There are rumors that Rob McKenna is a Podcasting Liberally aficionado. Go figure!

The rumors have come to light following a smear campaign against Democratic Secretary of State candidate Jason Osgood, who is running against Sam Reed. The tale is long and somewhat convoluted, but I have an unimpeachable source for the rumor: me. And the source of the smear campaign? Well…as the producer of Podcasting Liberally that rumor traces it back to…me. Or, stated more concisely, the smear originated from Rob McKenna’s misunderstanding of a podcast I produced, which McKenna is rumored (by me) to regularly enjoy.

Allow me to explain.

Last Friday, Washblog front-paged a diary by jeffuppy that traces the origins of the smear, so we begin our rumor/smear adventure last Wednesday at, of all places, a meeting of the 34th District Democrats:

Part of the night’s agenda included approval of proposals to donate money to Democratic candidates for statewide office.

…I stood and introduced a motion to contribute to Democratic Secretary of State candidate Jason Osgood. I expected little or no opposition….However, to my surprise, King County Council Member Dow Constantine stood to speak in opposition. Constantine was clearly upset with Osgood, and proceeded to trash him before the group. His anger was focused on public statements he claimed Osgood has recently been making to the effect that King County uses bar-codes on ballots which allow votes to be tracked back to voters. King County uses no such system….
[…]

…Jason Osgood has never said any of the things about King County ballots that he was accused of saying. In fact, Osgood has consistently and publicly said the exact opposite – that King County does not use bar-codes and that this is a good thing.

The donation motion did not pass, likely on account of the information rumor that Constantine had been so helpful in sharing spreading.

Afterward Jeffuppy asked Constantine about the rumor, and he produced an email to the King County Council from Sherril Huff, the King County Director of Elections:

…misinformation has been shared at local public meetings as well as editorial boards regarding how timing marks on ballots are used in King County. Unfortunately a candidate running for office publicly misstated that King County ballots can be traced back to the voter using a bar code on the ballot.

Not fully satisfied by this email that was all spiced-up in bureaucrateese, Jeffuppy asked Huff for a plain-language translation including when and where she had heard Osgood make these statements. But she had not actually heard the statements. Rather, Nick Handy, State Director of Elections (an office that under the Secretary of State’s office), had shared this information with her.

So Jeffuppy asked Handy the same “when and where” question. Remarkably, Handy didn’t have firsthand knowledge either.

He had simply been told about them, he said, by Attorney General Rob McKenna and by Eastside State Representative Fred Jarret. They had in turn been told about them by unnamed citizens.

That adds two more generations to the rumor.

Chad Shue writing at the Seattle Examiner summarizes the chain rumor thusly:

So there you have it. Based on unchecked statements by “unnamed citizens” allegedly passed on by Republican office holders to the chief deputy of the incumbent Republican candidate for the office that oversees state elections, the Director of Elections for King County has (hopefully unwittingly) aided in the effort to undermine the credibility of the Democratic candidate for that office.

Or, more succinctly: it was a “he said that she said that he said that they said that people said that Jason Osgood said…” chain rumor.

Last June 10th, just as his campaign was starting up, we had had Jason Osgood on the weekly Podcasting Liberally panel. If he was going to make a misstatement on the record, this early appearance would be the place. I’ve pulled out the relevant segment where Jason discusses King County and the bar code controversy (which is really about San Juan county):

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/secretballot2.mp3]

Osgood does mention King and San Juan counties in the same breath. I can see how someone might mistakenly think that Jason was flagging King county as one of the problem counties…particularly, if that someone is a closeted Podcasting Liberally buff secretly listening to the podcast in the privacy of men’s room stall in one ear while maintaining vigilance with the other ear. (As an aside, the “men’s room” stuff isn’t officially part of the rumor…I just threw that in as a hypothetical.)

Such an interpretation of Osgood’s words would be mistaken, as is clear from the transcript:

You know, I have studied King County the most, and Washington to a lesser extent. And nationally, I’m not very interested in Florida, New Mexico. I know that there are problems, but we are looking at King County. We’re looking a San Juan county and the issues that we’re facing here.

We have a constitutional right to a secret ballot. That means no one can determine how we vote—should not be able to determine—not possible. And in San Juan county and other counties using the same system, they have a unique bar code that is linked to your voter ID which is tracked—your mail ballot is tracked—all the way through to tabulation.

Jason mentions King county in passing but only before he raises the secret ballot issue, after which he only mentions San Juan county.

As long as politicians blissfully pass along unverified, fifth-generation rumors that tangibly cost a candidate money and support, I’d like to get in on the game. So, based on a simple plausibility argument (i.e. with no violations of the laws of physics), I offer a new rumor that sheds shocking new light on the fifth generation rumor about Osgood. My rumor is that Rob McKenna is a huge fan of Podcasting Liberally. That explains everything, because he obviously listened to our podcast, and simply misunderstood what Osgood was saying. McKenna started the Osgood rumor chain by passing his misunderstanding on to Handy and Huff.

Yeah, sure…I’ve got no real proof that Rob McKenna really enjoys the podcast—perhaps that is a stretch. By the standards of our esteemed politicians, however, spreading a rumor that McKenna enjoys the podcast is pretty tame stuff. And let me say, it is a real honor to have Rob as a fan of the podcast…I appreciate the patronage, even if it occasionally catalyzes a false rumor.

Oh…and Rob McKenna is a Muslim.

The most polled gubernatorial race in the country this election season, hands down, is Washington state. The rematch between Dino Rossi (“G.O.P. Party”) and Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) has had 36 polls taken, starting in August of 2005, just two months after a court declined to overturn Gregoire’s victory.

And now we have one new SurveyUSA poll to add to the collection. The poll of 714 people, taken on the 11th and 12th of August, shows Gregoire leading Rossi by a slim 50% to 48%.

The +2% advantage for Gregoire is smaller than the +4% found a week ago in a Rasmussen poll. It is much smaller than the +12% found in a late July Strategic Vision poll. But it matches the +2% found by a late July Strategic Vision poll.

That makes four polls all taken within the last three weeks. As can be seen in this figure of polling over the last three months, the race has scarcely moved provided one ignores those Elway polls.

Mr. Elway has offered a defense of his poll numbers, perhaps in response to a somewhat “underinformed” Eric Earling commentary. Elway discusses sampling differences (registered, known voters versus random digit dialing used by national pollsters), different modes of communications (humans used by Elway versus computer used by SurveyUSA and Rasmussen), question wording, and party identification (Elway uses the Washington state ballot labels). I think Elway’s arguments are all reasonable, and given Elway’s smaller sample size, I am not surprised to see this magnitude of difference between Elway compared to Rasmussen and SurveyUSA. Still, I’m not going to declare that Elway is “right” and the others are “wrong.” There is simply no way to know which pollsters have (statistical) bias until one can observe the performance against a number of actual elections. My preferred strategy is to take ’em all, and combine multiple polls that are close together in time, and hope any biases cancel.

A Monte Carlo analysis of just the current SurveyUSA poll (methods) suggests that, if an election were held now, Gregoire would have a 66.6% chance of winning and Rossi would have a 33.4% chance of winning. Here is the distribution of vote outcomes based on the polling information:

The more interesting analysis, however, includes all four of the polls taken in the last three weeks. This seems reasonable if we are allowed to assume that voter opinion has remained relatively static over these three weeks (i.e. no breaking scandals, “Macaca” moments, natural disasters, etc.)

The four pooled polls mentioned above give Gregoire 49.3% of the “votes” and Rossi 44.5% of the “votes”, with 6.2% undecided. There were 2,272 people surveyed who selected either Rossi or Gregoire. The Monte Carlo results suggests that Gregoire would win an election held now with a 95.9% probability and Rossi would win with a 4.1% probability. Here is the distribution of vote outcomes for the combined analysis:

Here are a couple of observations that back up these results. The last time Rossi led in a poll was in February. There have been 16 polls taken since then. One of those polls was a tie and Gregoire led in the other 15. Before that, one has to go back another seven polls, back to November 2006, before finding this poll in which Rossi led.

The take-home message is that (1) Gregoire has repeatedly held the lead in this race. It is highly unlikely that this has happened by chance (i.e. the lead is almost certainly real). (2) There has been very little movement in the polling numbers for Rossi or Gregroire over the last 1.5 years. (3) If the non-movement continues, Gregoire will almost certainly win a second term.

The appearance of Gov. Christine Gregoire at Drinking Liberally last night offered me the perfect opportunity for some gonzo-journalism. All politicians are alike, right? So in the interest of being “fair and balanced” in my journalistic endeavors I pulled out my video camera….

Dino Rossi has been doing a lot of whining about attack ads. But then he literally goes on the attack. It almost justifies something like this…

Join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. Officially, we start at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some folks show up early for Dinner.

Tonight’s activity will primarily consist of manhandling and tossing out anyone trying to videotape our activities tonight.

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area this evening, check out McCranium for the local Drinking Liberally. Otherwise, check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

Update: We had a couple of unannounced visitors at Drinking Liberally tonight:

Horses Ass and Sound Politics… The yin and yang of Washington’s political blogosphere? Or, maybe, fighting the same battles from slightly different perspectives?

Crosscut reports, you decide.

A new Rassmussen poll of the Washington state gubernatorial race shows Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) leading challenger Dino Rossi (“G.O.P. Party”) 50% to 46%, with 5% “undecided”. The poll had 500 respondents and was taken on August 6th. The margin of error is 4.5%

This race is a rematch of the 2004 closest gubernatorial race in history that Gregoire won by 133 votes after a count, a mandatory recount, one recount requested by the Democrats, and a failed Republican lawsuit challenging the election. (Rossi ran as a Republican in 2004. This year he is running under the “G.O.P. Party” label.)

The close 2004 election led to extraordinarily early polling for the 2008 race. In the first 15 polls conducted from August 2005 until November 2006, Rossi led Gregoire, and always with over 50%. But with this current Rasmussen poll, Rossi has not held the lead for 16 consecutive polls—going back to February 2008:

Also, Gregoire has now polled at 50% or better in the raw percentages for the last two polls (the graph shows the normalized percentages).

My usual analysis, a simulation of a million elections of 500 people each, shows Gregoire winning 735,981 times and Rossi winning 253,856 times. This suggests that, if an election were held today, Gregoire would have a 74.4% chance of winning and Rossi would have a 25.6% change.

The simulation yields a distribution of votes that looks like this:

Rasmussen also polled for the Obama–McCain race in Washington state. Obama leads McCain 54% to 42%. Obama’s +12% advantage matches the +12% in the previous poll, an Elway poll from late July, and the +11% of a Strategic Vision poll taken just before that. In fact, this race has largely stabilized in Obama’s favor after a weak spell in March:

(Cross posted at Hominid Views)

The Stranger’s Dan Savage finds some not-so-hidden meaning in “G.O.P. party” candidate Dino Rossi’s “too big, too hard” ad.

So he asks The Stranger’s Kelly O for something of a “truth in advertising” make-over:

As if McCain’s recent series of petty attacks on Obama aren’t enough to paint the old fart as pathetic. Now the McCain campaign is paying people to troll for him:

People who sign up for McCain’s program receive reward points each time they place a favorable comment on one of the listed Web sites (subject to verification by McCain’s webmasters). The points can be traded for prizes, such as books autographed by McCain, preferred seating at campaign events, even a ride with the candidate on his bus, known as the Straight Talk Express, according to campaign spokesman Brian Rogers.

The sign-up page, complete with talking points du jour and a report form, is located here.

I hope it works! I mean, nothing says “credible candidate” like the same talking point being dumped over and over again in every comment thread that even peripherally mentions McCain. I mean…it worked for Ron Paul didn’t it? (And those lovable whack-jobs weren’t even getting paid for their robo-commenting.)

I’m encouraging everyone (yes…even you) to get a piece of the action. I mean, the McCain paraphernalia memorabilia will be highly prized some day. Besides, how many of McCain’s supporters actually know about The Internets AND know that it’s a Google in order to find the “Spread The Word” page?

Therefore, by joining in the fun, you not only spread your own philosophy of McCain and his talking points, but you earn cool stuff and help the economy by enticing the McCain staff to hire additional webmasters to wade through thousands and thousands of comment reports.

The easiest way to comment is to simply copy the talking points verbatim. But my own recommendation is this:

John McCain is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

What could be more positive then that? Hundreds of thousands of times in blog comment threads across the land. Day after day.

Got another idea? Leave your suggested message in the comment thread. And then sign-up, get busy, and start earning cool stuff!

Join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. We begin at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some of us will show up early for Dinner.

Tonight’s theme song might just have to be a torturous number by the most recently declared presidential candidate:

For tonight’s activity, we’ll pass around and evaluate McCain’s recently announced health care plan:

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area this evening, check out McCranium for the local Drinking Liberally. Otherwise, check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

Elway Research has released a new Washington state poll that includes some interesting races. The big one, of course, is the Washington state gubernatorial race.

The poll shows Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) leading challenger Dino Rossi (GOP-Party) 52% to 36%, with 12% “undecided”. This relatively small poll of 405 people was taken from July 27th to July 31st, and has a margin of error of 5%

This is the fifth July poll in this race. Rossi has led in none of them. In fact, Rossi has not led in a poll since the end of February—going back 14 polls.

As usual, I’ll analyze the results using a Monte Carlo approach (1,000,000 simulated elections with 405 voters, but this time the analysis is modified [upon prodding by scotto and Richard Pope] to include an additional uncertainty term. Technically, now I am drawing counts of votes from a beta-trinomial distribution and using uniform [uninformative] prior distributions on the preference probabilities).

Result 1: Gregoire won 992,024 of the elections and Rossi won 7,115 times. This suggests that, if an election were held now, Gregoire would have a 99.3% chance of winning and Rossi would have a 0.7% of winning.

Here is a plot showing the distribution of votes in the million elections (blue bars are wins for Gregoire and red bars are Rossi wins):

You may recall that there was a recent Strategic Vision poll of this race that gave Gregoire a slimmer 47% to 45% lead. That poll was taken from 25th July to 27th July. Given that the Elway and Strategic Vision polls were taken back-to-back, a combined analysis would seem in order.

Result 2: This time, Gregoire won 955,951 elections and Rossi won 41,842 of the elections. The analysis using both polls suggests that Gregoire would win with a 95.8% probability and Rossi would win with a 4.2% probability. A statistician would point out that, even using both polls, Gregoire’s win is slightly outside the margin of error.

Here is the plot showing the distribution of votes in the million elections for the combined polls:

Elway Research also polled for the presidential election in Washington state. Sen. Barack Obama (D) leads Sen. John McCain (R), 47% to 35%. This +12% margin is notable because, if I’m not mistaken, this is the first time that Gregoire has polled better against Rossi than Obama has against McCain.

Other results of note in the Elway poll include the Commissioner of Public Lands race where Peter Goldmark (D) barely leads incumbent Doug Sutherland (R) 31% to 30% (well within the margin of error, obviously). In the Attorney General race, incumbent Rob McKenna (R) leads John Ladenburg (D) 41% to 30%.

(Cross posted at Hominid Views)

(…and almost ninety other media clips from the past week in politics are posted over at Hominid Views.)

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asks:

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

Paris Hilton and Britney Spears aren’t just “sexually provocative.” These are women whose celebrity, to a great extent, was shaped by very public airing of their sexual exploits and parts. These women have become cultural icons of the infamy that arises from celebrity mixed with unrestrained sexuality.

At the same time, images of nubile, promiscuous women juxtaposed with Barack Obama churn up stereotypes and primal fears held, largely beneath the surface, by many Americans: Black men with their uncontrolled sexuality are out to steal and rape “our” women.

Don’t fool yourself. Hilton and Spears were not simply chosen because of their celebrity. The same ad makes no sense whatsoever with other scandalous celebs substituted in for the starlets.

Take Martha Stewart…a scandal-ridden white woman who is closer in age to Obama than is Spears. Umm…no, doesn’t work. The ad becomes incomprehensible. But why a woman? How about pairing up Keith Richards and Steven Tyler, celebrities who are both closer in age to Obama than are Hilton and Spears, and have well publicized substance abuse problems and public personas of hypersexual rockers. Obama has confessed to drug use as a youth, so isn’t the Richards/Tyler imagery a much better way to paint Obama as an empty celeb?

This doesn’t work at all. We expect our rock stars to engage in hedonistic self-destruction and take on a hyper-sexual persona. It’s in the job description. Obama, by comparison would come out as clean cut, self-restrained, and rigorously responsible. Besides, they look old. The ad would invoke universal puzzlement (if not ridicule).

Let’s try Michael Jackson, who matches the Hilton/Spears celeb-gone-wild bits, but has the advantage of demographic accuracy: Jackson is male, is close to Obama in age, and is black. Surely, this must make for a better ad than using much younger, white women to exemplify indiscretions of celebrity.

This still doesn’t make any sense. Nobody believes Obama is on the Wacko-Jacko track, which is obviously pathologically bizarre. But, when it comes right down to it, nobody really believes that Obama is on the Hilton or Spears pathologically slightly-less-bizarre tracks, either. The analogy is deeply flawed. Obama has become a celebrity as a result of his skills as a politician and orator, not because his sexual imagery was successfully marketed. An certainly not because he was born, like Hilton, fabulously rich.

The fact is, the Hilton/Spears imagery fails any kind of test as a sensible analogy. (This is one reason why the media is all abuzz about it.) Superficially, the ad was supposed to paint Obama as a shallow celeb. The real function of the ad is identical to that of the infamous NRSC hit advertisement on Harold Ford : frame Obama as the frightening “sexual savage.”

Why would the McCain campaign use hateful, racist messages in a political contest against a sitting U.S. Senator whose only scandalous vice is chewing Nicorette? Because the tactic still works, as was demonstrated by the Republican’s smear ads against Harold Ford in 2006.

One thing that emerges clearly from this episode: John McCain has become a shell of the man he was in 2000.