(Cool stuff from Texas' new youngest national convention delegate. - promoted by Karl-Thomas Musselman)
While Democratic Congressional candidates have been polling sky-high between 60-65%, Obama is only around a mere 53% against John McCain -- and so they're saying en masse that this is evidence that Obama is a bad candidate.
But Presidential candidates are always "behind" by that much, historically -- below is a graph of Presidential Results and Congressional Results for every election since 1952 by Congressional district.
The green diagonal line is the pattern we'd see if Presidential candidates routinely did as well as Congressional candidates. But clearly, they don't. Saying Obama's running behind because Democratic candidates for Congress are doing so well is just untrue; in fact, when Congressional Dems hover around 60%, our Presidential candidates usually barely break even.
Note for nerds: the dotted lines represent the 95% confidence interval while the dots represent observations binned by 0.5% buckets.
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