Archives for October 2010

Click on over to Republican challenger John Koster’s website, and you’ll learn some interesting things about Democratic incumbent Rep. Rick Larsen’s “legacy.” Like, the fact that, apparently, he’s black.

Who knew?

Notice how the Grand Photoshop Wizards at the Koster campaign have attempted to color in Larsen’s and Pelosi’s complexion to match that of President Obama? Nope… no subliminal message there. And you won’t find one on Koster’s recent mailer either, which features the exact same picture on the front, while displaying a lilly white Koster and supporters on the back.

No doubt the Koster campaign will deny any mischief, but let’s just say you can color me skeptical.

I posted the results earlier today of the Washington Senate race based on KPLU’s news reports. At noon today, the KCTS/KPLU/Washington Poll top lines were released for public consumption.

In that all-important race between the single most powerful mom-in-tennis-shoe in the Senate & nation, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), and the single most sought-after motivational speaker on the foreclosure profiteering seminar circuit, Dino Rossi (R), we find Sen. Murray leading 50% to 42%. This makes five polls in a row that has Murray in the lead.

This poll surveyed 500 people from October 5th to the 14th. Hence, it overlaps every one of the other five October polls. Here is summary of all the polls this month:

	Start	End	Samp.		%	%	%
Poll	date	date	size	MOE	Murray	Rossi	Diff
WA Poll	05-Oct	14-Oct	500	4.3	50	42	D+8
SurveyUSA	11-Oct	14-Oct	606	4.1	50	47	D+3
CNN/Time/OR	08-Oct	12-Oct	850	3.5	51	43	D+8
Elway	07-Oct	11-Oct	450	4.6	51	38	D+13
Fox	09-Oct	09-Oct	1000	3.0	47	46	D+1
Rasmussen	06-Oct	06-Oct	750	4.0	46	49	R+3

What does this poll tell us by itself? A Monte Carlo analysis using the observed sample size and percentages gives Murray 902,830 wins to Rossi’s 92,001 out of a million simulated elections. That is, the poll provides evidence that Murray would have a 90.8% probability of beating Rossi in an election held now.

But we can pool the results from all six of the polls shown in the table. This gives us a total of 4,156 “votes”, of which 3,890 of them go to either Rossi or Murray. Murray gets 48.9% to Rossi’s 44.7% (or, if we look at just the votes for Murray and Rossi, Murray is up 52.2% to 47.8%). A simulation analysis finds Murray beating Rossi with 975,049 wins to his 24,332 wins.

The new KCTS/KPLU/Washington Poll has added a bit more certainty to Murray’s lead. Yesterday, this same analysis using all but today’s poll gave Murray a 94.5% chance of winning. Today, with six polls, we find that Murray would have a 97.6% chance of beating Rossi in an election right now.

Finally, let me address a meme about this race that has been quite prevalent in the recent media. There is an idea the the polls are “all over the place.” Maybe. But not really. Let’s look at results of polls taken in September and October:

Since these polls are taken on a sample of the underlying voting population, there is some uncertainty about the results. The vertical bars on the poll results show the plausible range that the voting population could have, given the margin of error inherent in the poll. (Other problems can lead to biased estimates; the margin of error only incorporates uncertainty reflecting the size of the sample.) And even then, by chance, we expect the true value to lie outside of the plausible range in about one in twenty polls.

Looking at the recent polls, it seems the last five polls mostly overlap, suggesting that the truth lies somewhere near a 54% Murray, 46% Rossi result. We also see this in early September. From mid-September to early October, Murray appears to do significantly worse.

Remember the discussion with the Elway poll last Tuesday? Elway was compelled to justify his noticeably higher numbers for Murray, and suggested that there was a difference between robopolls and live-interview polls. (Of course, if we consider the plausible range, the Elway poll fits right in.) The polls released since Tuesday support Elway’s suggestion.

Elway did not offer a hypothesis why robopolls would turn in different results than the live-interview polls, but I did. Via Goldy:

As Darryl suggested the other night at Drinking Liberally, what if the enthusiasm gap we’ve all been hearing about is largely manifested in who is or is not willing to give up ten minutes to interact with an automated poll? I know I’ve hung up on a couple robo-polls this year, but find it harder to do so with a real live person. Interesting hypothesis.

This looks right for all the recent polling. We see that the three live-interview polls (Elway, WA poll, and CNN) all post numbers on the high side and the robopolls (SUSA, Rasmussen and FOX News) all come in on the low side. That big dip in the middle is formed from six robopolls taken in a row. In fact, Rasmussen and FAUX News both use the same company—Pulse Opinion Research–to do their polling. It may not be chance that FOX New and Rasmussen both give Murray her worse performance in this series. And this would explain the question I posed in August, “What the hell happened to Survey USA?”

The robopoll/live interview/enthusiasm gap hypothesis was offered Tuesday before the three most recent polls were released, and I am now pretty confident that this is what is happening in the Murray—Rossi race here in Washington.

I am less confident about other House and Senate races nationally, but if it can happen here, it might well be happening elsewhere. I think there is a fair possibility that robopolls will systematically underestimate the performance of Democrats nationwide, which will make for a pretty darned interesting election night!

(Cross posted at Hominid Views.)

I did a lot of online fundraising for Darcy Burner over the last two cycles, and as proud and amazed as I was over the hundreds of thousands of dollars I helped raise for her, I was consistently disappointed by my failure to help her in my main capacity as a blogger: moving and shaping headlines.

Yeah, sure, the local blogosphere was instrumental in creating buzz around Darcy’s campaign in the spring of 2006, when nobody else was taking the 8th CD race seriously, but when push came to shove, I was never able to have the kinda impact I’ve had in countless other races. If anything, my fundraising efforts on her behalf were counterproductive in terms of my ability to influence media coverage. I don’t want to sound too narcissistic, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the Seattle Times’ over-the-top animosity toward Darcy might not have been at least partially directed at her enthusiastic supporters in the Netroots.

And so for that and other reasons, I’ve backed away a bit from activism over the past couple years, and focused more on the journalism side of what I do, pretty much abstaining from doing any candidate fundraising at all. Until now.

Seattle’s own Joan McCarter just announced on Daily Kos that Suzan DelBene has been added to their Orange to Blue ActBlue page… a testament to just how close the WA-08 race once again is. Of course, it’s also a testament to DelBene’s qualifications for office, and Reichert’s lack thereof, but she wouldn’t have been added at this late stage if there wasn’t reason to believe that the race is winnable.

I know the rest of the local media don’t believe it — they won’t believe it, because it fucks up their narrative of Democrats in crisis — but WA-08 has suddenly become one of the Democrats’ best shots at knocking off a Republican incumbent in an otherwise Republican-leaning year. Which would make a DelBene victory all the more sweet.

So please, give what you can, and help put WA-08 back in the hands of a competent representative.

No, Democrats are not in trouble in Delaware. Of course not. Democratic Senate nominee Chris Coons is going to wipe the floor with crazy teabagger Christine O’Donnell, and the Dems will pick up the state’s lone House seat as well.

And yet, both President Obama and Vice President Biden are making a high profile campaign stop in the Diamond State.

Huh. Guess that doesn’t fit in all that well with the Republican meme that Obama’s upcoming rally in Seattle is as sign that Democrats here are desperate.

KPLU is reporting that a new poll in the Washington senatorial race will be released today from The Washington Poll. The poll shows Sen. Patty Murray (D) leading real estate opportunist cum foreclosure seminar motivational speaker Dino Rossi (R) by 50% to 42%.

The sample size is 500 giving a margin of error of 4.3%. I’ll provide a more detailed analysis when the poll results are released.

The Washington poll is made using live calls (like Elway). This poll differs from most other polls in this race in that the results are of registered voters, rather than likely voters. The poll was sponsored by KPLU and KCTS-9 and conducted by the University of Washington out of the Political Science Department. (In the interest of full disclosure, I work for the UW; however, I have nothing to do with this poll.)

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told how dangerous I am, because, of course, I’m not nearly as civil as all those nice folks on the right…

Police arrested a man around 5 p.m. Thursday outside KSPS studios after he drove by a group of Sen. Patty Murray supporters waving a meat cleaver.

Meanwhile, inside the studio, Sen. Murray kicked ass… at least according to all the reviews I’ve read.

Yesterday I alluded to a new Survey USA poll that I thought would be released in a day or two for the Senate race between Sen. Patty Murray (D) and foreclosure seminar motivational speaker Dino Rossi (R). Well…it happened today.

The new poll has Murray leading Rossi, 50% to 47% from a survey of 606 likely voters taken from 22 October to 14 October. The margin of error is 4.1%.

This is the fourth poll in a row that has Murray leading Rossi. In fact, over the past month, there have been nine polls in this race (not including those released by the candidates or political parties). Murray has led in seven of the nine polls. Yeah…Rossi has a pair, but they are really pretty tiny (+1 and +3) compared to Murray’s (+3, +7, +13, +1, +1, +2, +5).

A Monte Carlo analysis of the SurveyUSA poll gives Murray 699,651 out of a million simulated elections. Rossi wins 290,266 times. In other words, in an election held now, Murray would have a 70.7% chance of beating Rossi, given the evidence offered in this poll. Here is the distribution of simulated election outcomes:

We now have five polls taken in October (the earliest poll was from Oct 6). Let throw them together for a better picture of the evidence. The five polls yield 3,656 “votes” of which 3,430 are for one of the candidates. Murray gets 1,781 “votes” (48.7%) and Rossi, 1,649 (45.1%). From the simulated elections, Murray wins 943,548 times; Rossi wins 55,016 times. Thus, the October polls, taken as a whole, support the idea that Murray would win with a 94.5% probability in an election held now. Here is the picture:

I’ve now written about new polls in this race for five days straight. If tomorrow bring us another poll then we can declare it WAPollpalooza week. And then maybe I can get some rest on the seventh day….

The Seattle PI’s David Horsey waded into the debate on California’s Proposition 19 this week. He looked to parallels with alcohol prohibition to understand our current predicament, but he missed the mark on a few of the details:

My mentor at the start of my journalism career was a man named William F. Asbury. He was a fine newsman and a recovering alcoholic. After he left the newspaper business, he began writing and lecturing about alcoholism prevention and developed a take on Prohibition that went against the conventional wisdom that it was an experiment in social control that did not work.

Apparently, not everyone was sneaking off to a speakeasy during the 1920s. According to Asbury, the ban on booze actually kept a lot of people away from alcohol, lowered the number of broken families and reduced the alcoholism rate.

That’s partially true, but it doesn’t tell the entire story. Once alcohol prohibition officially became the law of the land in 1920, alcohol consumption certainly decreased significantly. Since it was illegal, accurate statistics were hard to come by, but by looking at related statistics like alcohol-related deaths and arrests for public drunkenness, it’s believed that alcohol use quickly returned to about 60-70% of pre-prohibition levels. And in some cities, the number of speakeasies far surpassed the previous number of legal bars.

The gains that Asbury spoke of were a temporary one-time phenomenon that came from the shifting of alcohol production from legal distributors to organized crime syndicates. Once that transition ended, we saw the return of all the problems related to alcohol – with a grisly bonus in the form of significantly higher rates of crime from the organized crimes groups that were making obscene profits from the trade.

It’s likely true that a certain percentage of people who drank before prohibition refrained from breaking the law once it became illegal. But those were primarily folks who aren’t going to have a problem with alcohol ruining their lives in the first place. The barrier that prohibition put up only deterred the people least motivated to have a drink – moderate drinkers who aren’t going to wreck their lives on the stuff.

But there was one other particularly nasty aspect of alcohol prohibition that Horsey doesn’t discuss:

Amid this debate, one question sticks in my mind: What will this do to kids?

Like anyone who has raised children, coached a youth sports team or spent time in schools, I have seen how teenagers – especially boys – can be thrown off track by marijuana. The more they smoke, the less interested they become in school, in sports, in homework or in friends who don’t share their preoccupation with getting high.

Solid medical research has proven that human brains do not fully develop until a person is well into his twenties and that, the earlier a teenager starts using marijuana, the greater the risk of permanent impairment to the parts of the brain that govern rational behavior and mature judgment. The risk is exacerbated by the hugely increased potency of today’s drug, compared with the pot of the 1960s and ’70s. An early marijuana habit may enhance a kid’s prospects for winning a bit part in a Seth Rogen stoner movie, but cuts chances for achievement in most other endeavors.

I completely share Horsey’s concern here, and it’s one of the biggest reasons why we should be supporting Proposition 19 and an end to marijuana prohibition everywhere. While alcohol prohibition did manage to lower overall rates of alcohol consumption, that wasn’t necessarily true for younger people:

Drinking at an earlier age was also noted, particularly during the first few years of Prohibition. The superintendents of eight state mental hospitals reported a larger percentage of young patients during Prohibition (1919-1926) than formerly. One of the hospitals noted: “During the past year (1926), an unusually large group of patients who are of high school age were admitted for alcoholic psychosis” (Brown, 1932:176).

In determining the age at which an alcoholic forms his drinking habit, it was noted: “The 1920-1923 group were younger than the other groups when the drink habit was formed” (Pollock, 1942: 113).

Even worse, since there was a strong incentive to avoid getting caught with alcohol, drinking smaller quantities of more powerful forms of alcohol became more common. People carried flasks of homemade liquors as opposed to drinking less potent beers. When it came to preventing younger people from developing bad habits with alcohol, prohibition was a serious step back from the pre-prohibition era. And it’s very likely that if prohibition had continued for another generation that the end result would have been much worse than the problems of alcoholism before prohibition.

This is similarly true for marijuana prohibition today, as high school students continually report that it’s easier for them to obtain marijuana than alcohol. And compared to Holland, where marijuana sales have been tolerated for over 30 years, American teenagers use marijuana at a much higher rate. If Horsey is concerned about teenage drug use, his worries seem to be misplaced. It’s our current policies that put more young people at risk, not the policies that would exist with the passage of Proposition 19.

I’m on a deadline today, so please fling poo amongst yourselves.

My trolls tell me that President Obama’s upcoming rally in Seattle is an act of desperation, and that nobody is more unpopular around here these days than the president, except, perhaps, Gov. Chris Gregoire.

Maybe. But I’m just not feeling the gloom and doom right now, especially with the latest SurveyUSA tracking poll showing Obama’s approval rating jumping 12 points in Washington state last month, rising from 40% to a comfortable 52%. That’s Obama best showing since January, and represents a 24-point swing in the margin, from 16 points under to 8 points over.

Add to that the new CNN/Time poll that has Sen. Patty Murray up 51-43% over Dino Rossi, plus the Elway Poll that showed Washington Dems holding a 46-37% advantage in the generic congressional, not to mention the sudden tightening in WA-08, and you gotta wonder if the tide is shifting, at least in this corner of the country.

Or, perhaps, there’s something to Elway’s effort to distinguish between automated polls like Rasmussen and SurveyUSA, and live interviewer polls like his. As Darryl suggested the other night at Drinking Liberally, what if the enthusiasm gap we’ve all been hearing about is largely manifested in who is or is not willing to give up ten minutes to interact with an automated poll? I know I’ve hung up on a couple robo-polls this year, but find it harder to do so with a real live person. Interesting hypothesis.

I know there have been some polls that show Democratic seats at risk in WA-03 and WA-02 (and allegedly even WA-09), and we’ll certainly give back some of our recent legislative gains, but apart from that, there really isn’t very much hard evidence to suggest that Washington Dems should brace themselves for a red tsunami of the likes that swept them from office in 1994. At least, there’s not much evidence from this momentary vantage point some three weeks out.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sSWLuPJac0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

So I got an email blast from Markos today, showing Sestak finally pulling ahead of Toomey, and cheered by the news and feeling my Pennsylvania roots, I clicked through the link to the Orange to Blue page, and chipped in my ten bucks, as requested.

Understand, that I almost never give money to political candidates — I give more than enough at the office — so this was a very unusual impulse donation for me.

A few minutes later, Darryl called to talk about the new CNN/Time poll (Murray 51%, Rossi 43%), and he mentioned that he was sensing a shift in mood amongst Democrats nationally. And as evidence of that intuition he mentioned that he had received an email from Markos, and uncharacteristically clicked through to drop some money into Sestak’s coffers and a couple other races.

Coincidence? Perhaps, but apparently we weren’t the only ones. Markos’ email said he was looking for 500 contributors, but while I clicked through almost the minute I got it, he’d already surpassed his goal. In fact, he’s had to raise the target twice since then, with the campaign now sitting just 200 contributions short of its new 1,500 contribution goal.

Compared to the last two cycles, it’s been a tough year to raise money online, but this… well, it’s got that wistfully familiar 2008 air to it. Like a fresh ocean breeze. Or possibly even a shifting tide.

Yesterday we had a new Elway poll in the senatorial race between Sen. Patty Murray (D) and real estate opportunist Dino Rossi (R).

Today there is a new CNN/Time/Opinion Research poll weighing in on the race. The poll of 850 likely voters, taken from October 8 through 10, has Murray leading Rossi 51% to 43%. The margin of error is 3.5%. This result is pretty similar to yesterday’s Elway poll.

A Monte Carlo analysis consisting of a million simulated elections at the observed preferences in this new poll has Murray winning 954,664 times and Rossi winning 42,982 times. The evidence from this latest poll suggests that, in an election held today, Murray would win with a 95.7% probability; Rossi with a 4.3% probability. Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulated elections:

But I missed another poll that was released on Monday or Tuesday. A FOX News poll taken on 9 Oct on a sample of 1000 individuals found Murray with a 47% to 46% lead over Rossi (3% margin of error). Thus, there have been a total of four polls published in October and Murray has led in the last three—Rossi last led in a 6 Oct Rasmussen poll.

Given that all four of these polls were taken either consecutively or over overlapping days, we can combine them for a better picture of how this race is shaping up over the the second week of October. The four October polls give a total of 3,050 responses, of which 2,842 went to either Murray or Rossi. Murray got 1,478 ( 48.5%) and Rossi got 1364 ( 44.7%). A Monte Carlo analysis gives Murray 934,835 wins to Rossi’s 63,503 wins.

Thus, the four polls combined provide evidence that an election held over the past week would go Murray’s way with a 93.6% probability, and would go Rossi’s way with a 6.4% probability:

A look at the polling to date suggests that Murray’s September slump has ended; she has clearly retaken the lead and it seems to be her strongest lead to date.

This is definitely a good position for Murray to be in during the week that ballots drop. The next couple of polls will be telling, and I think we’ll have new polls from Survey USA and the Washington Poll within a few days, so stay tuned….

(Cross posted at Hominid Views.)

When Dino Rossi was asked about his stance on abortion during his first gubernatorial campaign back in 2004, he blithely quipped that “I’m not running for Supreme Court,” and everybody laughed and gave him a pass.

In 2008, during his second shot at Chris Gregoire, he pretty much offered the same non-denial denial in response to charges he was anti-choice, and once again reporters and editorialists pretty much shrugged.

And in 2010, sensing the Republican primary electorate shifting even further to the far right, Rossi grudgingly acknowledged that he opposes legal abortion except “maybe” in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at stake… but repeatedly emphasized that he’s “not running on that issue” in refusing to discuss it further.

So the question is, with the election only weeks away, and Rossi this time running for the U.S. Senate at a time when the Supreme Court is a mere pubic-hair-on-a-coke-can away from overturning Roe v. Wade, will our local media call Rossi on his obfuscation, and finally explain in detail where he stands on abortion and other women’s health care issues?

We may find out today at 3PM, when Gov. Gregoire and Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards hold a joint press at the Women’s University Club of Seattle to “highlight what’s at stake for women’s health care this election, including where the candidates stand.” If the cameras and reporters show up, and feature their comments on the evening news and in tomorrow’s papers, then we’ll know that the local news media is finally taking women’s issues seriously. But if they don’t, well, it’s another free ride for Dino Rossi on a position I’m sure he holds genuinely, but which separates him from a large majority of Washington voters.

To be clear, this isn’t just another press conference. This is the governor, for chrissakes, taking time out of her day to take questions from reporters. And since she’s not running for anything, likely every again, you just know this press conference is mostly about Rossi.

That’s news. But only if, you know, the press decides to report it.

The record is clear. Rossi opposes abortion, opposes funding to reduce teen pregnancy and opposes access to emergency contraception. He’s voted to oppose requiring insurance prescription plans to include contraception, and twice voted to deny family planning services through Medicaid. In 1992, he even spoke in favor of re-instituting “homes for unwed mothers” as an alternative to abortion. Most reporters know that.

But the fact that the latest SurveyUSA poll shows Rossi still earning 29% support from self-described pro-choice voters, is clear evidence that the public isn’t nearly as well informed.

This is an opportunity for our media to make up for six years of looking the other way. I’ll be interested to see if they take advantage of it.

Fear of flying?

Federal regulators on Wednesday proposed fining a feeder airline, Corporate Air, $455,000 for allowing a small airliner to carry passengers on 80 flights despite an engine that needed repair.

You know what’s destroying our nation’s competitiveness? Too much government regulation. If we just got off of corporate America’s back, the magical powers of the free market would sort everything out for the best. Because that’s what markets do. Always.

Or so I’m constantly told.