September 30, 2012 John Hinderaker at Power Line has some good advice for Romney partisans; keep calm and carry on. As Paul noted last night, the Gallup Poll currently has Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by six points, 50-44. Paul expressed skepticism about that finding, with which I agree. Why would Obama be enjoying a spike in support over the last week? Are voters happy to see an American ambassador murdered and the Middle East in flames, while our economy continues to stagnate? I don’t think so.

Certainly the Rasmussen survey, which tracks likely voters, hasn’t seen any similar bump for Obama. As of today, Rasmussen’s three-day rolling numbers have the race tied 46-46. It couldn’t be closer: with “leaners” included, Rasmussen has it 48-48, and in the swing states it’s 46-46.

Obama’s resurgence in the Gallup Poll looks suspiciously like the one that Gallup gave Jimmy Carter in 1980. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, Gallup tried to convince its readers in October 1980 that Carter had surged to an eight-point lead over Ronald Reagan:

So, were voters suddenly happy about American hostages being held in Iran for a year, or about high unemployment and skyrocketing prices? Of course not. The Carter bounce was entirely fictional, caused either by lousy polling technique or an effort by Democrats at Gallup to drum up support for their candidate. I suspect that this year’s Obama bounce is cut from the same cloth.

Still, there is no denying that Republicans are nervous. This election shouldn’t be close, given Obama’s record, yet it looks as though it will be. So everyone has advice for the Romney campaign. ...

WSJ Editors listened to the Obama excuses and responded. ... "When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.1 And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren't paid for,2 as a consequence of tax cuts that weren't paid for,3 a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,4 and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.5

"Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit,6 and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.7"

Footnote No. 1: Either Mr. Obama inherited the largest deficit in American history or he won the 1944 election, but both can't be true. The biggest annual deficit the modern government has ever run was in 1943, equal to 30.3% of the economy, to mobilize for World War II. The next biggest years were the following two, at 22.7% and 21.5%, to win it.

The deficit in fiscal 2008 was a mere 3.2% of GDP. The deficit in fiscal 2009, which began on October 1, 2008 and ran through September 2009, soared to 10.1%, the highest since 1945.

Mr. Obama wants to blame all of that on his predecessor, and no doubt the recession that began in December 2007 reduced revenues and increased automatic spending "stabilizers" like jobless insurance. But Mr. Obama conveniently forgets a little event in February 2009 known as the "stimulus" that increased spending by a mere $830 billion above the normal baseline.

The recession ended in June 2009, but spending has still kept rising. The President has presided over four years in a row of deficits in excess of $1 trillion, and the spending baseline going forward into his second term is nearly $1.1 trillion more than in fiscal 2007.

Federal spending as a share of GDP will average 24.1% over his first term including 2013. Even if you throw out fiscal 2009 and blame that entirely on Mr. Bush, the Obama spending average will be 23.8% of GDP. That compares to a post-WWII average of a little under 20%. Spending under Mr. Bush averaged 20.1% including 2009, and 19.6% if that year is left out. ...

... Footnote No. 5: Mr. Obama keeps dining out on the excuse of the recession, but that ended halfway through his first year. The main deficit problems since 2009 are a permanently higher spending base (see Footnote No. 1) and the slowest economic recovery in modern history. Revenues have remained below 16% of the economy, compared to 18% to 19% in a normal expansion.

The 2008 crisis is long over. The crisis now is Mr. Obama's non-recovery.

Footnote No. 6: Even at face value, Mr. Obama's suggestion that he is "only" responsible for 10% of what the government does is ludicrous. Note that in addition to his stimulus, what he calls "emergency actions" include his new health-care entitlement that will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even using low-ball assumptions.

But the larger point concerns executive leadership. Every President "inherits" a government that was built over generations, which he chooses to change, or not to change, to suit his priorities. Mr. Obama chose to see the government he inherited and grow it faster than any President since LBJ. ...

More on this from Veronique de Rugy at The Corner. Who remembers President Obama’s first budget? I do. It was called “A New Era of Responsibility.” Back then, the president promised that he would cut the deficit to $912 billion in 2011 and to $581 billion by 2012. But that’s another of the president’s promises that never come to pass. As Fiscal Year 2012 nears to an end, the data shows that the deficit for 2012 will surpass a trillion dollars for the fourth straight year in a row.

But according to the president, he has almost no responsibility in this sad state of affairs. In fact, he claims that “90 percent” of the deficit is due to President Bush’s policy:

Over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

That’s a remarkably bold statement considering that President Obama has been in office for four years, and that he has engaged in seriously expansive policies of his own. I am always happy to remind conservatives about the incredible fiscal irresponsibility that reigned during the Bush years, but for Obama to claim that he shares almost no responsibility (10 percent, to be precise) in this fourth trillion-dollar deficit is ridiculous.

In fact, Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler looked at the claim this morning and concludes that the president deserves four Pinocchios for it. ...

September 24th Pickings had poll analysis from Charlie Martin at Pajamas Media. Martin added more which we have today. It isn’t unusual for the state of the polls to be a big issue this close to an election, but this week has been different from any previous campaign I remember — it’s not who’s ahead in the polls, it’s the polls themselves that are the big topic of discussion. My article “Skewed and Unskewed Polls” got picked up by both Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh’s Stack O’ Stuff and — along with plenty of other contributions — made the topic of how polls are being performed into a national one.

The problem is that the discussion (as happens only too often) is now being led by people who don’t understand the whole topic very well. So let’s just talk about this a bit. I promise to almost completely eliminate the math; believe it or not, people can learn to reason about statistics without learning the central limit theorem.

Imagine a future day when, through technology and psychic powers, we can at any moment take an instant poll, checking what people mean in their heart of hearts to do when they vote in November. (And let’s not think what else could be done with that technology — this is a thought experiment.)

Secretary Dumbledore, Minister of Polling, goes into the office and pushes the appropriate button, and the poll is taken, click. It’s 51,267,303 for Romney and 49,109,941 for Obama, with 2,007,007 undecided. Does this tell us how the election is going to really come out? No, because it’s still 40 days (and nights) into the future. People may change their minds. Some people will die unexpectedly. And those two million-odd undecideds will have to either decide how to vote or decide not to vote at all.

And that’s the way it would work if we had this Perfect Magical Polling Wizardry. That would be a perfect poll.

Of course, we don’t. So this is what real polling companies do: ...

Joel Gehrke in Beltway Confidential reports 55 percent of small businesses would not be started under this regulatory regime. Fifty-five percent of small business owners and manufacturers would not have started their businesses in today’s economy, according to a new poll that also reports 69 percent say President Obama’s regulatory policies have hurt their businesses.

“There is far too much uncertainty, too many burdensome regulations and too few policymakers willing to put aside their egos and fulfill their responsibilities to the American people,” said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, which commissioned the poll along with the National Federation of Independent Businesses. “To fix this problem, we need immediate action on pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that put manufacturers in the United States in a position to compete and succeed in an ever-more competitive global economy.”

The poll reports another ominous statistic for job creation: “67 percent say there is too much uncertainty in the market today to expand, grow or hire new workers.” Why? Because “President Obama’s Executive Branch and regulatory policies have hurt American small businesses and manufacturers,” according to 69 percent of the business owners surveyed. ...

Power Line Keep Calm and Carry On by John Hinderaker

As Paul noted last night, the Gallup Poll currently has Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by six points, 50-44. Paul expressed skepticism about that finding, with which I agree. Why would Obama be enjoying a spike in support over the last week? Are voters happy to see an American ambassador murdered and the Middle East in flames, while our economy continues to stagnate? I don’t think so.

Certainly the Rasmussen survey, which tracks likely voters, hasn’t seen any similar bump for Obama. As of today, Rasmussen’s three-day rolling numbers have the race tied 46-46. It couldn’t be closer: with “leaners” included, Rasmussen has it 48-48, and in the swing states it’s 46-46.

Obama’s resurgence in the Gallup Poll looks suspiciously like the one that Gallup gave Jimmy Carter in 1980. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, Gallup tried to convince its readers in October 1980 that Carter had surged to an eight-point lead over Ronald Reagan:

So, were voters suddenly happy about American hostages being held in Iran for a year, or about high unemployment and skyrocketing prices? Of course not. The Carter bounce was entirely fictional, caused either by lousy polling technique or an effort by Democrats at Gallup to drum up support for their candidate. I suspect that this year’s Obama bounce is cut from the same cloth.

Still, there is no denying that Republicans are nervous. This election shouldn’t be close, given Obama’s record, yet it looks as though it will be. So everyone has advice for the Romney campaign. (Running a political campaign is one of those things, like calling football plays, on which everyone is an expert.) Byron York writes that Republicans are imploring Romney to get more aggressive on the campaign trail:

Romney’s oscillation between a more and less aggressive stance comes as Republicans both inside and outside the party establishment are urging him to be more assertive against Obama. At Ryan’s first Ohio appearance of the week, a rally Monday in Lima, voter after voter recommended the Romney campaign change course. “Be more aggressive,” said one. “More forceful,” said another. “Bolder,” said another. “Hit harder,” said another. “More fire,” said another. By that, they meant not only that Romney hit Obama harder but that he also be more assertive and forthcoming about his own plans for the White House.

A candidate’s partisans nearly always want the candidate to be more aggressive; recall how many Democrats have accused Obama of being too low-key on the stump. Still, the desperate situation in which America finds itself does seem to call for an all-out attack by Republicans this year. Like most conservatives, I doubt whether our country can survive another four years of Obama. For what it’s worth, the one time I have seen Romney live in recent weeks, he was very aggressive, sounding like the Romney that York describes here; of course, on that occasion Romney was talking to donors:

Addressing a crowd gathered in chilly, rainy weather outside the Wright Brothers Aviation hangar at Dayton Airport, Romney said the president has “a vision of government that is entirely foreign to anything this nation has ever known.” Obama’s vision is an America with “a larger and larger government, taking more and more from the people, intruding itself into your relationship with your doctor, investing in companies, picking winners and losers…”

“That is not the America I know,” Romney continued. “That is not the America that built Ohio. That is not the America that we’re going to restore.”

Romney himself, in the eye of the hurricane, has remained commendably calm. There is no sign that his confidence has wavered, no hint of a major change in strategy (despite the claims of some reporters), no indication of even a moment of panic. I don’t know what Romney’s internal polling is showing, but I suspect that he has confidence not only in his message but in the massive turnout effort that he and his supporters have been building. And, perhaps, in the voters. Americans are by no means infallible, but are they really dumb enough, or self-destructive enough, to want another four years of Barack Obama’s failures? Will 98% of African-Americans, in particular, vote for another four years of record poverty and unemployment? I don’t think so.

If Romney’s confidence proves misplaced, there will be time enough to contemplate how we can try to salvage America’s future. For now, conservatives need to stay engaged through the home stretch, supporting conservative House and Senate candidates like the Power Line Pick Six, doing our best to convince friends, relatives and co-workers to vote Republican, and, of course, turning out ourselves on November 6.

WSJ - Editorial The 10% President The annotated Obama: How 90% of the deficit becomes somebody else's fault.

A question raised by President Obama's immortal line on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday—"I think that, you know, as President, I bear responsibility for everything, to some degree"—is what that degree really is. Maybe 70% or 80% of the buck stops with him? Or is it halfsies?

Nope. Now we know: It turns out the figure is 10%. The other 90% is somebody else's fault.

This revelation came when Steve Kroft mentioned that the national debt has climbed 60% on the President's watch. "Well, first of all, Steve, I think it's important to understand the context here," Mr. Obama replied. Fair enough, so here's his context in full, with our own annotation and translation below:

"When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.1 And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren't paid for,2 as a consequence of tax cuts that weren't paid for,3 a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,4 and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.5

"Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit,6 and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.7"

Footnote No. 1: Either Mr. Obama inherited the largest deficit in American history or he won the 1944 election, but both can't be true. The biggest annual deficit the modern government has ever run was in 1943, equal to 30.3% of the economy, to mobilize for World War II. The next biggest years were the following two, at 22.7% and 21.5%, to win it.

The deficit in fiscal 2008 was a mere 3.2% of GDP. The deficit in fiscal 2009, which began on October 1, 2008 and ran through September 2009, soared to 10.1%, the highest since 1945.

Mr. Obama wants to blame all of that on his predecessor, and no doubt the recession that began in December 2007 reduced revenues and increased automatic spending "stabilizers" like jobless insurance. But Mr. Obama conveniently forgets a little event in February 2009 known as the "stimulus" that increased spending by a mere $830 billion above the normal baseline.

The recession ended in June 2009, but spending has still kept rising. The President has presided over four years in a row of deficits in excess of $1 trillion, and the spending baseline going forward into his second term is nearly $1.1 trillion more than in fiscal 2007.

Federal spending as a share of GDP will average 24.1% over his first term including 2013. Even if you throw out fiscal 2009 and blame that entirely on Mr. Bush, the Obama spending average will be 23.8% of GDP. That compares to a post-WWII average of a little under 20%. Spending under Mr. Bush averaged 20.1% including 2009, and 19.6% if that year is left out.

Footnotes No. 2 through 4: Liberals continue to claim that the main causes of the current fiscal mess are tax rates established in, er, 2001 and 2003 and the post-9/11 wars on terror. But by 2006 and 2007, those tax rates were producing revenue of 18.2% and 18.5% of GDP, near historic norms.

Another quandary for Mr. Obama's apologists is that he has endorsed nearly all of these policies. The 2003 Medicare drug benefit wasn't offset by tax hikes or spending cuts, but Democrats expanded the program as part of ObamaCare.

The President also extended all the Bush tax rates in 2010 for two more years in the name of helping the economy, and he now wants to continue them for people earning under $200,000, which is where 71% of their "cost" resides. The Iraq campaign was won and beginning to be wound down when he took office, and he himself surged more troops in Afghanistan.

Footnote No. 5: Mr. Obama keeps dining out on the excuse of the recession, but that ended halfway through his first year. The main deficit problems since 2009 are a permanently higher spending base (see Footnote No. 1) and the slowest economic recovery in modern history.

Revenues have remained below 16% of the economy, compared to 18% to 19% in a normal expansion.

The 2008 crisis is long over. The crisis now is Mr. Obama's non-recovery.

Footnote No. 6: Even at face value, Mr. Obama's suggestion that he is "only" responsible for 10% of what the government does is ludicrous. Note that in addition to his stimulus, what he calls "emergency actions" include his new health-care entitlement that will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even using low-ball assumptions.

But the larger point concerns executive leadership. Every President "inherits" a government that was built over generations, which he chooses to change, or not to change, to suit his priorities. Mr. Obama chose to see the government he inherited and grow it faster than any President since LBJ.

The pre-eminent political question now is whether to reform the government we have to make it affordable going forward, or to keep growing the government and raise taxes to finance it, if that is even possible.

Mr. Obama favors the second option, though he pretends he can merely tax the rich to do it. Nobody who has looked honestly at the numbers believes that—not his own Simpson-Bowles commission and not the Congressional "super committee" he sanctioned but then worked to undermine.

At every turn he has demagogued the Romney-Ryan proposals to modernize the entitlement state so it is affordable, and he personally blew up the "grand bargain" House Speaker John Boehner was willing to strike last summer.

Footnote No. 7: Mr. Obama's posture as the tightest skinflint since Eisenhower is a tutorial in how to dissemble with statistics. The growth rate seems low because he's measuring from the end of fiscal 2009, after a one-year spending increase of $535 billion. That is the year of his stimulus and thus spending is growing off a much higher base. The real annual pace of government growth is closer to 5%, and that doesn't count ObamaCare.

In another news-making bit with "60 Minutes," which the program decided not to air, Mr. Obama conceded that "Do we see sometimes us going overboard in our campaign, mistakes that are made, areas where there's no doubt that somebody could dispute how we are presenting things, that happens in politics."

Note the passive voice, as if the President's re-election campaign is disembodied from the President. If Mr. Obama's campaign seems dishonest enough that even Mr. Obama is forced to admit it, this is because it's coming from the top.

The Corner The President's Trillion-Dollar Deficits by Veronique de Rugy Who remembers President Obama’s first budget? I do. It was called “A New Era of Responsibility.” Back then, the president promised that he would cut the deficit to $912 billion in 2011 and to $581 billion by 2012. But that’s another of the president’s promises that never come to pass. As Fiscal Year 2012 nears to an end, the data shows that the deficit for 2012 will surpass a trillion dollars for the fourth straight year in a row.

But according to the president, he has almost no responsibility in this sad state of affairs. In fact, he claims that “90 percent” of the deficit is due to President Bush’s policy:

Over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

That’s a remarkably bold statement considering that President Obama has been in office for four years, and that he has engaged in seriously expansive policies of his own. I am always happy to remind conservatives about the incredible fiscal irresponsibility that reigned during the Bush years, but for Obama to claim that he shares almost no responsibility (10 percent, to be precise) in this fourth trillion-dollar deficit is ridiculous.

In fact, Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler looked at the claim this morning and concludes that the president deserves four Pinocchios for it. Using data from my colleague Chuck Blahous, he breaks down the numbers for us:

2009:

Economic/technical differences: $570 billion (46 percent) Bush policies: $330 billion (27 percent) Obama policies: $325 billion (27 percent)

2010:

Economic/technical: $815 billion (51 percent) Bush: $225 billion (14 percent) Obama: $565 billion (35 percent)

2011:

Economic/technical: $720 billion (46 percent) Bush: $160 billion (10 percent) Obama: $685 billion (44 percent)

You can read the whole thing here (including Kessler’s methodology).

Now Obama’s solution for cutting the deficit is simple: Blame the deficit on the Bush tax cuts and raise taxes on the rich. While we can commend the president for his persistence in

repeating the same thing over and over again, it doesn’t make it true and it certainly won’t fill our budget gaps.

It is simply incorrect to blame the deficit mostly on tax cuts. In fact, a few weeks ago, the CBO released a report that looks into the cause of the disappearing surpluses at the end of the 1990s and show that half of the blame goes to increased spending. Here is a chart:

As you can see, according to the CBO estimates, tax cuts contributed to 24 percent of the surplus’s disappearance (and some of these tax cuts were extended by Obama). Projection inaccuracy alone contributed even more than tax relief.

It is really unfortunate that President Bush’s 2003 tax cuts were not followed by serious spending cuts. I do believe that well-designed tax cuts have a very positive impact on the economy. However, no tax cuts can compensate for the damage caused by the dramatic increase in spending that we experienced during the Bush years (a 60 percent increase in spending above inflation over eight years, compared to Clinton’s 12.5 percent; two Keynesian stimuli in 2001 and 2008; bailouts; and more.)

And if spending is mainly responsible for our current deficit, it should play a large role in addressing the problem — there aren’t many other ways to go about it. Congress must cut spending and cut it fast. More important, it must reform Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, since they are the drivers of our debt crisis. The rule is simple: Reform the entitlements, save the world. Ignore them, and you can count on many more $1 trillion dollar deficits in our future. And please, don’t get fooled by the doomsday predictions that the world will end if sequestration – across-the-board spending cuts — is allowed to go into effect on January 2.

Pajamas Media The Truth About Polling: Yes, Romney Is Probably Tied or Winning Knowing the nuts and bolts of polling science leads to this rational conclusion. by Charlie Martin It isn’t unusual for the state of the polls to be a big issue this close to an election, but this week has been different from any previous campaign I remember — it’s not who’s ahead in the polls, it’s the polls themselves that are the big topic of discussion. My article “Skewed and Unskewed Polls” got picked up by both Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh’s Stack O’ Stuff and — along with plenty of other contributions — made the topic of how polls are being performed into a national one.

The problem is that the discussion (as happens only too often) is now being led by people who don’t understand the whole topic very well. So let’s just talk about this a bit. I promise to almost completely eliminate the math; believe it or not, people can learn to reason about statistics without learning the central limit theorem.

Imagine a future day when, through technology and psychic powers, we can at any moment take an instant poll, checking what people mean in their heart of hearts to do when they vote in November. (And let’s not think what else could be done with that technology — this is a thought experiment.)

Secretary Dumbledore, Minister of Polling, goes into the office and pushes the appropriate button, and the poll is taken, click. It’s 51,267,303 for Romney and 49,109,941 for Obama, with 2,007,007 undecided. Does this tell us how the election is going to really come out? No, because it’s still 40 days (and nights) into the future. People may change their minds. Some people will die unexpectedly. And those two million-odd undecideds will have to either decide how to vote or decide not to vote at all.

And that’s the way it would work if we had this Perfect Magical Polling Wizardry. That would be a perfect poll.

Of course, we don’t. So this is what real polling companies do:

– First, they get a whole bunch of phone numbers. (When I was a kid, they actually sent pollsters door to door, but that’s pretty much died out.)

– Then, they establish some rules: people who are qualified to answer are adults, or adults who are registered to vote. They want to make sure to sample enough of important demographics (woman, minorities, and so forth) and they don’t want to sample too many people because it costs them between $10 and $100 per person they call. So they set some goal for the number of respondents they want, say 1000.

– They start to make calls, and at each call they ask some questions. Let’s say they call me, and I tell them I’m a male, mixed-race, Buddhist, registered Republican. If by chance they’ve already called the other one, they may say “okay, thanks, that’s all we need.” Or, they may go ahead and ask their questions.

– They repeat this thousands of times. Yes, thousands, plural: some people don’t answer, some people hang up, some say “Mommy’s in the bathroom and I’ve got a new kitty, want to hear him?” Eventually, they get a big enough sample.

(How, you may ask, do they know what “big enough” is? There’s a mathematical way of estimating what the probable error will be for a given population and sample size. You can look it up — look for “standard error” and “confidence intervals.” The main thing to remember is that it quickly leads to diminishing returns. You’ve got to get lots more respondents to improve the accuracy very much. This is why nearly every national poll has more or less the same margin of error: that’s as much accuracy as the press will pay for.)

The thing about this is that these people have been picked as closely as possible to be a random sample. Ideally, they use dice or something like them to pick which people’s numbers they call; practically, they can’t always get it perfectly random — what if you’re calling a Texas football town and the high school game is that night? — but they do try.

Finally, though, they have their sample, and it includes enough people according to their rules. But: because they have been picked randomly, they almost certainly don’t exactly represent the real population.

Think about it — I have 100 million people, and I can only pick 1,000 of them. There are lots and lots of ways they could pick that random set (lots and lots: the interested reader should go to Wolfram Alpha and type in “100 million choose 1000” to see how many.) And almost none of them will really be a perfect sample.

What they have instead may give them 63 percent Democrats and 32 percent Republicans.

Now, here’s where the pollster’s special magic comes in. Through mathematical methods, they can manipulate these numbers for different populations. So they create a mathematical model of the population, and they adjust the raw results to match that model. In an election poll like the ones we’re talking about, that is called a turnout model, and it comes down to saying that you expect there to be, say, 37 percent Democrats, 32 percent Republicans, and 31 percent independents.

So, the polling company takes their actual raw data, and they fit it to that turnout model, and that’s what they present as the result of this poll.

Those results, however, depend on how well the sample matches the real population and depend on how well their turnout model fits what people actually do on that longed-for day when we actually have the election and can stop fretting about polling companies.

So with all that in mind, now let’s think about how to read a poll.

First: when you read a poll, you’ll always see it stated as something like “53 percent Democratic, margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.” Here’s how you should read that: “The polling company believes that if the election were taken today, there is 1 chance in 20 that the actual result will be more than 56.5 percent Democrat or less than 49.5 percent Democrat.”

You see, that’s what the “margin of error” really means: by statistical methods, they believe that 19 out of 20 times — or 95 percent of the time — the real value would come out between 49.5 percent and 56.5 percent.

Second, and this is where the controversy is coming now: the quality of those results depends on the accuracy of that original model.

So, when a Quinnipiac poll comes out and says that Ohio is now 53 percent Obama, what should you do? Ready, class?

First, we restate that. I can’t find the margin of error for this poll readily (this should make you suspicious at the start), but if you can’t find one, you’ll always be close to right if you say it’s 3 percent plus or minus. So we re-read this as “they’re saying there’s 1 chance in 20 it will come out either above 56 or below 50.”

Second, we look for the polls’ “internals” — in other words, that turnout model. Now, here’s where this poll gets interesting. Hugh Hewitt interviewed Peter Brown, the head of Quinnipiac, and challenged him directly on the turnout model:

HH: I want to start with the models, which are creating quite a lot of controversy. In Florida, the model that Quinnipiac used gave Democrats a nine-point edge in turnout. In Ohio, the sample had an eight-point Democratic advantage. What’s the reasoning behind those models?

PB: Well, what is important to understand is that the way Quinnipiac and most other major polls do their sampling is we do not wait for party ID. We ask voters, or the people we interview, do they consider themselves a Democrat, a Republican, an independent or a member of a minor party. And that’s different than asking them what their party registration is. What you’re comparing it to is party registration. In other words, when someone starts as a voter, they have the opportunity of, in most states, of being a Republican, a Democrat, or a member of a minor party or unaffiliated … (emphasis added)

A little later, he says:

HH: Why would guys run a poll with nine percent more Democrats than Republicans when that percentage advantage, I mean, if you’re trying to tell people how the state is going to go, I don’t think this is particularly helpful, because you’ve oversampled Democrats, right?

PB: But we didn’t set out to oversample Democrats. We did our normal, random digit dial way of calling people. And there were, these are likely voters. They had to pass a screen. Because it’s a presidential year, it’s not a particularly heavy screen.

In other words, the way Quinnipiac does it is they assume that the thousand or so people they poll on a certain day really do represent the population, and if that comes out with a D+8 distribution, that’s the way they report it.

Now, it’s tempting to jump for the conspiracy theory and think Quinnipiac is slanting the poll, but they’re being very upfront about it. They have a method they like and they’re running with it. They’re not adjusting to an assumed turnout model, which seems at least as reasonable in a real-world way as having an assumed model. But the effect is the same: whether they have a

skewed sample, or they make a turnout model adjustment, if what they’re going with doesn’t match the real world, the results will be skewed.

So what do you, as a lay reader, do? Well, you can work out a correction with algebra, but you’ll be pretty close if you assume that every percentage point you correct the distribution will change the results by one percentage point, too. So, if we have, say, Obama 53, Romney 45 and a D+8 sample, then we can look at a range of assumptions:

D+ Obama 53 Romney 45 D+8 53 45 D+7 52 46 D+6 51 47 D+5 50 48 D+4 49 49 D+3 48 50 D+2 47 51 D+1 46 52 even 45 53 D-1 44 54

Now, you’re ready to think for yourself. Do you really think turnout in Ohio will be 38 percent Democrat, 30 percent Republican? That was how it went in 2008, with the Lightworker in full cosmic wonder.

But notice if the real turnout is only D+7, we’re in that margin of error. If it’s D+4 the odds are 50/50. If it’s D+1, then we’re back to where the poll is starting to really predict a win for Romney.

The real lesson of all of this is: the only poll that really matters is the one on Tuesday, November 6. Or if you’re a Democrat, Wednesday, November 7.

Washington Examiner 55 percent of small business owners would not start company today, blame Obama by Joel Gehrke

Fifty-five percent of small business owners and manufacturers would not have started their businesses in today’s economy, according to a new poll that also reports 69 percent say President Obama’s regulatory policies have hurt their businesses.

“There is far too much uncertainty, too many burdensome regulations and too few policymakers willing to put aside their egos and fulfill their responsibilities to the American people,” said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, which commissioned the poll along with the National Federation of Independent Businesses. “To fix this problem, we need immediate action on pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that put manufacturers in the United States in a position to compete and succeed in an ever-more competitive global economy.”

The poll reports another ominous statistic for job creation: “67 percent say there is too much uncertainty in the market today to expand, grow or hire new workers.” Why? Because “President Obama’s Executive Branch and regulatory policies have hurt American small businesses and manufacturers,” according to 69 percent of the business owners surveyed.

Here are the key findings in the poll, as highlighted by NAM:

67 percent say there is too much uncertainty in the market today to expand, grow or hire new workers.

69 percent of small business owners and manufacturers say President Obama’s Executive Branch and regulatory policies have hurt American small businesses and manufacturers.

55 percent say they would not start a business today given what they know now and in the current environment.

54 percent say other countries like China and India are more supportive of their small businesses and manufacturers than the United States.

“Instead of smoothing the way, our government continues to erect more barriers to growth through burdensome regulations that increase costs for small businesses and all Americans,” NFIB president Dan Danner said.

Those statistics suggest that even Democratic and independent small business owners criticized Obama, because only 46 percent of poll participants identified as Republicans, per Roll Call.

“It’s clear that small business owners and manufacturers are becoming increasingly more frustrated by the federal government’s inability to solve America’s economic problems,” Bill McInturff, whose Public Opinion Strategies conducted the poll. “Manufacturers place most of the blame squarely on policies coming out of Washington.”