Paulsonhead

I came across this unsettling image of Hank Paulson's disembodied head today, and think that it's dying to be photoshopped.

More below the fold. The reader who creates the best one (in my sole opinion) will receive a free copy of "Flipping Houses for Dummies."

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Baseball and attrition

The Minnesota Twins started today 1/2 game ahead of the White Sox in the AL Central Division, with seven games left to go (3 Twins games and 4 Sox games). After both teams lost tonight, the Twins remained 1/2 game ahead. So which team had the more successful day? Clearly the Twins did, since the White Sox now have only five games instead of seven to make up the Twins' lead.

From listening to commentary, I get the sense that neither candidate clearly won tonight's debate. (I for one missed most of it, working late.) If this assessment is correct, tonight's debate clearly helps Obama because he currently holds a lead, and McCain/Palin now have one fewer major campaign event with which to make up Obama's significant lead. Like the Twins, Obama only needs to hold the race where it is right now; like the White Sox, McCain desperately needed to make up serious ground tonight.

Go Twins!

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Rare mid-day update

Obama is continuing to surge ahead. I haven't had a chance yet to update the info on the sidebar, but Obama now seems to lead, with slightly over 300 expected EVs, a popular vote lead of over 2%, and an 84% chance of winning on e-day. If the election were held today, I'd call it for Obama with over 99% certainty.

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Read this; believe it; understand it; don't argue with it

To everyone who fancies himself a concerned Democrat: Read this; believe it; understand it; don't argue with it.

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Colorado Colorado Colorado

If you locked me in a room until election night, and then made me guess the electoral winner using only the knowledge of one state's winner or the national popular winner, the question I would ask is not "Did Obama win the national popular vote?" The question I would ask is "Did Obama win Colorado?" That's how important I think CO is.

For some time now, CO has been at the top of my list of swing states, with only MI occasionally appearing to be nearly as important. Because the blue-to-red ranking of states is highly stable, and because CO is currently the clear electoral tipping point with only six weeks left to go, I've argued here, in a comment here that there is a small number of states that matter, and that CO is at the top of that heap.

It's nice to see the conventional wisdom and top-shelf bloggers are advertising the importance of CO, and that the Obama campaign is putting offices throughout CO.

Here's a graph of how much Obama's lead in CO exceeds his national lead, over time throughout 2008, with 3σ confidence bounds. Polls were infrequent early in the year, but it's clear that Obama picked up about 0.25% in CO relative to the US recently (probably because of the Denver convention). This is a big deal, because it gives Obama a slight advantage in the electoral college. Recall that Kerry had a slight advantage in the electoral in 2004, but that the electoral college has looked neutral to me, because of Obama's huge gains in deep-red western states. Now Obama has roughly a 70-80% chance of winning an election if the national vote is tied, which translates roughly into a 4% extra chance of victory. In other words, the fact that the Democrats held their convention in Denver gives them a 4% extra probability of winning, compared to holding their election in a random spot. Combine this with the tepidity of CO Republicans toward McCain, and we could easily be headed for an Obama electoral win even if McCain wins the national popular vote.

By contrast, the Republicans made even better gains this summer in MN relative to the whole country, which doesn't matter because MN is not a swing state. Both parties made pretty ballsy guesses about which states would become swing states; the Democrats guessed right, the Republicans wrong.

Off topic, but I was surprised that McCain does not have offices in the areas of Maple Grove or Woodbury, MN. MN was a state that the Republicans wanted to pick up, right? And the burgeoning NW and E suburbs and exurbs are natural places for Republicans to organize, right?

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News flash: Obama retakes lead (sort of)

I am now projecting that Obama has a 54% chance to win the electoral vote, and a 49.99% chance to win the popular. (He has a slight advantage in the electoral college because the key swing state of CO is slightly more Democratic than the rest of the country.)

Most of the data here has been updated, except for the colored maps.

It looks like this rebound happened between 9/12 and 9/15, that is, over the course of last weekend. I suspect that the emergence of the economy as the key issue over those days helped the Democratic side.

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Nothing should focus the mind like falling into second place

Current polling shows an extremely tight race that John McCain probably leads. If the election were today, I would predict a 67.5% chance of a McCain victory, a 27.5% of an outright Obama victory, and a 5% chance of on Obama victory through an electoral tie. Given my uncertainty about future changes in public opinion, I have the race as almost a total tossup.

I hope that the Obama camp will use this opportunity to take a hard look at which states are true swing states, in other words, those likely to make a difference in a close election. The states that are close right now -- CO, OH, MI, NM, PA, NV, VA, WI -- are the states that will determine the election. That means that these are the states to focus on, even if states like IN look winnable (as it did a few weeks ago) or if states like MN look loseable (as may come to pass).

It drives me crazy when I turn on the TV and see Obama stumping in Terre Haute (IN) as he did a week ago. There's nothing wrong with Terre Haute, except that it's just about the farthest in Indiana that one can physically get from a swing state. If Obama wants to stump in a population center the size of Terre Haute, he should choose Battle Creek (MI) or Lima (OH) or Altoona (PA) or Longmont (CO) or Santa Fe (NM) or Charlottesville (VA) or Oshkosh (WI) or Carson City (NV).

Neither campaign really gets this, and both are wasting time in states that don't matter. Just compare Obama's and McCain's public schedules from 8/5 to 9/5, with states ordered by a measure of relative usefulness (swinginess of the state, divided by population):

State	Obama visits	McCain visits	Usefulness
NM	1	1	4.57
NV	1	0	3.44
CO	2	1	2.75
MI	1	2	0.98
OH	1	4	0.82
VA	2	0	0.65
PA	2	4	0.48
WI	1	1	0.40
IA	1	1	0.17
MO	1	1	0.12
IN	1	0	0.10
MT	1	0	0.10
MN	1	2	0.05
FL	1	1	0.02
Others	4	4	0.00

Both candidates are spending half their visits in places that don't matter.

What I find interesting is the very different ways that the two campaigns have allocated their visits to states that do matter. Obama is making more visits to smaller swing states (NM, NV, CO, VA) while McCain is making more visits to larger swing states (OH, PA, MI). The trade-off is this: 1) Changing the result in a large state is more important to the Electoral College than changing the result in a small state, but 2) it's much easier to change the result in a small state because you have to sway fewer people. Obama's bet is that A) because of how the electoral math works out this year, certain small states are as important as many large states, and B) a visit to a large state will sway only as many voters as a visit to a small state. Point (A) is a bet that part (1) of the trade-off is not so important, and point (B) is a bet that part (2) of the trade-off is accurate. On the other hand, McCain's bet is that A') even if it looks like CO is as important as OH/PA/MI at a point in time, he can swing OH/PA/MI enough to put the election out of reach, and B') a visit to a large state will sway many more voters as a visit to a small state because of more widespread media coverage. Point (A') is a bet that part (1) of the trade-off is very important, and point (B') is a bet that part (2) of the trade-off is inaccurate because of efficiencies to campaigning in large states.

It's interesting to me how the candidates have made these very different bets, and I'm excited to see how they play out. It's not clear who's right, but I tend to think that Obama's bets are better.

First, let's look at whether large states are really more important than small states this year. As I've said many times before, public opinion changes in different states are highly correlated, meaning that blue-to-red ranking of WI-PA-(NH/MI/NM)-CO-(OH/NV)-VA is likely to remain stable through the rest of the race. This means that WI will be bluer than PA, PA will be bluer than NH/MI/NM, NH/MI/NM will be bluer than CO, and so on. If this ranking holds up, then CO will be the key state, despite its small size. If this ranking holds up with one transposition, then CO, MI, NM, OH, or NV will be the key state. What's clear here is that size doesn't matter -- small states like CO/NM/NV are as important as big states like MI/OH/PA. Because of this, I agree with Obama's bet (A) rather than McCain's bet (A').

Of course, if you believe that states are loosely correlated, then the current ordering of states doesn't matter much, and so OH/MI/PA are clearly more important.

Second, let's look at whether campaigning in large states is more efficient than campaigning in small states, as the McCain campaign believes. This would be the case if vastly more people saw the earned media from a visit to a large state than from a visit to a small state because the population centers there are bigger. I think that this is wrong. The thing that really matters is the size and extent of a media market. Because CO/NV/NM are dominated by one media market each, I think that a visit to CO/NV/NM will sway almost as may votes as a visit to PA/OH/MI. Put another way, Philadelphia may have 3 times the people as Denver, but its media market covers barely as many Pennsylvanians as Denver's covers Coloradans, and as a percentage of state population, it is far smaller than Denver's.

Conclusion: I think that Obama has the right strategy of focusing in smaller swing states, but he needs to stop wasting time in places like Terre Haute.

[Edited to add: Jerome Armstrong makes a nice comment about how Obama is wasting field resources too in states that aren't going to turn this election. I think field is even more important than earned media, so this concerns me.

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Blue Screen of McCain

During the part of McCain's speech I was awake for, I couldn't stop thinking of this image.

I hereby retract my prediction that McCain would get a greater bounce than Obama.
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data integrity; Biden and convention bounces

I was surprised by the sudden uptick in Obama support, which appeared to happen a couple days before Obama announced Biden. I tracked it down to a data input error: Instead of typing in Rasmussen's recent TN poll as 60-35 McCain, I had typed it in as 60-35 Obama. So, I've been spending most of today creating some data integrity checks so that errors don't recur. I also went back through all the past data, and found that there were only a few errors, and they were generally immaterial.

My best evidence is that Obama's lead has grown by about 1.5% from mid-August to the close of the convention. It increased by about 0.5% in the days leading up to the announcement of Biden, another 0.5% right after that announcement, another 0.5% through the convention, and continues to trend upward. This isn't a humongous bounce, but it's about what I expected in today's 46-44-10 landscape.

The above chart shows, for each recent date in August, my best estimate of Obama's lead using only polls through that date.

I predict that McCain's bounce will be slightly larger than Obama's, and that Obama's lead will fall to about 1% after the Republican convention. The reasons are that McCain played his VP announcement excellently, and that the Republicans are getting great press by scaling down their convention during Gustav (much better than they'd be getting if George Bush and Dick Cheney were in St. Paul).

Although I think that McCain's inexperienced VP choice will be a liability for him in the long-run, Obama's response was uncharacteristically flat-footed. It's pretty clear to me that their response ad was a prefabbed ad that was intended for release regardless of who John McCain chose. They created an ad that avoided mentioned the name or sex of the running mate in the audio, and then just plugged in a couple shots of McCain and Palin once she was announced. As a result, the generic message of this generic ad ("VP pick is not a change") clashes with the obvious truth that McCain's pick is downright weird.

The Obama campaign has a couple big themes at its disposal -- change and judgment. As I just mentioned, "no change" is a hard message to make about Gov. Palin. Instead, the Obama campaign should have (and I think would have, if they had prepared properly) made an ad on the theme of McCain's judgment in choosing an inexperienced small-state governor.

Luckily for Obama, the McCain campaign seems to have prepared for his VP choice almost as little as the Obama campaign did. It appears that they didn't do due diligence on her state trooper scandal or her family situation, and they still have Alaska drawn without its panhandle on their U.S. map.

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