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Obama Seizes the Upper Hand

By Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast

16 October 12

Using newfound energy to slice up Romney's record, the president forced his rival on the defensive. Howard Kurtz on the impact of the second debate.

arack Obama came to play in the second presidential debate Tuesday night, unleashing a series of attacks against Mitt Romney that accused him of favoring the rich and "extreme" social policies.

Romney got in the president's face more than once, repeatedly challenging him and at one point refusing to let him break in: "You'll get your chance in a moment, I'm still speaking." It was a power move that temporarily silenced Obama.

But what became the flashpoint of the debate was when Romney claimed that the president had not initially called the attack on American diplomats in Libya an act of terror, only to be corrected by moderator Candy Crowley-which immediately drew complaints from GOP partisans.

Romney again turned in a solid performance here at Long Island's Hofstra University, but there was one stark difference from the faceoff in Denver: this time he had an active and engaged opponent. And as the evening wore on, Obama gradually took control, repeatedly forcing Romney to respond to his barrage and shifting the discussion firmly onto his turf. Compared to the lethargic figure of two weeks ago, it was as if the Obama campaign had sent a body double.

Romney seemed off balance at times as he tried to regroup and regain the initiative.

Obama strategists were far more upbeat after the debate than they had been last time. David Axelrod said Romney was "outright dishonest" at times, that he was "fact-checked by the moderator," and spent the night "backpedaling ... Tonight you saw a guy who looked like he was trying to pull a bait and switch on the American people."

Romney senior strategist Ed Gillespie was more subdued, declining an opportunity to declare his man the winner. "No doubt the president changed his style tonight, but that doesn't mean he can change his record," Gillespie said.

Former New Hampshire governor John Sununu was more aggressive, saying Obama's comments on Libya were "the most dishonest I've ever heard" in a presidential debate and that Crowley was "wrong" and should not have stepped in.

Romney got off to a strong start, telling college student Jeremy Epstein that he would protect Pell student grants-so much for budget-cutting-and that "the middle class has been crushed the last four years." But the president fought back in the opening minutes.

"Governor Romney said we should let Detroit go bankrupt," Obama said. When Romney insisted to Crowley that Obama took General Motors and Chrysler bankrupt, the president said Romney would have provided no way for the automakers to stay open and "we would have lost 1 million jobs." He pivoted to say that Romney has "a one-point plan: make sure those at the top play by a different set of rules."

In a not-so-veiled reference to Romney's tenure at Bain Capital, Obama suggested his rival's philosophy was to have the rich buy and bankrupt companies, strip their pensions and still make money.

It was during a spat over oil and gas production-Romney insisting it had plummeted, Obama maintaining he had taken away leases from non-producing companies-that the two circled each other like prizefighters poised to pounce, staring each other down while cutting each other off.

Romney reinforced his move toward moderation while defending his tax plan, saying: "I'm not going to have people at the high end pay less than they're paying now."

Obama punched back in a way he utterly failed to do last time, gradually seizing the upper hand as the debate wore on. "Governor Romney's allies in Congress held the 98 percent hostage" because they want tax breaks for "the top 2 percent," he said. Obama said Romney had talked about cutting taxes for everyone-not tax rates-during the GOP primaries. And in accusing his rival of refusing to disclose what tax loopholes he would close, or spending cuts beyond those for Big Bird and Planned Parenthood, he said Romney was peddling "a sketchy deal" that no one should accept.

Sounding increasingly defensive, Romney touted his record in running a business, the Olympics and the state of Massachusetts. "When we're talking about math that doesn't add up, what about $4 trillion in deficits?" When Romney tried to continue one of his answers and Crowley raised her voice and forced him to stop, it temporarily took the wind out of his sails and he seemed grumpy.

After a question about pay equity for women, Obama pivoted to another assault on Romney, saying he opposes a provision in the new health care law to require insurance companies to provide contraceptive coverage.

Another question from a woman in the audience forced Romney to put some distance between himself and the last Republican in the White House. "President Bush and I are different people," he said.

Time and again, Obama went beyond the questions to shoehorn in what were obviously rehearsed lines of attack.

Having invested in companies that are "pioneers of outsourcing to China," the president said, "Governor Romney, you're the last person who's going to get touch on China." He added that Bush didn't propose turning Medicare into a voucher program (as Paul Ryan did), and embraced immigration reform, rather than calling for "self-deportation" as Romney did in one primary debate.

Romney kept returning to the economic failures of the last four years, his strongest suit by far, citing figures on unemployment, poverty and food stamps and recycling lines from earlier in the night.

Obama seemed at his most passionate when a Latino women asked about immigration, saying those here illegally "think of this as their country" and promised during the primaries to veto the Dream Act-a version of which Obama has imposed by executive order.

Again, Romney was forced to explain and deflect. "We're not going to round up 12 million people," he said. By "self-deportation," Romney said, he meant "let people make their own choices."

The president defused another toe-to-toe confrontation with humor. When Romney kept demanding, "Have you looked at your pension?", Obama shot back: "I don't look at my pension-it's not as big as yours." Romney was trying to make the point that Obama's retirement fund also invested in China.

A number of the audience questions in this town hall format subtly favored Obama by focusing on immigration, women's rights and Bush. One exception came in the final half hour, when a man asked about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya.

Romney was mounting an effective critique of the administration's shifting explanations of the fatal attack when he overstated the case-and was corrected by Crowley.

"It took the president 14 days to call it an act of terror," Romney said.

Not true, Obama interjected: "Get the transcript."

"He did in fact, sir," the CNN anchor told Romney, effectively defusing the attack.

Even an exchange on gun control enabled Obama to recycle a barb once used against John Kerry, who played Romney in debate prep. "Governor Romney was before an assault weapons ban before he was against it." Obama said, invoking a ban on such weapons that Romney signed in Massachusetts.

Thematically, Romney repeatedly invoked his tenure as governor to portray himself as a hands-on executive pursuing moderate solutions-something he rarely mentioned during the Republican primaries. Obama, while defending his record, spent much of his newly discovered energy eviscerating Romney's proposals and invoking contrasts with his primary rhetoric.

Oct. 15: Distracted by Polling Noise

By Nate Silver, The New York Times

16 October 12

onday was an orderly day in the polls.

National polls showed a modestly favorable trend for President Obama, allowing him to gain slightly in our forecast. (Mr. Obama's chances of winning the Electoral College are now 66.0 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight model, up from 63.4 percent on Sunday.) But the movement toward him was not anything extraordinary, serving only to offset some of the decline he experienced in the polls late last week, and to bring the national polls more in line with state-by-state surveys.

The state polls themselves were decent for Mitt Romney. But there weren't all that many of them, and the trend that they showed - a four-point gain for Mr. Romney, on average, since the Denver debate on Oct. 3 - was in line with our previous understanding about the magnitude of his gains.

None of the polls published on Monday really ought to fit the definition of an outlier. Some were slightly more favorable or slightly less so for the respective candidates, but in a way that is consistent with unavoidable statistical variation and the methodological differences between different polling firms.

Let me first you show you the trend in national polls; there were 10 of them published on Monday.

Mr. Obama made gains in 5 of the 10 polls as compared with the previous version of the survey, which in most cases postdated the Denver debate. Mr. Romney gained in one poll, although by less than a full percentage point. The others were exactly unchanged.

On average, Mr. Obama gained slightly less than a percentage point, going from about half a point behind in the previous version of the polls to half a point ahead instead.

That is a modest difference, to be sure, but it is getting late enough in the campaign - and the election is so close - that these modest differences can potentially matter when averaged across a number of surveys.

A half-point advantage for Mr. Obama in the national polls is also a little easier to reconcile with the state polls than a half-point deficit. The estimate of the national popular vote from our "now-cast," which uses both state polls and national polls, shows Mr. Obama up by one percentage point.

Mr. Obama's position in the "now-cast" is improved by 0.7 percentage points since Friday. That modest overall gain matches the small gain that he made in the national polls on Monday, suggesting that the national polls may be coming into line with the state polls rather than the other way around.

Unlike on other recent days, the state polls did not constitute a moving target. As I mentioned, Mr. Romney gained about four points on average from the predebate baselines in the same surveys. That is very consistent with where the "now-cast" pegs Mr. Romney's debate bounce.

Note that all of the state polls were from swing states; the argument that Mr. Obama would somehow be immune from seeing his swing-state numbers decline was pretty well discredited by late last week, at least in my view. On the other hand, there is equally little evidence that Mr. Obama's decline has been especially large in the swing states.

(One can make a straight-faced argument that Mr. Obama's decline has been slightly larger than average in Florida and slightly smaller than average in Ohio, but even those differences could easily be caused by statistical noise.)

In general, it shouldn't be surprising when you see new polls showing a decline for Mr. Obama from his predebate averages. For instance, the Muhlenberg College poll in Pennsylvania, which showed Mr. Obama's lead declining to four points from seven before the debate, got quite a lot of attention on Monday afternoon. But that was pretty much exactly what you would expect based on the way everything else has trended.

At this point, the more useful question may be how Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are polling relative to their postdebate numbers. Is Mr. Obama losing further ground still? Are there signs that Mr. Romney's standing has peaked?

Still, even a fairly calm day in the polling can give people opportunities to see what they want to see in the data.

The most egregious form of this is if you cherry-pick the three or four polling results that you like best for your candidate. Every now and then, a candidate's polls are so abysmal that even this exercise will fail to yield satisfying results (Friday was such a day for Mr. Obama, for example). But the vast majority of the time, you can find a couple of results that you like.

If you looked at only the three best national polls for Mr. Obama on Monday, you would conclude that he was three points ahead in the national race. If you looked at only Mr. Romney's three best polls, you would say that he was ahead by two points instead.

Most people avoid this sort of mistake, however. It's just too flagrant a case of cherry-picking, when there are 20 polls published in a day and you're discussing only two or three of them.

There is a more subtle form of bias, however, that a lot more of us are prone to. (I'm sure I'd be prone to it myself, which is why I like having a computer program that looks at all the polls and has consistent rules by which it does so.) That bias is to look at all the data - except for the two or three data points that you like least, which you dismiss as being "outliers."

If you're a Democrat, for example, and throw out Mr. Romney's three most favorable polls from the 10 national surveys published on Monday, you'll claim that Mr. Obama is ahead in the race by 1.3 percentage points. If you're a Republican and do the same thing, dropping Mr. Obama's three best polls, you'll have Mr. Romney ahead by one point instead.

That is not quite as biased as cherry-picking the best results - but it gets you halfway there, and it is a heck of a lot easier to rationalize. There is something that can be critiqued about almost every poll: the methodology, or the demographics, or the sample size, or the pollster's history, or something else.

Often, these critiques have a grain of truth in them: I'm not a relativist who says that Gravis Marketing polls are as good as what Gallup or The Washington Post puts out.

But what people often do is come up with reasons (valid or otherwise) to avoid looking at the polls they don't like - while giving a pass to those they do.

I think claims about polls "oversampling" Democrats or Republicans are deeply misguided, for the most part. But if you're going to do it, you ought to do so consistently. If you're critiquing the partisan split in Monday's Washington Post poll, for example, you probably ought to have done the same thing for last week's Pew poll, which also had a partisan split that was different from the consensus.

If this sort of error can be hard to avoid, however, there is a different type that is much less forgivable. That is in making too much of demographic or geographic subsamples within a poll.

For example, Monday's Washington Post poll had Mr. Obama performing better in what it termed swing states than in the country as a whole; the Gallup poll showed just the opposite.

This data is largely useless. A typical national poll might interview 1,000 people, of which perhaps 250 or 300 will live in swing states, depending on exactly how it defines them.

The margin of error on a 250- or 300-person subsample is enormous: about plus or minus six percentage points. (The swing state sample from the Gallup poll was somewhat larger, but still small as compared to the 3,000 or so voters that it interviews for each instance of its national tracking poll.)

In contrast, in the state polls, there are often tens of thousands of people interviewed in polls of battleground states on a given day. (There were about 2,500 on Monday, for example, despite its having a relatively low volume of state polling.)

There is just no reason at all to care about what 250 or 300 people say when you can look at what 2,500 or 3,000 do instead. If you're going to indulge this habit, then look at the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll of swing states, which at least has a decent sample size. (And which, not coincidentally, generally shows results similar to Rasmussen's overall national figures.)

Even this can be problematic, however, because there is not a clear delineation between what is a swing state and what isn't. If you include Republican-leaning states like Arizona and Missouri on the list of swing states, while excluding Democratic-leaning states like Minnesota - or if you do just the opposite - you would expect to see some persistent differences.

A related point is that some of the swing states are a lot more important than others. Ohio alone, for instance, is likely be the pivotal state in the election more than 40 percent of the time, according to our tipping-point analysis: about as much as the next four or five states combined.

Nevada, despite having a much smaller population, actually ranks higher on our tipping-point list than Florida, and yet Florida (because of its larger population) will have a much greater influence on a battleground state subsample.

The same problem occurs when people focus too much on demographic subsamples within the polls. You'll often see whole news articles focused around themes like: Did you see how bad Mr. Obama's numbers were among Latinos in the Pew poll? How good they were among working-class women in the Quinnipiac survey of Ohio?

It is bad enough to focus on one poll when 20 of them are published on a given day. It is much worse to focus on one of the 20 demographic subsamples within one of the 20 polls, which gives you 400 options to pick from.

These stories are fake news that have no value to consumers. But it is often the outliers that make for better arguments, and better headlines.