I am a huge fan of Talking Points Memo and, in particular, TPM Election Central, so the following must be taken in the spirit of admiration and bonhomie in which it is offered:
You guys don’t know how to report on polls. Seriously. You’re utterly clueless.
All it takes is a shiny new press release to prompt the TPM guys to slap up a 48-point headline announcing the latest devastating news from the front lines of the electoral process.
The problem is that these polls do not share a common methodology and are often of uncertain provenance, so they aren’t measuring the same thing (and often, I suspect, aren’t even measuring the things they intend to), yet they are paraded across the screen to the viewer as though they represent succeeding chapters of a coherent narrative.
In the recently completed PA Primary, for example, TPM reported on poll results from no fewer than 78 polls over the course of the contest.
6 of these polls were one-time wonders. Although sometimes by a recognizable media outlet, a one time poll is as useless as a Greenpeace bumper sticker on Dick Cheney’s limo. Without a couple of attempts, you can’t even tell if the polling methodology is stable. These were:
EMILY’s List (Ed. Note: Seriously, WTF?)
Mason-Dixon
Suffolk
Temple
TIME
Times/Bloomberg
The following chart summarizes the remainder. Comparing to the final results of the contest (54.5% HRC, 45.4% BHO), the metrics you want to check are A) who got the spread about right, as close as possible to a 9.1 point spread (note to TPM: 9.1 is not 10, you can look that up), and you also want to see B) who had the smallest margin of ‘Undecideds’ … we are trying to project how people will vote, not how long they can dither. The gray semicircle on the y-axis represents the Actual finish (centers on the 9.1 point spread … Undecideds are Zero on election day).
The winners are Quinnipac, SurveyUSA, and Zogby/Newsmax. The lesson here is that whoever is covering the News Desk should consider not publishing anybody that hasn’t yet got at least a little bit of history, like this, of doing well.
The losers show a variety of problems. By 4/20, PPP had somehow determined that the race was going to Obama. In a dead heat that is an excusable mistake, but HRC won by over 9 points! Similarly, ARG’s bubble seems to be filled with helium. Muhlenberg was actually on its way to nailing it, but their last poll was on 4/2. The intern must have gone on spring break.
Mark Penn has demonstrated that numbers are more often than not a favorite weapon of flim-flam men and charlatans. Which is a shame, because basic statistics can be a great revealer of truth, but only if shared by a fourth estate that knows how to select and report on a quality product.
To deal with the looming specter of Credit Default Swaps imploding like subprime mortgages, one proposal is to centralize the clearing of these transactions through the Chicago-based Clearing Corporation. Chief operating officer of the Clearing Corporation is Kevin McClear.
The move is favored by Mr. McClear and by two of his board members, Dudley Do-Right and Mr. Goodwrench.
Anyone with some high school math realizes that the race for the Democratic nomination has been over for about six weeks at this point. Obama continues to run a fairly classy, non-negative campaign largely because he has the luxury to do so. The Sound and Fury from the Clinton camp over the last two weeks is apparently important in the weird science of Television Entertainment (although on any other reality show I can think of she’d have been voted off by now … except maybe a special edition of ‘Biggest Loser’). It’s enough to inspire some wailing and keening and gnashing of teeth on sites like TPM Cafe, but even there it is done so in half-hearted angst. The season is over. Time to rest up and get ready for the playoffs.
Updating the chart of the vanishing superdelegate gap though Saturday (from the data in Politico’s logbook) the trend continues to illustrate this reality. Reconstructing the data day by day since Feb. 25th, I come up with a gap today of 24 delegates. Politico has it at 19 on another summary page, so things are close to an end from my data, but possibly closer in reality.
Although the polynomial trend (projecting when the gap vanishes) is still more satisfying, it is now coming in only a week earlier than the straight line forecast, and both before the end of May. (The exponential trend provides HRC with a margin +10 into June).
Dr. Steve, our best and bravest battlefield reporter, filed this report on Monday.
I am glad you are in Pennsylvania to hear constant hilaryobamabill stuff and i know you will help obama carry pa and end hilary’s agony. How could they have 106 million dollars. LBJ also made a lot of money during and after his presidency.
We were birding in Texas and went to a bat cave and at dusk saw 13 million bats leave. Give or take a few. The guides told us that as bats leave the cave, they pee. It smelled like urine. It never occurred to me–why would it–that bats and people have the same smelling pee.
These bats are all female and eat moths, not mosquitos. And they are Mexican bats, here with no documentation. Hence, the pee. That very cave served as a source of gunpowder during the civil war, as the guano was boiled and made into nitrites, etc. The people who went into the cave to shovel the guano had one thing in common. They were all black and were digging for the confederancy.
We did see a lot of birds including the black capped vireo. And the golden cheek warbler. You would have to be there.
In the 1960s the CEO of an average Fortune 100 company made about 60 times as much money as his average employee. His pre-evasion income tax rate was 91% until 1964, when it was reduced to 77%.
By 2001, I thought the end times must be at hand because the CEO was now making 600 times as much as the average employee, and we were back to the extremes in wealth concentration that the U.S. had last seen during the gilded age of the robber barons.
It took Teddy Roosevelt, trust-busting, two world wars, the Great Depression, the rise of the labor movement, 90% tax brackets, and the G.I. bill to tame those excesses. But there it was again in 2000 – ostentatious avarice, back in fashion.
And where are we now?
Jenny Anderson in the Wednesday edition of the New York Times reports on the incomes of the top 25 hedge fund managers. Three of them are at or above the $3 billion level, led by John Paulson at $3.7 billion. When I was a kid, the U. S. defense budget was less than that.
The median American household now has an income of $60,500.
That means the leading hedge fund manager’s income now equals the median family income SQUARED.
The highest earners have gone from making 60 times a typical household income in the 1960s (which was bad enough) to 600 times a normal income in 2001 to 60,000 times the median household income in 2008. One person makes more than everybody in Providence, RI combined, or Brownsville, TX, or Worcester, MA, or Huntsville, AL. One person makes much more than everyone in Dayton, O, Tallahassee, FL, or Salem, OR.
Actually, it’s even worse than that. The average family has to pay income taxes on their wages. The hedge fund manager enjoys a tax loophole that allows him to count most of his income as capital gains and pay only 15% of it in taxes – or whatever paltry fraction of 15% his all-star team of lawyers and accountants decides to let the government have as a token ceremonial civic and public relations gesture.
Does the gentleman work 60,000 times as hard as you do? Is he 60,000 times smarter or more earnest or more virtuous than you are? Are his children 60,000 times more deserving of the advantages money can bestow?
Just for the record, God makes $350,000 a year and doesn’t take a tax deduction for charitable contributions.
An update on the vanishing gap in superdelegate endorsements between HRC and BHO.
When we last checked in (data through April 2), the superdel endorsement gap had fallen to 33. Since then Barack is up another 10 endorsements, and Hillary is net +2, so the gap has shrunk by 8, and now stands at 25.
In the chart, the exponential trend line show HRC holding on to a 10 Superdel endorsement lead after the last primaries. The linear trend shows the gap vanishing around May 21st. and a third order polynomial trend (which I include for no other reason than I love the result) shows the gap vanishing by the end of April.
Gail Collins on the ironies of the first black and the first woman presidential candidates trying to woo white males, the swing voters in Pennsylvania:
*
“Courting them is extremely tricky. It’s not like you can promise that under your presidency, more white men would be appointed to the Supreme Court.”
*
“I once tried to make a list of specifically guy things that no woman was ever going to want to trespass upon. All I came up with were The Three Stooges and lawn care.”
New York Times Op-Ed Saturday 4/5/08
Politico maintains a page marvelous in its simplicity and high-grade information: a log of daily superdelegate announcements and other developments.
Following this page over the past month, it’s hard to fight the sense of growing momentum in the Obama campaign when it comes to the superdelegates … towards the end of February, the HRC campaign held a margin of almost 70 superdel endorsements when compared to Obama (they had the difference at 68 on Feb 25). Since then, the log book is a punishing repetition of Obama’s name, and as of April 4th, HRC’s overall count had gone up by 4, and Obama’s count had increased by 39.
The following chart presents the diminishing spread from February 25 (245 HRC to 177 Obama) through April 2 (249 HRC to 216 Obama).
I’ve fit two trend lines to this data looking out over the next 30 days, one linear trend and another (kinder) exponential, but both suggest the spread will fall below 20, and possibly below 10, by the end of the month.
It won’t quite develop that way. There are only 329 supers still in play at this point, and at a run rate of 10 Obama endorsements for every one picked up by HRC, 30 days would use them all up, and surely a core group will hold out for the convention. Although who knows? Recent polls have started to show a similar closing of the gap in the Pennsylvania Primary, and if that latest bastion of ‘the contest that really counts’ should slip away from HRC, it may be time to fold all the cards.
It’s a good thing the Heart Association decided to stop recommending mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and just to urge people to do chest pushes on someone suffering a heart attack. I think I’m a member of the ACLU (I sent them money a few times anyway), and I’m opposed to unreasonable searches of my seizures.
Already they’re covertly collecting my longitude and latitude.
I have an E-Z Pass box on my windshield, and an On-Star system came with the car; so I guess the government snoops would take the position that I have voluntarily put my whereabouts up for public auction. Actually, I was just trying to get into the fast lane at the toll booths where the On-Star system often sends me by mistake.
It’s an important issue, probably headed for the Supreme Court because if any of the Justices who have On-Star and EZ-Pass have been frequenting brothels, now there are public records of their travels, and I wouldn’t put it past them.
In San Diego, detectives shadowing a murder suspect picked up a cigarette butt he discarded, had it tested for DNA, and linked him to a murder fifteen years earlier where the same DNA was found in the blood stain on a towel. The defense attorneys are trying to get the cigarette butt suppressed on the grounds (sic) that its retrieval constitutes a search without a warrant.
It’s called surreptitious sampling.
Detectives contrive to get DNA specimens from coffee cups, water bottles, soft drink cans, tissues, straws, or silverware used by suspects. In one case in Massachusetts, the perp spat in the street, and the police…..oh yes they did.
The defense tried to suppress the evidence as an invasion of privacy. The judge thought otherwise. “The expectorating defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy,” he ruled. I wish he had said the defendant had no reasonable expectoration of privacy, but in law school they discourage wordplay.
It’s a delicate issue. You definitely own your own saliva, and they have no right to come looking for it where it characteristically reposes. But once you spit it out on the sidewalk, even in righteous indignation, you’ve relinquished custody.
What if a suspect sneezes on a surreptitious detective?
Who owns the mucous droplet on the policeman’s lapel? Should the detectives be required to go to court for a snot warrant?
For that matter, who owns my fingerprints? And footprints?
I’ve left them everywhere, and it’s doubtful I could claim in court that I fully intended to go back and retrieve them at the Lost & Found. As for my personal aroma, I have to assume that’s theirs because they’ve used bloodhounds for decades without a challenge. But I don’t think they can sneak a filter into my bathroom sink because that would be entrapment.
Watch for future developments on the constitutional frontier of illegal search and seizure, but you know what? Surreptitious sounds like spit anyway.
