And I thought the crying child would be the best thing of the day. How wrong I was! Here is the Unskewed Polls projection of the presidential race:

All you need to know here is that every state that Romney has even the slightest chance of winning is given to him. So even in Minnesota where Obama leads in every poll by 3 to 8 percentage points, Unskewed Polls, in their infinite wisdom calls the state for Romney. If this sounds familiar: it should.

If this election goes more or less as the polls suggest, it’s going to be fun to drop over to the Unskewed Polls website next Wednesday. On the other hand, if they turn out to be right, I’ll be too depressed to even think about what went wrong.

This comes to me via Richard K. Barry over at The Reaction in an article titled, I So Totally Relate. So do I my friend; so do I.

There have been a few tweets the last couple of days speculating that in the event of a Romney loss, the Republicans will offer a new narrative. Most recently, this comes from Ben Smith at BuzzFeed, “Top Republicans are already hinting that if Romney loses, his people will blame the storm for stalling his momentum.” It goes like this: After the first debate, Romney’s campaign went into high gear. They were charging the finish line. They had momentum. They were going to win! But… The Hurricane. It destroyed Romney’s chances.

I don’t suppose this matters. If Romney loses, it will not cause the Republicans to admit that maybe their policies really are toxic. I think there is an important 47% in this country, but they aren’t the people who pay no federal income taxes. Instead, they are the people who find modern Republican values so vile they won’t vote for them regardless. (The number for Democrats is much lower: more like 35%.) That isn’t a lot of turf to fight over.

Before the hurricane, the narrative was going to be that Romney was too liberal. As Ann Coulter said, “If we don’t run Chris Christie, Romney will be the nominee, and we’ll lose.” The tendency among revolutionary movements is to treat losses as opportunities to purify. So the new narrative at least isn’t explicitly calling for more conservatism.

Regardless of the narrative the Republicans pick, the only way we can get them to move to the center is by defeating them in 2014. They have stayed alive (and even thrived) on the carcass of a broken electorate that just doesn’t show up for these off-year elections. If everyone voted, the United States would be a very blue country. So we need to spend the next two years convincing people that they must vote. Our very lives depend upon it.

This is just getting boring. Like all good liberals, I check Nate Silver’s blog several times a day. (It’s a Good Liberal Club rule!) But now it is just getting predictable. Let’s think about this for a moment.

It must suck being Mitt Romney. Here you are working your campaign strategy of never answering questions. And: bam! This hurricane comes along and makes President Obama look heroic and now your surrogate Chris Christie seems to have a man crush on the President. Damn! And you know Romney was on non-message:

The 9 Ohio polls of the last 4 days all show Obama winning the state—except for the Rasmussen poll, which is kind of like your mother picking you for her basketball team.

But frankly, I don’t give a shit about Romney. He has already had far, far more happiness than he deserves in life. So any pain he gets is good for the universe. The problem is that I’m a little deficient in the happiness race. I’d like to get a little back from the universe. But I’m sure not getting there via the Good Liberal Club and Nate Silver. It’s become de rigueur.

The fabulous Nate Silver [Yawn!] has increased President Obama’s chances of winning re-election to 78.4% with a predicted electoral college total of 299.7. But that’s not all. The most likely electoral college total is 332 votes—there is more than a 17% chance of this being the number of electoral votes he gets. You know what they call that? A landslide. [Yawn!]

There’s never a good first presidential debate when you need it!

Update (1 November 2012 9:48 am)

Our good friend Will wrote to Garrett Haake with the subject, “saw you mentioned on FranklyCurious blog site.” (Thanks Will!)

Haake, who uses a BlackBerry, wrote back:

For some reason, people think I know about economics. I kind of do. Mostly, it is just that I read really smart people like Dean Baker. The group Econ4 (4 people, 4 the planet, 4 the future) is attacking the problem of our national crisis in economic thinking. Here is their video. It pretty much is completely in line with the way the economy really does work. It’s 12 minutes long. It’s well worth that time.

Afterword

The video strikes a blow against all the bad guys, but it also attacks President Obama. Everyone knows that the President is not perfect. This is a good example of important places where the President has been dead wrong. It doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy. If we force him, he will do that right thing.

The economy is crazy. The stock market is even more so.

Tom Lee of JP Morgan told CNBC that Hurricanes are normally good for the stock market. How can that be? After all, hurricanes cause some much damage; wouldn’t that mean that the economy has less value? In a fundamental sense, no. True, capital is destroyed. But in a depressed economy like ours, there is a lot of money that is sitting around idle. A big natural disaster makes use of that money. People have to rebuild. They spend cash reserves (their own or by borrowing). And this causes business activity. It stimulates the economy. And you know what that means: jobs! Not that the Wall Street types give a rat’s ass about that.

Lee said:

This is at its base a Keynesian idea. And everyone understands this stuff. It frustrates me greatly. When conservatives are in power, they are huge Keynesians; but when they aren’t in power, they claim it is some kind of communist plot.

Of course, hurricanes are bad. People die. Property is lost. Keynesian spending should be performed by the government on good stuff like education and roads and new technologies. But now that we’ve had Sandy, it is nice that some good will come of it.

Halloween is my favorite holiday. It’s cool. There are great movies to watch. People dress up in costumes. And the cobwebs in my house are totally in.

Everybody scream! This is Halloween!

Dan Hopkins at The Monkey Cage takes the idea of polling bias for independents more seriously than I do: Polling Biases and Their Potential Impacts. This is in reference to Jay Cost’s claim that the independents are going to break hard for Romney.

Frankly, I don’t see the problem. Over half of all independents are just Democrats (24%) or Republicans (32%). And my experience is that Republicans who call themselves “independent” normally do so because they are more conservative than their party. At this point, all of these people know how they are going to vote. “Independent” does not mean “undecided.”

Let’s do a little calculation, shall we? Let’s look at Ohio where Obama is leading in the poll average by 48.5% to Romney’s 45.8%. I’m going to assume that the makeup of the undecideds is the same as the make up of the independents. This is the best case scenario for Romney. That leaves 5.7% of the electorate undecided. Let’s assume that the Democrats will vote for Obama and the Republicans will vote for Romney. That will add 1.4 and 1.8 percentage points to the two candidates. This makes the race 49.9% (Obama) to 47.6% (Romney).

Let’s further assume that the remaining (true independents) will break as the partisans did: 51.2% for Obama and 48.8% for Romney. This gives an additional 1.3 and 1.2 percentage points. Thus, Obama should win Ohio 51.2% to 48.8%. (Note: the numbers are almost identical to the numbers before we added the true independents because they split so evenly.) This gives Romney an extra 0.3 percentage points over the total he gets from the poll average.

In order to win 50.0% of Ohio, Romney would have to win 74% of the undecideds. That isn’t reasonable given what we know about the electorate.

I did this calculation to show that Romney is not secretly winning in the polls. The kinds of tricks proposed by Jay Cost and his colleagues could also be used to make Obama look better. We could claim that the polls are under-representing who will actually vote. In the end, the polls only give us a decent idea of who will actually vote and how they will vote. At this point, I’m going to believe the polls. The Weekly Standard folk can use the next week to complain. And then we’ll see who was right.

On Saturday, the Des Moines Register endorsed Mitt Romney for president. It is kind of a big deal, because Iowa is a swing state. But this is not why the endorsement is getting a lot of news. Mostly, people are focusing on the weakness of the case the paper has made for Romney. Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast called the endorsement “little more than a practical joke.” And he went on to say that it had all the hallmarks of a dictate from the top, “Our idiot publisher forced this tripe down our throats, and we’re counting on you the more knowledgeable readers to understand this.”

But one part of the endorsement really caught my eye. They went beyond full-tilt Confidence Fairy:

I’ve written many times before about this pernicious Job Creator myth. For the hundredth time this months: businesses hire because they cannot handle their work load with their existing personnel; they do not hire out of the goodness of their hearts or because they feel “confident.” (Ever hear of “temporary workers” and lay-offs?)

But there is another myth that is much more important in the Des Moines Register endorsement: consumer spending. This is something that Dean Baker hammers on over and over and over. Yet no one seems willing to believe it. Americans are spending at the same rate they were spending before the dot-com and real estate bubbles. Here are the data via the Bureau of Economic Analysis via Beat the Press:

This chart is actually a little frightening. If anything, Americans are not saving enough. But it is certainly ridiculous to suggest that the problem with our economy is that Americans are spending too little.

These kinds of myths are hard to kill because of the way they hide in plain sight. Anyone reading the Register endorsement is likely to just accept the claim that consumer confidence is low; it is stated as a fact inside a larger argument; no one (Not even the writers!) even notice it. This is how we get to the point where “everybody knows” stuff that just isn’t true. Luckily, this doesn’t happen in foreign affairs, otherwise we might go to war for no good reason. Wait…

Update (31 October 2012 6:51 am)

Dean Baker picks up on the endorsement this morning, Des Moines Register Endorsement of Romney Flunks the Which Way is Up Test on Economics. He goes into much more depth about it than I do. Check it out.

You know I will always tell you the truth. And the truth right now is that I am following Erin Kissane on Twitter only because I think she is really cute. Part of it is the hair color. Of course. No question there. But I’ve seen pictures of her with different hair colors and she is equally adorable.

Of course it isn’t just her looks. She an editor at Contents Magazine—a magazine so cool I can’t even figure out what it is about. She’s also editor at OpenNews Source—something so radical I don’t even know enough about it to call it something other than “something.” And she is the author of The Elements of Content Strategy—a book I should probably read as soon as I figure out that I need a content style.

Good night Kissane, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

I am not a Star Wars fan. I saw it when I was 13 years old. And I thought it was all right. I liked the effeminate robot C2P0. But I didn’t understand why Alec Guinness offed himself early on in the film. (Since then, I figured it out; it was embarrassment.) But like I said: it was okay. I was never tempted to see any of the sequels and I have no interest now.

I tell you all this because I want you to know that I have not been paying attention. Yet, there is one thing I remember from that time: the announcement by George Lucus that Star Wars was but the first film in a trilogy and that this trilogy would be the second of three sets of trilogies. At the time, I thought, “Yeah, right!” I suppose that’s why I remembered it. After the second film came out, I thought that maybe he was serious about it.

This is why when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out, I was not surprised. And I thought it was very strange that people were making such a big deal out of the idea of a “prequel.” (By the way, the word “prequel” dates back to at least 1972.) Lucas didn’t just invent the idea because he had completed the original trilogy. “This was always his plan,” I would tell to my friends who ignored me because I was always ragging on the series anyway.

But then I was surprised! George Lucas announced that he would make no more Star Wars films. What?! But he promised! Sure, I wouldn’t have gone to see them. But I liked the idea that they would come out and everyone would complain that they weren’t as good as the earlier ones. How could Lucas go back on his promise 35 years ago?!

It turns out it was all a ruse. George Lucas is retiring. He isn’t going to make any more Star Wars films. Instead, he is selling his company to Disney and they are going to make the films. Of course, Lucas isn’t totally off the hook. Most likely this means that there will end up being more than a trilogy of trilogies. But on that score, I never really believed Lucas. For the record, I don’t believe J. K. Rowling either. But her I have a crush on. (As long as I don’t have to read her books.)