FL: Insider Advantage: McCain with small lead in FL

[Sam Spade]

All I advise is to remember the rule of Florida...

[Sam Spade]

Folks, the Olympic buys are national buys.  Also with that table - I thought Obama had bought airtime in Alaska.  That seems to say otherwise.

[Sam Spade]

The McCain campaign would be foolish to advertise in "safe" states at this point in the campaign - imagine the publicity.  If its close, they won't do anything until the end of the campaign (last few weeks)

Though not advertising in Florida is telling - remember the rule of Florida.

I still don't understand Georgia on Obama's side.  Or North Carolina for that matter, but I'm not going to stir the hornet's nest.  I'm willing to let Indiana slide until I see more polls (instead of just relying on SUSA).  I'm actually ok with MT, AK and ND - note the amount of expenditures.

Texas - I can't explain.  It's not like that amount would do anything anyways.

[Sam Spade]

What's the rule of Florida, Sam, for us less enlightened posters?

1) Trust Mason-Dixon above all, and when Mason-Dixon hasn't polled...
2) Trust that the real numbers in Florida are, at least, more Republican than the recent polling average, and at most, more Republican than the most Republican poll out there.

[Sam Spade]

SR, let's see if we can narrow down what you saw.  When were the ad(s) that you saw and on what channel(s)?

[Sam Spade]

2) Trust that the real numbers in Florida are, at least, more Republican than the recent polling average, and at most, more Republican than the most Republican poll out there.

Was this true in 2000 or 1996?

I wish I could find any state polls of 1996 - they were very few and far between back then.

In 2000, M-D said Bush +2, Zogby said Gore +2 (after his tracking poll said Gore +10 the day before - lol), I think the St. Petersberg paper had Gore +3, but I don't remember.  Rasmussen was polling as Portrait of America back then, but I don't know whether he polled Florida.  Ironically, although his national poll was terribly off, his state polls were quite accurate.

My statement was true in 2006, though - less so than 2004 obviously.

[Sam Spade]

My statement was true in 2006, though - less so than 2004 obviously.

Ok. I think I would need more datapoints (as we have with several years of N.J. and, to a lesser extent, Virginia polling wildly in the wrong direction long before Election Day) before we could call this a law.

In 2004, everyone acknowledged that polling in Florida was disastrous because the state had been hit with four hurricanes. Many articles said "no one knows what's going on there" when reporting on it. What was going on, that didn't get much reported or remarked on until after Katrina, was that FEMA was firing cash at Floridians like a firehose with lots of fraud and excessive benefits that people hadn't asked for. Among other things. At the same time, Florida's economy was still booming, and if anything employment was up as a result of the reconstruction boom. Jewish retirees from the tri-State area unexpectedly swung from the Democrats there as their friends and children did in New York and New Jersey. Finally, the profile of many parts of Florida matched the general profile of strong Bush regions--fast growing suburbs and exurbs with young families and weak ties to government, with a mix of religion and a dearth of union laborers.

Florida is a state where things can change quickly. The boom turns to bust. A mass migration turns to a trickle. The cost of living jumps. Communities change their ethnic make-up. I would hesitate to extrapolate from 2004 to future presidential elections as a "law," particularly when we can't extrapolate backwards with clarity, and I would also be reluctant to read any race with Katharine Harris in it as if it were a model for anything else. She did better because a lot of Republicans skeptical of her or outright embarrassed decided to vote for her in the end. This is not the kind of dynamic that moves a McCain from 48% to 51% or even from 51% to 54%.

I would say that we don't know what's going to happen in Florida, that McCain has an advantage vis a vis the national average, but that we do not have evidence to support the idea that Florida has a built-in Republican edge that is invisible to polls aside from M-D but will come out on Election Day. It's too much of a just-so-story from one election that has too many other possible explanations and not enough datapoints.

We can ask the Vorlon whenever he reappears.  Otherwise, you're just going to be unsure and that's ok to me. 

I know that he agrees with my rule because he's said so in the past, but since he's actually done internal polling for political campaigns in Florida before, he's quite a good source on this matter.

[Sam Spade]

We can ask the Vorlon whenever he reappears.  Otherwise, you're just going to be unsure and that's ok to me.

Your certainty in your beliefs is fine with me, as well.

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I was not around for that first discussion (and don't know who the Vorlon is, as a poster) so I did not know this was based on internal polling, not data that are commonly available. I will defer to someone who has that kind of firsthand knowledge that I'm not in a position to evaluate.

According to him, fwiw, but I have seen no reason to doubt him in the past as one often should do on the Inet, Vorlon has conducted internal polling for political campaigns in two states - Florida and PA.  The PA campaign he said specifically before was Rick Santorum's campaign in 1994.