Archives for October 2010

Just posted a longish piece on Slog, about how our state’s Catholic run hospices, which are the sole hospice providers in many parts of the state, not only refuse to participate in our Death With Dignity Act, but refuse to even answer patients’ questions about it: “Don’t Tell When Asked”: How Catholic Hospices Are Denying Patients’ Rights to Death With Dignity.

In fact it’s part of a much larger, and very sensitive issue that has so far escaped much public scrutiny. For all the immense amount of good our state’s Catholic hospitals and health systems do by providing quality medical care, often in otherwise under-served regions, recent expansions, mergers and affiliations have given these systems virtual monopolies throughout much of the state. And due to their requirement that doctors, nurses, counselors and other care givers adhere to Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives, this expansion has also served to restrict access to many legal medical services, including abortion and birth control, as well as end of life directives.

Anyway, this post is a good start on a complicated issue that I hope to come back to in greater detail. Read the whole thing, and let me know what you think.

No surprise after the primary endorsement, but the Seattle Times officially endorsed Democrat Suzan DelBene today:

The Seattle Times endorses Democrat Suzan DelBene. The technology entrepreneur from Medina is politically untested but offers tremendous promise.

And on that we agree: DelBene has tremendous upside. She’s smart, she’s energetic, she’s thoughtful. She’s probably not as progressive as me on some issues, but then neither is her district, so I can live with that.

Reichert, on the other hand, no upside at all. What you see is what you get: a back-bencher warming the seat for Republicans until heir-apparent Reagan Dunn outgrows his political peach fuzz.

So here’s hoping the Seattle Times editorial board is more influential with voters than I give them credit for.

As is our custom, Tuesday brings us together for an evening of politics under the influence. Please join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by earlier for dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 249 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

A new Elway poll has just been released for Washington state. Included in the poll is a head-to-head match-up in the Washington state senatorial race between Sen. Patty Murray and real estate salesman Dino Rossi. The poll was conducted using live interviews between October 7 and October 11 on a sample of 450 likely voters. The margin of error is 4.6%.

The results have Murray leading Rossi by 51% to 38% with “leaners” excluded. Murray does even better (55% to 40%) if “leaners” are included. I’ll stick with the former numbers in what follows. Here is the polling in this race to date (excluding polls released by the campaigns):

This new poll reverses a not-so-good trend for Murray over the past month. Her lead had the appearance of slipping away (although really the recent polls have all been a statistical tie).

You may also notice that all four of the Elway polls are more favorable for Murray than nearly all other polls. As Goldy mentions, Elway goes to some effort to explain this discrepancy. Elway shows that there are distinctly different trends for polls done using automated questions compared to live interviews. The robopolls showed Rossi with a slight lead early in the year with the trend lines converging to a tie right now. The live polls showed Rossi and Murray tied early on, with Rossi staying relatively flat and Murray pulling away by about 7 points. No explanation is offered, but the implication is that Elway’s live polls are more accurate.

We can, to some extent, evaluate Elway’s hypothesis. Here is a graph I published on Nov 3, 2008, when Dino Rossi was running against Gov. Christine Gregoire in the Washington state Gubernatorial race:

Here again, Elway seemed to favor Rossi’s opponent relative to other polls, suggesting Murray would win 51% to 39%. The Washington Poll, another live interview poll, was also on the high side relative to other polls earlier (51.4% to 45%) and close later (50% to 48%). In the last month most pollsters had the race within two points: Strategic Vision (50% to 48% and 49% to 47% earlier), Rasmussen (50% to 48%), and SurveyUSA (50% to 48% and 48% to 47% earlier). The day after this graph was made, SurveyUSA released their final poll (52% to 46%).

The final tally in the Gregoire–Rossi race was 53.2% to 46.8% (+6.4). SurveyUSA’s last poll nailed it (+6), and the Washington Poll got the spread right (+6) in their earlier poll. Elway underestimated both candidates’ percentages and had a high spread (+12). This suggests that most of the recent polls underestimate Murray’s performance, even if the Elway poll probably overestimates it.

Back to the Elway poll…As usual, I’ll analyze it using simulated elections of 450 likely voters voting at the observed percentages in order to make a probability statement about who would win in a hypothetical election held now. From a million such simulated elections, we find that Murray wins 979,930 times and a Senator Rossi happens 18,537 times. In other words, this poll gives Murray 98.1% chance of winning an election right now. Rossi’s probability is 1.9%. Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulated elections:

Compare today’s picture to that from last Friday’s Rasmussen poll. In fact, since the Rasmussen poll was conducted on October 6 on a sample of 750 likely voters. It showed Rossi leading Murray 49% to 46%. Given that the Rasmussen poll was taken the day before the Elway poll started, it seems reasonable to combine ’em.

The combined Elway-Rasmussen poll sampled 1,200 likely voters of which 1113 chose one or the other candidate. Murray got 574 votes (47.8%), and Rossi got 538 (44.8%). A Monte Carlo analysis using a million simulated elections gave Murray 772,311 wins to Rossi’s 221,338 wins. In other words, these two polls combined suggests that Murray would have a 77.7% of beating Rossi if the election was held now.

To summarize, in combining the only two October polls to date—one done with live calls one by robocalls—Murray still comes out ahead, albeit not with a statistically significant lead.

Respected local pollster Stuart Elway just released a new survey of the Washington Senate race, and it’s a bit of a shocker for those plying the too-close-call meme: 51-38 percent in Sen. Patty Murray’s favor, and a yawning 55-40 percent gap when “leaners” are factored in. That’s a far cry from the spate of surveys from national polling firms that have recently shown the lead bouncing back an forth, near or within the margin of error.

Elway of course is painfully aware that such a dramatic departure from the national narrative might “come as a surprise to many and as unbelievable to some,” so he goes on at some length explaining why these results should not be dismissed as an outlier. This survey only interviewed “likely voters,” defined as those who have voted in at least two of the past four elections, or who have registered since 2008. The demographic profile of this sample matches the samples all year, and the expected profile of likely voters. And, Elway’s results are actually in line with the trend from other, non-automated surveys.

But in the end, one of the big differences between Elway’s results and those of other pollsters comes down to “philosophy.”

One of the challenges of election polling is determining what to do with respondents who are undecided. The philosophy here has always been to let them be undecided. After all, it is still 3 weeks until election day and the purpose of a survey is to describe the campaign situation today—not to predict the outcome. As a consequence, The Elway Poll routinely indicates more “undecided” voters than other surveys—a position that fails to satisfy the partisans, often resulting in charges of incompetence and/or bias from partisans on the short end of data.

And not only doesn’t Elway push the undecideds, he also doesn’t statistically weight the data the way many national pollsters do, using some “secret sauce formula” to estimate how the undecideds will break based on party identification. But if he did weight the data, here’s how the results might look:

51 to 49 percent… that’s right in line with Rasmussen. But as Elway points out, the Party ID model assumes that all of the remaining undecideds would break for Rossi, ignoring the fact that leaners in this survey actually broke 2 to 1 for Murray.

According to Elway, these results illustrate the difficult challenge for Rossi, as “there are simply not enough undecided voters left” to sway.

One path for Rossi is to bring new voters into the electorate—people who were not in the “likely voter” sample. This is where Tea Party voters may help, assuming that there are a significant number who are not “likely voters.” Sufficient help from that quarter seems problematic for two reasons. First, it is not clear that Tea Partiers are disproportionally less likely voters. Second, Rossi has consciously not courted the Tea Party constituency.

This means Rossi must take votes away from Murray. He must convince enough Murray supporters to switch sides, which puts a premium on the two debates and on making an effective “closing argument” in the final three weeks of the campaign.

Good luck with that. Murray has been in the U.S. Senate for 18 years, and this is Rossi’s third appearance on a statewide ballot in six years, so a lot of voters came into this election with their minds already made up. And it doesn’t help Rossi that, according to Elway, Washington seems to be bucking the national generic trend, with a plurality of voters preferring Democrats maintain control of Congress by a 46 to 37 percent margin.

All in all, pretty good news for Patty Murray.

Several readers have now emailed or commented about my “Dino Rossi Did Not Write the 2003-2005 Budget” Slog post, suggesting that I submit Rossi’s false budget-writing claim to the Seattle Times Truth Needle for further fact-checking. But that would be immodest.

That said, I wouldn’t be opposed to other folks submitting it themselves.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV37LrNG7KI&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

In case you haven’t been following this truly bizarre/disturbing story, Ohio GOP Congressional candidate Rich Iott has not only been exposed as an avid Nazi SS re-enactor, he’s even gone so far as to defend the Nazis as merely wanting to protect their homeland from the greater threat of Bolshevism.

And when asked last night by CNN’s Anderson Cooper whether he thought the members of the 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division he portrays were “valiant men,” Iott refused to pass judgement:

Iott defended the members of the unit, who he said “wanted to fight what they saw as a bigger threat to them than Germany,” so they joined up with the Nazis to fight the eastern front of the war against Soviet forces. “I don’t think we can sit here and judge that today. We weren’t there the time they made those decisions…”

“I don’t think we can sit here and judge that today.” Huh. Tell that to all my murdered and never-born relatives.

There are cynical folks who like to claim that there isn’t much difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, but I’m pretty damn sure my party isn’t running a self-avowed Nazi sympathizers this cycle.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and I just said it over on Slog: Dave Reichert did not catch the Green River Killer.

He simply didn’t. In fact, if anything, it was Reichert’s investigative bungling that allowed Gary Ridgway, one of the earliest suspects in the case, to go on killing for 18 more years.

Of course, the inspiration for both these posts is Michael Hoods excellent series on BlatherWatch, the re-posting of which has become a much looked forward to biennial media event.

Read the whole thing.

Over on Slog, I do a little myth-busting, pointing out that despite all the credit Dino Rossi gets for balancing the state budget in 2003, he really didn’t do much budget writing at all. In fact, according to contemporaneous news reports at the time:

The Republican budget has much in common with the all-cuts plan that Democratic Gov. Gary Locke unveiled in December. In fact, Rossi opened a press briefing yesterday with a PowerPoint presentation titled: “Following the Governor’s Lead.”

The truth is, Rossi wrote the 2003-2005 state budget much in the same way that Dave Reichert caught the Green River Killer, in that he didn’t. Though just like with Reichert’s claim to fame, that hasn’t stopped the media from parroting Rossi’s revisionist narrative unchallenged.

Our friend Joan McCarter’s got the scoop at Daily Kos, with new polling data showing the race in WA-08 between Republican Dave Reichert and Democratic challenger Suzan DelBene closing to within the margin of error:

Dave Reichert, for the third election in a row, remains among the most vulnerable Republican House members. This is the swing district where Darcy Burner nipped at Reichert’s heels in both 2006 and 2008. It could be that voters in the 8th have finally decided to stop grading Reichert on a curve, and expect their congressman to start doing more than just showing up….

Most of the public polling in the race has been done by SUSA, which has had some pretty funky numbers in the Seattle Metro area in polls this cycle. Nonetheless, the SUSA numbers have shown an increasingly tight race here, with their latest poll showing a seven-point gap, Reichert leading 52-45. An internal poll released by DelBene last week confirms PPP, with Reichert leading by the skin of his teeth, 48-44.

In other words, we’re off to the races!

And a quick look at the cross-tabs shows that there’s still plenty of upside for DelBene, with 31% of WA-08 voters still having no opinion of her, and plenty of opportunity for her to pick up support with women, who she currently splits 47-47, despite Reichert’s anti-choice record. As far as I know, there’s little or no outside money committed to defending Reichert’s seat, so if DelBene can continue her air assault while perhaps doing a little better job of introducing herself to voters, this one appears winnable.

And, as Joan astutely points out, given the Seattle Times’ primary abandonment of him, “it doesn’t seem likely that Reichert can look forward to another October surprise hatchet job coming from them.” Cross your fingers.

The Tacoma News Tribune now makes the fourth major paper to endorse Democratic Sen. Patty Murray over Republican challenger and foreclosure speculator Dino Rossi:

Murray has made a political career out of defying expectations. She’s grown into a formidable lawmaker who has proven she can both help lead the Democratic Party and work across the aisle when needed. To turn her out now, when she is at the height of her ability to fight for important state, regional and local projects, would be foolish.

Foolish indeed. Which is why none of these endorsements comes as much of a surprise.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvm0cWgHp6A&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Yup, Republican strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie are spending millions of dollars in secret, undisclosed money, some of it from wealthy foreign donors, to run misleading attack ads against Democrats nationwide. And much of that dirty money is being spent right here in Washington state against Sen. Patty Murray.

And Dino Rossi accuses Murray of being a captive of the other Washington?

Of course, all this is made possible by the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision, which overturned a century of established precedent by essentially ruling that money has more free speech rights than speech itself. And the secrecy is aided by the Senate Republicans refusing to let the DISCLOSE Act come to the floor for a vote… a bill that Sen. Murray has strongly supported, and which Rossi would oppose. The result has been to dramatically expand the destructive and undemocratic influence of wealthy special interests:

“We have allowed these 527s to run wild, unfettered, unregulated, not subject to the same rules and regulations as the national parties. And I think that’s been incredibly unhealthy.”
— Republican strategist Ed Gillespie

Yup, that’s the same Ed Gillespie who is working with Rove to fund and run these secretly financed ads on behalf of Dino Rossi. But then, it’s hard to be a Republican these days without also being a shameless hypocrite.

Hmm. If the Seattle City Council can’t manage to pull the trigger on Mike O’Brien’s very sensible proposal to create a city-run registry to allow citizens to opt-out of receiving the yellow pages — thus saving innumerable trees, not to mention $350,000 a year in recycling costs — perhaps it should consider our surfeit of unwanted phonebooks as an opportunity to solve the city’s homeless problem?

The books form a ready made, insulated building module held in place with sheet metal angles normally used as drywall bead material. Once tensioned, the phone books form a stable wall into which additional layers can be easily screwed. The roof joists are also made of laminated phone books. The finished structure becomes a kind of time capsule, recording the names and numbers of community members.

Yeah sure, it looks kinda silly, but I mean, who the fuck actually still uses a phonebook these days to, you know, actually look up phone numbers and stuff? So this makes as much sense as simply tossing ’em straight from your porch, into the recycling bin.

Or, the Council could just give us the opportunity to tell the phonebook publishers to shove off.

Last week’s contest was a bit of a lay-up, which Liberal Scientist solved in quick fashion. It was Sioux Falls, SD.

This is the second Sunday of the month, so this week’s contest is the first of my new contest theme, TV and movies. The picture I choose for this will be related to something in a TV show or a movie (new or old). Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Don’t drink from the red cups. That’s what I’ve been telling folks here for years.