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August 29, 2008

State Battlegrounds and Home Grounds

By Charles Franklin

A quickie from Detroit Metro Airport.

Mark Blumenthal reported on an interview with Obama campaign manager David Plouffe yesterday at Pollster. Plouffe discussed the 18 states the Obama campaign sees as their target states, and Mark reported what states those were in his post.

Here we take a quick look at the polling in those states. The chart above is sorted by the Obama minus McCain margin, and shows the 95% confidence interval. The dot size is proportional to electoral vote.

Below I show the status of the states based on our polling categorization of each state.

Time to run for the plane.

By Charles Franklin on August 29, 2008 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

August 28, 2008

The Myth of "Obama Fatigue"

By David Moore

By David Moore on August 28, 2008 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

August 27, 2008

McDonald: Democratic Dissention: An Artifact of Survey Methodology?

By Guest Pollster

Today's guest pollster contribution comes from Michael P. McDonald, an Associate Professor of Government and Politics in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

A media storyline surrounding the Democratic convention is how a sizable number of Hillary Clinton supporters are backing John McCain over Barack Obama. A recent CNN/ORC poll provides grist for the mill. Twenty-seven percent of self-identified Clinton supporters are reported backing John McCain, an increase from 16% in a similar June survey.

Yet, there are indications that something is amiss in this survey. CNN reports they interviewed 1,023 adults. The organization does not report the sub-sample size of Democrats who support Clinton, but they do provide a margin of error of this sub-sample from which we can infer the number of Clinton supporters. The reported margin of error for Democrats who support Clinton is 7.5 percentage points, which is equivalent to 171 persons assuming a simple random sample. That is 16.7% of all adults in the survey, which when applied to my 2006 voting-age population estimate of 227 million persons means that there are 38 million self-identified Clinton supporters among Democrats in the CNN/ORC poll (with a 95% confidence interval between 20.9 and 54.9 million persons).

As one might recall, Clinton received 18 million votes in the primaries. If she had received 38 million votes, she would be accepting the Democratic Party's nomination on Thursday.

The question arises, who are these 20 million or so self-identified Democrats who support Clinton who did not participate in the primaries? It is difficult to tell without analyzing the survey in depth. While there are many reasonable explanations for the discrepancy between the election and survey results, a plausible explanation consistent with the large percentage of self-identified Clinton supporters who report supporting McCain in a two-way contest against Obama is that the CNN/ORC questionnaire is worded in such a manner that elicits persons who self-report supporting McCain to report that they are a Democrat who supports Clinton for the party's nomination.

The implication is obvious: if these surveys that purport to measure Clinton supporters who will vote for McCain actually measure McCain supporters who would like to see Clinton as the Democratic nominee, the media storyline of Democratic dissention quickly unravels.

By Guest Pollster on August 27, 2008 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (29) | TrackBacks (0)

26 Million (and Counting)

By Mark Blumenthal

Following up on yesterday's post on the Nielsen ratings for the first night of the convention. A.C. Nielsen sends a press release pointing to their new blog site "with background information on political, Olympics and other viewing information."

Here's the latest:

1) Hillary's night (26.0 million viewers) had higher ratings than Michelle's night (22.3 million viewers).

2) African Americans continue to watch the convention in a higher proportion than the rest of the population (the African American rating, or percentage of the African American population watching, was 12.7 vs. a 9.0 for the population as a whole)

3) Almost five times as many people (26.0 million) watched Day Two coverage in 2008 vs. Day Two in 2004 (5.9 million) when only the cable networks covered the convention.

By Mark Blumenthal on August 27, 2008 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Plouffe on Obama and Polling

By Mark Blumenthal

How is the Obama campaign using surveys and other data to guide their strategy? What do they think about national polling generally, and the Gallup Daily tracking in particular? This morning, I got an earful on both subjects at an on-the-record briefing by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, communications director Dan Pfeiffer and campaign advisor Anita Dunn for a dozen or so editors and executives of the Atlantic Media company and the National Journal Group.

My colleague Marc Ambinder has already blogged some highlights from the session. Let me fill in a few more details that touched on the campaigns use of polling, research and targeting.

First, Ambinder reported on this exchange on national polling:

We tried to get Plouffe to react to a spate of national polls showing a tightening race.

"All we care about is these 18 states," he said. He repeated, with emphasis, that the campaign does not care about national polling. Instead, the campaign's own identification, registration and canvassing efforts provide the data he uses to determine where to invest money and resources.

Plouffe also emphasized that the internal polling the campaign does is focused on those same 18 states,** and that their real concern is not the horse race results but the "data underneath." Later, he added, "the top-line [polling data] doesn't tell you anything." Rather, they focus on who the "true undecideds" are, "how they're likely to break," and what messages will best persuade them.

The Gallup Daily tracking poll is apparently a particular sore point. When asked whether they were unhappy that the Biden announcement had not produced a bounce in national polls, Plouffe shot back: "How do you determine a bounce. . . from the Gallup Daily?" The Gallup Daily, he added is "something we don't pay attention to," he said again.

Communications director Dan Pfieffer later put it more bluntly, expressing unhappiness with the "inordinate focus on bad polling" by the media and also in the routine misinterpretation of sampling noise in the Gallup Daily poll. "The Gallup Daily is the worst thing that's happened in journalism in 10 years," he said.

Plouffe also warned against "making too big an assumption" based on focus groups when asked about the Frank Luntz group of undecided voters that received a fair amount of attention this week. "We certainly don't use [focus] groups to make assessments of swing voters," he said. They conduct focus groups, mostly "to hear people talk" about the issues and candidates, but when it comes to identifying "true undecided" voters, their emphasis is on quantitative data, including traditional surveys and data on registration and vote history collected from lists and supplemented with information gleaned through direct voter contact.

I asked about Marc Ambinder's report of the "data" collected by the Obama campaign Monday night that left them with a "high degree of confidence" that Michelle Obama's speech went over well in their 18 target states. Marc had inferred that "the campaign ran several focus groups" Monday might, but I'm skeptical given the logistical challenge of doing traditional focus groups in 18 states in one night. My guess is that they ran some sort of online test, and asked Plouffe if he could add more detail:

That information "will have to be a mystery," enjoying the play on my nomme de Internet. He did say that their efforts to monitor undecided voters features "not through the traditional methods of quantitative and qualitative research.  We also have hundreds of thousands of contacts [made] every night."

Much of the briefing covered specifics on the focus on turnout by the Obama campaign and their massive effort to "adjust the electorate" to their benefit. He cited several examples, including Florida where he claimed that roughly 600,000 African Americans that were registered but did not vote in 2004, with more than half of that group coming from African Americans under 40 years of age. "If we just execute on turnout" in Florida, he said, "we're going to be bumping up on our win number." They also believe they can keep states like Virginia and North Carolina competitive if they "blow the doors off turnout."

The briefing included much more that my National Journal and Atlantic Media colleagues will be reporting on later today and this week, and I will try to add links here as they become available. I'm also likely to say more at some point about the Obama campaign's overall approach to research and strategy based on these comments.

Finally, please note that the verbatim quotations above are from my notes. We are hoping to post a full transcript later in the week.  [Update/Correction:  With a transcript in hand, I have corrected a few minor wording errors.  In the original version, I erroneously quoted Dan Pfeiffer describing the Gallup Daily as "the worst thing that's happened in journalism in 20 years" -- he actually said 10 years.]    

Update - Here's a quick response via email from Gallup's Frank Newport: 

These are the same types of sentiments that have been expressed since George Gallup's first presidential polls in 1936.  Campaigns like to control the narrative, and don't like outside intrusion in their story lines. Bottom line:  The American public is vastly interested, and always has been, in where a presidential race stands during a campaign.  Gallup (and others) can help provide a scientific answer to that question, using careful methodology and deliberate analysis.  Without independent polling, the public would be reliant on campaign operatives' self-promoting insights on where the race stands, or on journalists' guesses.  And, of course, polling provides a vast array of insights into the dynamics and currents of a campaign and represents the voters' views, thoughts, and wishes.

**Update 2: The 18 states that the Obama campaign is focusing on are: Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

By Mark Blumenthal on August 27, 2008 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

McCain, Obama and Clinton Favorability

By Charles Franklin

A little interesting movement in views of the candidates has taken place since the end of the primaries in June. All three candidates, McCain, Obama and Clinton, have seen rises in their favorable ratings and an initial decline in unfavorable views though with a slight upturn recently. McCain and Obama are enjoying essentially identical ratings, with 60% favorable and only 35% unfavorable. Even after a significant amount of negative portrayals of him in RNC and McCain ads, Obama's rating has risen over the summer, and so has McCain's. (According to the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which monitored and coded all 100,000 ad airings in June and July, one third of McCain's ads contained negative information about Obama and 100% of RNC ads were negative. In the same two months, 10% of Obama's ads mentioned McCain.)

Whatever happens after the conventions, both candidates enjoy an enviable standing with voters as attractive figures instead of a pair of lesser evils. The fall capaign may alter this, but even after a hard fought primary season the nominees remain attractive figures.

Meanwhile, Senator Clinton has also enjoyed an upturn in favorable ratings and a decline in unfavorable ratings since the end of the primary season. While improved, Clinton remains a more polarizing figure than either McCain or Obama, with slightly lower favorable but noticeably higher negative ratings.

Senator Clinton is far more popular among Democrats than among either Independents or (especially) Republicans. In that sense, her speech to the Democratic Convention last night was an example of speaking primarily to the party and her supporters, rather than to the broader public. The contast between former Virginia governor and now Senate candidate Mark Warner's speech and Clinton's is a good example of this difference. Warner stressed unifying themes and appeals across political groups, which was greated warmly but which fell short of electrifying the Democratic delegates. In contrast, Clinton played to the party and produced a predictably enthusiastic response within the DNC convention hall. Conventions contain both elements. Monday, the party celebrated Sen. Kennedy's life and family legacy, primarily an inside the family affair, perhaps touching some independents but not likely to attract Republicans. In contrast Michelle Obama's speech could have easily been given at the Republican convention, with its themes of family, hard work, pulling oneself up from working class circumstances. Hers was a speech designed to reach out beyond the party.

The one remaining question from the Clinton speech is whether her supporters also resepect her enough to follow her lead. For Clinton to be a power in the party includes the requirement that she be able to deliver her supporters for Obama. If any significant number of her supporters refuse to be delivered, they reduce her status as a result. This is hard to judge from the cable news coverage, who can easily find individual delegates willing to say they are unpersuaded. But what effect the Clinton speech has with her supporters outside the convention hall will be critical.

By Charles Franklin on August 27, 2008 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

August 26, 2008

22 Million

By Mark Blumenthal

The Page is linking to a report from the LA Times blog on the Nielsen ratings from last night:

The opening night of the Democratic National Convention drew more than 22 million viewers, a 20% larger audience than in 2004, according to Nielsen Media Research.

If you want even more detail on the numbers (and I know you do) check out this post on the very helpful blog, TV By The Numbers.

To keep all of these numbers in perspective, consider that 22 million is double the 10.7 million that watched ABC's broadcast of the April 16 Clinton-Obama debate in Pennsylvania and five to twenty times the audience size of the many debates broadcast in 2007.

On the other hand, 22 million is still a far cry from the 62 million that watched the first Bush-Kerry debate in 2004.

These numbers show us that while the conventions are the most watched political events so far this cycle, they are still not quite the voters-as-jury experience that we sometimes assume. The news coverage that excerpts speeches and convention "moments" reaches a far bigger cumulative audience. Those of us interested in measuring the impact of the debates need to allow time for Americans to view that coverage, absorb it and sleep on it for a few days.

In other words, be patient and stop worrying about the "bounce" (or lack thereof) in daily tracking. Conventions matter, but the response we are interested is not necessarily instant.

By Mark Blumenthal on August 26, 2008 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hillary's Opportunity

By Mark Blumenthal

My second National Journal column for the week (which will appear in tomorrow's Convention Daily) will be posted within the next few hours. Since it is all about the opportunities presented by Hillary Clinton's speech tonight, I'll post a key block quote now and add the link later.  Update:  the full column is now live.

The gist is that I disagree with the "Hillary can't win," damned if she does, damned if she doesn't them of Marie Cocco's column in this morning's Washington Post (echoed to some extent by Todd, et. al. in FirstRead). I think the speech presents Clinton with a huge opportunity, both for her own long term interests and for the Obama-Biden ticket. I make the case with survey data in the column. While an Obama-Clinton ticket would have come with risks to offset benefits, the same cannot be said for tonight's speech. Quoting myself:

And the decision by the McCain campaign to release (if not air) three different television advertisements this week invoking Clinton's criticisms of Obama during the primaries provides her with a huge tactical opportunity to create one of the convention's most memorable moments.

"I'm Hillary Rodham Clinton, and I do not approve of that message," she told the New York state delegation yesterday. In her speech, she can do more. I am not a speechwriter, but the "truth hurts" tagline of the first of these spots seems like an obvious opening for a riff on the records of McCain and President Bush.

We'll see how it turns out.

PS: Nate Silver made a very similar point about the Clinton-quoting McCain ads earlier in the week:

I could see the ad being very effective. But it also tosses a big softball to Hillary Clinton, who will speak to a national audience on Tuesday. The risk to the Republicans can be summarized in five words: "Shame on You, John McCain". A finger-wagging, how-dare-you moment by either of the Clintons at the convention -- but especially Hillary -- could be both effective and therapeutic, especially when coupled with a reminder that McCain voted against measures like SCHIP (and voted to impeach her husband).

I prefer big "hanging curve ball," but I'll defer to the baseball guy. 

PPS:  I'm catching up on my RSS feed while listening to the speeches.  This post yesterday from Marc Ambinder seems relevant to what Clinton can help accomplish (emphasis added):

They are, yes, Hillary supporters, but a certain type of Hillary supporters: mainly white voters without college degrees. Ron Brownstein has noted that in four polls taken before the convention, Obama sits at 38% with this group.  These voters, as pollster Stan Greenberg's new data shows, have a panoply of concerns. Unquestionably, some are racist. But a majority of them worry about Obama's credentials, his liberal positions on national security issues, and whether he truly understands their economic insecurities.

It is much easier to convince these voters to vote for Obama when they see Obama as the antidote to the Bush presidency, and when they see McCain as a Bush Republican. SO -- you will hear and see speaker after speaker portray McCain as a Bush Republican.  Polling shows that even when recalcitrant Democrats learn about Obama's middle class roots, they're still skeptical. It is MUCH harder to convince them to vote for Obama because they LIKE him. It is much easier to convince them to vote for Obama because they think McCain represents a continuation of President Bush's policies. (Obama's campaign has polling data suggesting that an unusually large number of pro-choice Democrats don't know that McCain is pro-life.)

By Mark Blumenthal on August 26, 2008 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

August 25, 2008

Measuring the Bounce

By Mark Blumenthal

Here's the link Convention Daily edition of my National Journal column for today, which covers the difficulty pollsters will have measuring the "bounce" that Barack Obama gets this week. The short version: There will be many polls this week but no way to measure the bump or bounce that is comparable to past years. So it's probably best to dispense with metaphysical comparisons to years past and just focus on what surveys tell us about what voters are learning and what conclusions they are coming to.

Incidentally, I will be writing two Conventional Daily columns for the National Journal this week (the second will appear on Wednesday morning), and two next week. In exchange for this contribution, I get to be on hand in Denver this week and in Minneapolis next week.

I've been traveling most of today and just got to our work space. Soon I'll be off to wander the hall, and seek out pollsters and their wisdom...

By Mark Blumenthal on August 25, 2008 7:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

August 24, 2008

How Pollsters Affect Poll Results

By Charles Franklin

Who does the poll affects the results. Some. These are called "house effects" because they are systematic effects due to survey "house" or polling organization. It is perhaps easy to think of these effects as "bias" but that is misleading. The differences are due to a variety of factors that represent reasonable differences in practice from one organization to another.

For example, how you phrase a question can affect the results, and an organization usually asks the question the same way in all their surveys. This creates a house effect. Another source is how the organization treats "don't know" or "undecided" responses. Some push hard for a position even if the respondent is reluctant to give one. Other pollsters take "undecided" at face value and don't push. The latter get higher rates of undecided, but more important they get lower levels of support for both candidates as a result of not pushing for how respondents lean. And organizations differ in whether they typically interview adults, registered voters or likely voters. The differences across those three groups produce differences in results. Which is right? It depends on what you are trying to estimate-- opinion of the population, of people who can easily vote if the choose to do so or of the probable electorate. Not to mention the vagaries of identifying who is really likely to vote. Finally, survey mode may matter. Is the survey conducted by random digit dialing (RDD) with live interviewers, by RDD with recorded interviews ("interactive voice response" or IVR), or by internet using panels of volunteers who are statistically adjusted in some way to make inferences about the population.

Given all these and many other possible sources of house effects, it is perhaps surprising the net effects are as small as they are. They are often statistically significant, but rarely are they notably large.

The chart above shows the house effect for each polling organization that has conducted at least five national polls on the Obama-McCain match-up since 2007. The dots are the estimated house effects and the blue lines extend out to a 95% confidence interval around the effects.

The largest pro-Obama house effect is that of Harris Interactive, at just over 4 points. The poll most favorable to McCain is Rasmussen's Tracking poll at just less than -3 points. Everyone else falls between these extremes.

Now let's put this in context. We are looking at effects on the difference between the candidates, so that +4 from Harris is equivalent to two points high on Obama and two points low on McCain. Taking half the estimated effect above gives the average effect per candidate. The average effects are at most 2 points per candidate. Not trivial, but not huge.

Estimating the house effect is not hard. But knowing where "zero" should be is very hard. A house effect of zero is saying the pollster perfectly matches some standard. The ideal standard, of course, is the actual election outcome. But we don't know that now, only after the fact in November. So the standard used here is the house effect relative to our Pollster Trend Estimate. If a pollster consistently runs 2 points above our trend, their house effect would be +2.

The house effects are calculated so that the average house effect is zero. This doesn't depend on how many polls a pollster conducts. And it doesn't mean the pollster closest to zero is the "best". It just means their results track our trend estimate on average. That can also happen if a pollster gyrates considerably above and below our trend, but balances out. A nicer result is a poll that closely follows the trend. But either pattern could produce a house effect near zero. For example, Democracy Corps and Zogby have very similar house effects near -1. But look at their plots below and you see that Democracy Corps has followed our trend quite closely, though about a point below the trend. Zogby has also been on average a point below trend, but his polls have shown large variation around the trend, with some polls as near-outliers above while others are near outliers below the trend. The net effect is the same as for Democracy Corps, but the variability of Zogby's results is much higher.

Incidentally, the Democracy Corps poll is conducted by the Democratic firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Reserch in collaboration with Democratic strategist James Carville. Yet the poll has a negative house effect of -1. Does this mean the Democracy Corps poll is biased against Obama? No. It means they use a likey voter sample, which typically produces modestly more pro-Republican responses than do registered voter or adult samples. Assuming that the house effect necessarily reflects a partisan bias is a major mistake.

How can you use these house effects? Take a pollster's latest results and subtract the house effect from their reported Obama minus McCain difference. That puts their results in the same terms as all others, centered on the Pollster.com Trend Estimate. This is especially useful if you are comparing results from two pollsters with different house effects. Removing those house differences makes their results more comparable.

What impact do house effects have on our Pollster.com Trend Estimate? A little. Our estimator is designed to resist big effects of any single pollster, but it isn't infallible, especially when some pollsters do far more polls than others or when one pollster dominates during some small period of time. We can estimate house effects, adjust for these, and reestimate our trend with house effects removed. The result runs through the center of the polls, but doesn't allow the number of polls done by an organization to be as influential.

The results are shown in the chart below. The blue line is our standard estimator and the red line is the estimate with house effects removed. Without house effects the current trend stands at +2.0 while ignoring house effects produces an estimate of +1.7. A little different, but given the range of variability across polls and the uncertainty as to where the race "really" stands, this is not a big effect.























The impact of house effects isn't always this small. Looking back along the trend we see that the red and blue lines diverged by as much as 1 point in late June, an effect due significantly to the large number of Rasmussen and Gallup tracking polls during that time and few polls with positive house effects in that period. A smaller but still notable divergence occurred in late February and early March.

The bottom line is that there are real and measurable differences between polling organizations, but the magnitude of these effects is considerably less than some commentary would suggest. Many of the house effect estimates above are not statistically different from zero. Even ignoring that, the range of effects is rather small, though of course in a tight race the differences may be politically important. Finally, the effects on our Pollster.com Trend Estimate is detectable but does not lead to large distortions, even if we can see some noticeable differences at some times.

The charts below move though all the pollsters and plots their poll results compared to the standard trend and the trend removing house effects. Pollsters with fewer than 5 polls are all lumped together as "Other" pollsters. Once they get to our minimum number of polls, we'll have house effects for them too.

By Charles Franklin on August 24, 2008 7:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

August 22, 2008

Why It's Taking So Long

By Mark Blumenthal

So I went off the the beach with spouse and kids a few hours ago ("vacation," remember?), assuming that I'd come back to news on Obama's running mate. But as of the moment I clicked "publish" on this entry, nothing had been announced.

The reason a lot of us assume the announcement is imminent is the report that has been airing on CNN all day that a "highly placed Democratic source" who says Obama "called some people on his shortlist for the vice presidential slot Thursday night to tell them he had not selected them as a running mate." Usually, when the phone calls start, the news leaks out almost immediately.

My colleague Marc Ambinder confirms that Obama has called some "who were vetted by didn't quite make it." He adds: "Maybe these aren't the short-listers. Maybe these are the long-listers."

"What the hell is taking so long," Noam Scheiber asks? In retrospect, I think the reasons for the timing seem obvious to me. The slow drip of "news" is entirely consistent with maximizing response to their "Be the First To Know" email/text message campaign.

Think about it: The week starts with a leak to the New York Times generating a front page story that tells us:

Senator Barack Obama has all but settled on his choice for a running mate and set an elaborate rollout plan for his decision, beginning with an early morning alert to supporters, perhaps as soon as Wednesday morning, aides said.

Somehow, Matt Drudge hears about the article the day before and gives the news the full Drudge treatment. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign runs banner ads on web sites all over the Internet promoting the email text message alerts. Then after days of speculation, Obama confirms yesterday that he has made a decision. Today his campaign confirms to reporters that some potential running mates have been called. And nearly every story features some reference to the fact that the campaign will share its news via email or text messaging.

Coincidence? I think not.

PS: One of Marc Ambinder's readers points out the irony of CNN "begging viewers to stay tuned so CNN can bring them coverage of a text message." Another "triumph of new media" is the timing itself: Major campaign news timed not for the evening news, but (perhaps) for prime text messaging time.

By Mark Blumenthal on August 22, 2008 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

Obama VP "Someone Who's Independent"

By Mark Blumenthal

Here's a lesson: If you work in politics (a) don't try to take a vacation in August of an even numbered year and (b) if you do, leave your laptop behind. Having made both mistakes, and waiting like everyone else to see who Barack Obama has selected as his running mate, I have a reaction to the one piece of real news we got yesterday about the choice.

In interviews published in the last 24 hours, Barack Obama has implied that his choice leans toward someone who will balance him ideologically. He has decided on "somebody who's independent," he told USA Today, "somebody who can push against my preconceived notions and challenge me so we have got a robust debate in the White House."

The conventional wisdom about vice-presidential choices shifted a bit in 1992 when Bill Clinton picked Al Gore, arguably the most successful vice presidential selection of the last several decades. Gore's selection was widely viewed as reinforcing Clinton's key strengths rather than providing geographic or ideological balance. Clinton, a young, Southern centrist Democrat bucked the conventional wisdom about ticket balancing and picked another young, Southern centrist politician. The combination reinforced the central "change" message of the 1992 campaign and helped provide a huge and sustained boost to the Clinton-Gore ticket.

But if you look back, Clinton had a real need to reinforce his core "change" message. Before the 1992 Democratic convention, Clinton had net negative favorable ratings and was running behind George H.W. Bush and (at on some polls) independent candidate Ross Perot. Voters had been introduced to Clinton during the primaries through news about an alleged affair and efforts to avoid the draft while a student at Oxford and Yale. In his book, Middle Class Dreams , Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg recounts learning from his research that doubts about Clinton focused on the perception that he was a typical politician from a privileged background.

To address the perception of privilege, the Clinton campaign used the convention to emphasize the "Man from Hope" story of Clinton's modest upbringing. My sense is that the Gore selection helped counter the perception of Clinton as a younger, but otherwise typical pol. Rather than making the predictably "political" choice (an grey eminence with years of Washington experience), he picked another young Southerner (albeit one with considerable Washington experience). So in picking Gore, Clinton was, in a sense, shoring up a weakness, making that case that his election really would be a break with politics as usual.

Now consider Obama. He owns "change." Between his age, his race, his name, his unusual background, his limited time in Washington and his campaign's exceptional message discipline, Obama has no need to convince anyone that his presidency will be different or that he "really likes change." What voters doubt most is whether he is prepared to be president, and perhaps whether he is a bit too taken with the "audacity" of his own candidacy. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 22% of voters choose "arrogant and cocky" as the negative characteristic that best describes Obama.

So Obama reaches out to someone of considerable experience with whom he disagreed on the Iraq War, someone with a different political philosophy or someone with proven willingness to challenge him, he can help shore up a weakness with relatively little risk to his core brand. At least that strikes me is the logic behind the kind of pick Obama is telegraphing.

By Mark Blumenthal on August 22, 2008 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Omero: Young women optimistic, yet uncertain

By Margie Omero

EMILY's List released their Women's Monitor survey this week comparing women across four different age cohorts: Gen Y, Gen X, Baby Boomers, and seniors.  While their findings on the Presidential race are interesting and worth reading, I'd like to focus more on attitudes toward the role of women.  (Disclosure: EMILY's List is a Momentum Analysis client, but we had nothing to do with this survey.)

Overall, women across age groupings agree on many topics.  But the survey finds younger, Gen X or Gen Y women consistently more optimistic than their older counterparts, especially when it comes to changing women's roles.  Boomers and senior women are more likely to strongly agree that "sexism is still a serious problem for women in our society today" and "there is still a need for a woman's movement that has a strong political voice in America."  They are also more likely to strongly disagree with:  "women today have equal opportunities and equal treatment in the workplace."

While hardly anyone uses words such as "satisfied" or "proud" to describe how the country is headed, younger voters are the least pessimistic about the future.  And while majorities across age groups disagree with the statement "this is a good time in America's history to be a young person just starting out in life," youngest women disagree with it least often.

However, despite being generally more optimistic, younger women are at the same time the most uncertain about the future.  They are not as likely as Boomer women to agree that "because they have so many more options and choices available to them, young women today are better off than their mothers' generation."  And when asked to identify what word describes the direction of the country, they are more than twice as likely as older women to say "uncertain," and are far less likely to say "dissatisfied."

Uncertainty could have many causes.  First, the study shows younger women less engaged in politics, and less likely to follow the news.  Second, the survey also suggests younger women are more concerned than older women about issues affecting them personally, such as pocketbook issues, rising gas prices, issues affecting children, and college affordability.  Third, age itself could be a factor, where women with more life experience are less likely to be unsure of the future.

Given younger women's optimism, with uncertainty, it is not surprising that they prefer a candidate who is also optimistic, but provides clarity.  Younger women are more interested in a presidential candidate who can provide "hope and optimism," while older women are more likely to crave "safety and security" or both equally. Younger women are also more likely to prefer a candidate with a "vision for the future," and older women are disproportionately more likely to seek a candidate who can "get things done."

Below are some of the responses across age groupings.  I calculated net agree/disagree, and a 4-point mean score, where 4 means "strongly agree," and not sure is omitted.  Other results, methodology, and some question wording are available here and here.