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I must say, it's a lot of fun having very little but contempt for both parties and watching from the sidelines. Both parties are consistent on this matter: Whoever is behind in the polls claims that the polls are rigged or irrelevant or inaccurate or whatever. Dems have done it countless times, Repubs have done it countless times.
We still haven't seen the full impact of the debate on the polls. Rasmussen was the first one to come in that would have gathered the bulk of their data after the first presidential debate. I wouldn't get too excited until we see the other polls come in. I do think that it seriously hurts Obama to show up for a debate looking weak and lethargic like he did. We've seen it before. He's a wiz at reading a pre-written speech from the teleprompter, but he's always kinda sucked at debates where he has to react quickly and spontaneously to the unexpected. The key to beating him has always been to throw a wrench into his pre-memorized script and that is exactly what Romney did.
Debates can sometimes have virtually no impact at all and sometimes they have a tremendous impact on the outcome. If Romney can solidly win all of the remaining debates and no unexpected scandal pops up, I think it'll be enough for him to win the election.
Personally I don't give a damn about polls because the only one that matters is election day. Everything else is just speculation. But PLEASE don't try and say Democrats cry about the polls as much as Republicans do. I don't recall Dems saying the polls were 100% right when up until last week they were ahead by abit and I don't see Dems coming out now saying the polls are wrong after the debate and it shows Romney closing in on Obama.
Conversly the Repubs have been CRYING ALL ALONG about the polls, the media and everything else under the sun being 'biased against them', but now that their boy Mitt had ONE good performance, all of a sudden that bias has magically disappeared and ANY poll from ANY source (even from those evil liberal media outlets) that shows Romney closing or even passing Obama is seen as TRUTH.
And look at the jobs report that just came out that shows unemployment at 7.8%. Repubs IMMEDIDATELY come out of the woodwork saying 'ITS FAKE, NUMBER HAVE BEEN TAMPERED TO HELP OBAMA!'. Yet if the number went they other way to 8.4% or something, Repubs would be going 'That job report is 100% INDISPUTABLE FACT that shows Obama is a FAILURE!'. That's the Republican way. ANYTHING that helps the opposition is fake and biased. Anything that helps you and it becomes 100% indisputable fact.
Also while its true Obama was lackluster in this first debate, the ONLY thing Romney really won was in aggressiveness, because he sure as hell didn't win in TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT ANYTHING. Remember that saying 'if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it'? That's pretty much Romney and the Republicans in a nutshell.
Its completely ASTOUNDING to me that so many people simply looked at debate performance and declared Romney the 'winner' yet so few people cared that most everything he said was either a LIE or something that could not be backed up by any kinds of facts or math. Yet people didn't care. He looked more confident and stronger and spoke his lies more forcefully and that's all that mattered. And then a couple of days later he COMPLETELY FLIPS on the 47% comments after he completely flips or alters every stance he took in the Republican primaries (and every stance he had the years before that) and it seems many Americans just don't care.
How sad is it that a man like THIS could become the next president of the United States and its a reflection upon Americans as to how impatient, gullable and stupid they've become to ever vote for such a man to lead this country.
Last edited by Max Sterling; 10-06-2012 at 06:17 PM..
What everyone fails to realize is that these polls don't take into account for the cold water Friday's jobs report threw on the post debate after glow.
The unemployment rate has been broken for ages and is a terrible representation of what's really going on in America.
Labor Participation Rate is a better measure by far:
If you are over 16 years old then you're counted. Instead of trying to guess how many people could be working that aren't, the LPR simply states the percentage of all US citizens over the age of 16 that are gainfully employed. The unemployment rate can and does make all sorts of broad assumptions about individuals leaving the workforce:
1.) A married woman leaving the work force only ever happens because she wants to return to a more traditional "housewife" roll.
2.) Everyone over the age of 60 who leaves the workforce is retiring -- which contradicts findings by studies that demonstrated that your 60 and over crowd is a significantly larger part of the overall workforce today than they ever have been in US history.
3.) If you haven't turned in a job application in X amount of weeks it means you don't want a job and you no longer count.
According to the raw (and unmanipulated) LPR numbers, Obama is doing terrible. The workforce in the United States is bleeding and nothing that Obama has done thusfar has managed to successfully stem the bleeding. Every single year he's been in office the percentage of Americans old enough to work has gone down.
Its completely ASTOUNDING to me that so many people simply looked at debate performance and declared Romney the 'winner' yet so few people cared that most everything he said was either a LIE or something that could not be backed up by any kinds of facts or math.
Both candidates were and are equally guilty of this. Obama says he created 5 million jobs, but conveniently doesn't mention that more than 5 million jobs were lost, earning Mr O a negative net gain. But it would be idiotic for anyone to expect him to come right out and say, "Our nation suffered a net loss of X during my presidency." That would be political suicide after all -- even if doing would be the more honest.
We're talking about politicians here. They will have data and research to back up every single claim they make. Virtually all of those claims will be from biased or questionable sources. Debates are seldom about winning the war of honesty. No politician could ever hope to do that.
A debate is: 1.) It's a contest of presenting your version of reality and selling it. 2.) A chance to see who looks the most "presidential" in an unpredictable situation.
I must say, it's a lot of fun having very little but contempt for both parties and watching from the sidelines. Both parties are consistent on this matter: Whoever is behind in the polls claims that the polls are rigged or irrelevant or inaccurate or whatever. Dems have done it countless times, Repubs have done it countless times.
We still haven't seen the full impact of the debate on the polls. Rasmussen was the first one to come in that would have gathered the bulk of their data after the first presidential debate. I wouldn't get too excited until we see the other polls come in. I do think that it seriously hurts Obama to show up for a debate looking weak and lethargic like he did. We've seen it before. He's a wiz at reading a pre-written speech from the teleprompter, but he's always kinda sucked at debates where he has to react quickly and spontaneously to the unexpected. The key to beating him has always been to throw a wrench into his pre-memorized script and that is exactly what Romney did.
Debates can sometimes have virtually no impact at all and sometimes they have a tremendous impact on the outcome. If Romney can solidly win all of the remaining debates and no unexpected scandal pops up, I think it'll be enough for him to win the election.
1. I am an Obama supporter and I didn't ever think that the polls are rigged or irrelevant or inaccurate. The numbers are what the numbers are. Obama did badly in the first debate and Romney got a couple of point bump. Whether that will stay or subside is a matter for another day.
2. Historically, first debates had little affect on the outcome. Since 1975, only one incumbent has won the first debate (Bill Clinton) and it didn't stop G. W. Bush or Ronald Reagan from being re-elected. In the other instances of Presidents that lost, their poll numbers didn't produce a lasting difference. They were trailing and stayed trailing.
There are also one more presidential debate and a vice presidential debate.
3. It is interesting, however, that Romney supporters were calling the polls rigged that showed Obama ahead and when Romney gained in those polls those same supporters proclaim they are the honest truth now.
But this measure too has problems; it’s the fraction of people 16 and over at work, which means that the denominator includes a rapidly growing number of seniors, who presumably don’t want to keep working. How can we correct for this demographic bias?
One answer, which I’ve used before, is to focus on prime-age adults, between 25 and 54; Calculated Risk did this yesterday, and pointed out that there has been some real improvement over the past year. This is a good quick-and-dirty approach. But it can lead to (false) accusations of cherry-picking, and it also throws out information.
So here’s an arguably better measure: constant-demography employment, which shows what would have happened to the employment-population ratio if the age structure of the population had stayed constant.
For my calculation, I’ve divided the population into three age groups, 16-24, 25-54, and 55 plus, for which employment-population ratios are available in the BLS databases. (Scroll down and use the one-screen data search). I’ve then taken a weighted average of these ratios, where the weights are the 2007 shares of each group in the civilian noninstitutional population. And here’s what you get:
Aha. So there is real if modest improvement over the past year. Also, the September numbers looks not like an aberration but like a return to trend from what looks like noise in the data over the previous couple of months.
...
1. I am an Obama supporter and I didn't ever think that the polls are rigged or irrelevant or inaccurate. The numbers are what the numbers are. Obama did badly in the first debate and Romney got a couple of point bump. Whether that will stay or subside is a matter for another day.
2. Historically, first debates had little affect on the outcome. Since 1975, only one incumbent has won the first debate (Bill Clinton) and it didn't stop G. W. Bush or Ronald Reagan from being re-elected. In the other instances of Presidents that lost, their poll numbers didn't produce a lasting difference. They were trailing and stayed trailing.
There are also one more presidential debate and a vice presidential debate.
3. It is interesting, however, that Romney supporters were calling the polls rigged that showed Obama ahead and when Romney gained in those polls those same supporters proclaim they are the honest truth now.
It's kinda obvious that Obama supporters wouldn't be calling foul. Their guy has been ahead in every poll all year with only a blip here and there showing anyone else ahead of him. You don't tend to disagree with data suggesting that your candidate is going to win. It goes against human nature to do so.
I never said the polls were rigged either and I'm not going to start anytime soon. I did say I'm curious to see the rest of the polling from other polling entities. We have Rasmussen and nothing else so far. We really have no idea if Romney is even in the lead. Rasmussen is one of those polls that has been surprisingly accurate in the last decade or so. Many Dems tend to write them off as GOP-biased in the same fashion that "liberal polling" is downplayed by the GOP. If it's only Rasmussen showing Romney in the lead then it's nothing much to get excited about. Anomalies happen. My suggestion:
1.) Wait for the rest of the polls to report in.
2.) Let's see what happens in the next debate.
It's kinda obvious that Obama supporters wouldn't be calling foul. Their guy has been ahead in every poll all year with only a blip here and there showing anyone else ahead of him. You don't tend to disagree with data suggesting that your candidate is going to win. It goes against human nature to do so.
That isn't my point, so perhaps I wasn't making it clear. What is obvious is that those on the left believe in data and trust the data regardless of what that data suggests politically, while those on the right believe what they want to believe and disregard the data that is contrary to their political view.
When the jobs numbers look good, the right immediately declares them fake without a shred of proof. You don't see that kind of view on the left. When jobs numbers were bad, they didn't challenge the validity of those numbers. The same thing is true of Obama's polls. Most of the time, Obama had an unfavorable approval rating. Did the left say that Gallup, et al were fudging the numbers? No.
The right lives in an alternate reality that they create. In their reality Obama is a extreme radical who is bent upon destroying America, instead of the moderate president in the mold of most modern presidents, like Gerald Ford, who wanted to raise taxes on oil companies; who created an Economic Policy Board by Executive Order; who was a supporter of equal rights of women; who negotiated with the Soviets; and, who asked Congress for a five-percent income tax increase on corporations and wealthy individuals. Yet, nobody called Ford a Socialist or a radical.
At the behest of both parties, the unemployment rate has been effectively ruined over the years. Labor Participation Rate is a more honest statistic.
The LPR data (from the Bureau of Labor's website) says that 65.8 % of working age Americans were gainfully employed the day that Obama took office. The September numbers say that 63.6% of working age Americans are gainfully employed now.
That means you have a net loss of 2.2% of Americans over 16 that are no longer employed. Americans over 16 years old are 79.8% the US population or about 251 million people. A loss of 2.2% would be 5.5 million fewer Americans working since January of 2009.
The latest unemployment rate came in at 7.8% which is exactly where it was the day that Barack Obama took office. So how do you make a net loss of 2.2% or 5.5 million jobs come out to equal out as a net loss/gain of zero??
The Labor Participation Rate throws out all the tweaking and adjusting and just reports a raw number. In my opinion, the discussion on jobs or the lack thereof should begin with LPR. If your political party can find data to explain the numbers, then explain away. But start with the unfettered truth as a baseline and offer up your excuses and explanation out in plain sight where everyone can see them.
What everyone fails to realize is that these polls don't take into account for the cold water Friday's jobs report threw on the post debate after glow.
People dont vote based upon jobs reports, they vote upon individual situations.
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