Please join us tonight for another evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by earlier for dinner.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| The Gretch Who Saved the War on Christmas | ||||
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Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 235 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.
(And there are some 40 more links to political media of the past week now posted at Hominid Views.)
Please join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by earlier for dinner.
Who knew he had it in him? When state Rep. Leo Berman (R-TX) starts spewing Birfer Conspiracies and Stuff, Anderson Cooper goes all fact-checky on his ass (via TPM):
Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 235 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.
The TSA gives some advice to Goldy for his return trip….
(There are about 40 more links to media from the past week in politics at Hominid Views.)
Almost there…
The 2010 election vote tally is finally over in Washington state. Yesterday was the deadline for counties to certify results. So there is a bit of unfinished blogging business.
Throughout the election season, I posted analyses of just about all the polls in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Washington’s highest profile real estate salesperson, Dino Rossi (R). There were some ups and downs in the poll, but mostly ups for Murray and downs for Rossi. Our would-be Senator from Wingnutopia only led in three of the fifteen polls taken after the first of October:
We saw countless examples of a breathless media describing a close finish based on flip-flopping polls, and apparently ignoring that Murray led in eleven of the last fifteen polls that included one tie. How close was it in the end?
Murray took 52.36% of the vote and Rossi took 47.64%. That is, Murray won by a sizable +4.72%. That’s nearly five percent.
I find good news and bad in this final result. After analyzing the last poll in the race, I wrote:
Make of it what you will. The polls say it is a tie or a very small Murray victory. So what do I think will really happen tomorrow? First, let me state that I obviously want Murray to win. Even so, in my professional life, I am a scientist, and evidence is exceedingly important to me, even if it goes against my desires or pet theories. So here goes….
As I outlined at the end of this post there is a discrepancy between live interview polls and robopolls in the Washington Senate race that has also been seen nationally. I offered an explanation (i.e. a theory) as to why the discrepancy exists. It all leads me to believe that robopolls are systematically underestimating Murray’s performance in this race. If the theory is correct, I expect Murray to come away with about a +5% advantage over Rossi after all the votes are counted. But I concede that tomorrow night, reality will confront theory.
Reality always wins.
The good news for me (I guess) is that I freakin’ nailed it! (Suck on that, Mr. Cynical!)
The bad new (and being a little more serious) is that polling cannot continue to be practiced as it has been done. While it may have been an enthusiasm gap problem that caused many robopolls to underestimate Murray’s performance earlier in the race, right near the end that pattern was a little less strong. Robopoll and some live interview polls underestimated Murray’s performance.
Interestingly, the Washington Poll was the most accurate of the late polls, predicting +4% for Murray. After that it was FOX News (+2), Marist (+1), SurveyUSA (tied), Rasmussen (-1) and Public Policy Polling (-2). (Elway and CNN/Time/OR did their last polls three weeks out and got +8 and +13, but we have no gold standard that far out—i.e. an election—as a three to eight point decline in three weeks cannot be ruled out.)
So what was it? The other possibility causing polls to lowball Murray’s lead was “the cell phone problem.” The problem has been discussed for years, but it didn’t really seem to materialize in 2008. It did in 2010 according to a new Pew study:
The number of Americans who rely solely or mostly on a cell phone has been growing for several years, posing an increasing likelihood that public opinion polls conducted only by landline telephone will be biased. A new analysis of Pew Research Center pre-election surveys conducted this year finds that support for Republican candidates was significantly higher in samples based only on landlines than in dual frame samples that combined landline and cell phone interviews. The difference in the margin among likely voters this year is about twice as large as in 2008.
Across three Pew Research polls conducted in fall 2010 […] the GOP held a lead that was on average 5.1 percentage points larger in the landline sample than in the combined landline and cell phone sample.
The bottom line: the cell phone problem can no longer be ignored.
(Cross posted at Hominid Views.)
It is freakin’ cold out there…even for this Midwest boy. So dig out your parka and grab your boots and mittens. It’s time for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet 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 243 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.
Please join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by even earlier and enjoy some dinner.
Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 250 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.
(There are more than thirty links to media from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)
The election has come and gone and most of the smoke has cleared. So please join us tonight for an evening of post-election debriefings and celebrations under the influence. We meet at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Some of us will be there much earlier to watch discuss election returns ballot counts over dinner.
Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 250 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.
Roy Zimmerman has updated his song Vote Republican
(And there are plenty more media from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)
Election day is here! So vote. And then join us for an evening of election returns under the influence. We meet at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Some of us will be there much earlier to watch election returns over dinner.
The Move On folks will be joining us tonight. No doubt their RepubliCorp friends will tag along and cheer for the best candidates money can buy.
My Girl’s a Republican from jeff on Vimeo.
Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 250 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.
Looking for place to drop-off your ballot? Or looking for an accessible voting center?
Here is a map for King County.
Start here to find ’em in the rest of the state.
Another poll has been released today in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and real estate tycoon-turned-perennial-candidate Dino Rossi (R). The FOX News poll taken on 30 October on 1,000 likely Washington voters (for a 3% MOE) has Patty Murray leading Rossi 49% to 47%.
That’s very interesting, because earlier today, I reported on a Public Policy Polling poll that had Rossi in the lead by +2%. Both were robopolls.
My usual Monte Carlo analysis of this poll has Murray wining 671,871 times, whereas Rossi wins 319,994 times. In other words, this poll alone gives Murray a 67.7% probability of winning to Rossi’s 32.3% chance.
Combining the last seven polls—all taken over the past two weeks—gives a total of 6,371 “votes” to work with. Of these, Murray received 3,073 (48.2%) of “votes” and Rossi received 3,052 (47.9%). The Monte Carlo analysis has Murray winning 568,596 simulated elections to Rossi’s 427,966 wins. That is, the polls support a Murray victory by 57.1% and a Rossi victory by 42.9%.
The result is close! Neither analysis presented here can be considered outside the margin of error. Here is, what I believe is, the final graph for this race: the last couple of months of polling results:
Make of it what you will. The polls say it is a tie or a very small Murray victory. So what do I think will really happen tomorrow? First, let me state that I obviously want Murray to win. Even so, in my professional life, I am a scientist, and evidence is exceedingly important to me, even if it goes against my desires or pet theories. So here goes….
As I outlined at the end of this post there is a discrepancy between live interview polls and robopolls in the Washington Senate race that has also been seen nationally. I offered an explanation (i.e. a theory) as to why the discrepancy exists. It all leads me to believe that robopolls are systematically underestimating Murray’s performance in this race. If the theory is correct, I expect Murray to come away with about a +5% advantage over Rossi after all the votes are counted. But I concede that tomorrow night, reality will confront theory.
Reality always wins.
Public Policy Polling has released their final poll of the election season in the Washington Senatorial race. The poll, taken from 29-31 October on as sample of 2,055 likely voters (giving a 2% MOE) has Sen. Patty Murray trailing real estate peddler Dino Rossi 48% to 50%.
While this is only the fourth of twenty polls taken over two months that has Rossi ahead, Rossi has led in two of the past four polls, and Murray has only led in one of them.
A Monte Carlo analysis of the PPP poll shows Murray winning 256,364 simulated elections to Rossi’s 738,506 wins. The poll provides evidence that Murray would win with a 25.8% probability to Rossi’s 74.2% probability. Since Rossi’s winning probability is under 95%, the result is, technically, a statistical tie. But don’t be fooled…Rossi has an advantage by this poll, as is clear in the distribution of simulated election outcomes:
A more complete picture of the election outcome comes by examining all polls taken over the past two weeks. There have been six polls conducted since 17 October until 31 October, and it includes all polls taken since ballots were mailed to most Washington state voters. The metapoll includes 5,371 responses, of which 2,583 are for Murray and 2,582 are for Rossi.
No kidding! They are literally tied as they can be, given the odd number of respondents who chose to “vote.” Can you say “recount!” and “paging Judge Bridges”? I think it is fair to say that this race has seen movement over the past month that has favored Rossi in dissolving Murray’s clear lead.
I’ll end this post with the raw polling picture over the past two months. In a race so close, different people will squint at this graph, view it through different ideological or partisan filters, dump polls they don’t “like”, and come to different conclusions. In fact, this race is, based on any individual poll or based on every poll taken in the past two weeks, utterly indistinguishable from a tie.
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