Reasons to be cheerful

[ciphergoth]

Two recent polls have Obama ahead in Florida by four to five points. The polls currently show Obama having a 74 vote lead in the Electoral College. My lovely graphs are starting to keel over, because all the lines are bunching up at the top: they currently show that Obama would have a 55-75% chance of victory even if he were to lose three percentage points against McCain nationally; on current form they show an 88-99% chance of victory.

This November we could be looking at total meltdown of the Republican party, with wipeouts not only in the Presidential elections but in the House and the Senate too. The Dems could have a sufficient majority to kill off the ridiculous procedural crap the GOP keep pulling. Let's just hope they find enough spine to use it.

Updated: Of course, this is before the coming advertising blitz has its effect. John McCain has announced that he's going to join the Federal "matched funds" programme, which means that he accepts a donation cap of $84.1M in return for a matching $84.1M from the Federal purse, giving him about $170M to spend on advertising in the coming months. This programme has been in place since 1972 and all Presidential candidates have accepted the matching funds in that time.

Except for Barack Obama, who announced yesterday that he will not be taking part in the scheme. This is because the Obama camp anticipate raising up to $500M from donations, largely small donations made online. In other words, starting from a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls, Obama will outspend his rival 3:1.

Oh, and just in case that's not enough, the Democrats are also going to sue John McCain for violation of campaign finance rules he signed into law.

Yee-har!

Comments

[elfy.livejournal.com]

my thought... one shouldn't even start thinking about what good that money could do.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Yes, especially when there's reasonable evidence that the amount of money spent makes very little difference to the results.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Well that certainly contradicts the received wisdom of US elections. Most of the studies I can find with a quick Google are behind paywalls and the abstract doesn't say what they found, but I was able to find the full text of this one:

Green, D. , Hillygus, S. , Sides, J. and Shaw, D. (2007, Apr) "The Influence of Television and Radio Advertising on Candidate Evaluations: Results from a Large Scale Randomized Experiment" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hotel, Chicago, IL (PDF)

Advertising thus appears to have the capacity to induce a substantial shift in the relative evaluations of the candidates. This conclusion remains unchanged when one introduces controls for the airing of opposing ads or the partisan composition of the sample.

Do point me at more research on this though, I'm sure it's a disputed area.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of this Levitt paper, which takes pairs of candidates who've stood against each other more than once, and examines the effect of different funding levels.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Interesting, thanks. Looks like both positions have credible evidence; I think I'd prefer to hear that it has little effect (even despite the fact that for once such an effect would tip the balance in favour of the better candidate) but reality may have another opinion :-)