Here's one interesting bit data that a chart like this make much easier to see... Not all the post-convention polls are in yet, but for all the talk of McCain's post-convention "surge" (the way the media describes it, it's much more than a bounce) McCain's only gained 7 EVs in the last week (as of Sept. 10, actual leaners only). Even more telling, he's actually 31 EVs below where he was on Aug. 21, just a few days before the Democratic convention started. Since that same date, Obama has actually gained 17 EVs.
Some surge, huh? [Update] Removed my snarky comment... See the comments for details[/update]
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19 comments:
wow, the graph is awesome! It would be nice to see red flipper over the y axis and compared directly to blue tho. Keep up the good work!
The "other surge" - oh you mean the one that sealed Allied VICTORY, crushed the remaining vestiges of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and reduced violence more than 80% in the last year?
What a great graph. and what silly comment. The main reason of the success in Iraq is that the army and diplomats started talking to the sunni tribal leaders instead of shooting them. Dilpmacy instead of muscles. But this is a blog about numbers nd it is good because of that. So excuse me for my diversion
http://blogamerica2008.blogspot.com/
It is definately a nice graph, forgot to mention that.
But the success in Iraq was definately due to the surge, you can repeat the left's anti-army and anti-america mantras all you want, it does not change reality.
The Anbar Awakening was a result of Al Qaeda in Iraq showing their true and ruthless face too soon and the Sunni tribe leaders realizing that America was really there to help them and wasn't going to leave them hanging out to dry as the democrats proposed and (fortunately) failed to do.
Statistics and graphs (the visualization of statistics) are naturally suspect by default. Tacking some jab to the end of its presentation automatically reveals your bias and puts your entire intention into doubt.
Great chart! I agree that adding the jab at the end of this post was a bad idea, although it does seem to have been a comment catalyst.
Flipping the red above the x-axis would make this chart unintelligible. The colored bars make the comparison between red and blue easy.
When I click on the chart, the new page shows me a smaller chart rather than a larger one.
Two of the red colors in the legend look the same to me.
Posting a comment that is obviously biased suggests to the intelligent viewer that your statistical formulas are suspect. It doesn't mean they are "manipulated" to reach the result you have, but should be taken with a grain of salt.
"The "other surge" - oh you mean the one that sealed Allied VICTORY, crushed the remaining vestiges of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and reduced violence more than 80% in the last year?"
Nice try. The US was the honey that brought Al Queda into Iraq in the first place. Geopolitics: you fail it.
Um, try the SURGE in US payola to militias not to blow stuff up & keep killing them. You'll see just how "wonderful" the surge is the day that money stops flowing.
Also try the truce declared by al Sadr due to high civilian casualties.
You'd've seen exactly the same environment today, with or without a surge.
FYI... No statistical bias on my part, since I'm not doing any statistics. All I'm doing are taking the numbers from another source and presenting them in a way that allows easy tracking of trends. Whether the Votemaster at Electoral-Vote.com has a bias I'll leave up to you, but his methodology is well documented.
As for the rest of my comment, perhaps I shouldn't have posted that at 1:45 in the morning (especially since the numbers that came out shortly thereafter showed McCain's surge is continuing to grow). It was just a joke, people (and probably not a very good one).
The surge has clearly been a success. My only problem is that the surge is only one part of a much larger set of circumstances that has lead to the situation improving in Iraq. Among those factors are improved US intelligence, the Anbar Awakening, the Mahdi army ceasefire, and the fact that the US is paying militants not to shoot at us. It's patently false for McCain to ignore all those other factors in his ongoing drumbeat of "the surge is working".
Oh, I almost forgot one other reason why blindly labeling the "surge" a success is wrong:
The surge would not have been necessary had the WAR not been bungled so badly from the beginning. Had the President not ignored the generals in charge and sent a much smaller force than the Pentagon suggested, we never would have needed to have a surge in the first place.
And in spite of that little detail, you never hear either McCain or Bush talk about the war anymore, they only talk about the "surge". The "surge" is a success! Yes, but how's the war going?
So is the surge a success? I guess that depends on how you define success. Many parts of Iraq are much safer today than they were eighteen months ago, but as I noted above, there are a variety of factors that contribute to that.
Perhaps the best way to judge the success of the surge is to look at the 18 Benchmarks that the President said would prove that the war was working.According to the GAO, as of September 2, 2007, only three of the 18 benchmarks had been met. The situation has improved in the meantime, but we still have a long way to go to meet all 18.
I don't want to sound too partisan on this... The surge has absolutely helped the situation in Iraq. So can any of you Surge supporters now come back and acknowledge that while it's helped, it wasn't the only factor? We'll see...
Hey slab. Ijust want to say a little something to you. I served in the army and I have many friends who went to Iraq, but their not Bush-loving McCain kissers. You see, the military DOES NOT CARE who is in office as long as they listen to their generals. Yet the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Bang-Bang Bush that there was no tangable evedince that Iraq had WMDs, wanted, WMDs, or thought of wanting WMDs. However, being servicemen themselves, they had to go along with it. I was in military intelligence and as far as I've witnessed, he has no friends there either. Serviceman and women don't need the opinion of somebody who yells fanatical ring-wing "patriotism" to the t.v. screen. Infact, you yourself would considered anti-American, because of your fascist views. However, you would know that if you served in the military, which you probably haven't. So keep you pseudo-AmeriNazi hate speeches to yourself and leave us real military folk alone. Thanks, but definatly no thanks.
Seems to me that comments to this blog would deal with polling or survey issues, not Iraq or Al Qaeda or surges. You can find enough of that in a bizillion other blogs.
EVStrength is an interesting
approach. I'm no statistician so I wouldn't dare get into accuracy issues, but it's a novel perspective that gives this wacky election a fresh, different "look".
@johnblades
Thanks for your comments. One thing that everyone needs to understand is that I'm not a statistician either. I'm also not really doing any statistics here. I'm just taking some statistics that another site puts out and putting the information into a easy-to-visualize format. Though I may offer my interpretation of certain polls or other events in my posts, everyone is welcome to ignore them and just look at the chart & the daily number breakdown in the left column. Those two bits of information are completely non-partisan and free from any bias other than those of either the polling houses or any methodology biases that may creep in at Electoral-Vote.com (those his methodology is well documented and apparently fair).
As for the surge comments... They are due to an unfortunate joke that I made at about 2am this morning, comparing McCain's current surge to the surge in Iraq. Some people seemed to take it the wrong way. While I still don't feel that the Surge has been the success that the McCain campaign insists it was, I decided to take the not terribly funny comment off the site to save the hassle of dealing with these comments.
Pete said "It would be nice to see red flipper over the y axis and compared directly to blue tho. Keep up the good work!"
Thanks for the suggestion... I'll see what I can do. Unfortunately, I suspect that there is just too much data represented here to allow such a formatting in a clear way. It might work if I format it as a bar graph instead of an area graph, but I suspect that a bar graph would obscure the trends a bit. I'll play with things and see if I can come up with a good way top show it.
No evidence of WMDs eh?
I guess the 550 tons of yellowcake uranium recently transferred from Iraq to Canada was for peaceful power generation, as it is in Iran hmmm?
"Nice try. The US was the honey that brought Al Queda into Iraq in the first place. Geopolitics: you fail it."
I don't dispute that. While they surely had agents there they didn't show up as a fighting force until we showed up. I mean, who can resist a chance to kill Americans, The Great Satan? We killed ALOT of these guys over there and as a result we, our allies, and even our enemies such as the liberal left here at home, are much safer.
The Sadr truce was the result of a shrewd politician seeing which way the wind was blowing and cutting his loses and saving as much face as possible. Definately helpful but to say the surge wasn't part of it is to go against your golden boy who recently said:
"I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated," Obama said while refusing to retract his initial opposition to the surge. "I've already said it’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."
I am an avid follower of Electoral-Vote.com and FiveThirtyEight.com, and I really appreciate the work you do here. Keep it up!
I have a few political numbers myself over at www.jrosen.wordpress.com. Thanks for checking it out!
Slab... What Obama has said repeatedly, and what you apparently continue to refuse to admit is that the surge was a success in some ways, BUT the surge didn't happen in a vacuum AND the success that has been had is far less than the stated reasons that we had the Surge in the first place.
First, all the other factors that I mentioned earlier a (and probably several others) also have contributed to the reduction in violence. Since we have no way to filter out the effect that those other factors had on the reduction in violence, we cannot know just what percentage of the reduction is the result of the surge, and what is the result of the other factors. What we can do is look at Iraqi polls: "A March 2008 poll of Iraq found that 42% of Iraqis call attacks on U.S. forces acceptable and that only 4% of Iraqis believe that U.S. forces are responsible for the drop in violence. The poll also found that 61% believed that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq was actually worsening the security situation. (Source). Clearly the Iraqis wouldn't agree with your assessment that the surge has been a resounding success.
But then there's that second point... Has the surge actually been a success even on its own terms? When we initially started the surge, there were Eighteen specific benchmarks that were laid out to demonstrate the the surge had been a success. Specifically, Bush said "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced." So were the Benchmarks met? Only 3 of the 18 benchmarks had been met on the first anniversary of the surge, and an additional five had been partially met. We'll be generous and give credit for the partial answers and call it Eight of the Eighteen-- that's still less than a 50% score and a failure in any test that I've ever seen.
Really, the only measure on which the surge has been an unqualified and resounding success is reducing the deaths of American soldiers. While that is a fantastic success, and something that every American is ecstatic about, it's important to note that that was not one of the eighteen benchmarks. So, yes, you could say that the surge has been a success, but only by redefining what it means to be a success in this context. If you go by the original, stated goal, the surge, like just about everything else about the Iraq war, has been a terrible failure.
Oh, and Slab... When you link to an article to prove your point, you might want to make sure that it actually proves your point.
That editorial is pure conjecture that ignores the facts in order to allow the author to continue to justify his support for this misguided war. Note that the author doesn't bother to actually site any sources. Maybe because no source can back up his wild conjectures.
Those 550 tons of yellowcake shipped to Canada? From 1981, and known, documented, and later guarded by the UN before the invasion. Of course the ideologue who wrote the editorial never bothers to mention this, but thankfully someone in the comments points out the flaw and links to an AP story that talks about the real history.
No one denies that Saddam had nuclear material. In fact one of the biggest criticism of the management of the war was Bush's failure to properly safeguard the both the nuclear material and the conventional weapon stockpiles after the invasion. Many of those conventional weapons ended up in the hands of the insurgents. Thankfully, at least as far as I'm aware, we were more fortunate with the with the nuclear material.
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