Monday, September 29, 2008

On The Cusp: State of the Canadian Race 29/09

This is a look at the state of the race in Canada's General Election judged by the polls as we enter the week of the leaders' debates, with particular attention to the prospects of a majority government.

The first hypothesis is that in using the polls to estimate the Conservatives' chances of a majority government, the Green vote can be ignored entirely. It can be subtracted from the total and the results reallocated among the 3 major parties. The Greens will win at most a handful of seats, their strength is a nuisance to the Liberals and the NDP, and the nature of their demographic appeal can affect Liberal/NDP races. But the number of seats the Conservatives will win in a given region is best predicted by comparing their poll standing with only the other parties likely to win seats. That's why people who talk about a supposed "40% threshold" for a majority government are wrong. As support for minor parties who are not going to win seats goes higher, the threshold percentage of the total popular vote needed to win a majority becomes lower.

We'll look first at most up to date national poll numbers -- all with the Green vote (and those of other 6th parties) being removed. In surveys which leave undecideds out of the party totals we will assume that they will break in the same proportions as decided voters. The dates are the dates that the polls were taken, where that can be determined. We will call these numbers the Toral-adjusted totals.

Nanos Research C 40 L 28 NDP 22 BQ 11 (Sept. 26-28)
Harris-Decima C 41 L 29 NDP 21 BQ 9 (Sept. 25-28)
Ekos Research C 38 L 29 NDP 22 BQ 11 (Sept. 25-28)
Angus Reid/Toronto Star C 43 L 23 NDP 23 BQ 11 (Sept. 25)

The next complication is that the Bloc will be highly effective in turning its votes into seats, because of the concentration of its vote. Let's give the Bloc 40 seats for the purpose of this exercise. Are these majority government numbers for the Tories? The Tory numbers are more impressive than they look because of the size of the differential between the Conservatives and their closest challengers. All the numbers except those of Ekos Research would suggest a Tory majority government; Ekos would have them right on the cusp. Perhaps this may explain some of Prime Minister Harper's recent willingness to come out and ask for a majority government, where he had previously been trying to dispel fear that one might happen. They're assured enough of at least a minority, and just uncertain enough about the possibility of a majority, that the time may have seemed right to stop pretending that they didn't want anything for Christmas and come out and ask for what they want.

Friday, September 26, 2008

McCain Vs. Obama, Part One

9:06...Lehrer in the tank already as he ignores the supposed theme of the evening, foreign policy, and leads off with a "financial crisis" question...allowing Obama to advertise his love for the ordinary American, and an unaccustomed concern that taxpayers get value for what they are paying....I've switched from Fox to CNN, which all in all has a more interesting bunch of commentators. They have a neat Audience Reaction meter which tracks the approvan of Democrats, Independents and Republicans...McCain shows himself equally supple in reducing the crisis to the currentproblems of the ordinary person on Main St., which are apparently more important than the possibility of the world financial system collapsing.

9:12 Obama skilfully expounds on the question what he thinks of the bailout without even a pretense of answering it. McCain finds an excuse to tell the old Eisenhower two-letter story, about the letter Eisenhower wrote in advance of D-Day taking full responsibility for the its failure had it occurred, but he blows it, not giving enough detail for people who don't already know the story to understand what he's talking about. It's a very poignant story if you tell it right. He emphasizes that he warned of these disasters in advance, and his demand for future accountability. AR heads way up on "accountability". Survived that question well enough I think.

9:15 These "people who live on Main Street" must be living in indescribable misery. The whole brunt of this crisis seem to have fallen on them.... Both candidates look like they are wisely going to ignore Lehrer's questions entirely and make whatever points they had planned to no matter what the question is....Obama looks defensive on earmarks. He may be startled to find him being out-populisted by a Republican....McCain's arm motions look stiff and awkward. The Republicans need to make sure every voter knows that this is because of the injuries he suffered as a POW. Perhaps he could start appearing in braces slings and bandages....On CNN's audience meter, independent approval of McCain jumps as he talks about his vote against the bill festooned with benefits for oil companies....Obama is asked what he will give up in terms of spending, and ignores the question entirely, instead giving his laundry list of things on which there needs to be more spending. Oh I beg your pardon. He will end unspecified "programs that don't work"....Whoops there goes Iowa for good. McCain calls for ending ethanol subsidies again....Spending freeze? Where did that come from? Is McCain making policy on the fly again? There will be lots of opportunities for Democrats to hit McCain on that all campaign long. John McCain -- wants to freeze spending on preventing childhood deaths...Huge gap on the AR meter as McCain talks about not letting the federal government run health care. Independent line moving up, moving closer to the Republicans.

9:42 Now we get into the meat. What are the lessons of Iraq? Oh oh...independent reaction bad as McCain talks about Iraq. And the Independents like Obama talking about he was against the war from the start. If Obama mentions his plan to get out on a deadline, McCain's response could decide the campaign...McCain is strong in saying that what's important about Iraq are the decisions that will be made in the future, not those made in the past....Obama's now stressing his 16-month deadline. Audience reaction good from both parties. And it slumps when McCain responds by talking about the successes of General Petreaus. I have long thought that despite the recent successes in Iraq, McCain's refusal to provide a deadline for getting out could cost him the campaign.

9:56 McCain slaughters Obama on Pakistan. I just hope the people listening can understand that it's not a good idea to start invading friendly regimes whose problem is their difficulty of controlling thir anti-American elements...Is Obama being effective dwelling so long on McCain's supposed errors about Afghanistan? I'm not sure people are going to understand his argument, and if the audience can't really understand the nature of a disagreement between the two, their default position, in foreign affairs, will be that McCain is right.

10:06 On to Iran...McCain wants "no second Holocaust". That should help fundraising in New York City....McCain starting to tire around 10:12, starting to stumble a bit. Obama's defense of direct diplomacy may or may not sell completely, but he's succeeding in sounding presidential. The Dem Ind and Rep approval lines on the AR meter are running almost even.

10:22 Obama is trying to look restrained and thoughtful as McCain gives him Hell on Georgia, but to me he looks more like a chastened schoolboy. McCain now reenergized...powerfully conveying outrage at the naivete of Obama's views...Weird coincidence of the day. McCain and Obama argue about who knows the difference between "strategy" and tactics". You know who doesn't understand that difference? Me. I was looking at Wikipedia today to try to figure it out.

10:31 McCain not so dumb as to try to actually estimate the likelihood of another 9/11 attack. If you say "high" you encourage panic and suggest the Republicans haven't been dealing adequately with the danger; if you say "low" you suggest the government's domestic security meaures may be unduly harsh and that all the hullaballoo about security is unncecesary.

10:36 The debate is fading, and people are losing interest. Or maybe it's just me.

MY VERDICT: A narrow McCain win, with Obama able to be satisfied that he held his own in the debate on his weakest area. As Rich Lowry stated on NRO, McCain was the aggressor on foreign policy, but Obama counterpunched adequately enough.
The polls on this debate will be important though, because if either candidate has a small 5% advantage on the question "Who won?", the popular wisdom will become that that candidate won, and 2 weeks from now the notion that that guy won will become the overwhelming consensus.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Elephants on the March -- Thursday at the RNC

Some thoughts on the go about the most important night of the Republican convention.

Meg Whitman, former EBay Chairman, a billionnaire, sometimes mentioned as a potential vice presidential candidate, speaking about the economy, gives the impression that in a debate she could buy and sell Joe Biden and make a profit on both ends. Carly Fiorina gives the same impression with an added political touch. I like CNN's countdown box on the lower right corner of the screen -- counting the minutes and seconds till Palin's speech as if was a liftoff into space.

I have never felt any kind of emotional connection when listening to Mitt Romney. He's a business conservative who only seemed to be speaking with passion during his presidential campaign when he talked about his grandiose plans for rejuvenating the auto industry in Michigan. On social issues, I thought it out and conjecture that his so frequent changes in belief were not because of insincerity, but because he treated his position on them as a product that he as a businessman was trying to sell. If you are trying to get the public to buy a product, you don't offer for sale the style of widget that you happen to like, do you? No...you offer the style of widget that you think the market wants to buy. And if the people of Massachusetts like different coloured widgets that the people voting in Republican presidential primaries, you offer each group the kind of widget they want.

Having said all that, Mitt sounded like a man who would have been a good vice presidential candidate. Between Mitt, Huck, and Rudy, the Democrats may have had the superstar public speaker in Obama, but the GOP who had the deep bench, and Rudy probably came through better in the clutch even than Obama.

I was hoping that Palin would put the line accepting the nomination of her party at the end of the speech instead of in its traditional place at the beginning. It would have made a great exit line.

From Palin what we were looking for was poise and confidence. As some blogger I cannot remember wrote earlier today, half of getting past the doorman is acting like you belong where you're going. She had established that before the two minute mark had past. The rest is now history. I was hoping for the best, but not expecting the best acceptance speech by a member of a GOP ticket since 1984. I was hoping for three or four memorable or funny lines, not 15 or 20.

Just from hearing Gov. Palin's rollout speech in Dayton I was completely astonished why anyone would assume that Sarah Palin was likely to be demolished by Joe Biden in a debate. If such a demolition is in the Democrats' plans, I would suggest they think again.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Palin as a Girl Thing -- Days 1, 2 and 3

The choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as GOP vice-presidential nominee should be a potential goldmine for political psychologists, whether academics or political practitioners whose major concern is to determine how the selection of a person from a given demographic will move the polls among downwardly mobile red-haired transexuals in Dubuque. I don't know how quickly academic grant applications can be churned out and approved, but if I were a political psychologist I'd be working every connection I have to find out.

Gov. Palin's inexperience, and solidly social conservative views, in one sense compromise the purity of this Rorschach test. It would, for example, be fascinating to see how feminists' views of the nomination would add up if they did not know of Palin's pro-life position. But we must work with what we have. The Palin nomination's disparate effect on men and women will be worth noting. But the resolution of this question isn't the main attraction; it's just the undercard. We will see different reactions from young, middle-aged, and old women; between working-middle- and upper class women; and between homemakers, women who work because they feel to have to to make a living, and career women. Of special interest will be the reactions of career women who have intentionally limited the size of their families in order to better pursue professional interests; and of those uncounted millions of women in the United States who have had abortions (a group unreachable by polls).

I first sensed that reactions to the nomination were not going to fall within the range I had expected when I read the facial expressions, the body language -- and heard the words -- of professional newsreaders and commentators like Gloria Borger and Cameron Brown on CNN. The not very unspoken subtext of their remarks was that a nominee for the vice presidency should be someone older that Sarah Palin, someone who had sacrificed more than Sarah Palin had, someone who had had to fight harder against the male establishment than Sarah Palin had -- someone, well, more like them. There was a resentment there that seemed to go beyond the quite reasonable point that supporters of Hillary Clinton's agenda could not be expected to do a 180 to support anyone who happened to be a woman.

The best way of following immediate real-time reaction to the choice among conservatives was NROnline. In general the reaction of social conservatives as reported on blogs like NROnline was wildly enthusiastic. NRO Editor Kathryn Jean Lopez -- a fierce Mitt Romney partisan -- was quickly noting that "What's already irritating me though is the suggestion that women will run to her because she's a woman. Pro-life Palin is going to be a hard sell for liberal feminists, even if she has a uterus." That is the theme that we would repeated as often as one could want over the next few days. Shortly thereafter Kathleen Parker, NRO Contributor and author of the influential anti-feminist
Save the Males, was the first to introduce in that forum the issue of the candidate's style and attire: ". Ranging over to more superficial turf, I'd like to suggest a style makeover . . .soonest.". I was not surprised: although women in politics may complain about the attention paid to their makeup and dress, in my experience 90% of the interest, and criticism, on these subjects is from women. The daily comparisons of the colour of Hillary Clinton's pantsuits to the colour of the daily terrorist threat warning was all from women. Parker later posted that her e-mailers were for scratching the makeover; readers liked the "hot librarian" look. it later turned out that Gov. Palin had adopted the up-do and "schoolmarmish glasses" look specifically to ensure that she wasn't taken unseriously because of her gender.

Lisa Schiffren, one time speechwriter for Dan Quayle, was the first I noticed to take up the theme of social class -- one that was to take on more prominence as the first weekend went by:
I love that she is a former union member, married to a member of the Steelworkers Union. Here comes Ohio, and many of those midwest blue collar workers who aren't so comfortable with the idea of the first "community organizer" president. That she is an athlete and a hunter makes the story even better. I bet the Palins paid for their house themselves (and it wasn't any $1.6 million mansion)
The first data came from the Rasmussen Pollreleased Sunday morning. 31% of women said they were more likely to support the Republicans because of the Palin choice, and 41% said they would be less likely. The figures for men were 43% more likely and 34% less likely. Rasmussen noted that the figures were capable of explanation as a simple reflection of the usual gender gap between the parties.

We'll find out more after Gov. Palin gets her chance to speak on Wednesday night.