Free Republic

I rarely post vanities, but I wanted to ask Freepers if they thought it would have made any difference to the average Obama voter if he had stated the same policy goals as Romney. My personal opinion is that for most Obama voters, and for much of the democrat base, it would make no difference. For that matter, I don't think they would have liked Romney any better even if he had run on Obama's platform. This is an important issue, because if its all about brand name, and not about actual policy positions, then there is essentially no way...

The balance of party identification in the American electorate now favors the Democratic Party by a decidedly larger margin than in either of the two previous presidential election cycles. In 5,566 interviews with registered voters conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press during the first two months of 2008, 36% identify themselves as Democrats, and just 27% as Republicans. The share of voters who call themselves Republicans has declined by six points since 2004, and represents, on an annualized basis, the lowest percentage of self-identified Republican voters in 16 years of polling by the Center.

[snip] This provides evidence to support both aspects of my hypothesis. First, polls that weight [by party ID] are more similar to one another than polls that do not weight. Second, polling firms that weight show less movement from poll to poll than polling firms that do not weight. Well, yeah. If you weight every poll to the same PID [party identification], you will get the same vote. How can you not, when about 90% of Dems vote KE and about 90% of Reps vote BC? Imposing a pre-determined PID weight insures consistency, at the cost of repressing changes in...