New York Times: Morons

So all the rage this morning in all the main stream media is how Obama “isn’t closing the race gap” as supposedly evidenced in the CBS/New York Times poll.

The support for this? Obama has a favorable rating of about 80% among African Americans, but only a 30% favorable rating among whites.  What the media then either doesn’t say, or blows off is:

1) That the unfavorable is 37% with 31% either undecided or who haven’t heard enough, so it’s not actually as bad as they make it sound

2) McCain as well only has a 35% favorable – with 28 unfavorable and 35% undecided or who said they don’t know enough.  So how exactly are McCain’s numbers all that different from Obama’s?

3) McCain also has a “race” gap – 35% of whites approve of him while only 5% of blacks do.  Why don’t we hear about McCain’s “race gap” problem?

4) You mean the African-American candidate is seen more positively by African-Americans? Oh my god, stop the presses!

5) This whole exercise ignores the fact that blacks traditionally vote for the democratic candidate by margins like 90% to 10% anyway, even if the candidate isn’t African American, so it is absolutely no shock at all that Obama would have a significantly larger approval rating for Blacks than Whites.

So basically the New York Times is taking a pretty unsurprising and completely expected result, and is blowing it into some problem for Obama.  I’m trying to figure out what Obama is supposed to do to fix it?  Lower his positives among blacks?  Increase is positives among whites to 80% as well (and if he did that, he’d probably win every single state in November).  And again, why no word on McCain’s race gap?

And did anyone notice that Obama’s net approval is +8 while McCain’s is -1? No, I thought not.

Also…just look at the questions in the poll and the breakdowns.  It’s race everywhere.  The very reason they did this poll was to have a headline dealing with race in the campaign.

Calling the New York Times “morons” is probably being nice.

Notes from the ABC/Washington Post Poll

As many people have probably seen now, Obama leads McCain in the new ABC/Washington Post poll by 8%, 50%-42% among registered voters (10% if you include Barr and Nader), and by 3%, 49%-46% among likely voters.

Now, I found this a little odd since, given the trend that Obama voters are “more excited,” one would think that Obama would at least do no worse among likely voters than registered voters in general unless ABC/WP is calculating likely voters oddly

Well, here is where they are apparently getting their likely voter model from:

The number of Republicans who said they are “certain to vote” stayed the same at 83% between now and February, while the number of Democrats who said they were “certain to vote” dropped from 82% to 66%.  Also, the number of those aged 18-29 saying they were “certain to vote” dropped nearly 1/3.

Personally, this seems a little odd, but it could be some sort of “Clinton effect,” though clearly these numbers are way to high as they are, as we’re looking at something like a 60% to 70% turnout if these numbers were true, and we normally struggle to hit 50%.  If you combine the total “certain to vote” number and the “probably will vote” number, you get a total of 80%, obviously a number which is way, way too high (which is standard, because people will rarely admit that they don’t vote).

However, speaking of the Clinton effect, among registered voters, Obama has now nearly completely eliminated it.  While 23% of former Clinton supporters still say they’ll vote for McCain, overall party numbers show that 13% of each party now say they will vote for the other candidate, meaning that the remaining Clinton hold-outs are for the most part no larger than the standard “switch” vote one sees in any given election anyway.

However, even then Obama looks like he can still sway former Clinton supporters, as they are the 3rd most “moveable” demographic, just behind White Catholics and moderate/liberal Republicans (that can’t be good news for McCain).  Generic Independents and Moderates are also groups which can still sway to either candidate.

Going back to the difference between likely and registered voters, one saw a similar trend last month as well, where Obama led in registered voters 49% to 45%, but McCain led in likely voters, 48% to 47% – another 5% swing towards McCain.

This is despite the fact that (again, these numbers are way too high) 75% of Obama supporters say they will “definitely” vote for him, while only 68% say the same about McCain (and more McCain voters say they’re open to changing their mind as well).  Also, more Obama voters say they are voting For Obama rather than Against McCain than McCain voters say of their candidate.

So, I’m not sure where the hell the ABC/WP is coming up with a likely voter model which gives McCain 5%.  It clearly doesn’t seem to be from enthusiasm data from their own poll, in any case, unless, again, they’re using the “certain to vote” thing.

McCain leads Obama on 5 issue items, virtually all dealing with foreign relations: Iraq (by 2%), terrorism (by 6%), the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (by 2%), Iran (by 2%), and “an unexpected major crisis” (by 9%).

The “unexpected major crisis” thing may just be due to the perceived lack of experience on Obama’s part, but one should note that McCain’s leads in all of these are relatively small, and Obama is over 40% on all of these issues.  Meanwhile, McCain is sub-40% on 4 issues: the economy, immigration, federal deficit, and social issues.  So basically the only reason why people are still voting for McCain is that they see international issues as the most important and still trust McCain on that front.  If McCain were to fall behind on those, then there is little reason for people to vote for him.

However, for all of those who are like “omg people have doubts about Obama!” check this out:

Those who worry about some things about Obama: 66%.  Those who worry about some things about McCain: 74%.

So McCain is trailing, despite having the “commander-in-chief” gap and being more trusted on foreign policy, has less enthusiastic voters, and people have more doubts about him.  Ouch.  People also see Obama is more trustworthy, more consistent, and, by a 2-to-1 margin, believe he would be better at improving America’s image abroad.

One other thing I’d like to note – as much crap as the Democratic Congress gets, their approval rating is better than Bush’s (despite that one Rasmussen poll).  I know that’s not hard to accomplish, but Congressional approval ratings are usually lower than Presidential ones (and it also seems to indicate that the overall Congressional approval rate is largely caused by lingering disapproval of the Congressional GOP).