My Sarah Palin "I Told You So"

All right, I was kind of hoping I was wrong on this one, but: I told you so. Sarah Palin, despite her ridiculous lack of experience, abilities, qualifications, and smart people who actually think she's up for a job with all of two constitutional requirements, seems to have been a brilliant choice. The McCain-Palin campaign has pulled even, and even slightly ahead of the Obama-Biden ticket in national opinion polls. That's what's been getting the most attention, though I think it's relatively meaningless. Here are three specifics that should be even more worrisome for the Obama camp:

1 - Not only are the Republicans pulling even and ahead in polls, they're getting a bigger bump in polls of likely voter than in polls of registered voters. There are two main kinds of these opinion polls: ones that will take anyone registered to vote, and polls that ask people if they're likely to vote, and focus on the likely voters. Palin is to the McCain campaign as a diet of nothing but Red Bull and Coca Cola are to students across America, students like my high school classmate Max Power who got through finals on that cocktail. She has rallied and energized the conservative base of the party, and the people who value social stances above how well someone can lead a nation in a complicated global economy and increasingly internationalized world. With these now-likely voters revved up, the Republicans can count on votes and fundraising from a group of people who will place abortion over every economic and foreign policy issue combined. And, as implied by many studies, once the Sarah Palin excitement dies down, most of these voters are going to stay in the "likely" column. And they're not going to care about the fact that physical proximity to two foreign countries whose leaders she's never met is the extent of her foreign policy experience.

I'm hoping the Red Bull and Coca Cola analogy holds and the McCain campaign winds up crashing and burning, moaning about how stupid they were and possibly having a seizure (like what usually happened to Max Power), but I'm afraid I think that's where the analogy breaks down.

2 - They've gained a few points in national polls, but they've grabbed a key demographic that was up for grabs: white women. According to the Washington Post, Reuters and other sources, the McCain campaign may have gained as many as 20 points among white women (quite a few of whom were former Hillary supporters). And these women are also disproportionately concentrated in a group of states which include Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and possibly even Pennsylvania. All of those states were battleground states (though probably not Indiana anymore), and the election may just be decided by the rust belt and northern midwest. And the McCain campaign just picked up Hillary's ball and combined her ground game with their perennial linebacker blitz (yeah it's 1pm and football just started) of promoting conservative down-home "values." Even if those in their target market for the VP pick think one side of that coin is a crock, they're being drawn in by the other. Obama's gone from winning that demographic by a healthy margin to being significantly behind. So much for women being smarter than that and able to see through it. Women are just as dumb as men in general, and are falling to the only-human instinct to be rendered temporarily even dumber by an understandable, earnest and worthy desire to correct their underrepresentation in government. (I don't mean to be sexist; I think were we in a female-dominated society, men would be subject to the same proclivities, and would become the dumber sex in an election in which one party sought to put a representative from their/our gender in the White House.)

3 - Not only have polls flipped, but futures on InTrade have flipped. For those of you who don't know, InTrade is the most prominent of several online predictions markets. These are markets, which operate like a stock market, in which people buy and sell contracts that pay off when a certain event happens. From the terms and pricing of these contracts, one can easily derive implied probabilities (for example, a contract that paid $1 on heads and expired worthless on tails would trade at $0.50, because the market would know the probability to be 50% and price the asset accordingly). Obama's implied probability of winning went from around 60% before the Sarah pick to around 47% now (if you check my numbers and see that the two don't always add up to exactly 100%, it's because transaction costs prevent absolutely perfect implied probabilities...one might say the "margin of error" is about 4%). Why would anyone care about InTrade? Well, for several reasons. First, the people making the bets are actually putting their money on the line, so they're likely to be better informed than, and not as casual as, a random person who gets a phone call. They're also thinking long term, while those polled can waver and give the opinion of the moment. And empirically, InTrade predictions are more accurate than polling, especially 2 months in advance of an election sure to get lots of media attention. I personally consider InTrade to be more reliable than polling--it definitely has a better record than polling with regard to Senate races (there isn't enough data on presidential races to be statistically significant yet).

So Obama camp, get geared up. I'm here for you if you need me (and I'll start discussing issues more and the horse race you seem to be bungling less).