Hmmm.

What was the point of this?

Netroots blogger cat fight!

Go Jerome!

Very petty posting. Guess you guys aren't friends anymore.

Surprising that you couldn't make a better case against the accuracy of R2K tracker.  Candidly, the fact that you were relegated to making these ticky-tacky points about the cross-tabs speaks well for the poll.

One of the good things that they did was air all of the dirty laundry of their cross tabs.  You point to cross-tabs that were 2, 2, and 5 points off.  On the racial breakdown, R2K nailed AA turnout, but overestimated Hispanic turnout.  The only point you make that is compelling is the independents/refused cross-tab, which always seemed incongruously high and ended up being so.

Also, the tracker fell down into the 5-8 point range well before the election, and so it did not fall in line at the last minute like many of the others, including Zogby.  On balance, the poll did pretty well.  The comparison to Zogby is not fair.  I suspect that if you had access to the cross-tabs of most other polls, you would come up with much better fodder to attack the poll.  

One thing that HAS been refuted is your prediction that turnout by party affiliation would be roughly even, with perhaps a small +2 or so edge to the Democrats.  R2K's +9 was much closer than your prediction.

Your comments are ironic given the way you're cherry picking what was wrong in the R2K sample and ignoring or dismissing everything that was right -- including the accuracy of the last poll.

You're making a whole lot out of being two points off a number of groups, which is unusual given that the margin of error in polling is 3 points and higher in subsamples.

Lumping blacks and latinos together to ignore how the black sample was just 1 point off is also pretty conspicuous. The same goes for independents.

By god, I'm going to be right about something this year!!!

actually, R2k wasn't far off at all.  They were much closer than, say, IBD/TiPP, at least until that poll decided to mysteriously jump 8 points on the last day.

Your pessimism and doomsday scenarios for the Obama campaign for the last year were downright prophetic.

You said that you only supported Hillary because you were pragmatic and simply thought she was more electable. But you never wasted an opportunity to bash Obama during the course of the campaign for his every move. You are so full of it.

Hehehe... Jerome, I do believe you stirred up a Kossack nest.

When Markos is trying to boost the MOST FLAWED DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE EVAHHH!!!!1!

but R2k's transparency so that people like Jerome could parse its crosstabs, and the results of their polls give Kos' arguments the edge here.

Survey USA had wacko crosstabs on racial demographics in many states, but whose bottom lines were seen as the gold-standard through this election. Call them out too.

So R2K's demographic breakdowns were off by a few points. Big deal. So Ds outnumbered Rs by 7 instead of 9. You're conveniently omitting the fact that your predictions/expectations/personal biases were much further from reality than the demographic breakdown of the R2K tracker. I seem to remember you writing a lot of diaries insisting that the party ID breakdown would be the same as 2004, i.e., roughly equal numbers of Rs and Ds. And throughout the campaign, you were among the most pessimistic on Obama's chances. And you repeatedly called the GWU/battleground poll the "gold standard", but they were showing the race much more favorable to McCain than anyone else until very near the end of the campaign, so they appear to be just as deserving of the Zogby award as R2K, if not more so.

This really isn't a whole lot to hang your hat on, considering how many readers you alienated when MyDD became PUMA-ville for a while after Clinton lost the primary. Your writing since the end of the primaries betrayed a palpable desire on your part for Obama to lose, so you could say I told you so. Get over it, man. Obama knew what he was doing, you were way off base about his chances. He won states Hillary probably couldn't have, like VA, NC, CO and IN, and he won all the big swing states that Hillary won in the primary (OH, FL, PA, and MI), that Clinton supporters argued Obama couldn't win. They were wrong.

So R2K slightly overestimated minorities and Democrats and slightly underestimated old people. Considering how far off-base much of your analysis was, well, if this is what it takes to nurse your damaged ego, then so be it, but will you ever stop sulking? Geez...

Jerome "reweighed" the R2K internals when he decided they didn't measure up to his standards?

Maybe he'll share his weighs with everyone so we can compare his own assumptions with the final results?

It's kind of funny seeing Jerome crow about R2K being a point or three off in its internal assumptions. And it's funny seeing the weird cherrypicking that allows him to make the poll look worse.

For instance, R2K had the independent sample at 30 percent. It was 29 percent in the exit polls. There was an "other/refused" category in the R2K poll for respondents who, well, refused to state their partisanship. But that's not the same as "independent".

And in the racial category, the bigger question was the white vote, since that would, in large part, determine how well Republicans did. Ethnic and racial minorities were heavily Democratic, whites leaned Republican. And on that front, R2K predicted 72 percent white sample, the final result was 74 percent. Jerome's gold standard, Battleground, thought it would be 77 percent.

Finally, on age, Jerome makes an assumption unsupported by the data (regarding older voters), while ignoring that R2K nailed the youth sample on the dot (18 percent).

In fact, if you look at his gold standard of a poll, Battleground, you'll see that they thought that the over 65 group would be 22 percent of the sample. That group ended up being 16 percent.

So anyone can play, "nitpick the internals of the poll you hate".

Fact is, R2K was one of the top four performers on election night. Of the three polls Jerome held up as the gold standards -- Battleground, Gallup LV, and Rasmussen -- only Ras had a good night. And I bet if we got a chance to look at his demographic slices (which he never made public), we could find plenty to nitpick there as well.

*R2K said voters above 60 years of age would comprise 22 percent, I said higher, and it was at least 24 percent.

Hmm, I seem to recall Markos claiming the 60+ result was lower.  Will look this up.  I'll bet it's the difference between 60+ and 65+.

In the meantime, let me do a little Frist-like diagnosis over a blog.  Anyone else find it curious that Jerome mentions:

1) That this blog is not his primary source of income?

2) That Markos is "chest-thumping" and "pointing fingers"?

3) That the poll Markos paid for, because Markos rakes in so much dough on dKos, deserves to be conflated with a poll many bloggers and especially Markos has disdain for?

Methinks Kos' blogfather has grown a little jealous of the blogchild's success.

Clearly jerome and kos are not best of friends. But i sort of agree with jerome here, R2k was a bit too volatile (like Zogby) in the final stretch. I think that was probably because a) their sample size was small and b) this was their first national tracking poll.

On the other hand, their  state races were okay (except of course Alaska).

Chest thumping aside, I think that for it's flaws in the sample, the R2k poll was the only one that has any sort of a Democratic lean.

For Years, we have been bemoaning the fact that most of the polls we see have the Republican Bias (as they did in this cycle).  What Kos's poll did was to: (a) Force the methodology of the other polls out into the open.  (b) have a poll to counter the Right leaning polls to give the troops hope.  

Every day, if there was an R talking about how McCain was ahead, we could point to a National Poll and brag about Obama.  The methodology was transparent and that was when the McCain bots just grumbled and walked away (the bystanders listened though).  

More than a poll with some Dem bias built in, it became a flag to rally under that could chip at the VRWC and the MSM theme of how the race was such a 'tossup'.  It gave the undecided an unbiased faith in our candidate. It gave it a national counter punch to the MSM themes.

of the primary and flip a coin to decide who'd get to be the devil's advocate(support Clinton) and you lost?

how the hell do you know how "off" R2K was in the days preceding the election?  Could it not simply have been tracking late deciders or vacillators?

As far as I know, they didn't tweak their methodology just before election day.

...the Jermoe certainly gets the "Rich Lowry" 2008 award for "massive failure to predict presidential races without letting your own biases get in the way".

After all, according to Jerome, Obama couldn't win, he was the "worst nominee in a decade".

Then after Obama won by an extremely comfortable margin, Jerome disappeared for days. Only to return and let everyone know that blogging just ain't that important, ya know?

But hey, when you insult the intelligence of your audience, your audience goes elsewhere. As evidenced by the fact that it now takes only one single rec to get a diary on the rec list.

I'd say all my pissing and moaning about Jerome will probably get me banned, but seeing as how posters here can post racist comments without repercussion, you don't think I'd get banned just for being honest, do you?!?!  ;-)

Jerome rooted against Obama, now he's picking fights with Kos. He's not even a Democrat. I think he should go run Alegre and Texas Darlin's crap blogs for them.

I would shame rec this garbage if I could.

Jerome, stop acting like a 12 year old with a skinned knee!

Shame recced!