Which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives? Who is the current Secretary of State? Who is Great Britain’s prime minister? Only 18% of people answered all three of those questions correctly when they were posed in a survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. That so few people would get answer all three correctly sadly isn’t that surprising. We’ve seen surveys before suggesting most Americans can name more American Idol judges than rights guaranteed...

If this debate proved anything, it’s that most political pundits don’t have the foggiest idea what they’re talking about. I popped over to Politico’s roundup of reactions, and the consensus is that McCain did great, even if it wasn’t a game changer. But look at the post-debate snap polls: Mediacurves: 60% of Independents say Obama won; 30% say McCain; 10% called it a tie CBS: 53% of voters say Obama won, 22% say McCain CNN: 58% of voters say Obama won, 31% say McCain We’ve...

Observers who claim Obama’s success is only because of luck and a bad economy are seriously underestimating his skills as a politician. What Democrat, other than Obama, could have turned one of the most successful Republican talking points of the last 30 years completely on its head. Take a look at this nugget from the latest CBS poll showing Obama with a 14-point lead: Which candidate will raise your taxes? Respondents, by 51% to 46%, say it’s McCain. Now compare that with a Gallup poll...

Nate Silver points to a recent survey suggesting Obama is well ahead in the early and absentee votes cast so far in five states polled: New Mexico (+23%), Ohio (+18%), Georgia (+6%), Iowa (+34%), and North Carolina (+34%). For a little historical perspective: “Early voters leaned Republican in both 2000 and 2004; with Bush earning 62.2 percent of their votes against Al Gore, and 60.4 percent against John Kerry.” There’s obviously a large enthusiasm gap between the two parties, and...

I’ve got to say, Campbell Brown has impressed me with her willingness to say what other journalists have only been thinking this election season. First, she called out the McCain campaign for shielding Palin from the press “like a delicate flower who will wilt at any moment.” And her latest commentary addresses the bigotry against Arabs and Muslims popping up at McCain rallies. Last week a supporter told McCain she didn’t trust Obama because he was an Arab, to which McCain...

Remember earlier in the year when Obama was accused of playing the race card for predicting Republicans would try to scare voters into thinking “he’s not like us.” A lot of people are now giving him credit for his prescience, but honestly how hard is it to predict McCain’s game plan when he’s relying on the same playbook that Republicans have used the last two elections? McCain has one last Hail Mary option that might work. He can fire Steve Schmidt and all other reminiscences...

Absentee ballots mailed out this weekk in Rensselaer County, New York gave voters the option of voting for “Barack Osama.” Both Democratic and Republican election officials insist that it was simply a typo.

The latest McCain ad ignores Wright, Rezko, and Ayers and instead accuses Obama of a single, supposedly disqualifying, grievance: Being liberal. But I argue over at Ablogistan that this assumes too much and, after this election (assuming Obama holds onto his lead and wins), Republicans are going to finally come to the realization that “liberal” isn’t the dirty word it once was. It may just be a generational thing. Being liberal picked up a very negative connotation from “culture...

We seem to be seeing the same trend as after the first presidential debate and the VP debate: Pundits and political junkies saw it as a tie, but voters in snap polls give the edge to the Democratic candidate. The results from about 500 uncommitted voters surveyed by CBS: Who won the debate? 39% say Obama, 27% McCain, 35% rate it a tie. How did the debate impact vote preferences? 15% say they are now committed to Obama, 14% to McCain and 70% are still uncommitted. Candidates rated – would...

This is the only town-hall style debate where audience members are allowed to ask questions, so some are wondering how the audience members were selected. Mark Blumenthal has the answer. Participants were selected with the help of Gallup based on the pollster’s criteria for “likely voters” and with the intent of finding people who mirrored Nashville’s undecided voter population. Gallup’s Frank Newport explains what that means for the final result: This is a population...

The conservative blogosphere gave us a preview today of what tomorrow’s post-debate talking points and spin will sound like. The short version: It’s Gwen Ifill’s fault. The problem, apparently, is a “pro-Obama” book she plans on releasing on Inauguration Day that led Matt Drudge and other bloggers to question her objectivity as the moderator of tomorrow’s VP debate. I skeptically use quotations because the book is about how the black political structure of the...

The Guardian contrasts public reactions from the two presidential candidates. The McCain campaign responded the way a lot of politicians responded today—by assigning blame (and taking no responsibility). The response from economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin: From the minute John McCain suspended his campaign and arrived in Washington to address this crisis, he was attacked by the Democratic leadership: Senators Obama and Reid, Speaker Pelosi and others. Their partisan attacks were an effort...

There are already some numbers coming in measuring perceptions about who “won” tonight’s presidential debate. To start, CBS News polled 500 uncommitted voters and found: 40% thought Obama won, 22% thought McCain won, and the rest thought it was a draw 46% said their opinion of Obama got better tonight 68% think Obama would make the right decisions about the economy, compared to 42% for John McCain 55% think McCain would make the right decisions about Iraq, compared to 49% for Obama MediaCurves...

Some liberal bloggers have been floating the idea that McCain’s “suspend the campaign” stunt was really basically an elaborate attempt to distract people from Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric that began running last night. Now, I initially dismissed this as paranoia and still don’t think it is even close to the primary reason for McCain’s actions. But the more I watch of the interview, the easier it is to believe that some McCain staffers heard her answers...

Here’s why I can’t view McCain’s plan to suspend his campaign and return to Washington until the economic crisis is fixed with anything but cynicism: He hasn’t voted in the Senate since April 10, more than five months ago. To be fair, Obama has missed a lot of votes as well. But McCain has missed 64% of votes in the 110th Congress to Obama’s 46%. And while the current economic crisis presents a very unique situation, McCain has missed some pretty major pieces of legislation,...

Obama gave one of the clearest, most substantive explanations of the election (by either candidate) about what “changing Washington” means in Green Bay yesterday. Unfortunately, it wasn’t laced heavily with attacks on McCain or soundbites and therefore got very little coverage (even on political blogs). But if you’re interested in actual issues and plans, give it a watch. He divided the speech into three sections: Political reforms, government reforms, and regulatory reforms....

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how John McCain essentially drove a wedge between rural and urban America with the Sarah Palin pick and the overall tone of the RNC. And although I still think that is one of the biggest strategic benefits she brings to the ticket, a new poll from the Center for Rural Strategies suggests he still has some work to do to win rural voters by the margins he needs. Not that he isn’t ahead. McCain leads Obama 51%-41% in the survey of 13 swing states. But that isn’t...

There have been a couple of interesting studies published in the last week that may shed some light on why, despite promises for clean and issues-based campaigns, our elections always turn to gutter politics. The short answer: It works. First, from ABC news: In the study, released Thursday in the journal Science, Rice University professor of political science John Alford and his colleagues studied 46 subjects with strong political beliefs. They subjected these people to startling stimuli then compared...

In today’s political climate, it’s a bit of a risk to invest money in a two-minute ad about policy issues. But Obama’s latest ad about his economic policy may be just what he needs, precisely because of the serious tone. Viewers may or may not pay attention to the details, but the sober and substantive tone contrasts sharply with the negative, and sometimes silly, ads run by McCain (i.e., “Paris Hilton” and “Lipstick on a Pig”). On the surface, voters may...

If there ever was a doubt that a lie repeated often enough can supplant the truth in people’s perceptions of reality, take a look at the two graphs below. The first is from the Tax Policy Center and compares the after-income effects of the McCain and Obama tax proposals. Now, take a look at what Americans believe each candidate’s tax proposal will do: Although only 1% of Americans will see an actual tax increase under Obama’s plan, 53% believe he will increase their taxes. I...

Democrats have a trump card up their sleeve this year that could possibly win the election (or at least shift the momentum in Obama’s favor), and they either don’t know it or they for some reason are unwilling to play it. From the New York Times: Congressional Democrats have scrapped plans for another vote on expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, thus sparing Republicans from a politically difficult vote just weeks before elections this fall. Before the summer recess,...

Plenty has been said about the McCain camp’s exploitation of this whole lipstick-on-a-pig thing—it’s petty, it’s divisive, and it’s not the type of political conversation this country needs right now. I’m not going to get much further into that, but you can read some of my thoughts over at Ablogistan. The media’s culpability in the whole matter, however, is something worth exploring more, because this sort of things happens every election season. Controversies...

I was surprised at how hard Republicans hit Obama on taxes last week. Of all the problems that have been on voters’ minds in the last few months—Iraq, health care, the housing market, gas prices, etc.—I would guess that high taxes are pretty low on the list of concerns. And it seems like an easy enough issue for Obama to counter. Most Amercians would receive a bigger income tax break under his plan than McCain’s, and if you’re going to argue that tax cuts will spur economic...

In speech after speech at last week’s RNC, Republicans argued that one of Sarah Palin’s virtues as a candidate is her upbringing in a small town. It was a way for voters to connect with her and at the same time provided an opportunity to attack Obama for the cardinal sin of being too “cosmopolitan” (a phrase uttered without irony by the former mayor of one of the biggest cities in the world). This is, at its core, political pandering and another type of identity politics....

I know, Sarah Palin is a Washington outsider with no direct ties to the current administration. In that sense, she does represent a clean break from George W. Bush. But when you get past the narrative and look at her positions on actual issues, she’s much closer to Bush ideologically than McCain is. The Palin pick was designed to fire up the segment of the Republican party that has always had the most enthusiasm for Bush: social conservatives (i.e., the Christian right). She has succeeded in...