Politi-crap is in the tank, keeps up their bad work on jobs

Another day, another dishonest Politi-crap rating on Wisconsin job numbers that I have to knock down. It’s becoming a bad habit with these guys, and this latest effort not only kills any remaining chance they aren't GOP-biased, but is also a lazy effort that wouldn't work in a high school journalism class.

This time, they’re parsing out a claim Mary Burke made on Wisconsin Public Radio, where she took a shot at Scott Walker’s lousy job creation record.

"Frankly, it’s not getting any better," Burke told host Joy Cardin. "The longer he’s in office, the worse it’s getting."

She continued: "So, 2013 job creation was worse than 2012, which was worse than 2011. And 2014 is shaping up to be the worst year ever, with the loss of 4,300 jobs in August alone."…

The data says that’s not the case -- it’s been an up and down performance. And employers have continued to add jobs, albeit not at a strong pace.

We rate the claim False.

As support, Politi-fact points to the Quarterly Census on Employment and Wages (QCEW) stats for the 3 full years of Scott Walker’s tenure, and if you look at those stats for private sector job growth for December-December of each year, here’s what it shows.

Private sector job growth, Wisconsin
2011- 29,800 (+1.31%)
2012- 33,872 (+1.47%)
2013- 29,723 (+1.27%)
(BONUS NOTE 2010- 33,658 (+1.50%))

So yes, Politi-fact is correct that private sector job growth hasn’t dropped EVERY YEAR in the Age of Fitzwalkerstan (the basis of the “False” rating), but that doesn’t change the fact that it is lower now than when Scott Walker took over at the start of 2011, and that 2013 had the lowest private sector job growth of Walker’s 3 years.

But wait, there’s more! If you look at that QCEW table again, you’ll notice an “annual” stat, which averages all 12 months of the year. And by that standard, private sector job growth has indeed declined for every one of Scott Walker’s 3 years in office.

2011- 37,069 (+1.65%)
2012- 32,117 (+1.41%)
2013- 28,452 (+1.23%)

Now maybe that’s not what Burke campaign spokesman Joe Zepecki meant when he tried to explain Mary Burke’s claim in the Politi-“fact” article, but it certainly holds true if you use the “weighted average” method of figuring out job growth in a year.

And there’s a second part of Politi-crap’s “analysis” that should be severely questioned. They mention Burke’s other claim that 2014 is on pace to be the worst job growth of all of Walker’s 4 years, and like the GOP-favoring outlet they are, they blow it off.

In 2011, after eight months, the state had added a total of 900 jobs for the year, according to the monthly estimates. The final total for the year, based on the more accurate Census figures, was 29,800.

In 2012, there was a similar pattern -- minus 500 jobs after eight months, but a year-end total of 33,872.

In 2013, there was less growth. There were an estimated 26,210 jobs after eight months, and the year-end total was 29,723.

I took a look at the monthly job numbers myself, and it seems like Politi-crap pulled these numbers right out of their ass. The only way I can even see where they’re close to these figures is by using the household “employment” survey, which is somewhat near Politi-crap’s claim, but they still don’t match up.

Besides, those weren’t the numbers Burke was referring to in her statement on WPR. She's referring to the monthly non-farm payroll numbers, and in this claim, she is 100% correct. 2014 is by far the worst start of the year we’ve had since Walker took office 3 ½ years ago.

Wisconsin private job growth, Dec-August
2011- 24,000
2012- 18,500
2013- 18,900
2014- 8,800

In fact, every other year of Walker’s tenure has had job growth more than TWICE AS FAST AS WHAT WE HAD THIS YEAR. And even those numbers are relatively unimpressive.

But that’s not what you’ll hear from Republi-fact and related GOP-aganda today. It’ll just be “Mary Burke is making false claims about Scott Walker’s record.” Walker just released an ad today (hilariously titled “The Facts”) which props up a Politi-crap rating that I refuted on Monday that put words in Mary Burke’s mouth to give her a “False” rating.

At this point, this ignorance of jobs numbers and mislabeling of Burke claims isn’t an accident. I have strong suspicions these guys at Politi-crap Wisconsin are in cahoots with the pro-Walker corporates at the Journal-Sentinel, and are intentionally downgrading Dem claims to boost their boy Scotty. It also makes me wonder if we’re looking at the wrong building to demolish for the Bucks Arena, but that’s a topic for another today.

Politi-crap’s act is disgusting because it’s done under the guise of “third-party objectivity”, and at the very least, they should be removed as the state’s “official fact-checker”, because they cannot be trusted to give a fair assessment. In fact, it seems that Politi-"fact" is not a legitimate news outlet, but instead a puppet of the corporate interests that pay their salaries.

Polling flaws = follow trends, and not only one poll

It’s interesting to watch media try to gauge where things stand for the November elections, not only because lazy horse-race coverage beats thinking and analyzing political positions, but also because the changes of the last few years have made it increasingly tougher to get a read on that horse race from polling data.

Polling in 2014 is as tough as its been in years, as this article by Carl Bialik in Fivethirtyeight.com shows. That’s the feedback Bialik got when he talked to numerous pollsters across the nation. And what’s the biggest problem in getting it right? Figuring out who is actually going to vote next month.

We asked pollsters if they expected more or less error in Senate election polls — the difference between what the latest pre-election polls show and actual vote margins — this year than two years ago. Ten said they expected a higher average error, while just five predicted lower error.

No one cited low response rates as a reason to expect poll error. Perhaps that’s because pollsters have managed to maintain strong national-election records despite declining response rates.

Instead, the top reason cited was the difficulty of forecasting turnout in midterm elections, without a presidential race to bring voters to the polls. And the crucial midterms are in states that don’t usually have close races. “The key Senate battlegrounds this year are also places like Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, etc., where most of the public pollsters don’t have a ton of experience,” one pollster said. “It’s not the Ohios and Pennsylvanias and Floridas of the world that we’re all used to polling a lot.”

With that in mind, Bialik asked the pollsters which are the places that are hardest to poll? And the answer ranged from high-population places such as New York City, California, Florida, to low-population places like Alaska, Hawaii and Nevada. But it seems there are two commonalities in the places hardest to poll accurately.

1. Heavy amount of the population that has moved into or out of the area, with area codes on their phones that may not match where they live.

2. High amount of immigrants and/or non-whites, which have relatively low response rates, with those who do respond not being a necessarily accurate sample.

If you take this down to Wisconsin, which areas become likely to be underrepresented and/or erratically reported based on this criteria? Madison (lots of college students and young professionals from other states) and Milwaukee (higher numbers of people with mobility, along with have a sizable minority and immigrant population).

Both of these heavier chances for error showed up in the latest Marquette poll, where Dane County’s share of people polled was only 7.9% in the “likely voter” sample that put Scott Walker up 5. This is different than what the 2012 November elections told us, where Dane County represented 10.2% of the vote in 2010 and 9.9% of the vote in 2012. In fact, it is probably more reasonable to assume Dane County will be closer to 11 or 12% of the overall vote in this election, given that where Latinos voted for Barack Obama 71-27 in 2012, and 66-34 for Obama in Wisconsin. Add in the fact that Walker heads up a suburban-based Wisconsin GOP that has promoted voter ID as a way to make sure “non-citizens” don’t get to vote, which I’m guessing is a stance that doesn’t go over very well in Hispanic communities, and I’m more than a bit skeptical that Scotty is leading with Hispanics. As Bialik’s FiveThirtyEight column notes, this likely overstating of WisGOP support from Hispanics in the Marquette Poll is similar to what is experienced in Nevada.

Some pollsters also named Nevada as challenging, saying Nevadan Hispanics and blacks who answer polls tend to vote more conservatively than their counterparts who don’t. Tom Jensen, of Public Policy Polling, said that many Las Vegas residents keep unusual work schedules that make them hard to track down. Another pollster added, “Too much happens under the radar for opinion pollsters to pick up. … Nobody gets elections right in Nevada.”

And this is why I have major issues with lazy Wisconsin media portraying last week’s Marquette Poll as an indicator that Scott Walker has some kind of notable lead in the Wisconsin governor’s race. As mentioned at the time the poll came out, its likely voter sample should not have had a “GOP +4.6” Party ID advantage for a state that has more often than not voted for Democrats in statewide elections in the last 26 years.

It’s not like the Marquette Poll numbers for candidates or Party ID are set in stone, as shown by these results in its likely voter samples from 2012 over the last 6 weeks of the campaign.

Wisconsin poll for president, Marquette Law 2012
Sept 27-30- Obama 53-42, Party ID Dem +7
Oct. 11-14- Obama 49-48, Party ID Dem +1
Oct. 25-28- Obama 51-43, Party ID Dem +5

Final Result- Obama 53-46, Party ID Dem +5

So yes, the Marquette Poll “hit” on their final poll, but unless you think we were amazingly fickle up here in the last month before the November 2012 elections, MU Law was way off with their modeling before that last poll. Just because their accurate final numbers make some people call them the "gold standard" does not necessarily mean they are on the mark all the way through. And I'm not implying that Franklin was intentionally rigging the poll to have the outcomes lean a certain way - it's a hard job to do and perhaps this reflects the responses of people willing to talk about the race at a certain time.

Which is why the aggregation of polls is definitely the way to go to figure out the state of a race (HuffPost Pollster has Walker up 48-47 in this model, using all polls from the last 6 months), because some will slant one way, and some will slant the other. This may be out of malice (especially with GOP pollsters trying to slant media coverage), but it’s also difficult to model what turnout will be in this time of low response rates among certain population. It’s also why it’s hilarious (and likewise scary) to see the hacks at Gravis Marketing backtracking on their poll that had Mary Burke up 5 points a little over a week ago, as they saw the Marquette Poll and panicked, claiming that they “oversampled Milwaukeeans” and made the result too Dem-leaning. Sure enough, they released another poll yesterday that was 50-46 Walker, with a higher amount of white voters listed- I'm sure that's just coincidence.

Given the history in 2012, perhaps Charles Franklin at Marquette makes a similar adjustment over the next couple of weeks, adjusting his poll sample to better reflect the larger and growing population of Dane County, and getting closer to the electorate that will be likely to turn out on Nov. 4, instead of just writing down the responses of who picks up the phone and underweighting certain demographics as a result. This will likely "shift" the race back toward Burke, and then it’ll be interesting to see if certain media changes its tune on the horse race in Wisconsin, and admits we’re back to where we were a month ago- in a basically even race that will likely come down to which party’s voters get their ballots cast (and counted).

Sorry, Politi-"fact". We really are last for jobs

I’ve had plenty of issues with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s “Wisconsin Politi-fact” segment in recent weeks, but apparently they refuse to listen to me when I note flaws in their work. They were back again this weekend with another absurd rating of a Democrat’s claim, using cherry-picked stats that are not part of the claim or the ad in question.

This time, it comes from a recent Mary Burke ad which discussed Governor Scott Walker’s failed record on jobs.

The narrator cites the preliminary August jobs count, which did show a drop of 4,300 from the previous month. But when combined with the language used -- "And we’ve fallen to dead last in Midwest job growth" -- it suggests that falling to the bottom is a new development.

For the first three years of Walker’s term, Wisconsin did rank last in the Midwest -- both for the three years as a whole, and in each of the individual years. That’s a true statement, and we have rated it as such….

Burke’s ad renews the claim that Wisconsin rates last in the Midwest in terms of job creation. She’s arrives at that conclusion by citing accurate data, but by using an unconventional shift in the time frame to make her point.

The ad also ignores the most recent 12-month performance -- a common yardstick for economists -- that says Wisconsin’s performance improved and was better than two other Midwest states.

We rate the claim False.

So now Politi-crap is going to verb tenses to hack up a Dem’s claim on jobs to arrive at a “false” rating (instead of a “half-true” or “mostly true”, which even they admit the claim is)? And because Wisconsin sucked under Walker for 3 years means repeating that fact is “old news” that should be ignored. COME ON, MAN!

By the way, Politi-crap is again trying their (now-common) move of putting words into Dems’ mouths to distort their claims. This is a trick they’ve pulled on claims from the AFL-CIO and One Wisconsin Now in recent weeks, saying that Dems meant something that they didn’t say. And the same happens here, as Burke campaign manager Joe Zepecki is quoted in the Politi-fact piece that he’s not talking about “jobs over the last year,” but instead is claiming overall job growth since March 2011, which allows the most recent QCEW to be included.

As a quick aside, the reason year-over-year numbers are used in the QCEW is because of the huge seasonal changes we see in raw (unadjusted) employment from month-to-month in this part of the country, which are smoothed out with “seasonal adjustments” in the monthly job stats that get headlines every month.

So with that in mind, let’s combine the March 2011-March 2014 QCEW “gold standard” stats with the monthly, seasonally-adjusted stats in the 5 months measured since then, to get as up-to-date a figure as possible.

Total private-sector job growth March 2011-August 2014
Mich +298,147 (+9.38%)
Ind. +162,122 (+7.02%)
Iowa +73,135 (+6.18%)
Minn +123,370 (+5.72%)
Ohio +224,755 (+5.44%)
Ill. +217,345 (+4.66%)
Wis. +101,529 (+4.59%)



So I don’t know why Politi-crap decided to splice up the claim to the August 2014 seasonally-adjusted year-over-year numbers to analyze whether Scott Walker’s Wisconsin is last in the Midwest for job growth under his tenure, unless they’ve decided to throw all pretense of fairness aside and become a pro-Walker outlet by giving into the cynical right-wing frame of “all politicans lie.” Given the actions of the Journal-Sentinel (with Daniel Bice still trying to pump the “jobs plan” story in his column today) and Politi-crap over the past couple of weeks, it’s hard to draw another conclusion.

Bottom line: Wisconsin IS LAST for job growth in the Midwest since Scott Walker’s been in office and gotten his economic agenda into law. The numbers show it, and no amount of spinning and cherry-picking those numbers into Politi-“facts” changes that reality.'

Random weekend thoughts

Been down visiting family in St. Louis for the weekend, where Fall has also arrived, but at least it hasn't had the snow like back home.

1. On the drive down, I got gas and food in Central Illinois, and you forget how damaged some of these places in rural America have become over the last decade. YIKES!

2. The Schlafly Brewery and tasting room at St. Louis Brewery is quite alright. As is the restorative powers of "adult" apple cider on a cool Fall night.

3. Why is every Badgers' trip to Northwestern the same? Weather is gray and cold, and Bucky finds a way to lose in some infuriating style? I have ratcheted down my expectations for this season, even with the Big Ten being awful and Mel Gordon being great.

4. Here is a great list of economic stats showing how much better off we are now compared to 5 years ago. I still think President Obama is too close to Wall Street and free traders hasn't done nearly enough to counteract the disaster of the Bush years, but if a Republican was half this successful at adding jobs and reducing the deficit, the right-wing bubble-world would be adding this guy's face to Mt. Rushmore.

Back to Dairyland and reality for Monday.

US jobs boom in September, Wisconsin lags further behind

Quick hits from the new US jobs report that was just released this morning.

1. Jobs up 248,000 total in September, 236,000 private sector. July and August also revised up.

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised from +212,000 to +243,000, and the change for August was revised from +142,000 to +180,000. With these revisions, employment gains in July and August combined were 69,000 more than previously reported.

So that means 317,000 more jobs than we had listed last month.

2. Unemployment rate drops from 6.1% to 5.9%, first time we've been below 6% since July 2008, and down 1.3% in the last 12 months. Given that this is the last jobs report before the 2014 elections, this seems noteworthy to bring up. Doesn't seem like Obamacare was exactly a "job-killer" was it?

3. The upward revisions in July and August also means the Walker jobs gap in Wisconsin grows yet again, now over 74,300 in the private sector, and more than 57,000 overall. It also means that we need around 4,500 jobs in September just to keep up with the rest of the country.





So when you hear Walker trying to spin the "Wisconsin Comeback", know that he's really saying "THANKS OBAMA!" The national economic recovery is the only reason we've created any jobs in Wisconsin, and we should be adding a whole lot more than we have.

Medicaid gap closes - THANKS OBAMACARE!

I was waiting to see what would happen when the state’s Department of Health Services gave its quarterly report on the Medicaid budget this week. This same report showed that there was a $93 million deficit projected in this fund at the end of June, so with an already-growing budget deficit coming on for Fiscal Year 2015 and the 2015-17 budget, the state couldn’t afford another budget hole to drag itself out of.

And it looks like that bullet has been dodged- for now. The Third Quarter Medicaid report shows that the $93 million gap has been almost entirely wiped out. So what explains the turnaround? Let’s look at what DHS has to say about it.

First, the Department has allocated $51.2 million in revenues from settlement payments from drug manufacturers to cover Medicaid benefit costs. The drug companies made these payments to the state to settle lawsuits alleging they improperly charged the Medicaid program for medications for Medicaid recipients. Prior quarter projections had not included these settlement revenues because it was uncertain how much revenue would be received this biennium. The $51.2 million represents available revenue this September.

I guess that’s a nice way to solve a budget problem- use a one-time shot of fines from crooked drug companies. But that doesn’t really seem to be sustainable long-term.

The other reasons singled out are also quite interesting.

· Costs per enrollee for BadgerCare Plus adults without dependent children is projected to be lower due to the age/gender mix of individuals enrolling in recent months.
· Enrollment growth in Family Care and IRIS has been slower than projected.
· Final year-end payments in FY14 were smaller and SEG revenue balances were higher than projected (basically filling some of the gap with non-taxpayer funds from other sources).
· Per-person costs for individuals in BadgerCare Plus are projected to grow more slowly in CY 15.

In other words, THANKS OBAMACARE! We’re seeing this trend nationwide, where the rate of health cost increases are going down- just like Obamacare proponents said they would. Take a look at this report from early September.

Estimates of U.S. health-care spending for the next five years have been lowered by two federal agencies, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is getting much of the credit.

U.S. health spending in 2019 will be $4 trillion, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said …$500 billion less than the agency projected in 2010 when President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul became law. That announcement followed by a week a report from the Congressional Budget Office lowering its five-year cost estimates.

Obamacare has been criticized by Republicans as costly and unsustainable. Now, four years after its arrival, the law’s mandated program cuts and the medical practices it encourages -- limiting unneeded procedures, and keeping people out of the hospital longer -- are cited by economists as key ingredients in trimming the nation’s medical bill. While the recession has had an influence on the cost slowdown, it doesn’t explain it all, according to policy analysts and the CBO

The "lower costs for childless adults" part of the DHS’s report is especially noteworthy, because it destroys a talking point the GOP anti-Obamacare hacks had (that a lot of the people enrolling would be the sick and would require a lot of care and cost). Imagine how much better Wisconsin’s Medicaid fund would have looked had we expanded Medicaid and had the feds pay for all of it under Obamacare?

While Obamacare and one-time injections of funds have stabilized the Medicaid numbers, it doesn’t change the fact that we still have a $760 million hole to fill in the next state budget under the current Walker/WisGOP plan, and fixing it will be a major challenge for whoever is in power in 3 months.

And by the way, that’s assuming the amount of childless adults enrolling in Medicaid levels off from where we are now. A quick look at enrollment figures through August shows how this demographic has come out the woodwork to sign up and get covered since they became eligible to do so in April 2014.

Childless Adults on Medicaid, Wisconsin
June 2012 24,292
June 2013 17,791
March 2014 13,923
April 2014 96,140
May 2014 103,126
June 2014 111,432
July 2014 119,090
August 2014 124,778
INCREASE SINCE MARCH 2014 110,855
INCREASE SINCE APRIL 2014 28,638 (+29.8%)

Given this rapidly increasing enrollment, and the fact that parents and caretaker enrollment in Medicaid has only gone down by 47,338 since March (meaning the net change is over 63,500 more people going on BadgerCare), I’ve got a small fiscal suggestion. Maybe expanding Medicaid to have the taxpayers across America pay for these people’s medical services is a better idea than having us pick up 42% of the cost of these new Medicaid recipients, and driving our budget even further into deficit. Whaddya think?

PS- For other interesting Medicaid/ Obamacare reading, check out Citizen Action’s release today on which Wisconsinites lost their health insurance because of Gov Walker’s “reforms” that removed them from BadgerCare in April. Many counties had half or more of those who lost their BadgerCare coverage end up uninsured, and every one of the ten counties that had the percentage of BadgerCare recipients fall to this fate are in rural parts of Central and Northern Wisconsin.

All 10 of these counties also voted for Walker in the 2012 recall election. Think those areas will still “Stand with Walker” come November?

Walker wins! If the voters are old white guys

Think turnout won’t be a big part of this November's election for governor in Wisconsin? Take a look at 3 different polls that have been released in the last 2 days. at the “Likely voter” sample of the Marquette Law Poll, the “registered voter” sample of the Marquette Law Poll, and the “registered voter” sample of a poll by Gravis Marketing. All of these polls were taken in the last week, but look at how minor changes in the sample make for different outcomes.

First, let’s look at the toplines in the Burke-Walker Governor’s race:

Marquette Likely- Walker 50.5%- Burke 44.7%
Marquette Reg.- Walker 46.4%- Burke 45.1%
Gravis- Burke 50- Walker 45%

Quite a wide disparity in itself- No poll is within 4.5% of each other. So what’s going on here? Going inside the numbers will tell the story.

Party ID (with Leaners in MU Poll)-
Marquette Likely- Republican +4.6%
Marquette Reg.- Democrat +0.4%
Gravis- Democrat +1%

Interesting- let’s check out some other demos.

Age
Marquette Likely- 18-49 41.4%, 50-64 31.2% 65+ 27.4%
Marquette Reg.- 18-49 46.7%, 50-64 28.5%, 65+ 24.8%
Gravis 18-49 48%, 50-64 31%, 65+ 20%

Race (of those giving an answer)
Marquette Likely- White 90.5%, African-American 4.5%, Hispanic/Latino 3.0%
Marquette Reg- White 89.2%, African-American 5.8%, Hispanic/Latino 4.8%
Gravis- White 84.9%, African-American 6.5%, Hispanic/Latino 3.2%

As an interesting addition to this- UW-Madison just came out with a report today on the rapidly increasing Latino population throughout Wisconsin, so go with the Marquette registered voter model’s larger Hispanic numbers on this one.

Education level
Marquette Likely- Bachelor’s+ 37.9%, AA/Some College 32.7%, HS diploma or less 28.7%
Marquette Reg- Bachelor’s+ 32.1%, AA/Some College 32.4%, HS diploma or less 34.4%
Gravis- Bachelor’s+ 54%, AA/Some College 30%, HS diploma or less 17%

There’s a definite link between the difference in demos in this survey, and the outcome. The Marquette Law “likely voter” list has the oldest, whitest most Republican electorate, and Walker does best in that one. The Gravis sample has a younger, more racially diverse Dem electorate, and Burke is winning in that one. The registered voter one is mostly in between, with a slight edge to Walker’s electorate, and it’s basically even.

The 5% difference in party ID explains a lot of the 4.5% difference in Scott Walker's lead between the "likely" and "registered" polls from Marquette. What's interesting is if you go inside the cross-tabs of the Marquette Poll you’ll see the difference in poll sample bear out between "registered" and "likely" voters across numerous categories. I’m also going to add gender, as the responses are interestingly different, even though the percentage of respondents is mostly the same in all three polls (51-53% female)

Age 18-44 Walker 47.5-46.2 LV, Burke 47.5-40.7 RV
Age 45+ Walker 52.1-44.2 LV, Walker 50.2-43.8 RV
Male- Walker 61.9-33.9 LV (!), Walker 54.2-39.1 RV
Female- Burke 54.5-40.2 LV, Burke 50.4-39.5 RV
Bachelor’s+ Burke 48.3-44.9 LV, Burke 47.0-44.4 RV
AA/Some College- Walker 54.3-41.1 LV, Walker 50.9-41.0 RV
HS diploma or less- Walker 52.9-45.2 LV, Burke 48.1-43.9 RV
White- Walker 52.9-42.6 LV,Walker 49.9-41.9 RV
African-American- Burke 91.3-0 LV (!), 91.3-0 RV (!)
Hispanic/Latino- Walker 55.0-42.3 LV, Walker 48.4-41.0 RV(?)
Other- Burke 60.7-39.3 LV, Burke 72.4-27.6 RV

Look at the change you get from “likely” voters to “registered” voters. Walker loses support across the board except among women, and those with bachelor’s degrees or above (and he still loses both demographics). These crosstabs and differences in sample make a clear point. If the electorate in November is overwhelmingly older, white, male, and with more Republicans coming to the polls, then Scott Walker will probably win. If it’s younger, more diverse, with more women, and with Dems turning out, then Burke will likely win.

Which means TURNOUT! TURNOUT! TURNOUT! The GOPs have been cranking up their fauxtrage machine in recent weeks, and it is reflected in their advantage in the Marquette Poll’s (too tight?) likely voter screen. The Marquette Poll was taken at a relative low point in Burke’s campaign, with Dan Bice and the GOP-aganda machine pumping the “copied job plan” story. The question is, can the Dems respond in kind, and get their voters fired up to go to the polls (and what the hell are they waiting for)? With Burke’s strong ad that just came out answering that non-story, the rising anger over voter ID from Dem-leaning groups, and Walker's campaign contributors allies at WMC denigrating the idea of equal pay for women, I’m thinking that “enthusiasm gap” is gonna drop real quickly- if it ever really existed in the first place.

With that in mind, it makes sense to me to use the “registered voters” numbers from the Marquette and Gravis polls if you want any idea where things stand, because I’d bet that’s going to be more like the group casting ballots in November than the “GOP +4.6” that was in the Likely voter Marquette poll. This seems to be anyone’s game with a month to go.