Could Barack Obama Lose The Election?

Obama is leading the polls by a clear margin and is shown by the Real Clear Politics average of all polls today as being +6.5 ahead. Considerable supporting evidence exists not just at national level but also at State level where a substantial majority in the electoral college is indicated.


That said, there have been some small shifts towards McCain in the last two days. None of these are as yet of a size or consequence to suggest a major surprise could be in the offing.


Is it realistic to ask in the face of the really only “scientific” data available to us if Obama could still lose? A number of those blogging believe so, and these are not simply those in the McCain camp.


Of course some of this is immediate pre-election excitement. Some argue that Democrats are pre-disposed to self-doubt brought on by the failure of Kerry to beat Bush in 2004. For Republicans, the argument for their belief that the election is not yet lost is simply the result of a need to lift spirits.


There has been serious debate, however, as to how an upset may occur. It ranges from lengthy and profound discussion of the “the Bradley effect” and possible errors that may be common to the internals of many polls. Always there is that belief that “one day is a long time in politics” (I think first said by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and he spoke of a slightly more realistic week in politics). This prompts speculation of a last minute event, such a terrorist attack or a message from bin Laden affecting attitudes at the point at which people actually cast their vote.
So, if there are many knowledgeable commentators prepared to speculate on the lack of certainty of the outcome of the election, is there any evidence to suggest that the volatility of the electorate is such that last minute changes in intentions could occur?


There is and it is unavoidable. It is brought to our attention every time we look at the graphs tracking the polling situation over the last few months. It exists in the boost, albeit short-lived, that each candidate received in September that so altered the apparent race to the White House.


How a well orchestrated Democratic Convention and a populist, scripted speech by someone as light-weight as Sarah Palin could so dramatically reverse the relative standings of the two candidates is beyond comprehension.

The desperately serious business of appointing the leader of the world’s most powerful nation should not be capable of being so dramatically affected by events so contrived and insubstantial. Yet they are, in all our countries.


The first two days of next week are going to be a time of considerable tension. As John Prine wrote and sang:


“Gonna be a long Monday

Sittin' all alone on a mountain

By a river that has no end

Gonna be a long Monday

Stuck like the tick of a clock

That's come unwound - again”

Unsupported Claims About Stolen Elections Begin - Again!

Although there are reasonable grounds for being concerned about Obama losing the 2008 elections, despite the overwhelming weight of polling evidence, explanations for this in terms of “stolen elections” have already begun.

It is surprising to find that one such posting has appeared on ePluribus Media, a blog which likes to apply and require of its contributors some rigorous evidence to support conclusions.

The commentary is titled "Exit Poll Mess - 2008 The Past is Prolog” and raises a reasonable question about an apparent anomaly in exit polling figures and the subsequent announced results. Like many such posts published immediately after the 2008 election, it is supported by part data graphically displayed that gives some semblance of “evidence”, sufficient to induce the first response to be headed “I find your research on this fascinating".

The information provided in the initial commentary are reasons for questions but do not constitute research to support the conclusions.

We are all aware of the furore that the apparent blatant discrepancy between exit polls and declared results in Ohio caused across our blogs in 2004. Reams were written about it, vast amounts of statistical analysis was produced. Much of it was faulty and lacked academic rigor. Some was much more detailed and prompted the beginning of serious research.

The best of this initial work was undertaken by a contributor to the blog that I had setup called New International Times. She is a remarkable person. In her fifties, she had been a professional classical musician before undertaking a change of direction and working for a new degree in psychology.

With a real interest and aptitude for statistical analysis, she became intrigued by the work being undertaken on Daily Kos. Many of the posts, that included voluminous graphs and tables, were being questioned by a few at a time when the “gestalt” on the site was to support the overwhelming desire to prove that the election was stolen.

So began our contributor’s work. Her background was a bit different from the main contributors to our site. Unlike us, she was not a Liberal Democrat but a member of the Labour Party, despite her disgust with Blair and what she saw as his betrayal of the principles of socialism with she had first become attracted to what became known in the UK as “Old Labour”.

Not surprisingly, her motivation was to prove that those who doubted the worrying evidence of manipulation of the election results in Ohio provided by the exit polls were wrong to do so.
The intensity of her work increased as she found the material far more complex than she had originally supposed. Of even greater concern to her, it pointed to a different conclusion than that which she had originally set out to prove.

At that point, she felt it important that her work was capable of serious academic review, as it would undoubtedly be challenged. As a consequence, she developed what had originally been intended as a detailed diary into a full and lengthy thesis. Despite it formality, Marcos agreed that it was published simultaneously on New International Times and Daily Kos.

She was right that her work would come under exacting scrutiny. It was picked up by academia in the United States and underwent the severest of peer review. It withstood the harshest of these critical examination by others, peer reviews that at times placed her under considerable personal stress.

The final outcome was that she was invited as a speaker to the main post-election conference of those who are expert in the disciplined analysis of polling data in the States and became a paid researcher in the research team of a Professor of one of your leading universities who specialises in this subject.

I am not a statistician, nor would I pretend to have the knowledge to contribute seriously on the subject of the apparent anomalies between exit polls and results. I do know the honesty of the person who began the first really serious analysis of the 2004 exit poll data, know her original intentions and know the integrity with which she brought to her work that led to her conclusions that did not fit well with her political leanings nor her original intentions.

Four years on, I have difficulty in awakening further interest in this subject. It is, of course, right that bloggers continue to raise questions for which they feel they do not have the answers. To raise those questions, however, is not to produce proof capable of rigorous scrutiny and to contend that this is clear and irrefutable evidence of the claims of this writer to support the statement with which he apparently concurs that “… there something very wrong with the 2004 election results, i.e., the election was almost certainly stolen.”

By all means let us maintain scrutiny, but let us not do so in a way that distracts from the far more interesting area of voter suppression, which I believe is of far greater importance in the outcome of US elections.