Over at CampaignSpot, Jim Geraghty noticed something that Bruce first drew to my attention two weeks ago: independent voters are breaking for John McCain.
In two successive posts yesterday, Geraghty observed that both the Wall Street Journal poll and the LA Times poll had McCain beating Obama among independents by margins of thirteen points and fifteen points respectively.
Yet, while McCain has slipped in the polls in the past two weeks, the Journal‘s Laura Meckler observes:
The survey finds that Sen. Obama has lost ground with the independent voters who will be crucial to the outcome of the election. They now favor Sen. McCain by 13 percentage points, up from eight points two weeks ago. In early September, just after both parties’ conventions, half of independent voters had a positive image of Sen. Obama; now it’s just 39%. Independents were also less likely to say they could identify with his background and values than they were in early September.
If Obama has lost ground among independents, how has he managed to gain ground among the general electorate? Has there been a stampede of voters away from the GOP and toward the Democrats? Or have the pollsters been oversampling Democrats?
UPDATE: Â Just received an e-mail from a politically independent acquaintance who tends to vote Democratic, but leans toward McCain this year.
Beware of playing the “Pollsters must be oversampling Democrats” game. Ask the question, fine. But party affiliation and enthusiasm are indeed fluid, for many people.
Good point, ILC. And that’s exactly what I do, raise the question. 🙂
You may be on to something here. As a registered republican for 31 years, I have NEVER been polled in a presidential election.
I did read yesterday that the Washington Post poll that put Obama 9 points ahead could not have been balanced equally between Democrats and Republicans. Meanwhile, while touting those numbers all other polls of the day still have the two neck to neck.
My sense is that the media is trying to use polls as a tool to effect the election. That was very clear last time when exit polls supposedly put Kerry over the top in the early stages of the day.
My personal hypothesis about the Clintons and their lust for power predicts them to work covertly / subtly / indirectly to defeat Obama. And it looks like it’s coming true:
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/25/awesome-mccains-acting-in-good-faith-in-pulling-out-of-the-debate-says-clinton/
Will they succeed in bringing down Obama, thus electing McCain? They are very limited in what they can do. Their hands are tied, because they can’t afford to be *seen* defeating Obama. On the other hand, come on, they are the political masters. So, is Obama doomed? McCain and Palin will still need to turn in very good performances in the debates and on the remaining campaign trail.
To be charitable, it could also represent more Democrats who were undecided last polling session taking the plunge for Obama, figuring an unqualified D is better than any R. I think the Democrats are Racist! poll that came out last week actually showed that the biggest mark against Obama among Democrats is the opinion that his inexperience was a reason to not vote for him.
Or that, while not necessarily oversampling Democrats, the pollsters are changing the weight they assign to party affiliations. I think The Corner had a deconstruction of a Gallup poll last week that suggested the convention polling bounces are the result of heavier weighting of the party that had just had their convention, not oversampling Dems or Republicans.
We won’t really know unless we can get into the guts of the poll, who they asked, what questions they asked, how they interpret the responses, and their mathematical formulas used to compute the numbers. As they say, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Rush agrees with you Leah. Hes always warned not to take polls seriously til the week before election. Now is the period when pollsters are trying to drive opinion with their polls, not report it. It is at the very end of the campaign when they start to reflect reality because they want to be correct on election day.
Independents:
Anyone who hasn’t made up their mind about this election hasn’t been paying attention to this campaign or politics for the last 70 years. There is nothing new here.
Obama is a solid member of the neosocialist* left determined to change what is left of American capitalism – first into a full blown social democratic state and then, as capitalism collapses under the ever increasing weight of social democratic policies, into a purely socialist state, all the while blaming capitalism and its “excessesâ€.
McCain is a moderate Democrat determined to make the middle work. The fact that he is also a defense hawk doesn’t make him a Republican, nor does the fact that he chose Sarah, who is.
All of the talk in the world won’t change this fundamental difference.
If you want to move this country farther down the road to socialism, Obama and the Democrats are your clear choice.
If you really do want the bipartisanship middle of the road approach many profess to want, McCain is your choice.
If, like me, you want something else, too bad, so sad.
If you’re too unaware or too stupid to know what you want, call yourself an independent and make up your mind over the media and ideology derived and driven “issues†and the biases they choose to push at the moment.
It really is just that simple.
* neosocialist: a socialist who refuses to accept the abject failure of 20th century socialist experience and who seeks to hide his socialist ambitions behind an incremental approach, bastardization of language, and evocative images of “equality†that could only be achieved under the boot of state sponsored socialism, but wouldn’t even then.