A focus on global health seems to be a trait Mrs. Clinton shares with her do-gooder husband. On Thursday, Hillary Clinton unveiled a new "blueprint" guide to wiping out the AIDS virus globally, and aiming for "an AIDS-free generation." The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief will focus on improving treatment and prevention worldwide. The secretary of state applauded a massive decrease in AIDS-related deaths (25 percent in six years), an increase in U.S.-funded anti-retroviral drug treatments, and a huge drop in HIV infections in developing countries. "We can reach a point where virtually no children are born with the virus," she said. read more...
Summing up the lessons learned from a massive investment in data and technology, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina has a blunt messagefor pollsters: "We spent a whole bunch of time figuring out that American polling is broken."
At a Politico forum on Monday, Messina spoke about the campaign's "three looks at the electorate" that gave him a deeper understanding of "how we were doing, where we were doing it, where we were moving -- which is why I knew that most of the public polls you were seeing were completely ridiculous."
David Simas, the Obama campaign's director of opinion research, provided The Huffington Post with more details about those three sources of polling data:
• Battleground Polls. The Obama campaign never conducted a nationwide survey. For a broad overview of public opinion, it relied on lead pollster Joel Benenson to survey voters across 11 battleground states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin) at regular intervals throughout the campaign.
Benenson conducted the aggregated battleground polls once every three weeks during the spring and early summer of 2012, every other week during the late summer, and twice a week for the final two months of the campaign. These surveys were used to test messages and to glean overall strategic guidance, but not to make individual state assessments.
• State Tracking Polls. To gauge the battleground states, the campaign conducted state-specific tracking polls on a similar schedule, shifting to three-day rolling-average tracking in each state after Labor Day, with sample sizes ranging between 500 and 900 likely voters every three days. The surveys were conducted by a team of Democratic pollsters: John Anzalone, Sergio Bendixen (among Latino voters), Cornell Belcher, Diane Feldman, Lisa Grove and Paul Harstad. These surveys helped drive message testing and strategy but also tracked the standings of Obama and Mitt Romney in each state.
• Analytics. Overseen by its internal analytics staff, the campaign also conducted parallel surveys in each state to help create and refine its microtargeting models and to provide far more granular analysis of voter subgroups. These surveys used live interviewers, very large sample sizes and very short questionnaires, which focused on vote preference and strength of support, with no more than a handful of additional substantive questions. During September and October, the campaign completed 8,000 to 9,000 such calls per night.
The call centers that completed these analytics surveys typically specialize in "voter identification," the process of contacting most or all individual voters in a state to identify supporters who can then be targeted in subsequent "get out the vote" efforts. But the Obama campaign's approach to voter targeting was different. It called very largerandom samples of voters to develop statistical models that generated scores applied to all voters, which were then used for get-out-the-vote and persuasion targeting.
The Obama campaign preferred such modeling over traditional brute-force voter ID calling, according to a member of the analytics staff, "because our support models more efficiently (and quite accurately) told us who supported us and who opposed us."
The analytics staff also routinely combined all of their data sources -- Benenson's aggregate battleground survey, the state tracking polls, the analytical calls and even public polling data -- into a predictive model to estimate support for Obama and Romney in each state and media market. Their model had much in common with those created by Nate Silver for The New York Times and by Simon Jackman for HuffPost Pollster. It controlled for the "house effects" of each pollster or data collection method, and each nightly run of the model involved approximately 66,000"Monte Carlo" simulations (a number frequentlycited by Messina and others in recent weeks), which allowed the campaign to calculate its chances of winning each state.
The massive scope of its polling effort helped guide the Obama campaign in ways that would be impossible with conventional polling. In late October, for example, its tracking detected a roughly 5 percentage point drop in support for Obama in the Green Bay, Wis., media market. A typical tracking survey in a market that size might have only 100 interviews (with a margin of error of +/- 10 percentage points), but the Obama campaign had far more data at its disposal. "Because we were conducting close to 600 interviews in the market every three days," Simas explained, "we had confidence in the market-level decision making."
The internal polling and modeling also told the Obama campaign a different story about voter trends than that emerging from the public polls. Simas said that from April through the conventions, the race was "fixed" in the battleground states at a 3-to-4 point margin (50 percent for Obama, 46 or 47 percent for Romney). There was "a bit of erosion for Romney right after the [Democratic convention] and in the midst of the 47 percent video period" in mid to late September, during which Obama's advantage expanded to roughly 6 points (50 percent to 44 percent), Simas said.
Within 48 hours after the first presidential debate in early October, those voters returned to Romney and the race "settled back" into the same 3-to-4 point lead for Obama across the 11 battleground states that the campaign's polling had shown all along. "Our final projection was for a 51-48 battleground-state margin for the president, which is approximately where the race ended up," Simas said.
The most recent results compiled by HuffPost Pollster for the 11 battleground states show Obama leading Romney by a 3.6 point margin (51.1 percent to 47.5 percent), although many provisional ballots have yet to be counted and only two of the states has produced final certified results so far.
National public polls showed bigger shifts toward Obama in September and back to Romney in early October. They also indicated a late mini-surge to Obama that his campaign's internal polling and models did not detect.
Unlike most of the public media polls, the Obama campaign's surveys relied exclusively on samples drawn from the official lists of registered voters. These lists allow for a different approach to reaching cell-phone-only voters -- in some states, voters provide phone numbers when they register, and list vendors attempt to match names and addresses to mobile and landline numbers culled from commercial data -- but they also come with shortcomings, such as voters listed without phone numbers.
Pollsters who rely on these voter lists must still weight their data demographically to compensate for these limitations as well as for low response rates and uncertainty about voter turnout. "You have to decide what the electorate is going to look like," Messina explained on Monday. "That's another place where [public] pollsters just got it wrong."
But what made the Obama pollsters confident they were right in their assumptions about the demographics of the likely electorate? "We spent a ton of time at the outset of the election looking at the historical trends in the battleground universe," Benenson said, adding that they drew on past exit-poll data as well as models produced by the internal analytics team.
Simas said that the campaign's analysis of official reports on who voted early in states like Ohio, Nevada and North Carolina "made me very confident that the team had nailed it on the makeup of the electorate. We were hitting our assumption targets across the board. In truth, that's the only way to know if you're right."
Obama's 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina sat down with Mike Allen at POLITICO's Playbook Breakfast held at The W Hotel on 11/20/12
"The Florida Democratic Party once-again congratulates Congressman-elect Patrick Murphy on his now official election victory over Tea Party Titan Allen West. Throughout Florida, the citizens of our state sent a decisive message to both Washington and Tallahassee that they are sick of the broken, Tea Party extremists epitomized by politicians like Rick Scott and Allen West and want a new direction for our politics. Patrick is a rising star in our party who is standing up for the middle class families of Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie, and he will be a strong voice for the people of his district in Congress."
Florida Democrats have now officially picked up four congressional seats — roughly 50-percent of the number of Democratic pickups made nationwide.
Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott says he will not implement the state health insurance exchanges mandated in the 2010 federal health care law despite President Barack Obama's re-election.
Speaking on the New College of Florida campus following a meeting of the state's university governing board, Scott said it will cost taxpayers and business owners too much to expand Medicaid and set up health insurance exchanges as called for under the law.
"No one has been able to show me that that health care exchange is going to do anything rather than raise taxes, raise the cost of our companies to do business," Scott said, adding that expanding Medicaid would also require tax increases.
Scott is one of many Republican governors who have resisted the state programs required by the law before Election Day, but he's the first to voice continued resistance after the election.
In Congress, Republican leaders have indicated that the election results, in which the Democrats retained control of the Senate and boosted their minority in the House, would curtail efforts of repealing the law.
"It's pretty clear that the president was re-elected," House Speaker John Boehner said in an interview with ABC News on Thursday. "Obamacare is the law of the land."
Before Tuesday, Florida Republicans had the wind at their back — record amounts of special interest money, a veto-proof majority in the Legislature and unbridled power all over the state.
But the muscle flexing appeared to backfire and the special interest money, this time, did not translate into landslide victories. Voters delivered a series of election night losses for Florida's power party. (Read more here)
I can't thank you enough for all your support during this hard-fought campaign -- and I can't thank the people of Florida enough for choosing to re-elect me to the United States Senate for six more years.
Grace and I are truly grateful to all of you for your friendship and your support.
While words can't fully express all of my appreciation to you and to the people of Florida, I wanted to try my best by sharing this short video message with you. I hope you'll take just a minute to watch it:
Serving the people of Florida in the U.S. Senate is a great honor and a privilege.
Thank you for everything you've done to lead this campaign to victory.
Sincerely, Bill Nelson
We have a significant number of volunteer poll drivers. Please provide me with any Democratic Voter who needs a ride to the polls. You can Broward Democrats headquarters at 954-423-2200. Thank you.
No need to worry about the Post Office. Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes’ office is accepting absentee ballots in person.
Unfortunately, Snipes has only two locations in Broward accepting the ballots. Voters from many areas of the county will have some traveling to do.
An office spokeswoman told The Miami Herald Sunday that it will try to accommodate anyone who wants to vote in person. They can’t guarantee, however, that these offices can accommodate many voters.
Miami-Dade’s election supervisor was forced to stop in-person voting on Sunday when the office was mobbed by voters.
Here is Snipes latest news release distributed Sunday:
For Immediate Release
Picking Up and Dropping Off Your Absentee Ballot in Broward
Broward County, FloridaThe Broward County Supervisor of Elections Office would like to inform Broward voters that they may continue to enjoy the convenience of voting through the use of the following services :Absentee Ballot Pick-Up:Election law permits voters to request Absentee Ballots to be picked up beginning on the Thursday preceding an election. Here are the details:
Broward Voters should call ahead to get a scheduled time to pick up their ballot: 954-712-1964 or 954-712-1974
Broward voters will be scheduled to pick up their ballot between 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, November 4 and Monday, November 5.
On Tuesday, November 6, voters should go to their assigned polling place to cast their ballot.
Location for Pick-Up
Voting Equipment Center
at the Lauderhill Mall
1501 NW 40th Avenue
Lauderhill, FL 33313
(NO ballot pick up will be scheduled for the downtown office)
Absentee Ballot Drop-Off:
Voted Absentee Ballots may be dropped off at our 2 office locations up to 7:00 p.m. on Election Day. If you plan to mail your absentee ballot, voters are reminded postmarks are not accepted.
Voters MAY NOT drop off their voted absentee ballot at any polling place location on Election Day.
Locations for Drop-Off
Broward Supervisor of Elections Office
Governmental Center
115 S. Andrews Ave.
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301
Will accept voted Absentee Ballots on the following schedules:
Sunday November 4 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Monday, November 5, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Tuesday, November 6, 8:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Voting Equipment Center
at the Lauderhill Mall
1501 NW 40th Avenue
Lauderhill, FL 33313
Will accept voted Absentee Ballots on the following schedules:
Reports of voter suppression tactics are surfacing, and don't underestimate the danger: it could cost Democrats the Senate. 11 races are deadlocked, and Republicans must win just four seats to take the majority.
So what are we seeing? - In Florida, forged letters are questioning voters’ citizenship and claiming to purge them from the rolls. - In Ohio, billboards designed to scare voters are popping up in predominately African-American neighborhoods.
The Broward Democratic Party is proud to co-host our county-wide election night party, (November 6th ) with DNC Chair/Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The celebration will begin 7 p.m. at the Signature Grand off 595 in Davie.
Join us to watch the election results with your Democratic Party.
Florida news station WPTV says it obtained a memo from a local GOP adviser in West Palm Beach concerned that early vote turnout "is starting to look more troubling" and that Democrats are "cleaning our clock."
If there was ever any doubt in your mind about how important the State of Florida in general and Broward County in particular is to this election, you can now put that doubt to rest. President Obama is coming to Broward County on Sunday! With only two days left before Election Day, Barack Obama has decided that Florida is so important, that Broward county is so important.....that he needs to come here to make sure that we get out enough of the vote to ensure that he carries Florida! The President will be at McArthur High School's Football Field in Hollywood on Sunday afternoon. The doors open at 12:30 PM, and in order to attend, you must sign up for a ticket at the following link: https://my.barackobama.com/page/s/see-president-obama-in-florida-11-4
