I'm just the guy that can't stand cant. ___________

 
MEET THE NEW TONE, SAME AS THE OLD TONE: While the Democrats have ample reason to hold themselves responsible for their dismal showing in Tuesday’s elections (as discussed in Wednesday’s post-mortem post), it’s nice of President Bush to remind us that he and the Republicans played a little role too.

Bush gives us this reminder in his own inimitable style of lying about how he and his followers are full of good intentions. Now that the election is over, Bush rewrites campaign history by informing us that the secret of Republican success was to “change the tone” and eschew negative campaigning. As the Washington Post reports today, this is pure malarkey:

Democrats were particularly incensed yesterday about Bush's claim Wednesday that Republican candidates had succeeded because of their clean campaigns. "Their accent was on the positive," Bush told his top aides, gathered in front of the Oval Office fireplace. “If you want to succeed in American politics, change the tone.”

Bush usually stays above the fray, but some of his hand-picked candidates ran tough negative campaigns. Some used images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden to try to tar Democrats as soft on national security. Bush occasionally joined in the attack.

The day before the election, Bush repeated a statement that had caused Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) to issue a futile demand for an apology when the president first said it in October. Complaining in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about his stalled plan for a Department of Homeland Security, Bush said the Senate is “more interested in special interests, which dominate the dialogue in Washington, D.C., than they are in protecting the American people.”

....

Bush's candidates were as rough as anyone in a tight race. Before the death of Sen. Paul D. Wellstone, GOP candidate Norm Coleman referred to Minnesota's two senators as “a joke and a shadow.”

“I run against a guy who quite often I think is just the lowest common denominator,” Coleman, who won his race, said in July.

Rep. C. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) used an ad featuring videotape of Osama bin Laden in his successful campaign to unseat Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), who lost both legs and his right arm in a grenade explosion while serving as an Army captain in Vietnam.

So let me get this straight. Bush thinks that a Republican campaign is positive even if it implies that the Democrats lack patriotism and insinuates that a decorated, triple amputee war veteran is soft on Osama bin Laden.

I shudder to think what Bush would consider a negative campaign.
posted by Gary at 10:16 AM

 
THE MORNING AFTER: You have to give people a reason to vote for you. The Democrats didn’t and they lost Congress last night. It’s that simple.

Fearing to confront a popular war-time leader, Democrats have too often shied away from confronting Bush and his disastrous economic policies in the past year. The Democrats have also failed to articulate their own alternative economic plan. By acting as if they were embarrassed to be Democrats, the Democrats have actually reinforced the Republican attacks on Democrats.

The Democrats have behaved as if voters would vote for them only if they didn’t make too much of a fuss. Instead, many voters heard Democrats asking to be ignored and those voters complied.

The Democrats’ timid approach flies in the face of American history, which shows voters want politicians to have plans to deal with problems. The Republicans’ Contract With America did not prove especially popular after Republicans captured Congress in 1994, but it had already served its purpose on the campaign trail by convincing voters Republicans had a substantive plan.

During World War II the Republicans did not shy away from attacking FDR and his domestic policies while supporting the war. Those Republicans were not viewed as unpatriotic for engaging in politics. Today’s Democrats need to realize that true patriotism requires one to fight for those policies – both domestic and foreign – that are in the country’s best interests. Besides being the right thing to do, such an approach will attract more voters than the Democrats’ fainthearted approach of the past year.

I hope the Democrats learn at least one lesson from this election. You can’t beat something with nothing.

As a final point for this election wrap-up, I note that many Democratic leaning pundits have egg on their faces for being too optimistic about the Democratic prospects in the election. The Self Made Pundit, however, is content to note that his electoral prognostication skills (see the previous post) have improved since his prediction in 1972 of a McGovern presidency.
posted by Gary at 10:02 AM

 
ELECTION FORECASTS: The Self Made Pundit has a long and proud history of making insightful written election forecasts since he received an A on his paper in college analyzing and predicting the outcome of the 1972 presidential race. (While I hesitate to get bogged down in such minutia, for those of you curious, the title of the paper was “Why McGovern Will Win The Election.”)

I predict that the big news of the election will be that the Democrats take both Houses of Congress. So, continuing in the proud tradition of President McGovern, here are my predictions:

House:

Dems 220
GOP 214
Ind 1

Senate:

Dems 53
GOP 46
Ind 1

Close Senate Races:

Arkansas -- Pryor 52, Hutchinson 47
Minnesota -- Mondale 50, Coleman 46
South Carolina -- Graham 53, Sanders 47
Colorado -- Strickland 50, Allard 48
Missouri -- Carnahan 49, Talent 48
South Dakota -- Johnson 51, Thune 48
Georgia -- Cleland 50, Chambliss 49
New Hampshire -- Shaheen 50, Sununu 48
Tennessee -- Alexander 53, Clement 45
Iowa -- Harkin 54, Ganske 44
New Jersey -- Lautenberg 53, Forrester 44
Texas -- Cornyn 51, Kirk 48
Louisiana -- Landrieu 50.1, Terrell (24)
North Carolina -- Dole 50, Bowles 48

Governors:

Dems 29
GOP 21
posted by Gary at 11:00 AM

 
THE POLLS’ DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: The polls have a dirty little secret. Put aside for a moment all those precise numbers listed as the polls’ margins of sampling error and confidence levels. The secret is that the polls’ election day forecasts are based on a large amount of guesswork.

While polls trumpet that they have 95 percent confidence that their margin of sampling error is 4 percent or less, what they don’t emphasize is the amount of guesswork that goes into determining the group of voters to poll as “likely voters.” At late stages in campaigns, polls typically focus on “likely voters,” not registered voters, since large numbers of registered voters do not vote in any given election. The guesswork comes in deciding what questions to ask to identify those “likely voters.”

Different polls use different criteria to select these groups of “likely voters.” For example, the Ipsos-Reid/Cook Political Report Poll identifies “likely voters” as those voters “who say they are extremely likely to vote.” By contrast, Gallup labels respondents as “likely voters” through “a series of questions measuring current voting intentions and past voting behavior.”

This explains why polls of “likely voters” can be widely divergent. The most recent polls of “likely voters” show anything from a Democratic lead in the generic Congressional vote of two points to a Republican lead of seven points. The reason these polls are getting different results is that they use different criteria to select these so-called “likely voters.” They are polling different groups of people.

Thus, when Gallup says that it can say with 95 percent confidence that the margin of sampling error for its poll of “likely voters” is 4 percentage points, it is only expressing a degree of confidence in the sampling the views of people who have those “current voting intentions and past voting behavior.” Gallup and the other pollsters express absolutely no confidence level that the respondents they have labeled as “likely voters” are actually representative of those who will actually go to the polls. Due to the subjective criteria used to identify “likely voters” there is no measurable “margin of error” for whether actual voters are being accurately predicted.

Pollsters’ selections of “likely voters” can be particularly unreliable since they fail to measure the effects of Get Out The Vote (“GOTV”) drives by the political parties. If the parties had roughly similar GOTV drives, this failure might not make a big difference. But the parties are not equal in this regard. The Democrats have been far more successful at GOTV drives in recent elections. While Republicans have claimed to made advances, the Democratic operation still appears to be far superior.

The failure to measure the effects of GOTV drives is one reason that most polls failed to predict in 2000 that Gore would win the popular vote and that the Democrats would gain five Senate seats. Interestingly, Zogby, one of the few pollsters to correctly predict that Gore would win the popular vote, now has the Democrats winning the generic Congressional vote by 51 to 49 percent, while Gallup, which wrongly forecast Bush as the popular vote winner, now has the Republicans ahead in the Congressional vote by a margin of 51 to 45 percent.

I think Gallup is seriously underestimating turnout this year. Gallup forecasts that voter turnout will be 35 percent, which is less than in each of the last four midterm elections, which had turnouts that ranged from 36 to 39 percent. Since Gallup and other pollsters agree that the Democrats lead among all registered voters, any underestimation of turnout tends to underestimate the Democratic share of the vote.

Voter turnout today will probably be better than the polls are assuming, in large part due to the Democrats’ GOTV. States that have early voting (with voting starting in late October) have been reporting that turnout (at least of early voters) is up significantly this year. I suspect that tonight will be a far brighter night for the Democrats than many pundits are predicting.
posted by Gary at 10:41 AM

 
ELECTION DAY ADVICE: It's finally election day. I had considered recommending that all of you vote, but then I realized that advice would probably be futile.

No, the Self Made Pundit has not received one of those Republican flyers designed to depress the vote and become apathetic. The reason I think such advice would be futile is that the possibility that anyone interested enough in politics to read this weblog is not already planning to vote simply boggles my mind. But, if you are that one special reader, please take my advice and vote today.

For the rest of you, my advice is try to convince some friends and colleagues to vote today. They'll be impressed at your civic mindedness. They'll look at you in a new light and you'll find yourself getting that date, that raise, that bacon cheeseburger you've been dreaming of.

Do whatever little thing you can to increase the turnout today. As I'll discuss in a post a little later this morning, this election will turn on the degree to which the turnout turns out ... to turn a phrase.
posted by Gary at 8:21 AM