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As I mentioned here and here, we have been treated to two new polls today in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D) and Dino Rossi (R).

A SurveyUSA was a robopoll taken on 678 likely voters (3.8 MOE) from 24-27 October and has Rossi and Murray tied up at 47% each. The KCTS/KPLU/Washington Poll poll used live interviews of 500 registered voters (4.3 MOE) taken from 18-28 October, and has Murray leading 49% to 45%.

In some sense, both of these polls are older than yesterday’s Rasmussen robopoll of 750 likely voters (4.0 MOE) taken completely on the 26th of October that has Rossi up +1% (48% to 47%). Therefore, the only reasonable thing to do is combine all three polls into one meta-poll and do a Monte Carlo analysis.

The combined 1,928 “votes” are split 916 for Murray (47.5%), 904 for Rossi (46.9%) and 108 (5.6%) for neither candidate. From a million simulated elections at these proportions and sizes, we learn that Murray wins 579,294 times and Rossi wins 414,495 times. In sum, these three most recent polls support a Murray victory with a 58.3% probability and a Rossi win with a 41.7% probability. This is very close to a tie (statistically, it is a tie), but Murray has a slight edge.

My usual near-election practice is to analyze all polls taken in the past two weeks. There are six such polls:

	Start	End			%	%	%
Poll	date	date	Size	MOE	Murray	Rossi	Diff
Rasmussen	26-Oct	26-Oct	750	4.0	47	48	R+1
SurveyUSA	24-Oct	27-Oct	678	3.8	47	47	0
WA Poll	18-Oct	28-Oct	500	4.3	49	45	D+4
Rasmussen	17-Oct	17-Oct	750	4.0	49	46	D+3
Marist	14-Oct	17-Oct	589	4.0	48	47	D+1
PPP	14-Oct	16-Oct	1873	2.3	49	47	D+2

The resulting meta-poll has a total of 5,140 “votes,” of which 2,484 go to Murray (48.3%), 2,406 go to Rossi (46.8%), and 250 go away. From a million simulated elections, Murray wins 785,190 times and Rossi wins 211,969 times. Thus, from the evidence found in polls taken over the past two weeks, we find that Murray has a 78.7% probability of winning and Rossi has a 21.3% probability of winning.

Statistically, the race is a tie because the probability of winning is under 95%, but the odds do favor Murray a little bit.

According to recent polls, I-1107, which would repeal a temporary two-cent per can tax on soda pop, is likely to pass after the soft drink industry spent a record $17 million promoting the initiative. Which I’m sure means the soft drink industry is laughing at how stupid and gullible Washington voters are. Laughing all the way to the bank.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R81wF0yPvCo[/youtube]

King 5 is reporting on a new SurveyUSA poll today in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D) and perennial candidate Dino Rossi (R).

The poll has the race tied up at 47%. This is a robopoll of 678 likely voters with a margin of error of 3.8%. More analysis to come….

This morning KPLU reported on a new poll from KCTS/KPLU/Washington Poll in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D) and real estate opportunist Dino Rossi (R). The poll has results presented in a couple of ways.

Among registered voters Murray leads Rossi 49% to 45%. However when a likely voter screen is used, Murray leads Rossi 51% to 45%. The survey was done using live interviews and has a margin of error of 4.0%. Full details on the poll will be available around noon. I’ll do a more in-depth analysis of the poll (and possibly another poll) later today.

I swear, if I hear one more Beck-addled teabagger railing against the “tyranny” of the Obama administration and the Democratic controlled Congress, I’m gonna stomp somebody’s head or something.

See, this government is not a “tyranny;” it’s what we call a “democracy.” You know, like when voters go to the polls and elect the government they want? For example, if the Republicans seize control of Congress next week through free and fair elections, I won’t call that “tyranny.” “Idiocy,” yes. “Mind-fuckingly stupid, reactionary, irrational, fear-fueled flapdoodle,” sure.

But tyranny? No… I’d call it just a really bad election season from my party’s perspective. You know, democracy at work and all that. However poorly.

But only a self-delusional sore loser would call it “tyranny.”

Tonight at 7:15pm the Cannabis Defense Coalition is hosting a legislative forum in their SoDo headquarters with Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles and City Councilman Nick Licata to discuss the bill being introduced next session to create a working dispensary system in the state. There will be a live webcast of the forum at this site.

I’m impressed with the amount of work that CDC’s volunteers have put into this space. Below the fold are two pictures from the newly renovated Cannabis Resource Center.

[Read more…]

My ballot was mailed earlier this week, but unlike Goldy, I was torn over I-1100. I’d really like to see the state’s monopoly over liquor sales go away. The state store system is archaic, and one can easily look at state-by-state statistics to see that states with privatized liquor sales don’t have more problems with drunk driving (one of the bogus scare tactics that proponents have been using to get people to vote against it). There’s an argument to be made that underage people could potentially access liquor easier, but I think that’s a problem that can be solved with better enforcement and larger fines.

On the other hand, I wasn’t convinced that I-1100 adequately addressed the drop in revenue that would occur from dismantling the system. And in a year where our revenue problems aren’t showing any signs of improving, this outweighed my desire to move to a regulatory system that was more customer- and retailer-friendly. I ended up voting against it.

I’m currently reading Last Call by Daniel Okrent, a book detailing the history of alcohol prohibition. What’s interesting is that when the late 19th century movement to ban alcohol was gathering steam, the movement ran into a similar problem:

By 1910 the federal government was drawing more than $200 million a year from the bottle and the keg – 71 percent of all internal revenue, and more than 30 percent of federal revenue overall. Only external revenue – the tariff – provided a larger share of the federal budget, and by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the tariff’s continuation was the most intensely debated issue in American public life. It would be hard enough to fund the cost of government without the tariff and impossible without a liquor tax. Given that you wouldn’t collect much revenue from a liquor tax in a nation where there was no liquor, this might have seemed an insurmountable problem for the Prohibition movement. Unless, that is, you could weld the drive for Prohibition to the campaign for another reform, the creation of a tax on incomes.

It may make us feel uncomfortable to have our budgets rely on revenue generated by the sale of alcohol, but that was the reality then and it’s the reality now. In fact, Okrent points out that taxes on liquor helped fund each of the wars of the 19th century, from the War of 1812 to the Spanish-American War. Right now, our state relies on the revenue it generates from controlling the sale of liquor. I’d be perfectly happy with breaking that dependency, but it doesn’t happen from wishful thinking alone. It requires figuring out how to restructure our tax system to allow for us to replace that lost revenue. With the outcome of I-1053 and I-1098 about to be decided as well – each having a large impact on how our tax system is structured, it’s anyone’s guess whether or not we’ll be able to do this in the near future – and that was too much uncertainty for me this time around.

We have fallen into a relatively dry spell for polling in the race between Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and real estate salesman Dino Rossi (R). Rasmussen has now released their latest Washington state poll showing Rossi leading Murray 48% to 47%. The poll of 750 likely voters was taken on Tuesday and has a margin of error of 4%.

This poll breaks Murray’s streak of eight consecutive polls with the lead. Before today’s release, the most recently taken poll was also by Rasmussen (17th Oct), and showed Murray with a +3% lead over Rossi (49% to 46%).

Using my usual Monte Carlo analysis employing 1,000,000 simulated elections, we find from the newest Rasmussen poll that Murray wins 415,950 elections to Rossi’s 573,763 wins. Thus, evidence from this poll alone suggests that, if the election had been held last Tuesday, Rossi would have a 58% probability of beating Murray to Murray’s 42% probability of beating Rossi. Given that the winning probability is under 95%, a statistician would tell us that the results suggest a statistical tie. Here is the distribution of simulated election outcomes:

A more comprehensive picture of the election emerges by combining all polls from the past two weeks. Besides the two Rasmussen polls already mentioned, we include the Marist poll taken from 14-17 October on 589 likely voters, giving Murray a +1% lead and a Public Policy Polling poll taken from 14-16 October on 1,873 likely voters and gave Murray a +2% lead. (Other polls in this race started the survey prior to the 14th of October so aren’t included.)

The combined meta-poll has 3,962 “votes” of which 1,920 go to Murray (48.5%), 1,862 go to Rossi (47.0%), and 180 (4.5%) just go away. In the Monte Carlo analysis, Murray wins 746,418 times and Rossi wins 249,788 times. In other words, the four polls suggest that Murray would win an election held over the past two weeks with a probability of 74.9%, and Rossi would win with a probability of 25.1%.

This collection of four recent polls gives the appearance that the race has tightened up a bit (compare this to the 98% win probability for Murray from pooled polls early last week). Keep in mind, however, that three of the four most recent polls are robopolls. As I discussed previously, there is a strong trend of robopolls showing Murray under performing relative to live-interview polls. Perhaps we will get a live-interview poll tomorrow….

Still no apology from the Seattle Times to our immigrant community for our sole daily’s credulous participation in the AP’s smear of OneAmerica Votes‘ immigrant voter outreach program.

Of course, considering this story was unfolding in its own backyard, you’d think the Times might consider doing a little original reporting of its own, rather than just copying and pasting the AP’s inflammatory headline: “In Washington, illegal immigrants canvassing for Democrats.” And if they had, they might of spoken to volunteers like Rim Abera, a 20 year-old college student and Franklin High grad.

Rim’s family, originally from Eritrea, came to Seattle from the Sudan when she was a baby. But despite achieving citizenship nine years later, her parents never registered to vote until 2008, when then-18-year-old Rim became energized through her work with OneAmerica Votes.

That’s the story the AP and the Seattle Times won’t tell you, and that’s the story the righties truly fear. For if more immigrants like Rim and her family do register to vote, and more of them show up at the polls and cast their ballots, well, that just doesn’t bode well for the right wing agenda.

A new poll released today shows Democrat Scott McAdams surging ahead of Republican Joe Miller 29% to 23% in the Alaska U.S. Senate race. This is the first poll to show McAdams leading Miller; incumbent Lisa Murkowski, running as a write-in candidate, leads the field with 34% support, with 13% remaining undecided.

Could Seattle’s former Yukon colony soon sport two Democratic senators? I wouldn’t bet money on it, but even a Murkowski victory would be a big blow to Borg Queen Sarah Palin on her home turf.

UPDATE:
Mudflats’ server is clearly having trouble keeping up with the traffic, but Markos has more details and analysis.

If Republican Jaime Herrera is expecting to run away with the election in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, she better pick up the pace, for just a week out from election day, Democrat Denny Heck appears to have the momentum.

According to a new KING-5/SurveyUSA poll, Herrera now leads Heck 50% to 46%, with a +/- 4% margin of error. That’s a big difference from just two weeks ago when Herrera led by a 53% to 42% margin.

Cross-tabs aren’t available yet, but I was particularly intrigued by this analysis from SurveyUSA editor Jay Leve:

“Democrats today are more likely than in 3 previous polls to identify themselves as certain voters, and the party breakdown of this poll reflects that.”

Huh. That sounds to me like the expected Republican enthusiasm gap is beginning to narrow. And if that’s true, that would bode well for Democrats up and down the ticket. (Or at the very least, bode less ill.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y3pic_Sny4[/youtube]

John Koster, the Republican challenger in Washington’s 2nd Congressional District doesn’t like to talk about Social Security “privatization,” unless, you know, he’s convinced he’s talking to a room full of fellow Republicans.

And that was exactly the situation on February 16, 2010, when Koster not only explained how confident he was that privatization would work, but even boasted about advocating for it a decade early:

“Individual retirement accounts will work. I advocated for those ten years ago, and you look at where Medicare and Social Security and those entitlement programs are going to soon consume nearly twenty percent of our annual federal budget. Twenty percent. And phasing those individual retirement accounts in will work.”

Of course, that’s total bullshit. Social Security ran a $180 billion surplus last year—the only federal program to run a surplus—and has an accumulated reserve of over $2.4 trillion. If we do absolutely nothing at all to “fix” Social Security it can continue to pay full benefits through 2037, and benefits at only a slightly reduced level indefinitely thereafter. So when Republicans like Koster talk about Social Security being a drain on the federal budget, they’re really talking about the federal government’s obligation to pay back the money it borrowed from the Social Security trust fund.

Koster’s solution? Privatize Social Security and then gradually eliminate federal benefits for retirees. That’s what he means by “phasing in” individual retirement accounts. In other words, he’d rather push retirees into the maws of Wall Street so that he can extend the Bush tax cuts to Wall Street billionaires and the rest of the top two percent of American households.

Meaning this isn’t just class warfare, but intergenerational warfare. Something WA-02 voters of all ages might want to consider as they mark their ballots in the race between Koster and Democratic incumbent Rep. Rick Larsen

In talking up his odds of defeating incumbent U.S. Sen. Patty Murray despite having lost two statewide races himself over the past six years, Republican challenger Dino Rossi likes to point out that he’d previously been handicapped by running in a presidential year. Republicans tend to do better in non-presidential years, when turnout is lower.

(I’ve always found this a curiously revealing assertion for a Republican to make, as it implicitly acknowledges that Republican candidates and their policies are markedly less popular with the general public than the results at the polls might indicate, and that Republicans thus benefit from lower voter participation. You’d think Republicans might be a little embarrassed by this admission, but oddly, no. But then, that’s a subject for another post.)

To some extent Rossi is right. About 25% fewer voters cast ballots in WA’s 2006 U.S. Senate race between Maria Cantwell and Mike McGavick than they did in the 2004 race between Murray and George Nethercutt, and the turnout drop-off between 2008 and 2010 is likely to be even greater. This should favor Rossi regardless of the political climate, as Democrats as a whole tend to be less reliable voters than Republicans, so when turnout drops, it almost always disproportionately hurts Democratic candidates.

But the question is, by how much?

For turnout is only one of many factors in an election, and while presidential year turnout certainly worked against WA Republicans in both 2004 and 2008, Rossi himself enjoyed the unique advantage of running against Gov. Chris Gregoire, who has never proven to be particularly popular, even amongst Democrats.

Patty Murray, on the other hand… well… folks just seem to like her.

For example, take a look at the 2004 race, a presidential year when both Murray and Gregoire were on the ballot. Murray actually outpolled John Kerry at the top of the ticket, receiving about 3% more votes than his 1,510,201 total. But Gregoire pulled in about 9% fewer votes than Kerry, and almost 12% fewer than Murray, only 1,373,361 total once all the recounts and court challenges were done.

And in 2008, even though she went on to defeat Rossi by a comfortable 6.5% margin, Gregoire once again tallied only about 91% as many votes as the Democrat at the top of the ticket, President Barack Obama.

That’s a pretty substantial drop-off, suggesting that Gregoire’s relative lack of likability made Rossi look more competitive than he otherwise might have against somebody like, say, Patty Murray. Who, you know, he’s actually facing off against this time around.

So yeah, turnout is going to be substantially lower in 2010 than it was in 2008, and that favors Rossi. But Murray is simply better liked by Democrats and independents than Gregoire ever was, and that’s a factor that by comparison, works strongly to Rossi’s disadvantage. And it’s a disadvantage I’ve never believed he could overcome.