Got this cute mock-up of an electoral/polling map from my girlfriend; not sure where it’s originally from. But it’s inspired.

The University of Wisconsin Advertising Project “codes and analyzes nearly all of the political advertising that is aired in 2008 federal and gubernatorial races across the country.” Yesterday it released a very interesting report on the two presidential candidates’ advertising in the week of September 28-October 4 (h/t Marc Ambinder). There’s a bunch of goodies in there, data-wise.

$28 million in one week

First of all, there’s the sheer volume of advertising that’s going on. Baffling amounts of money are being spent on equally stunning numbers of ads. In that one week alone, the two campaigns spent over $28 million on TV advertising.

That’s almost twice as much as in the first week of September. It’s also one and a half times as much as “the Bush and Kerry campaigns and their party and interest group allies spent” in the equivalent week of 2004. (Remember the reports back then about the unprecedented role money played in a record-breaking year of campaign spending?)

$28 million in one week. I mean, you could have 28 million young Africans immunised against meningitis for that. Just saying.

The result was that in the Las Vegas media market, Obama ads were aired 1,288 times in one week, and McCain ads 712 times. That’s a lot of ads.

Charting the ads

Secondly, the sheer extent to which Obama is outspending McCain on the airwaves. And the revealing differences in where they spend their money. In this one week, “the Obama campaign spent just under $17.5 million while the McCain campaign and the RNC spent just under $11 million combined.” I’ve graphed it, of course. This is by how much Obama is outspending McCain – and where:

On a total aside in a post on McCain’s (lack of) campaign strategy, Daniel Nichanian at Campaign Diaries has this remark, between parentheses, about Sarah Palin’s recent telephone interview with Bill Kristol:

(Kristol acknowledged that it sounded like Palin was being coached by staffers while on the phone with him)

No way. She had staffers sitting in on a phone interview with a sycophantic columnist to make sure she didnt goof even in that setting?

But it’s true: in his complete softball of an interview, Kristol playfully asked Palin whether, “since she seemed to have enjoyed the debate, [..] she’d like to take this opportunity to challenge Joe Biden to another one.” Silence followed: “There was a pause, and I thought I heard some staff murmuring in the background (we were on speaker phones).” Eventually she passed on the notion of a challenge.

Now I’m a layman, I’ve never accompanied any candidate on his or her business — is this normal?

God knows what got in the daily tracking polls today, because they’re all out of sorts.

Daily tracking polls update, 10/8: click to enlarge

Yesterday, the Diageo/Hotline poll suddenly had Obama’s lead drop by four points, from +6 to +2. That’s an unusually steep drop for a tracking poll. It was the biggest day-on-day change in any of the daily tracking polls since 7 September, over a month ago. It was all the stranger because none of the other tracking polls showed something similar: Obama’s lead dropped by one in the R2000/Kos poll, increased by a point in the Gallup poll, and was unchanged in Rasmussen’s.

Today, the weirdness continues. The Hotline poll has Obama’s lead down another point to +1. Rasmussen has his lead dropping by two points as well, from +8 to +6. But Gallup has it storming ever upward, today from +9 to +11; it has Obama at 52% of the vote. That result, as Gallup’s Jeff Jones points out, is “the best for Obama during the campaign, both in terms of his share of the vote and the size of his lead over McCain.”

So which is it? Is Obama up by 11%, 6% or 1%? That’s quite the difference. And is he moving up or down?

Earlier today, I wrote “Can we Wordle? Yes, we can!” Wordle being a toy for generating “word clouds” from any given text. I created a Wordle of all of Obama’s answers during last night’s debate. (Again, the hat-tip for the idea goes to The Monkey Cage, which did a Wordle of the Vice-Presidential debate, both candidates in one).

Still using the of same transcript, here’s the Wordle for John McCain’s words:

Click to see large.

So how do the two compare? And what words stand out for prominence – or absence?

Process-wise, what struck me is that Obama spoke slightly more (some 6,720 words) than McCain (about 6,550), and that McCain made more short quips and interjections. The dynamic of frontrunner versus underdog? McCain needed to be on the attack after all, push for some kind of break to revive his chances, while Obama’s main goal must have been to keep ‘er steady and not disrupt his comfortable lead in the polls.

An easily recognizable word in the McCain Wordle is friends – as in, “my friends”, McCain’s catchphrase. Another marked feature of the McCain Wordle is that America, Americans and to a lesser extent American are among the most prominent words. United and States are big too. The American President America is waiting for! In the Obama Wordle, America, American and Americans are all present, but very small.

The prominence of Well, like and look in McCain’s Wordle makes him look curiously like a Valley girl. But he’s also got thank fairly large in there, and Tom (Brokaw). Obama had less time for such niceties and spoke more directly to the audience, over Tom’s head.

Can we Wordle?

Yes, we can!

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Well, here goes: this is the Wordle of all of Obama’s answers during last night’s debate, on the basis of this transcript.

Click to see large.

A hat-tip is in order: I got the idea when I saw the Wordle on The Monkey Cage of the Vice-Presidential debate. That Wordle was of everything both candidates said though, which seemed less revealing to me than what you’d get Wordling each candidate’s words separately.

I’ll do one for McCain later today..

One way in which this age of Google and Wikipedia is different from that of decades past is that even the most obscure names live on forever, remaining forever a mouseclick away. How many times haven’t you thought, “hey, I wonder whatever happened to..”: fill in the name of an old acquaintance, a long-forgotten band, a football star of yore? In previous eras, you’d spend that wistful thought on it, and then by necessity shrug it off. Who knows?

Well, now you too can know. That obscure new wave band? The singer writes songs for TV shows now; the bassist works as a market salesman. That ridiculous Eurovision Songfestival contestant? He’s online now, editing his own Wikipedia entry and touting the brilliancy of his performance on specialist web forums. And a surprising number of tragic endings… one moment you’re listening to a song by The Sound that happened to pass by on last.fm, the next you’re looking up their bio and find out that the singer committed suicide, and his band mate died of AIDS.

So who remembers the Redskins? They were a punk band in the early eighties, and they were as political as could be. Committed to the revolution, they played every benefit gig, in support of the miners’ strike, against racism, against apartheid, you name it. They were Billy Bragg’s little skinhead brothers. They threw in pop and soul too if that enabled them to reach a wider audience with their message: “think the Jam, the Clash, the Specials, Dexy’s, the Fall and the Supremes all rolled into one,” as a retrospective review put it.

Edit: there was a video here, but it’s no longer available :-(

Their second single, Lean On Me, was dubbed “a love song to workers solidarity” and “a modern soul classic” by the NME. They even had some minor top 50 hits. Keep On Keepin’ On! reached #43 in the UK charts in 1984; Bring It Down (This Insane Thing) reached #33 the year after. The Redskins, concludes fan Dave T. on the unofficial band website redskins.co.uk, “were the first band to bring revolutionary socialism to the dancefloor.”

But when you wonder whatever happened with them, the story you find is rather tragic, and something of an allegory for an entire political culture which they, in their way, represented.

Tracking polls update, 10/6 (click to enlarge)

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The daily tracking polls haven’t shown a great deal of movement over the past three days. As you can see (at least if you click the graph and look at it in original size), the Research 2000/Kos poll is still off on its own, measuring a 12-point blowout lead for Obama/Biden today, but it’s been stable. The three other daily tracking polls are roughly in agreement: Gallup and Rasmussen have an 8-point Obama lead, the Hotline poll a slightly smaller 6-point lead. That’s all roughly the same as the last three days, when all those three polls had the lead at 6-8 point too.

On the other hand, this stability in the daily polls does confirm the slight move that I signaled in the last polling update three days ago. I wrote then that “after five days of similar numbers,” with an average Obama lead of 6.3-7% on each, there was “a hint of new upward movement”, with the average lead moving up to 7.8%. Well, the Democratic ticket has kept that extra point and another extra half: the average Obama lead has been 8.3-8.5% since.

This seems to have become something of a pattern in the past month or so. Obama moves up a couple of points, stabilises at the new level for a few days, then moves up a couple of points again.

The Research 2000/Kos poll, which has had the largest or shared largest Obama lead in all but 3 of its 26 days of existence so far, is becoming a bit of a distraction. It’s not entirely easy to take a poll at face value that so consistently diverges from the others, especially if it’s a poll commissioned by the Daily Kos and it’s diverging in favour of Obama. But even without taking the R2000/Kos poll into account, today’s numbers are very good for Obama.

The daily tracking polls have been relatively stable over the last three days, since the previous polling update here; hence also the absence of intermittent updates. But today’s polls are interesting because they do not, or hardly, include any impact the Veep debate might have. So they can be used as a yardstick for measuring any such impact in three days’ time, when most of the tracking polls will have a sample completely from after the debate.

(There’s some trickiness involved, of course, in that the Veep debate will hardly be the only development impacting opinions; what about the Senate vote for the bailout bill, for example? Or, as Gallup points out, “the new Labor Department report out today, showing a bigger job loss in September than many analysts had predicted”?)

Daily tracking polls, 10/3 (click to enlarge)

Here’s the graph. Gallup’s poll bounced around a little the last few days, with Obama’s lead shrinking from 8% to 4% between Monday and Wednesday, and increasing to 7% again by today. The Rasmussen and Hotline poll have remained almost entirely stable and similar, showing an Obama lead of 5-7%. And the Daily Kos tracking poll, conducted by Research 2000, is off on its lonesome showing a significantly larger Obama lead of 10-11%.

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Reviewing the average of the four polls, however, there’s a hint of new movement today.

The Hungarian TÁRKI Social Research Institute conducts an annual survey on xenophobia. As part of the survey, the sociologists ask respondents whether they would accept or refuse refugees from a list of specific ethnic backgrounds. Standard fare, so far.

Except as control group, they slip in a fictional group: the Pirezians.

Hungarian press agency MTI reports that once again, Hungarians blithely dismissed entry for these obviously no-good Pirezian refugees:

"Somewhere there is Piresia", the editors of Uncylopedia helpfully note

Sociologists divide Hungarians into three groups – 25-33 percent who would hermetically seal the country’s borders to all foreigners, 10 percent who would accept everyone with open arms, and the middle group of about 58 percent, who would pick and choose whom to accept, wrote [..] Nepszabadsag, citing a recent survey.

Sociologist Endre Sik pointed out that a key point in the survey [..] concerns the “Pirezians,” a non-existent ethnic group included in the survey as a reality-check. The two extremes on the scale for the pick-and-choose group are Arabs (rejected by 83 percent) and Russians (rejected by 76 percent) on the one side and ethnic Hungarians from neighbouring countries (rejected by 7 percent) on the other. The Pirezians were rejected by 66 percent of the mid-group, down slightly from last year’s 68 percent rejection figure, and up a bit from 59 percent in 2006.

The TARKI data reveal (Hungarian) that the middle, “pick-and-choose” group itself shrunk, while the xenophobic group that would hermetically seal the country’s borders to all foreigners grew in the past two years from 24% to 32%. So the group that would dismiss all foreigners, including those poor Pirezians, grew — and in addition, a larger part of the middle group looked askance at them as well. All in all, then, 70% of Hungarians want none of them Pirezians (Piresians?), against 65% two years ago.

Then again, other foreign peoples should be so lucky… It’s not just the Arabs and Russians that are even more undesired.

Seems like an appropriate link to recommend tonight: The Poetry of Sarah Palin. A whimsical, ironical (re)take on Palin’s words, written with a gentle and creative humor. The author, or should I say editor, is Hart Seely. You might remember how he turned Donald Rumsfeld’s cryptical utterings into The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.

“You Can’t Blink”

You can’t blink.
You have to be wired
In a way of being
So committed to the mission,

The mission that we’re on,
Reform of this country,
And victory in the war,
You can’t blink.

So I didn’t blink.

Trivia absurdism of the day. At Beyond Red and Blue, Robert David Sullivan last month did some serious research into bellwether states:

I calculated the percentage-point differences between each county’s swing and the nationwide swing for each election from 1980 through 2004, then added them all up to find out the places that have deviated the least from the US total over that time. (For example, there was a swing toward the GOP and George W. Bush of 2.86 points in the last election. A county that swing 12.86 points toward Bush and a county that swung 7.14 points away from Bush would each be penalized 10 points for that election.)

The result is a map, list and Excel spreadsheet of the Top 50 Bellwether Counties, 1980-2004.

Which county is #1 — the single most conformist county in matching the country’s overall swing for the last seven elections?

Defiance, OH.