Is it possible that Barack Obama and the liberal media could cause him the election?

There has been a definite change in the way Obama is approaching the election. He is acting as if he has won already. He’s starting to work on a transition team and post election plans (story here), he’s planning a party in Chicago for the night that he wins, and he’s even backing off on some states that may be closer than polls show.

The media is taking the same approach. The story line is that Obama’s election is inevitable. The stories about McCain are that he is so far behind now that he could never possibly catch up, short a miracle. The polls showing Obama with almost unbelievable leads are reported on and the polls showing him close are ignored. One poll in particular, the IBD/TIPP poll, shows Obama up 1.1%. This lead is down from 3.6 points from yesterday. What is significant about this poll? It was the most accurate poll in the 2004 election, off by 0.4%.

So, back to the original question, could this hurt Obama’s chance of winning?

Democrats have traditionally been fickle voters. Could we have a sense among Obama’s voters that the election is in the bag and their vote is not needed? Obviously we won’t know until November 5th but it is not an impossible scenario.

For the record, I am not hoping for low voter turnout, I do want people to get out and vote. The point is, maybe he needs to stop acting like he’s the president and start acting like he will lose everything if people don’t get out and vote. If he doesn’t, he just might lose everything.

I have been a little suspicious of the validity of the Presidential polls we have been seeing. There are several reasons for my skepticism, variance in polls, methods, past inaccuracies, and the fact that a lot of them are run by liberal organizations, among other reasons.

I have another, far less scientific, reason though. The late night ratings.

In the last week John McCain and Sarah Palin have appeared on separate late night shows, both with likely traditionally liberal and young audiences, and gave them both big ratings increases.

Last Thursday McCain appeared on the David Letterman show and gave him his biggest audience in almost three years. His 6.53 million viewers is almost double is nightly average and almost 40% higher than Jay Leno for the night, a show he usually draws fewer viewers than.

Then we have Sarah Palin’s funny appearance on Saturday Night Live. She drew the largest SNL audience in 14 years.

Watching the news this morning and scanning the news sites, it is incredible how wide the polls are on who won the Vice Presidential debate last night. This I think speaks more about polls than about the debate and further highlights something I believe, who won the debate is an irrelevant and unanswerable question.

The real question is how do you determine who won a debate. What does a “win” look like? Sometimes it’s obvious. If one of the participants would have spent the night stammering or showing a complete lack of command of the issues, one could point to a winner. Neither did this last night so, we can’t use this to decide.

Further, which part of the debate did either win? Did Biden win the questions on foreign policy? Maybe but how do you measure that absent a knock out? Same with the economy, war on terror, and on and on. So then how do people determine, based on the different questions posed during the debate, who won? Do they keep score at home? Is the last questions, and who won them, stuck in their mind? Is their one or two questions that they remember and this clouds their opinion of the debate?

Finally, there is the question of preconceived bias. The reality, and I am guilty of this myself, is that if you were a Sarah Plain fan, she won the debate. Conversely if you’re a Joe Biden fan, he won the debate.

Some will ask then, what about the “independent voter”?

First, I will go on record to say that I believe this notion of a vast population of independent voters is grossly over reported. I have noticed that over the last roughly 8 years, there has been an increased amount of talk about independent voters. My opinion is that it has taken on the feel of a fad. I can’t help but believe that it has become almost fashionable to say your independent. You have the media clamoring over you and if you happen to be in a diner when the media stops by, you get on the news.

Now this is not to say that there are not voters out there who truly are independent. I believe there are, I just believe it is not in the numbers reported. Actually, I believe that a true independent voter is the best kind. This means they are not blinded by ideology, they look at a candidate and vote according to what they see. They’re a model really for partisans like me.

I believe though that most so called independent voters have an inherent political bias and ultimately vote for a particular party. You will hear qualifiers such as Bob here is an independent who voted Democrat (or Republican) the last three presidential elections. This does not meet my definition of an independent.

Back to our question though, what about the independent voter. The discussion above illustrates that polling this group can be tricky at best. The main problem is what kind of independents are they polling. Do 70% of them lean one way or another, this skews the data.

I think the bottom line is that barring a real obvious win it is hard, if not impossible, to poll on who won a debate. The polls are nothing more than something else to debate and gives the media the opportunity to slant their coverage, a chance the media is taking full advantage of, based on a survey of the sites this am.

The real answer is how they ultimately help their respective campaign. We can ask 400 people who won, or we can see who ultimately wins the election.

Almost more important, I believe, than who is doing better in the “who won the debate question” is the other questions in the poll. Questions such as

-Who was more likeable?

Like it or not, this matters in presidential campaigns. I think it’s an indictment of our system that this is even an issue, but it is. Palin won this on several polls.

So the debate will rage over who won but I feel it’s not a worthy way to spend our time because there really isn’t a good, definitive answer.