Tedger.com

So there has been quite a bit of hullabaloo about if President-Elect Obama will use e-mail, and more specifically his BlackBerry, in the White House. As far as I can tell this seems to have started with a piece in the New York Times. It’s branched out into a number of publications, many have suggested he’ll have to give it up, that this is part of being President, some say he shouldn’t. The concerns have centered around the Presidential Records Act and security concerns. These are bogus concerns. There is no technological reason the President’s e-mails can’t be properly stored and archived. There is also no reason to think that sensitive information can’t be protected electronically, frankly you could just avoid emailing sensitive information but use e-mail for non-sensitive issues. Bogus concerns trumped up by those concerned with change.

As someone who studies politics, as both a practiced human activity and as social science, there is one thing that is clear, politics cannot happen in isolation. Isolation is the realm of tyranny and rulers, not the realm of politics and governors. To be a good President, to truly represent us as a nation, one must be connected to the public and to it’s politics. The Founding Fathers created the United States Government as an institution that protected and enshrined politics as the center of the way we govern ourselves. They modeled, in principal, our government off of classical Greek ideas of the polis, the public space. A place reserved for politics to keep out tyranny, a place where all citizens¹ are equal in their potential for excellence. A good politician in both the polis and in American Government are connected to the public, this connection allows them the flexibility and capability to act.

In the days of the early American Republic being connected to the public literally meant opening the doors of the White House. In the early 20th Century it meant traveling the country by train and car to hear the voices of citizens. In the mid-20th Century it meant more, and included television as a medium of public discussion.² In the early 21st Century it means the internet, and e-mail, and BlackBerrys. For President Obama to be connected in the best possible way with the public he must have access to the communication tools of our time. The New York Times article tells us he will be the first President to have a computer at his desk int he Oval Office, this is a step in the right direction but isn’t everything, he should have every tool at his disposal. He is the President after all.

The Wall Street Journal article reminds us that we’re an increasingly connected populace, using e-mail, and IMs, and social networking. I’m not suggesting that the “Change We Need” is a President with a Facebook page (although he does have one, just not one he personally manages) just one that is connected to the world in the same ways we are. Good politicians are connected to the public, and like it or not, this is the way we increasingly connect with each other. As such it’s the way we can increasingly interact and connect with the President, and this can only mean good things for our politics, our nation, and the public.

Update: Here is exactly what I want to hear out of my President-elect.

Predictions Recap As I write this most of the news sources I can find display a map that looks like this:

Montana, Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina are too close to call and President-Elect¹ Obama has small leads in all of them. Looks like I was wrong in Georgia and North Dakota but I myself said that they were a stretch. Interestingly the longest stretch I was willing to make seems to be the one of the three President-Elect Obama might win. We’ll have to see where things are in the morning.

On a final note it looks like California Proposition 8, along with several other homosexual-rights reducing ballot measures across the country, is going to pass. I’m not entirely sure how to feel about this. I attempted to rewrite these last few sentences and have settled on this statement of lack of words, but for different reasons than above. I suppose the only thing I can really say is that things are changing and for the better and we will just have to see.

I’m absolutely exhausted right now. I spent 16 hours working at Ames Ward 4 Precinct 3 today. I helped register ~100 people, and gave ballots to probably another 90. I was the first person to vote this morning (being a poll worker has perks) and one of the last to leave. More than physical exhaustion I’m mentally exhausted. After months of reading fivethirtyeight.com, politico.com, and realclearpolitics.com I was in a near blackout when polls started closing around the country (thanks to Scott and Rachel for alleviating some of that). But it’s finally over, and America has just elected a new President.

To say that I am proud doesn’t do justice to the way that I feel. Joy, excitement, pride, and love are only a few words that I can use to attempt to describe the way that I feel about my country right now. I don’t necessarily mean the people (although they are surely part of it) but also the institutions that make up our state, the shared ideals that make us a nation, and the Constitution that defines our government. For the last eight years America has endured a President of the people that voted for him, and just those people; a President unversed in the patriotism of politics, and ignorant of pride of all people, not just those who swagger and tote a gun.

For the last eight years I’ve felt just as much anger for the people that wanted to move to Canada as those who would tell me disagreeing with my President was unpatriotic. I sincerely believe that this election would have been far more of a landslide had it not been for the divisive anti-politics of President Bush and this is just the first step in healing that wound. America has a gaping gash that must be healed, and it will take years for it to be completely whole again, but we’re on the right track to recovery.

There is no picture to accompany this post, I can’t think of one fitting enough.

Edit: Corrected a sentence in the second paragraph (needed “mean” to be a real sentence structure) that should have even made sense to exhausted me.

Whew, can it come any sooner? November 4th is only 6 2 long days away from us now. Sen. Obama is up in the polls, at his highest point ever, and it’s looking increasingly like he’s going to clinch the White House before polls even close in the central time zone (the networks might not call it till later, they don’t want to repeat 2000 or loose viewers). Hell, it’s a long shot but it’s possible we could see Democrats winning 60 seats in the Senate. In typical Democratic fashion however I hear a lot of people very wary of any positive news for Obama. This includes the Senator himself saying in a recent rally “But for those of you who are getting a little cocky I have two words for you: New Hampshire.”¹ That’s not the analogy I hear most frequently though, it’s an analogy to the crushing defeat of John Kerry in 2004.

The polling situation now isn’t anything like either of those situations however. First of all, New Hampshire wasn’t heavily polled. There were only eight days between the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Nearly everyone had their eyes on the Hawkeye state leading up to the caucuses and pollsters had little time in the field afterwards to gauge the feeling of New Hampshire voters. With less polling you are far more likely to run into statistical problems with your data. In addition to this , and I think more importantly, New Hampshire is a small state, this makes the state easier to poll but makes it far more likely that it will swing in a manner that is fast enough to be missed by polling. This is exactly what happened in New Hampshire.

What about the Kerry analogy? Well, there are two issues in the Kerry analogy. The first is that people were looking at exit polling. Exit polling has issues that over the phone polling doesn’t have. First of all you are in face to face contact with the pollster. This leads to a comfort level issue, something that results in extreme response bias. Younger, enthusiastic, and individuals with strong party affiliations are far more likely to speak to exit pollsters, also, in the case of 2004, Democrats. The other issue here is comparing apples and oranges. What we have right now are pre-election polls, not exit polls. So lets look at some trends.

Hop on over to this link. Here you see some side by side polling averages for the presidential campaign courtesy of Electoral-vote.com². Specifically lets look at the second and fourth graphs. The second graph is the number of electoral votes each candidate has by averaging polls each day ignoring states that are within 5 points. These states are far more reliable come election day and as far as I know all of these states went for their respective candidates in 2004. The second graph is all for this year. You’ll notice that Obama is above 270 electoral votes ignoring “barely” or what other places call “leaning” states. In other words by these polling averages he could loose all the close states (for EV.com these are Nevada, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, Georgia, Montana, and North Dakota³). Now look at the 2004 graph, the fourth one, notice how Kerry and Bush were no where near that 270 mark? The election in 2004 is significantly closer than it is today.

There is something that is even more significant about these graphs though. Note how stable the 2008 graph is in comparison to 2004. This isn’t because it has fewer data-points, it’s because the race was so close that pollsters had a very hard time gauging the electorate, with such a closely divided electorate the electoral vote will fluctuate wildly because a very small change can result in a swing of the entire election. The Obama numbers are steady, and pretty stable, and they’re at their highest point of the election, Kerry peaked in late July, early August, and never firmly retook the lead. With the exception of the Palin/Republican National Convention “bubble” McCain hasn’t been ahead since before the end of the Democratic primaries.

This argumentation only takes us so far and doesn’t look at what the polls aren’t telling us. One of the most frequently cited polling anomalies this cycle has been “The Bradley Effect.” The Bradley Effect is named for Tom Bradley a highly popular mayor of Las Angeles that lost the 1982 California gubernatorial race. Bradley significantly underperformed polling that had him up by a reasonably safe margin before election day. The explanation is that some voters will tell a pollster that they are willing to vote for an African-American candidate but wont follow through with it on election day. The existence of the effect at all has come into question and many who believe that it existed at one time don’t believe it exists anymore. This is supported by Barack Obama’s performance in the primaries where he actually outperformed polls by about 2 points.

There doesn’t appear to be any sort of Bradley effect any longer, Barack Obama in the primaries, Harold Ford in the Tennessee Senate race in 2006 (which was highly racially charged, if you wanted to find a Bradley effect you would have found it there), Michael Steele in the Maryland Senate race in 2006, all cases where no Bradley Effect were seen. The idea that it exists any longer is outlandish, and the fact that it doesn’t speaks volumes for the way we’ve grown as a country.

The Bradley Effect would skew results against Obama but there are factors that actually favor him that won’t appear in polls. One getting major coverage is cell phone polling. Why does it matter? Cell phones are under-polled, it’s hard to get the numbers and cell phone users are far more likely to screen their calls than landline users. Cell phone users lacking landlines and/or mostly using cell phones are also overwhelmingly young. When you effectively have a systematic removal of one population group from the polls you only have an issue if that population group has a particular lean that is different than the population as a whole, which in this case you do. Young voters favor Obama by 2:1 in some polling and up to 3:1 in other polling. This has remained consistent throughout the campaign and has the possibility of having a huge impact. The question is how much of an impact. This hinges on two things, how much the under polling of cell phones has skewed polling, and how many young voters turn out on election day.

The skewing of polls as a result of lacking cell phone numbers is easy to see and according to Five Thirty Eight could be almost a 3 point bump for Obama. If you’re a reader of Five Thirty Eight you’ll be familiar with the mentioning of “house effects.” House effects are the leans that polling firms have shown over the course of the election. This isn’t due to attempting to cook the books (Fox News actually has a slight Democratic lean) it’s simply due to how the polling is conducted and how the questions are asked. Five Thirty Eight accounts for these effects so the “cell phone effect” is being controlled for as if it’s a systematic problem with the pollster when in fact it could be that the pollsters that call cell phones could be ~2.8% closer to the truth.

The “cell phone effect” is only an issue if young voters turn out. Young voter turn out is something like Godot, people keep waiting for it to happen, this year is always the year, but never seems to materialize. This year however if it’s going to be any year, appears to be the year. We’ll have to wait for Tuesday to know for sure but the GOTV⁴ efforts this year have been phenomenal at ISU and I have no reason to think it’s unique. Added to real empirical evidence of a youth vote turnout in the primaries I think that this might be the year.

The less covered advantage that wont be captured in the polls is Obama’s massive ground operations. Senator Obama has amassed the largest campaign apparatus in American history. He has a paid campaign staff edge of 3:1 in some battleground states which is matched by a similar edge in field offices⁵. This huge campaign apparatus is being predicted to turn out Democratic voters in record numbers in a year that Republican vote is probably going to be suppressed by the seeming unstoppable juggernaut of a campaign that bought up 30 minutes on every network to air an informercial, a move costing $4 Million, 4.5% of McCain’s total general election budget. Campaign organization has been credited by as much as a possible 3 point shift in some places, but it’s something we wont know till we see it on election night.

Predictions

I made these predictions on the air Wednesday and they’re based on what I’ve outlined here. I expect to see an Obama win, and a big one, something that might look a little like this:

Now that map is not what I think is most likely, just what I think might happen. More likely is that Montana and North Dakota will remain in the McCain camp, but barely. Montana, North Dakota, and Georgia are the only three states that the Obama campaign set out to compete in that they aren’t currently winning (except Alaska which was removed from the list when Gov. Palin was added to the GOP ticket). Georgia and North Dakota both have large numbers of young voters and Georgia has a large African-American vote. Montana is probably the least likely of the three but with a highly popular Democratic Governor and an independent streak I think there is potential (not to mention close poll numbers). These factors I think create a potential upset. I also think that the recent shift of Indiana and Missouri in the polls is going to be outweighed by the factors I’ve outlined above. I think it’s near guaranteed that Obama is going to take the states I’ve marked above except Montana, North Dakota, and Georgia, and highly likely that he’ll take Georgia; I’ll admit I’m going out on a limb with North Dakota, and even more so with Montana.

Additionally I think that Obama might carry some heavy coattails leading to a run-off election in Georgia’s Senate race, possibly taking the Democrats to 60 seats in the Senate.

We’ll see if I’m right come Tuesday.

Editorial Note: I wrote this over the last few days and I really just want to get it up so I haven’t heavily proofread it, apologies to spelling and grammar nazis.