Desperately seeking trends

Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell's latest piece of advice to Obama suggests that his campaign is in trouble and needs a sudden change. As evidence of Obama's recent troubles, they cherry-pick from a number of polls, noting that Obama is trailing Romney badly in the "battleground" state of Missouri (which isn't actually a battleground this year) and that Romney has closed the gap with Obama nationwide since May. Then they do this:

President Obama now leads by just one point in the latest PPP Florida poll (48%-47%)—down from a four-point lead (50%-46%) in an Aug. 22-26 CNN poll.

Look, I'm no pollster, but isn't comparing results across different polling firms and calling it a trend one of the cardinal sins of polling interpretation? And, given those polls' margins of error, aren't those two results statistically indistinguishable from one another?

How to criticize Obama without making crap up

I tweeted the other day that the GOP convention had thus far offered an excellent critique of things Obama hasn't actually said or done. Paul Ryan seemed to double down on that strategy last night, saying numerous things that were, at best, highly misleading. Poor Jonathan Bernstein blew a fuse when Ryan criticized Obama for opposing the debt commission recommendations that Ryan himself had voted against, and then later offered this explanation. Even Fox News called Ryan's speech "deceiving" and "distracting" (if also "dazzling").

But all this seems to be part of a convention strategy of attacking an alternate reality Obama rather than the one who currently resides in the White House. A national convention is a rare opportunity to get your message out to voters unfiltered, and when you spend nearly all of it criticizing the government takeover of health care that didn't happen, the apology tour that didn't happen, the war on religion that didn't happen, etc., and then make the entire convention's theme ("We built it") a response to an out-of-context quote that only works as a gaffe when you selectively edit the president's speech, and when it seems the media is finally willing to call bullshit on this stuff, it makes you look bad. It makes it look like the real Obama must be a brilliant, flawless president -- otherwise, why would you have to make stuff up about him?

Now, even the most ardent Obama fan (even Obama himself, I'll bet) would admit to some flaws over the past 3 1/2 years. Can Republican speechwriters not come up with any? Let me just offer a few suggestions for those still working on some speeches for tonight:

• The economy is still not great! Would it be so hard to say something like, "Yes, Obama inherited a lot of challenges in 2008, but so did Reagan in 1980. By 1984, we had 7% economic growth. Where's the Obama recovery?" I mean, tinker with the wording or whatever, but that's actually true. Is that not enough?
• Solyndra! Yes, it's small potatoes -- just the narrowest sliver of stimulus spending, which overall was well-spent and actually saw good results. But at least with Solyndra, the president took a gamble with taxpayer money and gambled wrong. There must be at least a handful of similar cases out there. Find them.
• Federal judges. I know this is generally a left-wing critique of Obama, and most Republicans are thrilled that there are fewer Obama judges on the bench. But the fact that he hasn't nominated more judges actually is a bit of a scandal. You can spin that to make it look irresponsible, can't you?
• You could attack ACA for what it actually does. It requires people to purchase something they might not have purchased. Yes, it's constitutional, but it seems like you could frame it as inconsistent with the current conservative vision of liberty without blowing it up into some Marxist caricature. 

I just have to think there's enough factual material out there to fill a 30-minute speech. The viewers on Fox (the primary audience for this event) might be content with the fantasy world attacks, but if you want to speak to a larger audience, a bit more might be demanded of you.

Colorado: It's not just a ski resort that burns down each summer

The University of Denver and the Glover Park consulting group conducted a press conference last Monday in Washington, DC, to discuss Colorado politics, the presidential debates, and the 2012 election. I was one of four DU faculty members in attendance, along with DSCC Executive Director Guy Cecil and former Colorado Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams. Dee Dee Myers hosted. You can see all the action here on C-SPAN.

Explaining Olympic medals, a follow-up

Two weeks ago, I posted some stats on the nations that were winning the most Olympic medals in the first week of the games. I thought I'd follow up with some additional charts now that the games have concluded. These are for the top 21 medal-earning nations, rather than every country, so please forgive the incomplete dataset.

I should also mention a little regression analysis I did showing that overwhelmingly the best predictor of how many medals a country won was how many athletes they sent to the games. The more you play, the more you win. Not shocking, I know, but still a better predictor than wealth. However, GDP turns out to be the best predictor of how many athletes a nation will send. So national wealth is important, but somewhat indirectly.

Anyway, charts are below the jump. North Korea, while having a great first week, fell quite a bit in most rankings. The big story now is Jamaica, a small and relatively poor country that won a ton of medals.

Links for following the 2012 elections

[Reposted from Mischiefs of Faction]

I recently did a talk for an Election Watchdog Workshop run by Investigative Reporters and Editors, during which I provided a list of recommended resources for following the fall campaigns. I figured I'd reproduce the list below. Please feel free to suggest any other good ones.

Campaign Resources

• Advertising - The Washington Post's Ad Tracker
• Candidate travel - Politico's Candidate Tracker and P2012
• Field office locations - Obama's and Romney's

Fundraising

• Federal races - Open Secrets
• State races -  Follow The Money

Voter Identification Laws

• National Conference on State Legislatures

Polling

• Pollster - Candidate matchups and job approval
• Real Clear Politics - Candidate matchups and job approval

Economic Indicators

• Bureau of Economic Analysis (GDP, RDI, etc.)
• Bureau of Labor Statistics (Unemployment)
• RealtyTrac (Housing statistics - paid service for recent data)

Election Forecasts

• FiveThirtyEight (Nate Silver)
• Votamatic (Drew Linzer)
• Bread And Peace (Douglas Hibbs)
• Intrade's Electoral Map
• Frontloading HQ (Josh Putnam)
• Wonkblog (Ezra Klein)
• Crystal Ball (Larry Sabato)

(h/t to John Sides and Lynn Vavreck for some helpful suggestions)

Medals per athlete, 2012 Olympics

I'm not surprised this statistic hasn't gotten a lot of attention so far, even though it's probably the fairest way to compare across countries.

Update: I'm not sure if this is a fairer measure, but here's medals won per million citizens. North Korea is still looking pretty solid, but Hungary's stomping the world.

Oh, and what the hell, here's the number of medals divided by nominal GDP, as reported in the CIA World Factbook.

Vacation tip: Minuteman Missile, South Dakota

We recently came back from a visit to western South Dakota, which was fantastic and surprising in many respects. I'd never been to the state, and the image I'd conjured in my mind was really nothing like what I saw. We were surrounded by bison in Custer State Park, we saw an active mammoth dig site in Hot Springs, we were mesmerized by the Badlands, we learned a lot about the Wounded Knee massacre in a tiny museum in Wall, and more. 

Not a big workspace.

But what I wanted to mention was our visit to the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. Much to their credit, the Park Service decided to maintain a Cold War-era launch control facility and silo. We toured the launch control facility -- it was free, but you need to obtain tickets in advance. The facility is basically a small base on the ground level, where roughly 10 people were stationed starting in the mid-1960s. They provided security, maintained communications, and cooked food for the two-person crew stationed thirty feet below in the launch control center.

The underground center is basically a capsule with 3-foot thick concrete walls, held to the surrounding earth by giant shock absorbers. It was built to withstand a nuclear detonation as close as a mile away. The two chairs inside it have seat belts so that the officers wouldn't be thrown around the chamber in the event of a blast.

The Park Ranger leading our tour gave us a good impression of the lives of the people stationed in this facility. They worked in 24-hour shifts but only had roughly 1-2 hours of work during that time. Beyond that, they just sat and waited for the order to kill millions of people. It's a serious head trip. Officers picked for this job were usually under the age of 25, making them more likely to follow orders and less likely to have families. 

Here's me about to turn my key to start World War III:

And here's some interesting gallows humor painted on the center's concrete door:

Anyway, it's a fascinating piece of history and very much worth the visit.