Security World: It's getting late early for Senate Democrats.

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Oct. 22, 2014

No. 143

By Jonathan V. Last

COLD OPEN

Polling bias is the last redoubt of the doomed.

This is universally true. In 1996 I had a friend who had recently graduated from college and gotten a low-level job on the Dole campaign. It was a great job for a kid who loved politics and he got to travel with the campaign, get to know the candidate, and see America.

One afternoon in late October, I had a conversation with my buddy that I'll never forget. I told him that it had been a great way to spend the year, even though he was headed to certain defeat in a week or two. And he replied incredulously. "What do you mean?" he asked. "We have this thing in the bag. In. The. Bag!"

And from there he launched into a state-by-state dissection of the race, explaining where the polls where wrong, what the poll bias problems were, and how Dole was closing.

You see this sort of short-term mania all the time in politics. Democrats and Kerry in the late days of 2004; with Republicans and Romney in late 2012. And now we have some Democrats at it now, arguing that things aren't as bad as they seem because the polls are skewed. (And then we have slightly more sophisticated Democrats playing off against that to argue that while the polls may or may not be skewed, the GOP advantage is only "small.")

Most Democratic pollsters, however, aren't buying this spin. Here's the very smart Mark Blumenthal explaining that intuiting the skew of polls before the fact is tremendously difficult. Sometimes they skew one way, sometimes another. And sometimes they're dead-on. (In case you're curious, Blumenthal's current model predicts that Republicans will finish with 53 Senate seats.)

The great Sean Trende has a meditation on the issue over at Real Clear Politics, in which he argues basically the same thing: That with a sample size^_meaning, of election cycles^_that's so small, you can find lots of patterns to explain discrepancies between the final poll numbers and the actual results. But that those theories might be exploded with the addition of a few more data points. Here's Trende offering up a theory for the difference in polls and votes in some of the most "skewed" years:

If you only have a dozen or so data points and go looking for a pattern, sooner or later you will find something that explains those data points well. The problem is that we don't have a great basis for sorting out the good theory from the bad, at least until the theory has survived a few trial runs.

To see the potential problem here, when I look at close races only in midterms, the pattern that jumps out at me is that pollsters understate the "victorious" party. 1994 and 2002 were good Republican years, and there was a pro-Democratic bias. 1998 and 2006 were good Democratic years, and there was a pro-Republican bias. This might suggest that there will be a pro-Democratic skew this year.

I can even justify this on the basis of theory: either pollsters miss a late break toward the fundamentals in these years (this is consistent with what John Sides suggests at the Washington Post) or they look at their results and think "this can't be right; Jim Sasser isn't going to lose," and sit on the poll . Obviously, 2010 would need to be explained away, but if I took this theory seriously I could do so, either on the basis that Republican voters made up their minds extremely early, so there was an inevitably Democratic break at the end, or that the indicators were so strong that pollsters were actually surprised when Democrats like Harry Reid and Michael Bennet were hanging on.

The bottom line is that we have neither the data nor well-tested theories to explain what sort of skew we should expect this cycle.

With just under two weeks to go, I'd still keep our over-under line at 54, with the Republican in North Carolina now under a point away in the Real Clear average and New Hampshire at +2.5 for the Democrat, the smallest margin of the race. Georgia has tightened for Democrats, but that still puts the GOP math at a solid 52, for a starting point, with 53 or 54 very possible, and 55 not crazy.

Thirteen days to go.

LOOKING BACK

"If politics were fair, Democrats would be in as much trouble as Republicans. And they'd be just as vulnerable. They've been obstructionist, anti-tax-cut, soft on terrorism, and generally obnoxious. On top of that, Pelosi is the most unpopular national politician in America. But in the sixth year of the Bush presidency, with a GOP-run Congress, Democrats aren't the issue. Republicans are.

"This explains why efforts by Bush and Republicans to target Democrats have been so unsuccessful. A veteran Republican consultant says lavish spending on TV commercials in races he's involved in has largely failed to either boost the poll numbers of his Republican candidates or drive down those of Democrats. Worse, in blue states, the Democratic crossover vote on which Republican candidates often rely has dried up. Democrats have gone home in droves."

^_Fred Barnes, "How Bad Will It Be?" from our October 23, 2006, issue.

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Constitutional Congress

Legislative correction.

'Our Nige'

Happy warrior.

THE READING LIST

Ryan Anderson on forcing ministers to officiate gay weddings.
* * *
On Michael Keaton.
* * *
Matt Continetti on the Macaca Democrats.

INSTANT CLASSIC

"For many years, there was only one way to get in touch with [Bill] Murray ^_ through his legendary 800-number, where even his best friends had to leave a message. Murray still uses that service, but he also now owns a cell phone: an old BlackBerry. 'I got it to communicate with my sons, because they will not answer a phone call, but they will answer a text,' he says. He's never used Twitter, and he's not a fan of email. 'I mean I have done it,' he says. 'But I have no interest in it. The kids' school stuff is all email, and they send thousands of emails. It's complete overload.' Murray is so private he won't even say where he lives exactly."

^_Yet more examples of the greatness of Bill Murray, Variety, October 14, 2014

THE LAST WORD

Next week I've got a book coming out. It's called The Seven Deadly Virtues and it's a little bit like Bill Bennett's great anthology, The Book of Virtue. Only, funny. It's a collection of essays from writers you know and love from The Weekly Standard: Matt Labash, Christopher Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, Michael Graham, and P. J. O'Rourke. Plus writers I'm willing to bet you love from other places: Christopher Buckley, Jonah Goldberg, James Lileks, Larry Miller, Joe Queenan, Iowahawk, Rob Long, and more.

You can pre-order it now, if you like. But even better, if you're in the Washington area, we're going to have an event to launch the book at the American Enterprise Institute next Tuesday, October 28. It's free and open to the public, but you have to register beforehand here. I'd love to see you there.

I'll have more on The Seven Deadly Virtues over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, a final thought on Ebola czar Ron Klain. There was not a little dismay that the Obama administration chose to set up a new posting to ride herd over the Ebola response and then to put a long-time political operative, Ron Klain, in the job.

Most of the criticism focused on the fact that Klain isn't a doctor and has no experience in the field of public health. None of that really bothers me. When you think of the tasks an Ebola czar would have to do, technical expertise is pretty far down on the list and you can get good advice from subject experts who do infectious-disease management all day, every day.

No, what the Ebola czar needs, more than anything, is to be skilled in management and logistics. The guy sitting at that desk needs to understand how to master an organization so that he's delegating properly, getting the right information from the real experts, and figuring out how to deploy people and material in the most efficacious manner. Maybe Klain will fit that bill. Maybe he won't. We'll see.

But it's not hard to think of names of people who would definitely fit the bill. Colin Powell comes to mind. Bill Clinton. Jeff Bezos. Yet weirdly enough, the perfect Ebola czar was obvious: Mitt Romney.

Romney's management work at Bain and job handling the Salt Lake Olympics are very on point. He's fast on the up-take with information and good at prioritizing. He's a known quantity with the American public and, because he isn't beholden to Obama in any way, people could trust that he was being transparent.

It's hard to think of a person who would have been better suited to the job^_and whose appointment would have immediately signaled to America that the president was taking the threat of Ebola seriously.

The only question is how it would impact the Romney 2016 campaign ...

I kid!

(Probably.)

Best,
JVL

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