Sweet dreams

Let's just enjoy Fox's copy editing before we get to the substance, shall we?

“Anthony Brown means eight more years of Martin O’Malley,” Carter said. “They are two pees in a pod.”

Because, after all, the point isn't Fox's playful sense of  language and bladder activity; it's the habit of running made-up stories about one political office or another that's on the brink of being plucked from the evildoers' grasp. These aren't lies in the sense of making stuff about pronoun frequency. They're more like bedtime stories: not falsifiable claims about how the world is, but instructive tales about how the world ought to work. And since all opinions are  equal, a friendly interpretation of the evidence is as good as any other. Right, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

The campaign for Maryland GOP gubernatorial nominee Larry Hogan earlier this week enthusiastically predicted that a win Tuesday would be the surprise, upset victory of the midterm elections.

And it might well be correct.

Well, sure. It could be correct about how surprising a win would be without actually predicting a win. But that wasn't the point, was it?

Left off essentially everybody’s list of hot governors’ races, the tightening Maryland contest has now captured the national spotlight with big outside money and A-list politicians coming in to close the deal for Hogan or Democratic nominee Anthony Brown, who has served eight years as Gov. Martin O’Malley’s lieutenant governor.

... Brown had led the race by double digits from the start. But recent polls -- including one by The Baltimore Sun in mid-October that indicated Brown ahead by just 7 percentage points -- have shown his lead starting to slip.

However, the turning point seemed to occur after a Republican-sponsored poll released Monday showed Hogan trailing Brown by just 2 percentage points, 46-to-44 percent.
Read more »

Run for the hills!

Today's lesson in survey methodology comes to you from -- aw, you peeked!

Long story short, the way to ask people whether they fear the economy could collapse is to ask them whether they fear the economy could collapse. Not -- though let's give credit to Fox for putting a link to the pdf right up top -- a question like this:

Do you think it’s possible the nation’s economy could collapse or is the nation’s economy so big and strong that it could never collapse?

"Possible" questions on their own don't tend to be very interesting, because it's hard to know what they're tapping: "possible, but not bloody likely," or "ZOMG pick up some ammunition and bottled water at the Wal-Mart 'cause the Kenyan is coming for your guns and daughters," or something in between? In this particular case, there's also "possible, because the morons in Congress have yet to pay attention to the sorts of regulation that would make it far less likely." But that doesn't seem to be the point, does it?

In short, be scared. Which is sort of the whole point of this screen-grab, except for the ACORN blurb, about which you're supposed to feel triumphant. Isn't journalism fun?

UPDATE: And this just in! The current lede story, hedded "Revenge at the polls":

The economy hits unspeakable lows. The immediate provisions of health care reform fail to ease opposition. Anti-incumbent fever sweeps the nation, and Republicans ride the wave of discontent to take control of Congress.

This is the elusive sequence Republicans appear to be banking on to translate voter dissatisfaction over health care reform into a 1994-style GOP tsunami.

Am I seeing things, or is Fox more or less openly acknowledging that the core Republican strategy is now "hoping for the economy to go to hell"?