened To The Margin Of Error?

It was a poll of all my friends and family and in my mind, it has just as much validity as any of the major news organizations and their latest sampling of 700 – 1000 people. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not a reactionary person for the most part. I’m usually the one urging calmness in the face of hysteria and stepping back to look at the big picture. Well, here I go again.

To me the biggest story from the weekend was the former Republican staffer who retired from the GOP and wrote a blistering piece about the lunacy in the Republican Party. It was all over the left blogosphere and Twitter. A lot of truth in the piece, along with a lot of bullshit about the Democratic party too, remember, he was a loyal Republican so we have to take what he says about Democrats with a grain of salt.

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The Hispanic Vote: Obama es Más Popular que Perry

Los Votantes Latinos Al Rescate!

 Over at PPP, Tom Jensen’s latest polling finds that Rick Perry is pretty popular among Republicans…and is immediately driving the Latino vote straight to President Barack Obama.

 

In our first national poll pitting the two Obama leads Perry 49-43. That six point advantage is pretty comparable to Obama’s margin of victory over John McCain. Perry has certainly come on strong with Republicans but independents view him negatively already by an almost 2:1 margin, 29/55, and Democrats pretty universally give him bad ratings at a 10/71 spread. As a result Obama leads Perry thanks in large part to a 24 point advantage with independents at 56-32.

 

Jensen does pitch a cautionary note however:  Even PPP finds that Barack Obama ties Mitt Romney at 45%.  But Perry also edges out Romney and Bachmann in Iowa in PPP’s latest numbers there, 22% to 19% to 18% respectively.

Here’s the interesting part:

 

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President Obama's Rock Solid Base And Why Pollsters Look Confused!

It Just Don’t Add Up!

I’ve seen this story in several places and felt the need to add my two-cents — maybe three. The Christian Science Monitor is the original source for the story that is titled “Gallup’s chief puzzled by Obama’s poll numbers”.

I’ll get to why I think the President has consistent poll numbers in the face of a slowly growing economy and many other issues that plague our country in the wake of 8 years of mismanagement. But first, I want to point out some disturbing trends in the media and amongst polling firms.

The mere fact that Frank Newton of Gallup would be puzzled by any poll number raises the question, why? Does he really think that the political world, or the world in general, operates in a pattern where it really doesn’t matter who the individual players are or what they say or do, it should just follow a predetermined pattern. I guess it’s the problem with statisticians in general. They use numbers to help order their worlds and depersonalize things so it is easier for them to understand. When you actually deal with real people and personalities, it isn’t quite as easy for them to understand.

Here is a passage from the CSM piece that illustrates this…

Looking at history, particularly Clinton and Reagan, it is somewhat surprising that [Obama] has never yet fallen into the 30 percent range in our approval rating,” Newport said. “And yet both Reagan and Clinton, in their first terms when the economy was perceived as bad … both fell into the 30s.”

I guess I need to point out to Frank that President Obama is not Clinton or Reagan and it is currently 2011, not the 80′s or 90′s.

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Republican Stupidity – More Please!

Skipping Down The Path To Prosperity

Republicans are in a world of hurt going into the 2012 election. You don’t hear much about it in the media, they devote the bulk of their time to pushing the Republican Party’s talking points and bringing on faux Democrats who seem to spend most of their time bashing President Obama and avoiding giving him credit for anything. What amazes me is that with 2 and 1/2 years of pounding on the President, he is sitting better than any incumbent president in my memory.

I don’t put much stock in horse-race polls this far out from an election, but non horse-race questions — when the sample is large enough — can be useful in analyzing trends. These results from an NBC/WSJ combined poll show some shocking numbers that make me know that the Republicans boneheaded move of hitching their wagons to Paul Ryan is already having an effect. From First Read…

In our combined NBC/WSJ polls for the first half of this year (so 4,800 total interviews, including 711 seniors), 44% of seniors identify themselves as Democrats, versus 35% who identify themselves as Republicans. So a nine-point spread. But in our merged NBC/WSJ polls from 2010 (12,502 interviews, including 1,931 seniors), Democrats held just a two-point edge among seniors, 42%-40%.

What is astounding to me is that in the 2010 midterms, the GOP won the senior vote by 20 percentage points. Clearly there is buyers remorse happening in the elderly voting population. I know when I first heard that the Republicans were getting behind the Ryan plan, I sat up in bed and actually said to the television, “you’re kidding?” I couldn’t believe it. In all my years obsessing over politics, that was by far, the dumbest idea I’d ever seen a political party embrace. Seniors show up to the polls and vote in their self interests. Like Richard Pryor said, “you don’t get to be old, being no fool.”

Republicans are also losing ground in the midwest, here are some more numbers to chew on from First Read:
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