This year is particularly difficult to assess because of the obvious political passion of the new Tea Party Movement. Whether one agrees with the current Administration and Congress or not, the last two years have been consequential, with nearly a trillion dollars of stimulus spending and a complicated and copious health care reform bill. This, coupled with the pain of nearly 10% unemployment that seems stubbornly fixed and a depressed housing market has dramatically changed the political landscape. A president who once enjoyed an approval rating of nearly 70% has seen that approval sink to below 50%.
Typically most Republicans will vote for Republicans, most Democrats will vote for Democrats. The questions are: How motivated these partisans are to vote,? What is the self-identification with the parties? Toward which party will the unaffiliated voters break? These questions make it difficult to model who will be the likely voter this year.
Rasmussen was the was the most accurate poll in predicting the presidential outcome in 2008, and is consequently highly respected. RealClearPolitics.com trys to average out poll biases by publishing a running average of major polls. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com is a statistician who during the last election cycle generated accurate predictions using multiple polls and averaging the results of thousands of computer simulations.
Although I yield to these full-time organizations and professionals for their noble work in making these assessments, I wonder how predictive a simpler approach might be. The Gallup Organization is over 70 years old and has a long track record with respect polling. Whatever its virtues and deficiencies the Gallup poll has existed for a long time.
One important bellwether for mid-term elections is the generic preference poll: what fraction of likely voters prefer an unnamed Democratic or Republican candidate. The horizontal axis below is the Gallup-measured Democratic advantage in the generic poll, for the mid-term elections since 1950. If this value is 2, it means the Democrats are preferred over Republicans by a 2% margin. The vertical axis is the margin, either positive or negative, that the Democrats earned in the actual House vote. For example, the value of 1 means that the Democratic margin in the actual vote for the House of Representatives is 1%.
A linear fit to these points is y = 0.8901 x – 0.0354, where x is the Democratic advantage in the generic poll and y is Democratic advantage in the House vote. The 0.8901 slope indicates that, in general, Democrats slightly under perform their poll numbers. Also note that the correlation coefficient sqaured, R2, equals 0.88, meaning that 88% of the observed election-to-election variations can be accounted for with the linear fit.

As of this writing, Gallup is uncertain as to its likely voter model. If there is a low turn out, this usually means proportionately more Republicans turn out, the generic poll value is -17% (the negative sign means the Democrats poll less well than Republicans). With a high turn out election, Gallups likely voter model produces a smaller -11% value.
Given the high energy level on the part of Tea Party members (likely to vote for Republicans), it is not clear that a high voter turnout is to the advantage of Democrats this year. Nonetheless, if we use the -11% value, the simple linear model suggests that Republicans could expect to gain 64 seats for a total of 242. Republicans need 218 to take the House. The 95% confidence limits suggested by the model predict a range of gains from 57 to 70 seats. If we used the -17% value for the likely voter generic preference for Democrats, the gain for Republicans would be an enormous 73 seats, for a total of 251, with 95% confidence for a gain of between 64 and 78 seats.
At present, the RealClearPolitics.com average gives Republicans a certain 220 seats with with 37 toss ups. Apportioning the toss ups evenly would give Republicans 239 seats for net gain 61 seats. Nate Silver predicts a Republican 51-seat gain. The proposed linear model clearly is more favorable to Republicans than more sophisticated ones. Since the Republicans have never before had a generic poll in their favor by more than 7%, we are predicting outside the range that this simple linear model has experienced.
There is still one week before the election. We will update the predictions using the latest possible generic poll and see how well this first-order model performs.
There is much that is opaque to the casual outside viewer of polls. In baseball, a spectator is not always able to tell that whether a well hit ball to the outfield has enough power to make it out of the park. However, astute students of the game will watch the outfielders who have a better perspective and likely a keener eye. By watching how they respond to the ball, one can get a indication of where the ball will go. If the outfielder starts to run toward a particular point, one can be assured that the ball will remain in the park. If the outfield doesnt move much, he likely sees that the ball will fly over the fences. Whatever the public and private polls are indicating, Democrats are rapidly pulling funding out of key districts, indicating they are retreating to protect their core in close raises where additional spending could have an effect. This is certainly indicative of what they believe is happening.
“Enemies”
Sunday, October 31st, 2010A wit once told a story that is perhaps apocryphal, but the nonetheless instructive, of a visitor to Princeton University. After some political discussions with a sample of students, the visitor remarked to his friend and professor at the university that the Conservative students seemed somehow sharper and more thoughtful than their Liberal counterparts. The professor responded that all Princeton students are smart, but Conservative students had to swim upstream against the general political flow of campus life had developed stronger rhetorical upper body strength than their Liberal friends.
Not only are Conservatives, particularly, those who live in “blue states, forced to more deeply consider their political positions, they also learn the important lesson that those that differ with them politically are not generally enemies or adversaries. They are probably friends with whom one may have important disagreements.
One to the disadvantages of President Baracks political life in Chicago is that he was not blessed with many friends with whom he could have robust and amicable disagreements on fundamental political issues. Instead, he spent too much time with the likes of 60s radical and bomber Bill Ayers and radical Pastor Jeremiah Wright.
Obama is generally moderate in demeanor if not political philosophy. Every once in a while he apparently reveals a deep animosity with political competitors. In a speech before Hispanic votes, he exhorted, “Were going to punish our enemies [emphasis added] and were gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us. Presumably, Obama was arguing that the majority, or at least a significant minority, of Americans that disagree with him on immigration issues are “enemies. This is particularly alarming since Obama is reluctant to refer to America haters like Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadineja of Iran as enemies.
It is certainly true that the term “enemy is bandied about too often in political discourse. However, a president, more than others, needs to be far above this. This is particularly true after President Richard Nixons “enemies list was used o be badgered with IRS audits and other abuses of executive power. The president is the only elected official that represents all Americans. He needs to use less incendiary rhetoric, and it seems that the press has largely given Obama a pass.
In September 21, 2001, President George W. Bush said, “And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. It was a call for those nations that try to have good relations with the US and at the same time deliberately harbor terrorists, that they would have to chose which side they are on.
The statement was not that those Americans who had disagreements with the manner in which the War on Terror is conducted were “either with or against us. Nonetheless, for the next eight years this statement was used by the Left to suggest was trying to suppress dissent. Conspicuous Conservatives generally dont do such things because they know that they will be roundly criticized in the Left-leaning press. Obama, by contrast, has not been so taught.
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