Bailout Fail

Turns out that smartass protesters can still get into congressional hearings.

Obama meets Bartlet

Okay, this is good. Sample:

OBAMA: I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET: I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

The cellphone bias

There's increasing concern that the massive use of cellphones is biasing polling numbers. Some younger voters, in particular, don't even have land lines, and such voters are sure to be missed by polling organizations that don't make an effort to include cell phone numbers in their samples. In the past few elections, such omissions have been considered negligible. It's not that the samples aren't biased; they just don't seem to be biased in a politically meaningful way. Roughly as many Democrats as Republicans have been omitted.

This may not be the case this year (perhaps because the electorate is suddenly so polarized by age). Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight did a little study comparing the polling organizations that use cell phone numbers with those that do not. It's a small-N study, but it's still pretty suggestive:

Six of the seven cellphone-friendly pollsters have had a Democratic (Obama) lean, and in several cases it has been substantial. On average, they had a house effect of Obama +2.8. By comparison, the control group had essentially zero house effect, so this would imply that including a cellphone sample improves Obama's numbers by 2.8 points. (Or, framed more properly, failing to include cellphones hurts Obama's numbers by 2-3 points).

The difference is statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gallup, Pew and ABC/WaPo have each found a cellphone effect of between 1-3 points when they have conducted experiments involving polling with and without a cellphone supplement.

Just to be clear: these findings suggest that those polling firms that do not survey cell phone users are understating Obama's true support by 2-3 points. This is a huge difference in a close election like this one. In Silver's state projections, he finds that accounting for cellphones moves Florida from lean-McCain to tossup, and moves Nevada from tossup to lean-Obama.

Energy Expert

Sarah Palin on oil export bans:

Oil and coal? Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It’s got to flow into our domestic markets first.

Here's the video.

I'm glad she used the word fungible. That helps.

Matthews on the responsibilities of partisans

This is really a remarkable clip. Chris Matthews appears visibly angry over Republicans who are posing as outsiders when they are, in fact, of the same party as the current president (who's been eerily silent lately). Matthews lectures Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) on his responsibilities as a member of the GOP. Watch.

More on "Why is this election so close?"

I was reading through a mid-August Quinnipiac poll of likely voters nationwide, and I came across this question:

Putting aside for a moment the question of who each party's nominee might be, what is your preference for the outcome of the 2008 presidential election - that a Democrat be elected president or that a Republican be elected president?

The response to that is Dem 46, Rep 34, DK/NA 20.

Compare that to the candidate matchup:

Obama 47, McCain 42, Someone else 2, DK/NA 9.

My initial suspicion was that Obama was running behind the generic Democrat, presumably because of his race. But that doesn't appear to be the case here. Obama's numbers are essentially identical to those of the generic Democrat. Instead, McCain is running eight points ahead of the generic Republican, which testifies to his main strength as a candidate, maverickiness. I'm guessing that his numbers will grow closer to the generic GOP numbers over the next few weeks. Still, even though a lot of Republicans aren't crazy about McCain, he wasn't a dumb choice for nominee. He was probably the only Republican in the field who had a remote shot of winning the general election.

More on the Palin gender effect

I noted earlier that tapping a female vice presidential nominee doesn't necessarily bring more women voters to the ticket. I was also interested to see whether the sizeable McCain/Palin post-convention bounce was due to women crossing party lines to support the GOP ticket. It doesn't look like it. Here are Gallup's weekly aggregates:There was definitely a bounce, but it seems that men were more impressed by the GOP convention than women were. This trend looks the same if you just focus on white voters. Indeed, the current race seems to be reinforcing the gender gap rather than mitigating it. If anything, the main effect of the Republican convention seems to have been to bring moderate and liberal Republicans back into the fold (which, of course, is the purpose of conventions). Support for the GOP ticket among this group went up by seven points in the last two weeks.