No Idea What They Are Talking About

When i read most articles about voters, their motivations, rationales, etc i want to smash my head against a brick wall. Today featured a string of blog posts by respected bloggers steve benen, digby, matt yglesias about exactly who and what independent voters are. These bloggers have gotten where they are today because they tend to write intelligently about things that they know and what they say is accurate. This is in stark contrast to the "reporters" and other media professionals who profess to cover politics.

Digby wrote a reflection that nicely illustrates the ignorance at work

I was listening to all the gasbags drone on all day yesterday about how the "independents" are all unhappy with Obama and are probably going to vote for the Republicans again when just a couple of years ago they were all unhappy with Bush and voted with the Democrats. This was interpreted as a signal that Obama needs to tack right immediately to recapture them.

Does that make sense? Isn't the answer more logically that independents just habitually dislike whoever is in power and think that both parties are incompetent? Why else would they identify as independents in the first place?

I realize that the villagers think there is some sort of "median" moderate voter who believes that the answer to all of our problems lies somewhere between the positions of the two parties. But that's not necessarily the independent's position. They don't like either party true, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they yearn to split the difference. In fact, I suspect that a large number of them are apolitical people who don't really understand politics at all and simply reject whoever is in power when things aren't going well, without regard to party. (In fact, there is great social utility in rejecting party politics and proclaiming yourself unhappy with the whole set-up. Who can't relate to that on some level?) Many independents ideologically fall far enough outside the two parties that they can't consider themselves members of either --- libertarians, greens etc.

The number of independents out there is quite large and all national politicians need to reach them in elections in order to win. But the knee jerk assumption that they are always more moderate than everyone else is probably wrong. They might just be more cranky, more cynical, more uninformed, more skeptical or more impatient. There are a lot of reasons why someone might be an independent in American politics but I suspect that ideology is at the bottom of the list.

It is embarrassing that the media in this country who cover politics daily have such little understanding about voters and their behavior. There is such a lack of sophistication in the coverage. There is a long history of voter theory in political science dedicated to figuring out why people vote the way that they do, how they form their opinions, etc. Yet discussions meant to inform the public and help them gain a better understanding of politics and how things are likely to work takes advantage of non of it.

When was the last time you saw V.O. Key referenced? Or Morris Fiorina? Its not like the basic texts are hard to find. Head over to this site for some summaries of the seminal theories of voting behavior. I would love to see direct references to these works in the predictions made by the pundits and other blatherers on tv. I would tolerate the taking of positions that showed even a minimal familiarity or understanding of the work. The deepest that any of the experts who routinely tell us why one thing is good for obama or this thing is bad is thomas franks' whats the matter with kansas. Though i doubt they have read bartels reply.

Is it too much to ask that the people who are paid to analyze voting and what is likely to affect it to exhibit a basic understanding of it? Digby's comments on independents are not surprising. The media describes things in terms of left and right. short hand for conservative and liberal, democrat and republican. The truth is that things are more complicated and messy than simple two dimensional axis. most people do not have developed coherent ideologies. they are all over the map.

About half said a major reason for their independence is that they agree with Democrats on some issues and Republicans on others, and that they are not comfortable with either party. Four in 10 said not wanting to put a label on their political views is a principal reason for calling themselves independents. Fifteen percent said they are independent because they are simply not very interested in politics.

As benen, yglesias, atrios, digby, all point out, describing independently registered voters or people without a party as being moderate centrists is lazy and its wrong. Being wrong on the scale that the village is damages political discourse, policy making, and society itself. Politicians change their behavior based on the incorrect assumptions of the media. With the failure of the village to provide even basically correct interpretation of voter behavior i am not surprised that papers are going under.

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Obama Misunderstands Res Judicata

I understand these are not exactly the words of Obama but if this is his thought process hes making a serious mistake.

Obama apparently believed he could avoid what is now happening. In the weeks during which he was weighing the release of the torture memos, there was a vigorous debate within his administration. There was, according to a senior official, considerable support among Obama's advisers for the creation of a 9-11 Commission-style investigation as an alternative to releasing the Justice Department memos. But Obama quashed it.

"His concern was that would ratchet the whole thing up," the official said. "His whole thing is, I banned all this. This chapter is over. What we don't need now is to become a sort of feeding frenzy where we go back and re-litigate all this."

Obama knew he could not stop Congress from doing whatever lawmakers decided to do but he was reluctant to give a presidential imprimatur to a national commission that would keep the controversy alive for months and months and months. Obama had his own agenda and wanted to move on. Putting out the memos was the cleanest way to accomplish his goal.

The problem is that Obama's decree that we wont do this anymore is not a final judgment that brings with it res judicata. He is not the judge in a bench trial between torturer advocates and opponents. A truth commission isnt relitigation of this issue because--the issue hasnt been litigated the first time. The issue is not, did we do this or does this work but how to stop it from happening again in the future and how do we clean up America's moral perception.

Obama can ban the use of these techniques now and during his term but just as he was able to reverse Bush the next person can reverse him. By trying to consider this case closed Obama has not put in place meaningful consequences for someone who tries to repeat this in the future. Augment the inducement to comply with the substantive law mr president. Prosecute those responsible for not only authorizing but also carrying out the policy. This needs to be done because the media framing and the general discussion still doesnt carry the message that TORTURE IS A HEINOUS ACT! from the dan balz article,

There was also a practical rationale for the White House to release the memos, according to officials. Much of the information contained in them was already in the public domain, in large part through an article in the New York Review of Books. Arguments that the release of the memos would compromise national security by providing a roadmap for enemies on U.S. interrogation techniques seemed less compelling given that the information was already publicly available.

see the problem here? the justification balz advances is that the techniques can now be trained against so letting everyone know about them doesnt matter. umm we arent supposed to be using them now or ever so the fact that al-qaeda or any one else reads about them is totally irrelevant. President Obama needs to do his job and ensure that in the future people recognize this for the seriousness that it has because right now it lacks the feeling of gravitas.

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Political Speech in the Classroom

As a current student still involved with the dichotomy between free speech in the classroom and undue influence i can say that students will definitely feel pressure if the stated beliefs of a teacher conflict with your own. This is never more true than in political instances. Matters such as gay marriage and abortion are volatile and if you know that your teacher comes down on the opposite side that you do you will always feel that there is a risk of retaliation there. This retaliation would be totally unjustified but the anxiety never goes away. That is why i am choosing to highlight the decision of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan that it should be up to individual school districts to determine whether buttons in the classroom interfered with learning.

From the times article,

it should be up to individual school districts to determine whether buttons in the classroom interfered with learning. He cautioned, however, that “school officials may not take a sledgehammer to freedom of expression and then avoid all scrutiny by invoking alleged professional judgment.”

The judge said that while a majority of students would probably understand that a button represented a teacher’s personal view, there would be “inevitable misperceptions on the part of a minority.”

It is my own personal opinion that teachers of k-6 are not going to make any disruption in the educational environment if they were a button. The friction and disruption occurs at higher levels of school where students have more defined political opinions. It is the potential conflict between one student's thoughts and the teachers that makes learning tough. Are these kids feeling pressure from their teachers to act in a certain way based on a button? Probably not. At the same time though i do not see the need to bring a campaign button into the learning environment.

I know that my teachers were always unwilling to discuss their own personal political opinions in class, even government, to avoid any issue. I do not feel that my education suffered from that and it probably benefited from that because no one felt restrained in voicing their own opinions out of fear of retaliation. Some of my classmates growing up were actually very conservative and learning would have been made more difficult for them if they had to fear teachers thrusting their opinion on them.

This is not to say that truth telling about the political events of the day has no place. If a child asked about the race and whether obama was a terrorist or even if his tax plan does what he says it does the teacher is more than free to respond. They are not forced to deny objective reality to be balanced.

Teachers should be non-partisan while in the class room. On their own time they are allowed to live their lives as they please, run for office, write letters to the editor etc. In the classroom though non-partisan is the way to go. After all, the truth has a liberal bias so teaching it should really sink the gop.

BtW, I found this to be amusing,

The government, like any business, has the authority to tell its employees what to do so that it can continue to operate effectively. A teacher cannot spend each English period talking about baseball, or each physics class teaching false scientific theories.

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Must Read Series on the Ground Game

I wrote a diary last night on the rise of fivethirtyeight.com the site created by Kossack Nate Silver aka Poblano. That site has done excellent work in a series of posts entitled On the Road where Sean Quinn aka PocketNines have visited six (6) different states and reported on the ground game he found there. If you have not read those posts do so now.

In my own opinion this series should win some type of writing award and not just for blogs either. If you have ever been interested in how the ground game works, what the campaigns are thinking this is must read material. It is an excellent look into the minds of the community level workers around this country dedicated to electing both Obama and McCain. Yes, i said Obama and McCain. It is one of the things i like most about this series of blog articles is that it delves into not only what Obama is doing and how he is organizing but also how mccain is organizing. It gives a complete picture. Here is the introduction explaining the series,

The story of the organizer and volunteer effort is one that needs to be told. It was much underreported in 2004 just how potently the Bush ground campaign organized. Say what you want about his governance – and we all have – but his competitive fire was lit for the election race. Republicans turned their voters out. Who’s got more heart this time? Missouri boys say: Show-Me.

This year, all available evidence suggests the Obama campaign is doing something unprecedented with its organizing efforts. Is it this: 29’2.5”? Is it Mexico City, 1968? The story seems to be hiding in plain sight. The effort is more reported than the Bush 2004 effort, but it is still underreported. More significantly, it is under-contextualized. Pollsters have to guess about turnout, and often they revert to more conservative estimates because their past modeling of likely voters suggests that’s correct. Besides, if ground games are equally effective, they should cancel each other out. There's an understandable bias against believing something and modeling it until it is proven. It's why big enthusiasm and GOTV can make up ground against a fully accurate poll of voter preference.

Just what is organizing? How does it work? What are the nuts and bolts? And why is it something a site primarily (but not exclusively) known for its polling analysis would want to cover as closely as possible?

And is the McCain campaign being given short shrift? Is it being taken too lightly? And what kind of galvanizing effect did the Palin addition offer the Republican base? This is not a one-sided story.

And it all deserves to be told in real time. We're tempted to do a photo series of the floors of organizers’ rooms, but we think organizer moms and dads would freak out. There ain’t no lipstick on that pig, we can assure you (and once had our own crazy-stupid organizer floor mess).

Since that first post the cities visited include carson, mindon, reno, and las vegas Nevada, Gallup, Espanola, and Albuquerque/Santa Fe New Mexico. In colorado they visited Boulder, Colorado Springs, Grand Junction and Durango/Cortez. They have hit up Omaha Nebraska, Des Moines Iowa and most recently St. Louis Missouri.

The articles discuss every aspect of the campaigns organizing efforts including the efforts on vote protection,

Many people have been asking about issues around the purging of voters from the rolls in various states, Colorado being a prime example. We hope to bring you more in-depth discussion of voter protection issues as we travel, and we’ve had several off-the-record conversations with campaign staff about those potential problems. We can report that Obama’s Voter Protection program, which has been actively soliciting local attorneys with civil rights experience, is fully on the case, much earlier than previous campaigns. In many instances, there are still negotiations going on with election officials where agreements in writing are being hammered out. Those party and campaign-negotiated agreements are much preferred to the injunction route to making sure voters have enough access, enough ballots, enough voting machines so that lines are as short as possible.

One post has dealt with the impact of early voting and why it is so important to the campaigns,

Consider a situation with no early voting. A campaign simply has to monitor the turnout throughout the day in targeted precincts to model what they expect to happen. The numbers get pipelined up to the boiler room and campaign staff makes decisions about where to throw ground troops to knock the final doors. But that is an extremely compressed period -- one day.

Now add in a multiday early voting period. When Executive Director Zach Moyle told us that the Republican Party will know several days in advance of November 4 whether they're going to win or lose Nevada, he wasn't kidding. That's what early voting/mail-in ballots do for a campaign. They can't actually see the tabulated vote, but they know if Joe Smith is a supporter of John McCain and Joe Smith has voted already, they don't have too much guessing what the score is.

The ground game is extraordinarily numbers-based. For both campaigns, every single precinct in every state has a vote goal -- a specific number of votes the campaign has determined it needs to stay on pace with its overall path to victory in the state. By voting early, a supporter of a given candidate are giving his or her candidate a kind of donation. The sacrifice is the feeling of having participated in a vote on Election Day -- it feels like giving up a little bit of tradition. But campaigns are less concerned with tradition than with winning.

I cant go post by post to give you all of the amazing detail, information and stories that are contained in the articles. I can tell you that every single one is worth reading, if not for the information about how the ground level operations work then for the stories revealed in Sean's travels like this one from Iowa,

What's a precinct captain? A year ago, Jane Brower didn't know. Now she captains her West Des Moines precinct like an veteran. She's built her own pyramid.

As both Republican and Democratic field organizers know, effective precinct captains are the single-most important volunteers a campaign can have. They are responsible for maintaining their own stable of volunteers that they participate in recruiting.

But when Jane first walked into an Obama field office during the pre-caucus period last September, she came to help address envelopes or generally help in what way she could. Slowly but surely, a skilled organizer named Caroline turned her into a precinct captain. Jane now manages 10 "block captains" who are responsible for their own slice of the precinct...

The story is worth reading in full. So after reading all of these articles detailing the stories, strategies, and stats related to the ground game i think that the latest post may be the most important. The latest post from St. Louis paints a very bleak picture for candidate McCain. If this comes down to the effects of the ground game and the street level activity and organization McCain is in a rough spot.

Let’s be clear. We've observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn't like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director.

Only for the first time the other day did we see a McCain organizer make a single phone call. So we've now seen that once. The McCain organizers seem to operate as maître Ds. Let me escort you to your phone, sir. Pick any one of this sea of empty chairs. I'll be sitting over here if you need any assistance.

Given a choice between taking embarrassing photos of empty phone banks, we give McCain’s people the chance to pose for photos to show us the action for what they continually claim we “just missed.” No more. We stop into offices at all open hours of the day, but generally more in the afternoon and evening. “Call time,” for both campaigns, is all day, but the time when folks over 65 are generally targeted begins in late afternoon and goes til 8 or 9pm. Universally, McCain’s people stop earlier. Even when we show up at 6:15pm, we’re told we just missed the big phone bank, or to come back in 30 minutes. If we show up an hour later, we “just missed it” again.

The McCain offices are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it's a whirlwind. People move. It's a dynamic bustle. You can feel it in our photos.
...
You could take every McCain volunteer we’ve seen doing actual work in the entire trip, over six states, and it would add up to the same as Obama’s single Thornton, CO office. Or his single Durango, CO office. These ground campaigns bear no relationship to each other.

I assume that Nate's model is taking the potential imbalance of turn out generated by ground level organizing into account for his model just as he is taking cell phone effects into account. After all that is what makes 538 so much better than the other sites.

One thing i particularly like is the exploration in the competing strategies of the McCain and Obama campaigns in how they are approaching the ground game. Obama is employing the principles of the 50 state strategy and the strategy he used in the primary where you keep it close in the places you lose and try to run up the score in the areas you win. Essentially caucus states versus california sized primaries. McCain in contrast is not opening offices to play offense. He is not trying to lessen the democratic margins in deep blue areas. This is probably due to the lack of funds he has.

Part of the justification for Picking Sarah Palin was supposed to be her ability to jump start the base. McCain needs those people to get out and hit the streets for him. I am not sure that we can generalize to all of the battle ground states but the effect does not appear to have been as great as advertised. If Palin has not been helping in states where McCain is battling with Obama but is instead confining her appeal to deeper red states that might not be such a great thing for McCain.

Beyond the amazing stories and the numbers that Sean has gone on the road to bring us, this series is a testament to journalism. This is something we are seeing less and less of, reporters not taking second hand stories, rumor and innuendo as given but instead hitting the ground and checking on things for themselves. It is real journalism. This diary might seem a little obsequious but i was really blown away after reading these articles. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Oh and they have lots of pictures.

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The Rise of 538 as a political force.

Remember back in the primaries when this guy named pablano was writing top class diaries that dealt with polling and demographics and the race? His regression and numbers based analysis really deserved some type of award. His writing were frequently the best source of election night predictions. Then we discovered that he was contemplating a new site dedicated to that type of work. That site, 538.com went live and we ultimately found out this amazing authors identity, Nate Silver. 53 has since exploded into one of, if not the, premier poll information sights on the net.

Every one knows about the work Nate has done with the polls. For example he has helped to publicize the impact of cell phones on polling data estimating a 1-3 point boos for obama due to the effect. One of the lesser known but just as important things he has done is his work on the general election ground game.

I guess it should not be surprising to see someone who is interested in polls looking for a way to understand the possible impact of one thing not found there, the ground level efforts. Nate and his partner Sean Quinn have been traveling around different states in a series entitled On the Road examining exactly what is going on on the ground in those states. For the most part they have been able to travel and observe unmolested. They have given some insight into the feel of each campaigns respective ground games in important cities and counties. They were able to discuss the effect, widely speculated about, that sarah palin was having on the republican base who volunteers for McCain. It has been very interesting and enlightening reading. today's post though revealed something interesting. They encountered resistance to their attempts to report on the McCain ground game.

Something interesting is happening with John McCain’s campaign. Up until now, we’ve had no trouble gaining access to field offices and volunteers. Here in St. Louis, we were told by Tina Hervey, Missouri Republican State Party Press Secretary, that she had never heard of FiveThirtyEight, and while they trusted Politico, we were people who they had to decide whether we “shouldn’t or don’t need to be talking to.” (McCain’s Missouri press secretary actually works out of Iowa, and did not return calls or email.) I told Tina that’s not a story we wanted to write, that this was our first Republican resistance, and that while she may not have heard of us, we’d probably go over 2.5 million site visits this week, now that we’re regularly past 400,000 per weekday. I told her I’d hold off writing her flat refusal and give her the opportunity to change her mind.

No budging. We were told that we’d be asked to leave public field offices we now attempted to visit. We did not get any promised follow-up helping get access to the post-debate Palin rally last night, and we were locked out. Hmm.

What is going on here is very clear. McCain does not want to validate or promote 538 as a site. This may seem like an extraordinary claim but i have some reasoning. The first point is that 538 is a numbers based sight that includes every poll. They do not pick and choose who to include, though they do decide who to weight based on their track record. This means that they give the clearest unfiltered picture of what is going on at any one time. This picture is currently very bad for McCain. 538, as of the time of this writing, has obama listed at 84.4% chance of victory. No amount of McCain campaign spin can change this. There is no narrative to move here. This migth gain some support depending on your interpretation of the recent spat with RCP over the methodology they use to select polls. The assertion was that they were intentionally picking polls to boost mccains numbers. If true McCain would be inclined to take the rcp side of this debate against 538. Think about it in the way McCain thinks about negotiating with an enemy, sitting down with them gives them increased status. Giving increased status to a site that predicts your loss may not be what they want to do.

McCain may know his ground game is not where it needs to be. The stories that 538 is doing on it seem to be the only constant source of information on the ground game. By excluding 538 from reporting on the problems they hope to keep it covered up. This is not a shock reading what was written today.

Let’s be clear. We've observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn't like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director.

Only for the first time the other day did we see a McCain organizer make a single phone call. So we've now seen that once. The McCain organizers seem to operate as maître Ds. Let me escort you to your phone, sir. Pick any one of this sea of empty chairs. I'll be sitting over here if you need any assistance.

[...]You could take every McCain volunteer we’ve seen doing actual work in the entire trip, over six states, and it would add up to the same as Obama’s single Thornton, CO office. Or his single Durango, CO office. These ground campaigns bear no relationship to each other. (emphasis mine)

Clearly not allowing Nate and Co access to cover the story has prompted a negative reaction. That should not have been a surprise. However the McCain campaign has a history of treating the press as if the damage they can do because they are pissed off and dont have access is less than they would do if they actually had the access, think Palin.

There is no way the McCain campaign does not know what 538 is. It would be political malpractice to be ignorant of the hottest growing political site on the net. There is also the possibility that they see 538 as a democratic blog or site and do not want to play ball with them. It is true that many of Nate and Seans posts that deal strictly with political opinion have a left slant. However the numbers are not tainted. Again that is the problem, the numbers.

No one wants to vote for a loser. That is one of the big lessons of the early primaries. If people think you are a loser it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If everyone started looking at 538 and saw the reality of the race, a significant Obama lead they might be less inclined to vote for McCain the sinking ship. McCain might see fund raising slow down as people question whether he is such a great investment. It would also undercut any of the media story lines he really wants to promote. Numbers tend to undercut rather than enforce the media and McCain relies on the media, or at least he used to, to get his point across. McCain probably figures that nothing good can come of 538 getting highly publicized exposure reporting how bad his campaign is. At this point at least he can deny they have the basis to make claims about his efforts.

did anyone think last november that one dkos diarist would create such a political force? 538 is that force. Here is Nate with Dan Rather

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