We’ve spent the last several days on TPMtv previewing the Senate, House and presidential elections. Today, we give you a preview of our election night coverage, with live results, TPMtv coverage from Chicago and of course live-blogging the results from TPM World Headquarters here in NYC. In today’s episode of TPMtv, we fill you in on all we have in store …
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
Someone from the McCain camp must have had a pretty stern talk with former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. He just went on Fox with a bracingly abject apology for saying that Sarah Palin wasn’t qualified to be vice president. So abject in fact that I must say that it had something of the feel of one of the Maoist self-criticism sessions or perhaps one of the public apologies during the Moscow show trials.
Some hyperbole, yes. But, believe me, not much. We’ll have the video shortly.
Late Update: Confess!
As regular readers know, TPM normally down shifts on weekends, with limited news section updates and more episodic blogging. But coming down to the wire on the election as we are, this weekend we’re going to be working right through the weekend — coming the final three days before the election just like we would on weekdays.
The whole staff will be here on Saturday and Sunday bringing you all the news and the latest updates as they develop.
There’s been a lot of chatter over the last few days to the effect that the major tracking polls show John McCain closing the gap against Barack Obama. Now, before going forward, I want to preface this by saying that you just can’t live or die on the basis of small gyrations in tracking polls — not if you want to live to an old age. A lot of this is just statistical noise. But to the extent that people have gotten preoccupied with this, I wanted to show you the latest release of our TPM Track Composite which came out a little less than an hour ago.
Here’s the chart from October 5th through tonight’s result …
As you can see, the margin was narrowing over the weekend and in the beginning of this week. But then it stabilized. And there’s some indication that it’s now widening again. Remember, all of this could be statistical noise. No race is over until it’s over — especially one with as many unique factors as this one. But if you’re going to go on the basis of the tracking polls, the most recent evidence points either to a stable race or even Obama again moving ahead.
Feingold to Wisconsin AG: Enough of the Vote Suppression antics.
From McCain campaign manager Rick Davis’s campaign memo just out this evening, discussing why Obama’s decision to run ads in Georgia, Arizona and North Dakota is a sign the McCain camp has him on the ropes …
Expanding the Field: Obama is running out of states if you follow out a traditional model. Today, he expanded his buy into North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona in an attempt to widen the playing field and find his 270 Electoral Votes. This is a very tall order and trying to expand into new states in the final hours shows he doesn’t have the votes to win.
Translation: The fact that Arizona has moved into the toss-up column is a devastating development for Obama.
(ed.note: When I saw the Davis memo pop into my inbox this evening, I didn’t have the heart to read it. But TPM Reader DMR flagged this little morsel for my attention.)
As you know, Gallup has been running three separate numbers in its daily tracking poll — registered voters and then both a ‘traditional’ and an ‘expanded’ likely voter numbers. Much has been made, especially by McCain supporters, of the fact that the ‘traditional’ number has shown Obama ahead by as little as 2 points — well within the margin of error. However, in the last few days, the three numbers have been converging. As of yesterday’s reading (the most recent), the registered number had Obama 11 points ahead, the ‘expanded’ number 9 points ahead and the ‘traditional’ number had him 8 points ahead.
Beside the numbers being generally good for Obama, one question I have is why the three numbers are converging, as opposed to moving in Obama’s direction with the same spread between them.
One possibility is the number of voters who’ve already voted. Gallup is also monitoring how many voters say they plan to vote early and how many say they have already voted early. I’m not certain how Gallup is computing their numbers. But the key in these different likely voter ‘screens’ is what you’ll take as evidence from a voter to believe they’re likely to vote. One of the key differences in a lot of these ‘expanded’ models, though I’m not certain about Gallup specifically, is whether the pollster is willing to believe you’re a ‘likely’ voter even if you have not voted before. Now, once someone has already voted, they’re not only a ‘likely’ voter but a certain voter. So I wonder whether some of the convergence may due to uncertain ‘likely’ voters, who made the cut in the expanded but not the ‘traditional’ screen, now reporting that they’ve actually voted and are thus now being counted in both tallies.
To be clear, I’m not certain about Gallup’s methodology in this respect. So count this as informed speculation. But these are the approaches being used by a few other polling outfits. So I think this is a good supposition. We’ll look into it today and report back to you.
You may have noticed that the AP is reporting that Barack Obama’s aunt (who he does not seem to have a relationship with) was denied asylum in the US four years ago and is now living illegally in Boston. Convenient timing, ain’t it?
The real story, though, is down in the third paragraph of the AP story …
Information about the deportation case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one of them a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release.
That’s about as transparent a red flag as an outfit like the AP is usually willing to give. And there you have it. Quite likely working in concert with the McCain campaign, a Bush administration official is leaking details on an immigration case to try to help McCain three days before the election. It’s shades of Bush I’s riffling through Bill Clinton’s passport files just before the 1992 election in a desperate last minute gambit as they were swirling down the drain.
Late Update: Note too that the story first got leaked to the Times of London, a Murdoch paper with a history of taking planted stories from Republicans for siphoning back into the US media.