BIASED REPORTING / FOX AND USATODAY
A Gallup poll came out yesterday showing the race neck and neck. A FoxNews poll came out yesterday showing the race neck and neck. Gallup had some negative numbers for Bush. Fox had some negative numbers for Kerry. The USA Today story on the Gallup poll was titled: Americans Express Worry, Bush Support Drops in Poll, and a companion story was titled Bush's Ratings Slip at Crucial Point of Campaign. These are both true statements about the results of the Gallup poll, but its hardly the whole story. There's no mention of Kerry's approval, because, oddly, Gallup didn't ask questions about impressions of John Kerry. Other pollling organizations have been asking those questions, and Swifty's unfavorables are rising significantly, which must certainly signal some kind of trouble for him. Sure, Bush's disapproval numbers are high, but so are Kerry's. Why would USA Today, in reporting the Gallup numbers, focus on the bad news for Bush? Doesn't it seem at least as important that the race is still tied, despite Bush's negatives? What does that say about Kerry? USA Today doesn't answer those questions in favor of painting a negative picture of Bush.

FoxNews, on the other hand, titled its story, Six Months Out, Race Still a Draw (the polls showed Bush up 44-41). Fox News notes that "The poll finds the president's job approval rating hovering in about the same spot since mid-February". Oddly, Gallup's poll show's the same thing, though USA Today's point Bush is now slipping. Kerry's dissaproval numbers are up over the last month, but Fox didn't write its story around the premise that "Kerry's Ratings Slip at Crucial Point of Campaign". Who's fair and balanced?

For the record, CNN, who commissions the Gallup poll along with USAToday, go it right. They titled their story Gallup Poll Shows Tight Race for Presidency.

PRESIDENTIAL POLLING SCHOOL
Dales' Electoral College Breakdown goes into excellent detail about polling methods in his recent update. Specifically, he talks about how pollsters determine who are likely voters. Some, like Gallup, use extensive questions to get at the issue. Zogby predicts turnout based on estimates by party. So, each poll is only as good as its methodology, and if its assumptions and predictions hold up, then the poll looks good, like Zogby predicting high turnout in 2000. Get it wrong, and you look like an idiot. He sums up the issues:

When examining poll results, it is important to keep in mind that not every likely voter poll is alike. Sometimes, comparing the results produced by one organization to that of another organization is like comparing apples to oranges.

As you know, the Federal Review Composite Poll™ compares apples and oranges, by using a weighted average of polls. This means that if all of the polls have bad assumptions, are wrong in their predictions about turnout and who is a "likely voter", then the Composite Poll will be wrong, too. Unless, the polls are randomly wrong (not generally favoring one candidate or the other), in which case the hope is that the Composite Poll will even out the swings caused by the bad methodology. In addition to this hope that varying "likely voter" methodology will be evened out by the average, we also weight polls less heavily in the average if they purport to be registered voter polls or merely adult polls, and we weight polls more heavily if they have a larger sample of voters. But I don't weight the Zogby poll more heavily than, say, the Gallup Poll, if they all use "likely voters" and have the same sized sample. (Rasmussen, a special object of my disdain, is further reduced in weight just because I don't trust it. The reason I use it anyway is described on the methodology page).

The main pitfall in this weighted average approach is that one poll used in the Composite may have the perfect methodology and assumptions and be dead-on with it's prediction, but the Composite is going to dirty that up by averaging with other polls. But until November 3, we won't know who's assumptions were correct. It would be interesting to see Gerry take the raw numbers from Gallup or Zogby (if he can get them) and then apply his own assumptions regarding likely voters and party turnout. That's a number I'd weight heavily in the Composite.

WHY WE LIKE BUSH
When the hate-Bush left sees the President, they see a silverspoon New England patrician living off of his Daddy's name, a damned dirty monkey look-alike shrub bent upon stealing oil for his business cronies, raping the environment and consolidating government power in the formation of a new American reich. A man who is hated by the victims of 9/11.

We see this man, comforting the daughter of a 9/11 victum, who described him thusly.

"I thought, 'Here is the most powerful guy in the world, and he wants to make sure I'm safe.' I definitely had a couple of tears in my eyes, which is pretty unusual for me."

And from her father:

"I'm a pretty cynical and jaded guy at this point in my life," Faulkner said of the moment with the president. "But this was the real deal. I was really impressed. It was genuine and from the heart."

IRAQI BLOGGER ON ABU GHRAIB
From The Mesopotamian

Of course the behavior at Abu Ghraib is terrible and I think everybody agrees; and most certainly the few who perpetrated these actions do not represent anybody but themselves. They have betrayed the Coalition soldiers and all the friends of democracy, before anybody else. However, the Media, and especially the famous Al Jazeera, Al Arabia & Co. are having great time with this affair. It’s like Christmas over there. Saturation coverage, trying all the time to sound objective and merely reporting what the western media are saying.

Well I am an Iraqi, and hate what I saw, but I would like to say in all honesty that compared to the practices of the old Baathists, this is a drop in an ocean. The terrors of Saddam torture houses make this isolated condemned practice by a small group of perverted individuals seem nothing, awful as it is. And more important, the outrages of the Saddam regime were sanctioned and perfectly well known and approved from the highest levels of the state and there was no question of any criminal investigations of the practices, the victims simply buried in any convenient ditch near by. But we never heard any righteous and noisy protests from Any Jazeera or Arabiya, nor did we witness much “Arab” anger during many years when torture, rape and murder were going on a regular basis and massive scale. Perhaps those hundreds of thousands of victims were not “Arabs” and did not deserve the righteous pity of the brotherly Arab masses.

How's that for a little perspective that is surely lost on those in the middle east who never found the energy to speak up about Saddam.

FAIR MODEL PREDICTS LANDSLIDE
Ray C. Fair, a yale professor, has revised his election prediciton model to take into account first quarter 04 economic numbers. His methodology, which, when applied to past elections, accurately predicts the two-party vote share within no more than about 3%. Of course, he's tweaked the model to make it work for elections going back to 1916, and provides this caveat:

it may in fact be a poor approximation and only look good because I have tried thousands of versions to come up with one that explains well. It may also be that there will be a sea change in voting behavior beginning with the 2004 election. In this case even though the equation may have been good in explaining voting behavior through 2000, it may no longer be any good. It is never easy predicting human behavior. These caveats aside, the bottom line here is that if there is anything to the vote equation, President Bush will be hard to beat in 2004.

As of now, he is predicting that Bush will win 58.74% of the two party vote. If I slap that number into the Composite Poll matrix, my computer belches smoke before predicting a Bush electoral landslide 376-162 (and that doesn't even take into account the discouraged west coast democrats who want show up when Bush sweeps the midwest). If that happens, I'll be getting drunk quickly as they tell me Bush wins Michigan and Pennsylvania, and that Illinois is "too close to call". I'll be passed out when a gloomy Dan Rather (and enthused Brit Hume) say California is too close to call.

Heck, even if he's off by 3%, that gives Bush a 360-178 win. I don't see that happening unless Kerry self-destructs, which is possible, though unlikely. I bet he's going to have to change the model after this election. And he lists his potential mistakes in his Note to the Media.

This guy's a social scientist who's done a lot of hard work on this model. I don't mean to disparage his numbers (and I sure hope his analysis is not "misspecified"), but a bunch of amateurs' analyses like the Composite Poll, Election Projection and Dales' Electoral College Breakdown seem more reliable at this point.

NEW HAMPSHIRE POLL, KERRY +4
Although this is down from a Kerry lead of +14 in February, it is greater than the 2 point Kerry lead in last week's Rasmussen Research poll and certainly different than Bush's 3 point lead from an early April poll. If this latest poll had been included in this week's Composite Poll, New Hampshire would be colored blue and the EV prediction would stand at Bush 279 | Kerry 259.

NEW OREGON POLL - Bush 46 | Kerry 48
Consistent with Rasmussen's latest showing a 2 point Kerry lead.
From the Portland Tribune.

NEW COMPOSITE POLL
The new Composite Poll is up. Several analyses:

Federal Review
Bush 283 | Kerry 255 -- Bush 49.46 | Kerry 48.35

Dales' Electoral College Breakdown
Bush 248 | Kerry 228 | Tossup 62 -- Bush 45.1 | Kerry 44.5

Electon Projection
Bush 274 | Kerry 264 -- Bush 48.56 | Kerry 49.61

DC's Political Report
Bush 162 | Kerry 169 | Too Close to Call 135 | No Polling Data 72

Complain in the Comments section.

Hopeful
I have no idea who the US is turning over titular "power" to on 30 June, nor does the US President. He'd have us believe it's now somehow a UN problem, not U.S. So our troops will be the force of stability but the interim gov't can't command it ( - not that we'd want them to, but how sovereign are you when 130K+ troops secure your government?. How is it that this govt can be seen as anything but a US puppet?

The most popular party in Iraq polls 14%! This is asking for it.... There will be no flowering Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq. Indeed, the expectation-lowering has already begun within the administration, floating the idea of stabilization instead. Realism sets in......

I both admire the willingness of the W. Gang to stick to the 6/30 plan and wonder if single-mindedness has conceded to adverse inevitability. Do they just hope that the civil war will take until after early November to start? Do they think that the insurgents will be spent by early July? I am open to the "why not push ahead?" theory as nothing else has worked. But let's be real about our expectations, please.................

If C-SPAN had read the names of the dead, could you then worry more about honoring fellow (fallen) Americans than worrying about who scored the latest political points? Sheesh. Whine about ABC all you want, but not at the cost of honoring our fellow Americans. If this has been a just cause, then we can honor those who died for it without embracing one political cause on the other..