VP timing

Jerome Armstrong at MyDD reports that McCain will announce his VP pick on Friday, 8/29, one day after the Democratic convention ends. Friday is traditionally the day to make announcements that you don't want the press to cover, but it's hard to see what earlier date would be better. If he announces between now and 8/24, he'll be fighting the Olympic coverage. If he announces between now and 8/27, the Democrats would have 1-4 days of convention coverage to define his pick. If he announces during the Democratic convention, 8/25 to 8/28, he looks gauche and possibly gets negative process stories from the Washington press. And if he announces on 8/28, he'd be going head-to-head against an Obama speech, which he'd do well to avoid. I think if I were McCain, I'd announce the VP on the day that Bush speaks at the Republican convention, in order to swamp coverage of Bush.

I do remember noticing in 2004 that Kerry got a larger convention bounce in PA than nationally, possibly because he had a huge, well-publicized rally in Philadelphia just before the convention that had a multiplier effect. McCain is hoping for an outsize gain in OH, and he think he'll get it.

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Tie scenarios

It's been a slow week here, as I've been spending all my free time watching the Olympics. (Definitely not watching the candidates discuss faith with Rev. Warren.) In my absence, it looks like Obama has resumed a modest post-June slide that has been broken only by his international trip. Absent major scandal, I'd be surprised if there were significant movement before the conventions.

For that matter, I expect the bounces for both parties to be very small, as they were in 2004. With so few undecided voters out there, a few hours of coverage by a few channels isn't going to make a big difference. But I could be wrong, particularly if Obama announces a VP at the convention.

I checked 538.com today, and saw that had an interesting post today about electoral tie scenarios. My simulations indicate a somewhat higher probability of a tie than theirs do (1.2% as opposed to 0.7%). I think this is a result of my belief that public opinion is less volatile than 538's methodology would imply. (Other examples of this phenomenon: They give McCain a 6.4% chance of getting 375+ votes, while I give him a 0.4% chance. Their most likely result has probability 2.2%, while my most likely result has probability 4.7%.)

Furthermore, my simulations give fewer possible scenarios for electoral ties. I just ran 50 simulations of electoral ties, and found that they broke down as follows:

• Gore+NV+NH = Kerry+IA+NV+NM. 29 out of 50 simulations. Obama won the popular vote in 25 of these. I haven't studied the simulations closely yet, but this seems very plausible if McCain strengthens just enough nationally to make the western CO/NV/NM very close.
• Gore+CO = Kerry+CO+IA+NM-NH. 18 out of 50 simulations. Obama won the popular vote in 8 of these. This combination seems to happen when the race remains stable out West, while McCain pulls ahead among the NHers who have always loved him in primaries.
• Gore+CO+NH+VA-MI = Kerry+CO+IA+NM+VA-MI. 3 out of 50 simulations. Obama won the popular vote in all of these. Obama has improved over Kerry in almost the whole country, but not in MI. If there's an important D-leaning state that McCain can pick off, it looks like it might be MI, which is why it's my #1 swing state.
• Other. 0 out of 50 simulations. 538.com does come up with other combinations, like Gore+NH+WV, but I find these implausible, at least unless Robert Byrd is the VP pick. If Obama somehow wins Applachian voters in WV, he will surely also win them in the much harder-fought states of OH and VA.

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Wasted gains

I've heard some pundits notice that a significant component of Obama's gains have been in irrelevant strongly red states. To some extent, I believe this is correct. To measure whether this is correct, I calculated the correlation (weighted by electoral vote) between 1) Obama's improvement by state, measure as (2008Obama-2008McCain)-(2004Kerry-2004Bush), and 2) the 2004 typicality of states, measured as (2004Kerry-2004Bush)-(2004KerryNatl-2004BushNatl). The result is a 25% correlation, which is medium-low, but enough to indicate that Obama tends to waste more votes than Kerry did.

This doesn't mean that McCain has an electoral college advantage yet though. Remember that Kerry had a significant electoral college in 2004, losing nationally by 2.5%, but electorally by only 2.1% in OH. By adding some wasted votes, Obama has made the electoral college almost perfectly neutral this year. That is to say, I estimate that if the popular vote moves to 50-50, both candidates have an equal probability of electoral victory. Obama is also helped a little bit because Democrats have captured a solid majority of state delegations in the House, meaning that a tie now goes to the Democratic nominee.

This is really a second-order thing, though. The Big Deal is that Obama has improved across the board by 5%. He hasn't posted 15-20% gains in swing states the way he has in deeply red western states, but he has gains 9% in IA and 7% in WI to put those former swing states out of reach, 8% in CO to turn that into a legitimate swing state, and major gains in VA, MT, and IN to put those states in play. Not to mention, he's had modest but significant 2-5% gains in swing states NH, PA, OH, FL, MO, NM, and NV. (Alone of swing states, MI has been flat.) Meanwhile, the race has improved for Republicans only in five states: 2% in AZ (McCain's home state), 2% in NY, 2% in RI, 4% in AR (the only former swing state where McCain has gained), and 13% in MA (Kerry's home state).

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Dear John Quinn of Parma, OH

Dear John Quinn of Parma, OH, STFU.

When I was at a so-called "town hall meeting" for John McCain in April, he didn't start it with the Pledge of Allegiance; rather, his MC started it by inviting Chris Shays up to the stage for impromptu remarks. Nor did McCain lead the pledge when his turn came to speak. In fact, the event didn't include the Pledge at all, despite four US flags being displayed on the small stage.

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Olympic advertisement

A couple weeks ago, the two campaigns made news with $5-6MM ad buys for the Olympic TV coverage. My take is that both campaigns ads are fairly good, but that Obama's positive ad has a better tone for an Olympic broadcast than McCain's mixed negative-positive ad. (More below the fold.)

Edited to add: When an observation is this obvious, everyone notices. See here on Kos by BarbinMD, here again on Kos by BarbinMD, and here on 538.

As some news analysis about ads from the AP says, Olympic advertisement tends to have themes of "unity," "the spirit of athleticism," "humanity," and (moreso in other years than this one) "national pride." When companies pay top dollar to release ads during the Olympics, they don't tend to be ordinary "3 out of 4 people prefer the taste of Pepsi" ads---they tend to be "Coca-Cola teaches the world to sing" ads.

Obama's "Hands" ad is a good commercial per se, but I think the aspirational can-do theme of potential achievement makes it a great ad for the Olympics.

By contrast, McCain's "Family" ad would be a decent ad for a cable news show where guests are shouting over each other to insult candidates, but the negativity of the Ominous Woman narrator clashes badly with the overwhelming positivity of everything around it during the Olympic broadcast. It's also confusing for the commercial to begin by implying that it's bad for crowds to be cheering for Obama, moments after the network cuts away from crowds cheering for athletes. Also, I think it's a bad choice to use the same narrator for both the negative and positive halves of a political commercial; every detail of a contrast ad (lighting, background sound, narration, etc.) should enhance the desired contrast.

I'm not creative enough to come up with a good idea for McCain's campaign, but I would think that he could effectively use a theme of American pride or victorious emergence from personal struggles.

I've been watching the Olympics so far on cable channels from a SW Connecticut provider, and broadcast channels from New York and New Britain (CT, between New Haven and Hartford). I've seen a ton of the McCain ad, and the Obama ad only once. I don't think it makes much sense for either candidate to be advertising in a NY/CT/NJ market, so I'm glad I'm seeing more McCain ads here. Any other reports of Olympic ads broadcasting in unexpected places?

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Wisdom about interpreting polls

This DailyKos post by "DemFromCT" has a lot of wisdom about reading polls. Some of the points there (Look at all the polls, Polls are a snapshot in time) are fundamental to the work I'm trying to do here. I think my only small quibble is that I believe that a snapshot in time today can be boundedly predictive of future results, since public opinion has a measurable amount of volatility.

The statement that state polling is more difficult than national polling is surprising to me, and I'm curious why DemFromCT thinks that, or what the evidence is. Anecdotally, from things I've been involved in, I can remember both the Star Tribune's poll on the 1998 MN gubernatorial race and Terry Madonna's poll on the 2006 PA-08 congressional race being way off the mark (speaking of Terry Madonna, who died and made him Grand Guru of Pennsylvania Politics?), but the dual of "anecdote" is not "data." I actually would have guessed that a national poll or a poll in a large heterogeneous state would be more difficult than a poll in a small homogeneous state. In a place like CA, a pollster has to account for different populations of people having different access to phones, speaking different languages, having different propensities to answer surveys, etc.; while in a place like ND, there's basically just one undifferentiated population.

One thing that DemFromCT emphasizes, but that I've never paid much attention to, is the difference between LV and RV (and, god forbid, A) polls. Now that I've worked through parameter-setting, something I might try to figure out is how to measure the uncertainty implied by the difference between LV and RV results. For now, my methodology is simplistic: If a pollster only gives one result, I use it; if a pollster gives both LV and RV results, I use RV for polls before the conventions end, and LV for polls after the conventions end.

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Exciting news about parameters

Possibly the most important parameters in my methodology are the assumed volatility of public opinion and the formula for assumed correlations between states. For most of this year, I've been assuming that one standard deviation of one-day national public opinion change is 0.2% and correlations of 95%+ between states, numbers that I chose because they looked roughly right from the data I saw, and because they gave results that made sense to me. However, ever since I saw the graph on this post from 538, I've worried that the volatility assumption was somewhat too low. So, over the weekend, I came up with a reasonable way to assess parameters from available 2008 data. More on that below the fold.

The main point is, now that I have a better grasp of the parameters I'm using, I have much greater confidence about my analysis than I ever have before. Additionally, I adjusted my estimates of voter turnout by scaling the 2004 turnout up by the increase in a state's voting-eligible population.

(By the way, I now believe that the graph I linked to above is somewhat misleading. I was only 10 in 1992, but as I recall Ross Perot's share of the vote plummeted after he bizarrely left and re-entered the race. I believe this is what produces the high-error dots early in the 1992 campaign.)

The key insight for setting parameters is this. Let's say I run the algorithm to generate estimates for each day during the campaign. If the algorithm's parameters are set correctly, then the polling data should tend to equal the estimate plus/minus a predictable error range. If the polling data are skewed to one side of the estimates, if the polling data match the estimates more closely than expected, or if the polling data match the estimates less closely than expected, then the parameters are bad.

For each date during the campaign and for each geographical unit, my algorithm produces (among other data) an estimate of the Obama-McCain difference in public opinion and the uncertainty of that estimate. Now suppose A is the uncertainty of my estimate on the polling date (i.e., one standard deviation of the difference between my estimate and the platonic truth), B is the poll's sample error, and C is the poll's non-sample error (which I assume is 2%). These are the three components of the difference between my estimate of the Obama-McCain difference (E) and the poll's estimate of the Obama-McCain difference (P), and it's reasonable to assume that these sources are independent. Then I expect the poll's estimate of the Obama-McCain difference to be normally distributed with an expected value of my estimate of the Obama-McCain difference and a standard deviation of sqrt(A^2+B^2+C^2).

In other words, if I list out the statistic (P-E)/sqrt(A^2+B^2+C^2) for each poll, I expect the list to have a standard normal distribution. To measure how close it is to a standard normal distribution, I first measure the mean (m) and standard deviation (s) of this statistic. Then, I evaluate the integral of [pdf(0,1)-pdf(m,s)]^2, where pdf(x,y) is the probability density function of the normal distribution with mean x and standard deviation y. Clearly, lower values of this integral signal a better distribution of polls around my estimates, which signals better parameters.

So far, the best parameters I've found are a daily national volatility of 0.245% and a correlation between each pair of states of 92%.

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No evidence of a bounce

Chris Bowers is orders of magnitude more insightful than David Gergen, so I won't mock him. However, he's wrong to see significant evidence of an Obama bounce from his foreign trip. I know that my chart of Obama's lead doesn't show any bounce. Also, I don't see any bounce in Pollster.com's chart either, which Bowers cites. I just don't see Pollster's average ever dipping down to 2.1% during Obama's trip. I suspect that at some point in time, Pollster had the race at 2.1% because of some randomness in which polls were released to the public first; however if we take their current chart as their best view of the race through time, it's pretty clear that there's little evidence of a significant bounce.

Of course, Bowers is right to criticize Adam Nagourney's dumb concern that Obama fails to crack 50%. When 10% of voters are undecided (and thus likely to split somewhere between 60-40 and 40-60), a candidate with 46-50% support is clearly winning.

Just to be clear, I don't have a view yet about whether there has been a bounce. I look forward to the next week of polling.

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Great moments in punditry, David Gergen edition

Every time I watch CNN, I remember how dumb pundits can be, and why I avoid watching CNN. Consider conservative commentator David Gergen. Earlier this evening, he was confused about whether Obama or McCain is currently winning. After all, one polling agency, Gallup, had released two polls with conflicting results.

Maybe if David Gergen were paid money to be a political expert, he could have found five minutes of spare time to look at all the polls taken this month, available at Pollster.com:

Obama ahead	Tie	McCain ahead
Gallup 7/27	Rasmussen 7/16	USA Today/Gallup 7/27
Rasmussen 7/25
Economist/YouGov 7/24
Gallup 7/24
Democracy Corps 7/24
FOX 7/23
Rasmussen 7/22
Gallup 7/21
NBC/WSJ 7/21
Rasmussen 7/19
Gallup 7/18
Economist/YouGov 7/17
Rasmussen 7/16
Gallup 7/15
CBS/Times 7/14
Rasmussen 7/13
ABC/Post 7/13
Zogby/Reuters 7/13
Quinnipiac 7/13
Gallup 7/12
IBD/TIPP 7/11
Newsweek 7/10
Rasmussen 7/10
Gallup 7/9
Economist/YouGov 7/9
Rasmussen 7/7
Gallup 7/6
Economist/YouGov 7/2
Gallup 7/2
Rasmussen 7/1

Ah, but of course David Gergen does get plenty of money from CNN, which thrives on excited reporting on close races. And, to quote Paul Krugman quoting Upton Sinclair today, it's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. I'd expect CNN to continue its pattern of selecting its own facts in order to report on a close race from now until election day.

[Edited to add...] Adam C of Redstate is clearly experiencing some wishful thinking, but is still smart enough to understand that poll averaging is an easy and useful thing to do. Why oh why can't CNN have better conservative pundits?

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Obama vote by state

Here's a list of states, order by Obama vote, with 95% confidence bands for the election-day result. (DC is off the chart.)

At the risk of repeating myself, I believe that the changes in different states are highly correlated, which implies that the order of the states here is roughly fixed. Some states may swap places during a campaign, and some (FL and MT) might move several spots from one campaign to the next, but I would be surprised by major changes to this list during the next four months. Therefore, the states whose results are close to the US popular vote (NM, OH, MI, PA) are far more important than the states that happen to have close races by virtue of nationwide fluctuations (FL, the Dakotas, MT, and so on).

From thinking at this list, I have a hypothesis that this race will be determined by the middle four states -- NM, OH, MI, and PA. Specifically, if Obama wins three of these, then he wins the electoral college, while if McCain wins two of these, then he wins the electoral college. Maybe this hypothesis sounds obvious, but it failed in 2000 (Gore won NM/MI/PA) and nearly failed in 2004 (Kerry nearly won NM). I think that Obama's solidification of IA and his gains in CO have changed the map in a way that's far more material than his more publicized gains in MT/ND/SD.

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