That was then, this is last night:
Shameless pandering to the pre-teen vote!
Posted on 09/22/2008 1:04:45 PM PDT by Chet 99
Uncharacteristically low turnout for Barack Obama rally in Green Bay, Wisc.
McCain/Palin drew 4,000 more supporters at same venue a week ago
September 22, 2008
BY ABDON M. PALLASCH Staff Reporter
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Hoping to shore up support in his suddenly undependable backyard, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama flew here Monday to talk about how he’d handle economic crises as president.
Recent polls have shown that Wisconsin — once pretty solidly in Obama’s column — is now a statistical dead heat between Obama and Republican John McCain.
“You all know that you hold this election in your hands,” Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat who said he worked on ethics legislation with Obama, told a crowd of about 6,000 cheering Obama fans in the arena next to Lambeau Field. “We just barely won this state for Al Gore in 2000 and we just barely won this state for John Kerry in 2004.”
The numbers in Wisconsin and Minnesota are getting close enough that the Obama campaign closed its 11 campaign offices in North Dakota and moved the 50 staffers there to these two states.
Just a week ago, John McCain and his vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin — who can bring out crowds the way Obama can — appeared in this same stadium, Resch Center, to a crowd of 10,000 fans. There were an uncharacteristic amount of empty orange seats for Obama’s rally.
(Excerpt) Read more at suntimes.com ...
That was then, this is last night:
Shameless pandering to the pre-teen vote!
I'm not too worried about that VA poll with Obama up 6. It's a definite outlier, and I'll only get worried about it if two or three other polls come out showing similar results. It WILL surprise me if this is an outlier, in a way, because SUS is usually one of the more accurate polling outfits. I just finished a study of polling results for the week prior to election day in 2004 vs. the actual results of the election for a number of battleground states in 2004 (specifically - CO, FL, IA, MI, MN, MO, NH, NJ, NM, OH, OR, PA, VA, WA, and WI) since these states were interesting enough to the pollsters to have good numbers of polls taken between 26 Oct and 1 Nov 2004, thus providing a large enough data set. I looked at the results of the actual spread (diff. between Kerry and Bush results) versus the predicted spread from the polls, and then correlated the various major polling houses to see who was more accurate and precise.
Survey USA was one of the most accurate, with an average 2.1% difference from the actual spreads over n=14. Other good ones were Mason-Dixon (1.9% from actual, n=15), ARG (0.8% from actual, n=5), and Research 2000 (1.0% from actual, n=2 so this may not be all that relevant).
Rasmussen, Quinnipiac Univ., and Strategic Vision were all in the 2-3% from actual range, though Rasmussen had a relatively huge SD, meaning that it's polls were all over the place.
The two which did very poor were Gallup (5.0% from actual, n=7) and the LA Times (5.6% from actual, n=2 again a small sample set), and both had huge relative SDs, so they were not very precise either.
I would generally trust SUS, but even they had three polls in the data set I looked at where they missed the spread by 4% or greater.
What? No free bread or circus-uh, concert tickets this time?
Last week, McCain and Palin were at the same venue, and filled the 10,000 seat Resch Center to capacity. 4 short days later, Obama comes and barely fills half!
......we just barely won this state for John Kerry in 2004.”......
translation..... had we not punctured all 4 tires of all the vans to drive Republican voter to the polls, we would have lost
IIRC, haven't numbers from the past few weeks shown that there's near parity between the two parties?
It is epidemic in Wisconsin.
One point on Research 2000: This year it is sponsored by Daily Kos, so you can throw it out until a few days before the election. People only remember your number right before the actual vote, so you can do whatever fudging you want within reason up till then to please your sponsors. These pollsters are businesses first and foremost.
After last night’s Cowboys-Packers game they were probably all too depressed to go.
Thanks! I agree that the demographic internals show a strong movement toward McCain/Palin. On some other thread someone posted some numbers where a blogger re-weighted the Gallup and Rasmussen polls by actual exit poll voter turnout data from past presidential elections and it showed McCain 45%, Obama 39%.
see that little inpish face? thats my girl......
Piper is a total winner.
I thought Green Bay had been angry at McCain ever since he revealed the names of their offensive line to the North Vietnamese during his captivity??? :o)
Where did you get this info about 12 points down?
From your lips to God’s ears!
This is fantastic news. I have been kind of bummed out over the polls and hearing this news has made my day! I LOVE IT!
I am shocked that the media would report this though.
Another explanation might be that he has solidified his vote, it's solid and will come out on election day so no reason to expend energy (personal and fossil) to go to an Obama rally.
That's both good and bad for us. First, his base may be looking at the polls and figure he has it won so they are not going to rallies. Further, they may get lazy and stay home on election day for the same reason. On the other hand, it may indeed indicate a real drop off of support combined with increasing support for McCain/Palin. I'd like to believe its both of the latter.
The turnnout numbers are so ridiculously stable over the past thirty years as to be nearly constant. A swing of even 2% is pretty sizable. Averages are around 37%-39% Dem to 35-37% GOP, IIRC. The last presidential election was the first in 30 years to show identification equal at 37% a piece. The high for the Dems came not in 2006, but in 1996, at 39%, I believe.
Oh...you mean...
NEARLY TWICE AS MANY showed up for John & Sarah!
Internal polls are ones the campaigns PAY for, and they want them ACCURATE.
They don’t play funky games with Voter ID’s to drive headllines.
There have been MANY references in the last month that say the differences between Media polling, and ACCURATE polling are getting larger. And you can see it in where Obama is currently campaigning.
He’s NOT in states that are Republican takeaways, but in states like Wisconsin and PA that have been in the Dem camp. And the same applies to where he is shifting staffers to.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.