The irony is that TYT (and the pollsters) seems to be misinformed, while some of the protesters may have similar principles to what the Democrats like to say they stand for (and hence a carefully worded question may elicit the response they wanted), journalists from the OWS movement recognize that "The electoral system is a corrupt mirage where only corporate-approved candidates are allowed to be considered seriously" and that "Obama and the Democrats are part of the problem, not the solution".
http://october2011.org/blogs/kevin-zeese/van-jones-and-democratic-party-operatives-you-do-not-represent-occupy-movement

Have a look at the sites for many of the occupy movements, most distance themselves from any party affiliation - that's kind of the entire point of the whole protest movement, people are getting raped left, right and center by both parties.

@marinara you're a strange person. Go to that URL, look in the upper left corner of your screen. Click on the chart, and you get the link I had in my original post, where Nate says "our simulation projects Republicans to gain a net of 4.0 Senate seats in this November's elections, a figure unchanged since last month" and "The Republicans now have only a 6 percent chance of an outright takeover of the Senate, according to the model".

I'm more optimistic than that about the Senate, but that's partly because I have seen polling data from May that Nate's post doesn't incorporate (yet).

As for the house, here's his most recent analysis, along with a graph plotting house popular vote vs. net change in seats. Right now pollster.com has the House Generic ballot polling an effective tie (43.1% R vs 42.9% D, for a net +0.2R), and if you look that up on Nate's chart, that would foretell a 30-seat swing towards the Republicans, which isn't enough for them to take control (the dotted red line on the graph), but it's worse than my prediction.

For a midterm, we're still very early in the process. Hell, even in 2008, at about this point in time we didn't know if it would be Clinton or Obama facing McCain in the fall, just to put things in perspective.

Pollster.com also appears to want to take this claim apart as being misleading as well:

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/a_teacup_80_or_more_full.php

I usually read through these every day:

http://www.dailykos.com/
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
http://thinkprogress.org/
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

If I have time left over, I dig into these:

http://delong.typepad.com/
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/
http://www.balloon-juice.com/
http://pandagon.net/
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

I also like these blogs, but I don't read them on a regular basis:

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/
http://www.pollster.com/ (this goes back into my daily-read list once they start doing serious 2010 polling)
http://www.wonkette.com/
http://blog.indecisionforever.com/
http://www.crooksandliars.com/

I also peruse these non-politics sites pretty much every day:

http://www.autoblog.com/
http://www.joystiq.com/
http://kotaku.com/

It almost goes without saying, but I use Google and Wikipedia a lot too.

More polling information about health care (from actually reputable sources):

Poll Finds Most Doctors Support Public Option (published originally in the New England Journal of Medicine)

Obama job approval on the rise

NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds 76% support public option

And a de-spun ABC/Washington Post poll shows 76% support a public option if it's reserved for those unable to get health insurance now -- which is the way it would work in all the drafts of legislation being considered.

Mostly though, there's one trend I've seen in all the polls, and a professional poll-watcher like Nate Silver backs me up on this, but the more specificity you provide, the more support for the package rises.

It's something I noticed during the election too -- the more information people got about Obama and his platform, the more support for him rose. Same thing is happening with health care.

I'll go with 538 on the accuracy of the poll,not that the sentiment isn't there:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/ibdtipp-doctors-poll-is-not-trustworthy.html

"1. The survey was conducted by mail, which is unusual. The only other mail-based poll that I'm aware of is that conducted by the Columbus Dispatch, which was associated with an average error of about 7 percentage points -- the highest of any pollster that we tested.

2. At least one of the questions is blatantly biased: "Do you believe the government can cover 47 million more people and it will cost less money and th quality of care will be better?". Holy run-on-sentence, Batman? A pollster who asks a question like this one is not intending to be objective.

3. As we learned during the Presidntial campaign -- when, among other things, they had John McCain winning the youth vote 74-22 -- the IBD/TIPP polling operation has literally no idea what they're doing. I mean, literally none. For example, I don't trust IBD/TIPP to have competently selected anything resembling a random panel, which is harder to do than you'd think.

4. They say, somewhat ambiguously: "Responses are still coming in." This is also highly unorthodox. Professional pollsters generally do not report results before the survey period is compete.

5. There is virtually no disclosure about methodology. For example, IBD doesn't bother to define the term "practicing physician", which could mean almost anything. Nor do they explain how their randomization procedure worked, provide the entire question battery, or anything like that."

^ Obama's favorables are rising.

I'd also recommend looking at the DailyKos weekly trends polling, particularly at congressional Dems vs. congressional GOP, as well as just the Democratic and Republican parties themselves.

But you probably won't believe those.

I disagree. I don't think a third party vote is a waste. I think it shows future politicians where some voters stand. In this election year in particular pollsters are trying to find every swing voter they can. And 3rd parties is a good way for annalists to see what the underdog has going for him that the red and blue don't. Besides I can't in good conscience vote for McCain or Obama, And I'd rater give my vote to someone who I feel well do the best job in the position, regardless of the overwhelming number of voters who only see two parties.

From TPM:

Here's our daily composite of the five major national tracking polls. Barack Obama still holds a solid lead over John McCain, with the overall margin is unchanged from yesterday:

• Gallup: Obama 51%, McCain 41%, with a ±2% margin of error, compared to a 50%-43% Obama lead yesterday.

• Rasmussen: Obama 50%, McCain 45%, with a ±2% margin of error, compared to a 51%-45% Obama lead from yesterday.

• Hotline/Diageo: Obama 48%, McCain 42%, with a ±3.4% margin of error, compared to a 49%-41% Obama lead yesterday.

• Research 2000: Obama 52%, McCain 40%, with a ±3% margin of error, compared to a 53%-40% Obama lead from yesterday.

• Zogby: Obama 48%, McCain 44%, with a ±2.9% margin of error, compared to a 49%-43% Obama lead yesterday.

Adding these polls together and weighting them by the square roots of their sample sizes, Obama is ahead 50.1%-42.5%, a lead of 7.6 points, compared to a 50.4%-42.8% Obama lead yesterday. The undecideds have increased by a total of 0.6%, but it's come equally out of both candidates' scores.

Fivethirtyeight.com gives McCain a 6.2% chance of winning.

Pollster.com shows Obama as having 320 EV's with just lean/solid Democratic states, 270 EV needed to win.

Even the conservative-run realclearpolitics.com shows Obama with 277 EV's, not counting toss-up states -- and their map matches my gut feeling about what states are in play at this point.

Obama people can't afford to be complacent, but McCain has a huge hill to climb if he expects this to even be close.

Right where he wants us, indeed.

>> ^SDGundamXo, I fail to see how this could be a plan to disenfranchise military voters since 1) it wouldn't work and 2) don't most active military vote Republican?



1) This is pretty much exactly how they've disenfranchised people before (oh, we mailed your confirmation to your address in the 9th ward, and you didn't respond. you can't vote!)

2) Who knows? The military doesn't like giving pollsters any records relating to voting or party affiliation. But I did read that over 30% of registered military voters are independent. And Obama has received way more donations from military personnel than McCain. (something like 6-1)

"You'll never hear anything like that from any Democratic Pollster, er, President, including the Obamessiah."

That may be true, but he is lying... Just read the history of the Iran Contra affair. Not to mention the horror show the Regan regime caused in Central America.

>> ^quantumushroom:
"First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I'm still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior.
You'll never hear anything like that from any Democratic Pollster, er, President, including the Obamessiah.


And you will surely never, ever hear this from Bush.

"First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I'm still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior.

You'll never hear anything like that from any Democratic Pollster, er, President, including the Obamessiah.

Just because the media makes up some B.S. story about expectations doesn't mean anything. Look, IN was only 4-5pts for Clinton for many months.. See here: http://www.pollster.com/08-IN-Dem-Pres-Primary.php

And in NC, guess what? exactly the same thing for Obama. He did do slightly better with 14 pts compared to trends, but also many people expected 20pts or more. http://www.pollster.com/08-NC-Dem-Pres-Primary.php

So don't fall for artificial expectations that are only there for the media to frame up a story to sell.

It's not really a big win for Obama. These numbers were predicted by BOTH camps for the last few months. I can point to the Obama projections from two months ago that have exactly this. So, in reality nothing has changed. If anything Clinton couldn't ever really win from the remaining primaries, she is totally dependent upon supers. On the otherhand Obama could have won outright, but failed. If he won IN or did much better in NC, it would be over. He fell short and now has to keep up the dirty drag down cagematch brawl.

From Controversy explodes over Clinton YouTube video

The video is a clip from the movie "The War Room," which is a behind the scenes look at the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign.

Hillary Clinton's Indiana spokesman Jonathon Swain says what wasn't clear from this small video clip, but is clear from a fuller context, is that Kantor was referring to the pollsters who took an Indiana poll, not the people of Indiana.

Swain also says that a racial epithet was dubbed over. Politics at the speed of light. This YouTube account created less than a day ago and already it is news. I'm wondering why we bother with elections. Let's just create a new television reality show for all presidential candidates. The one left standing at the end gets to be America's newest dickhead.

[ed] I'm upvoting only because this type of shit politics needs exposed wherever it happens