The Good Post Gallery

[Landslide Lyndon]

I love how Rasmussen's own methodology even openly admits their polls are garbage nowadays, if you just read between the lines ever so slightly.


Here's how a Rasmussen poll is made!!!

• Poll conducted during a four-hour period of a single weekday evening
• short time means no calling back any numbers
• Robot voice asking questions and telling you to press buttons
• Questions asked of whoever picked up the phone; could easily be small child
• Calls are only made to landlines
• Instead of, you know, calling cell phones, they channel inspiration from Zogby: "To reach those who have abandoned traditional landline telephones,  Rasmussen Reports uses an online survey tool to interview randomly selected participants from  a demographically diverse panel."
  
  Let's see. At this point, they have data showing which buttons were pressed by whoever they called that evening who happened to be home, who decided to answer that phone call, and who didn't hang up when they heard a recording on the line. They add this data to internet surveys taken by people who deign to sign up to be part of the "demographically diverse" Rasmussen internet panel and trust none of these internet folks lied about any of their personal information.
  
  But wait, now the fun part!
  
  
• The sample isn't representative in the slightest, so it gets adjusted to match census data for the area!
• Still not representative enough, so it gets adjusted again to match voter registration records!
• Still not good enough, so it goes through a likely voter screen! Only the people who pushed the correct buttons when the robot voice asked them about their voting habits make it through this part!
• Almost good, but still one problem- it has to be adjusted for partisanship! This means they use the magical dynamic weighting system which uses "the state’s voting history, national trends, and recent polling in a particular state or geographic area" to figure out exactly how to BS where the numbers should have been if this was anything resembling a scientific poll.
  
  So, to recap: Have robots blanket the states with calls for a few hours while everyone's out eating dinner or watching football, record the answers from whoever does pick up the phone, mix that data with some totally legit internet surveys, arbitrarily readjust the numbers four times in a row, and presto! You have your very own Rasmussen poll!
  
  (source: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/about_us/methodology)
  

[Landslide Lyndon]

Alright is it time to call BS on all the pundits?  All we heard for YEARS is "Bush's brain."  All Rove was was lucky.  Had Bill Clinton smoked his cigar instead of doing weird sh-t with it Bush would never have been elected.  We kept hearing what a genius Rove is.  Turns out he was in the right place at the right time and just didn't F'up too bad.  Now this go around while Obama was putting together the craziest ground game this country has ever seen Rove's strategy was to buy half a billion dollars worth of TV ads.  Unbelievable.  I could have done that.

What pisses me off about this is Karl Rove walks away with literally MILLIONS for doing nothing.  Actually he didn't do nothing he actually burned money that could have been used for something useful.  But yet somehow Karl Rove is better than a single mother living on welfare.  How does that make any sense?  50 single mothers on welfare wouldn't waste as much money as Karl Rove but he is a glorious small business owner and a single mother is scum of the earth.  How does that make any sense?

And it's not just Karl.  What about all the TV pundits on the left and the right?  They get paid six figures to tell us how amazing Rove is for years.  They were 100% wrong.  We would have done better without them.  So are they better than single mothers living on welfare?  When are we going to wake up and realize a swindled six or seven figure paycheck does not make you a glorious "small business" owner that we should worship!

The fact of the matter is our society is full of self important leeches who tell us how critical their work is for our society while they talk about all the single mother's getting welfare checks.  It makes me sick.

[Landslide Lyndon]

cool righteous indignation bros

The more I see which posters reacted like that to my post, the better I feel about it.

[Landslide Lyndon]

I also don't know where people are getting the idea Brown would be a shoo-in for Senate from as well, what are the odds the Democrats will nominate someone as godawful as Coakley again?

It's not the Democratic candidate, it's the Republican candidate...the logic goes like this: before Elizabeth Warren declared her run against him, Scott Brown was basically safe. Warren won't be running against him. Therefore, while he certainly took a hit from the 2012 campaign, his approval rating remains positive and he is better-known than any potential opponent and, considering the sort of voters with a propensity to turn out in special elections like this, the electorate will be more favorable: therefore, he is slightly favored. Also, while you mention Coakley, ironically Coakley herself and Deval Patrick, the two most popular statewide officials in MA today, are probably the two strongest Democratic candidates. Alas, Capuano is probably the likeliest candidate. Coakley is never running for the Senate again and Patrick doesn't want it.

The argument against this is obvious (Massachusetts is so Democratic none of this matters!), but we'll basically have to wait for polling, probably from PPP, to see if that's really the case. (I actually recall back in January of 2010 the first polling company to show Brown in the lead was PPP, 44-43. Correct me if I am wrong...ah, those were interesting times, politically speaking.)

Given what happened, I don't think Brown could have beaten anyone in 2012. That said, a lot of the problem he had then will be worse now.

Coakley was the worst candidate Democrats could have run for reasons that had zero to do with her personal ineptitude as a candidate. The dominate feature in Massachusetts politics from 2004 onwards were the internal divisions opened up by the Gay Marriage issue. On one hand it swamped Romney, but less noticed is its effect on the state Democratic party. It brought in a wave of new activists, and probably made possible Deval Patrick's entry into the 2006 governor's race. While almost all Democrats supported it by 2007, there was a lot of resentment at the takeover of the party by activists, and Coakley, who was a protege of Reilly, was a big part of that.

Patrick made the situation worse by all but ignoring if not insulting traditional democratic players, even bringing up busing at his first St. Patrick's day Dinner. This culminated in the 2008 Presidential Primary, where the Coakley-Cahill wing backed Clinton, and Patrick backed Obama. Of course, Kerry/Kennedy treacherously backstabbed the Clintons, or at least that was the view of a lot of Democrats. The truth is, there wasn't much good feeling towards Kennedy in the final 18 months of his life in a lot of Democratic circles, and if anything, his high-handed endorsment actually backfired, leading to Clinton's 18 point romp.

Coakley was a die-hard Clintonite bordering on a Puma, voting for Hillary and then insisting on abstaining at the DNC. She entered the race for Senate as much to prevent a Patrick(and by extension Obama-aligned candidate) from taking the seat and to partially get vengeance on Kerry and the Kennedy's. It was a bizarre campaign, but one where she ran hard.

Of course she stopped campaigning altogether after the primary, because that was the campaign she cared about. She then planned to head to Washington where she would be a conservative for Massachusetts senator dedicated to making life hell for Kerry and Obama. Of course that didn't happen. Voters who felt the same way she did suddenly turned on their TVs over Christmas and saw a better version of what she was offering.

Coakley, when she got in trouble in early January, was therefore in the worst position imaginable to reactivate the Democratic coalition. She had based her primary appeal on being at least partially a vote against Obama, and the urban/yuppie/activist/minority domination of the party, and she suddenly needed general election turnout among all of those groups. And she was far too proud to ask for help.

None of those divisions exist anymore. The 2008 elections are years in the past. Brown will not fly under the radar. He will have to take positions on taxes, the debt limit(when it explodes again in March) and the Supreme court, and you can bet his Scalia statement from the debates would be everywhere.