Can We Bet on the Presidential Polls?

PBS News has a great behind-the-scenes look at the polls and other methods for checking the Presidential odds. One point made by an expert in the video (see transcript below) is that some Democrats might have skewed the polls after the first Presidential Debate because they were so fed up the morning after and hung up on pollsters. Yet anyone who was Republican in the same demographic (age, gender, income level, location) might have enjoyed talking about the debate, so their data got recorded instead. Hence, the polls tightened up all of a sudden and Obama lost his lead. That makes sense to me.

If the swings in the polls are making you dizzy and all this feels like a big crapshoot, well . . . that's basically what it is. So the conclusion for PBS Newshour is that betting and gambling websites might be just as accurate, and perhaps more soothing to ruffled voters, than the more academic pollsters who care more about who is voting and why.
Here are a few websites mentioned:
Intrade
Betfair
PredictWise.com
Iowa Markets




PBS Transcript Here

PAUL SOLMAN: Earlier this week, Quinnipiac surveyed voters in three of this election's swing states: Colorado, Wisconsin and Virginia.

MAN: Your telephone number was randomly generated by a computer, and I need to pick someone at random from your household to participate in this survey.

PAUL SOLMAN: To make sure they're polling a scientific sample of likely voters, these callers use random-digit dialing of landlines and cell phones. But that's just for starters, says Doug Schwartz.

DOUGLAS SCHWARTZ, Director, Quinnipiac University Polling Institute: When we call a household, we don't automatically speak to whoever picks up the phone, because they tend to be women. We speak to whoever has the next birthday in the household.

We also call over several days, because we don't want to just reach the easy-to-reach people. For example, seniors, people with young children are easier to reach. So we will call a phone number at least four times between 6:00 and 9:00 during the week, but then we will also try on weekends.

We also conduct interviewing in Spanish. So, it all gets back to this principle of making sure that everyone has an equal chance of being selected.

PAUL SOLMAN: But, of course, not everyone wants that chance.

Do people get angry at you?

DEETA MOUNING, Quinnipiac University Polling Institute: Oh, yes, they do. They blast us out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

But since every pollster claims to come up with a scientific random sample eventually, how can the results be Romney up by four and Obama down by three at the very same time?

A hefty margin of error, says newly minted Ph.D. economist David Rothschild, who works at Microsoft Research in Manhattan.

So, Rothschild incorporates models, polls, and markets into a constantly updated forecast on his blog PredictWise.com.

Last we looked, his data mash-up gave President Obama a 65 percent chance to win.

DAVID ROTHSCHILD, Microsoft Research: I never sweat too much about any individual poll because there's too much noise.

PAUL SOLMAN: Too much noise meaning?

DAVID ROTHSCHILD: Too much movement.

PAUL SOLMAN: Take the so-called bumps after a vice presidential pick, or a convention. Or take the first presidential debate. Say you're a Democrat the morning after.

DAVID ROTHSCHILD: A pollster calls you, you don't want anything to do with it. You're just -- you're upset. You hang up that phone.

They call another guy, exact same demographics as you, because they're trying to fill some sort of demographic hole or whatnot. He's a Republican. He's stoked. He wants to yell for how excited he is for Romney.

The same person on paper looks like he switched to Republican, but what happened really is, is that the Republicans want to talk that day vs. a Democrat who is like, I'm not even answering the phone. I'm in a bad mood. Obama screwed up last night. So...

PAUL SOLMAN: Between prediction markets and polls, which do you trust?

DAVID ROTHSCHILD: Prediction markets, because prediction markets have all of this polling information available to them, as well as additional information.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Through this one, the Iowa Market, 1,600 people place their bets, with a $500 limit per punter....

Director Joyce Berg:

JOYCE BERG: Right now, the markets are favoring Obama. If you look at the winner-take-all market, that market is showing our traders believe there's an 80 percent chance that Obama will get more than half the popular vote.

PAUL SOLMAN: That was before the first presidential debate, however. The odds are now much lower.

But they're still above 60 percent that President Obama will win the popular vote.

So, who's right, the professors, the pollsters, or the plungers?

. . . JOYCE BERG: So, we have gone back over time since the '88 election, looked at over 900 polls, and compared the IEM prediction to the poll prediction, and found, in 75 percent of the cases, the IEM was more accurate than the polls.

We also look at night-before forecasts, and there, in that case, we are usually within about 1.3 percent of the actual election outcome.

PAUL SOLMAN: For the latest odds from Iowa, Intrade and Betfair, just go to our Making Sense website, where we link to all of them in real time.

Romney's Harvest Home at Bain Reaps Profits

David Corn at Mother Jones has done it again - unearthed a video from 1985 in which a younger Mitt Romney brags about Bain "harvesting" companies to reap a profit. It was given to them by a former employee of Bain. Unbelievable! I don't know much, but I bet that even people in the business community must be just as sick of hearing about Bain Capital flipping companies for profit as we regular folk.

Romney sounds like the grim reaper, and I'm sure that's how the ex-employees of all those outsourced and ruined companies feel to this day. The Grim Reaper Romney.

Mother Jones Article Here

Mother Jones has obtained a video from 1985 in which Romney, describing Bain's formation, showed how he viewed the firm's mission. He explained that its goal was to identify potential and hidden value in companies, buy significant stakes in these businesses, and then "harvest them at a significant profit" within five to eight years.

The video was included in a CD-ROM created in 1998 to mark the 25th anniversary of Bain & Company, the consulting firm that gave birth to Bain Capital. Here is the full clip, as it appeared on that CD-ROM (the editing occurred within the original):

Mitt Romney:
TRANSCRIPT: Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit…

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900 Pages of Bain Capital Files Leaked

The website Gawker has obtained over 900 pages of financial disclosure files from Mitt Romney's Bain Capital. This is huge with the Republican National Convention looming next week.

The Bain Files: Inside Mitt Romney's Cayman Schemes

Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask).

Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama's fiscal approach and his money managers' embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren't made until years after he left the company.

Bain isn't a company so much as an intricate suite of steadily proliferating inter-related holding companies and limited partnerships, some based in Delaware and others in the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and elsewhere, designed to collectively house roughly $66 billion in wealth in its many crevices and chambers.

Much, much more at these links, with apparently more to come:

Equity Swaps, AIVs, and Mitt Romney's Other Tax-Dodging Tricks

Mitt Romney's Endless ‘Retirement' Package

How Mitt Romney Puts His Money Where Obama's Mouth Is

Derivatives, Short Sales, and Mitt Romney's Other Exotic Financial Instruments

Mitt Romney Is the National Enquirer's Banker

From the last link, Romney not only is involved in the company that owns National Enquirer - that's odd enough - but he's involved with many gambling companies, just like his good pal Sheldon Adelson. Actually, these articles make Bain Capital's spin-off, Sankaty, sound like the Loan Shark of the Cayman Islands.

Sankaty High Yield Partners II also lent money to such un-Mormon concerns as Las Vegas Sands, LLC ($3 million), which operates casinos in Las Vegas and China; Motor City Casinos ($1.8 million), and Yonkers Racing Corporation ($214,000). Not to mention Core-Mark, a nationwide cigarette distributor ($13 million in bonds). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, for which Romney has served as a bishop and "stake president," opposes gambling and smoking. Mother Jones' David Corn has detailed another Romney holding—Brookside Capital Investors Inc.—that also held substantial gambling-related investments, despite Romney's record of opposing "access to gaming" due to its "social costs."

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I urge everyone to spend some time reading each link. It's a treasure trove of riches about Bain.