Moe Lane

“State polls lag national ones.”

Those of you who subscribe to Ben Domenech’s Transom and read today’s (10/19/2012) edition will understand what I mean; those of you who don’t… well, subscribe already.

They do it fairly subtly, too: “U.S. registered voters are about as likely to say they would vote for the Democratic congressional candidate in their district if the election were held today as to say they would vote for the Republican candidate, 47% to 46%.”  Now, I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking But Moe, the Democrats are ahead by a point!  Yup!

They’re ahead on a poll of registered voters. Which, as Gallup itself concedes, “when Gallup has found congressional voting preferences close to even among registered voters, that is typically a better sign for the Republican Party, given usual Republican advantages in voter turnout.”  But let’s pretend for a moment that the above is a likely voter pool.  Gallup is touting the accuracy of its generic balloting in Congressional elections, so let’s take a look at these numbers for a second:

Those are the off-year Presidential election results, back to 1990 (data is spotty past that point).  ‘Gallup’ is the difference in the Republican & Democratic vote in their final survey; ‘election’ is the final spread in the two-party vote; …and ‘+/-’ shows how many seats the Republicans actually gained or lost in that time period*.  As is fairly obvious: when the Republicans do great on the generic Congressional ballot they do fantastic.  When the Democrats do great on the generic they do… well, not all that great, but reasonably well.  And when the numbers are about the same (which? …Nothing much happens.  Now, at this point a bunch of readers have probably forgotten about 2008, which was not an off-year Presidential election; but I did not.  There was a complication with regard to the fact that the 2012 has not yet switched to a likely voter model, but fortunately in 2008 Gallup reported both likely and registered voters, so we can look at the way things went:

‘Oct’ is the October 17, 2008 survey (44/51); ‘Final’ is the November 2, 2008 one (43/51).  As you can see there, it turns out that the significant gain of seats more or less reflects the distance between the Democrats and the Republicans at that point.  And that is why Gallup’s tie in the generic Congressional ballot doesn’t worry me; it’s essentially telling me that there won’t be much of a shift, if any.  Looking at 1998, which was the last time we had the first election after a dramatic flipping of the House to Republican hands… I could totally see the GOP losing five net seats this year.  Possibly even ten.

… And?  Right now there are 240 Republicans in Congress, and 190 Democrats (5 vacant seats).  Even assuming we lose every vacant seat election and another 10 besides, the 113th Congress will start with a 230/205 Republican/Democratic majority.  I don’t particularly want to lose those seats, of course; but we will still have a working majority.  Which is pretty much what everybody is expecting, even if they don’t particularly want to say so in public.

Moe Lane

PS: If you’re wondering why I’m not taking into account Barack Obama’s coat-tails, oh, that’s easy: I don’t think that he’ll have any.  Largely by Barack Obama’s own conscious choice.

*Gallup did not provide that information; I pulled it from Wikipedia.

The polls go up. The polls go down.

Have you noticed that the political polls have been all over the map lately? Is President Obama up 8 in Virginia, or just 1? Is Mitt Romney up 6 in North Carolina, or is Obama up 4? How about nationwide? Gallup and Rasmussen show a tie, but Pew shows Obama up 8. And so and so on.

What the heck is going on?

The same thing that goes on every election cycle: we have a bunch of things that can tell us how a campaign is doing, but only one of them (polling) is anywhere near being quantifiable. Guess which one makes it into the news?

Via Hot Air Headlines.

According to Jim Messina, at least.

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told reporters on Saturday that despite national tracking polls showing the president and Romney tied, Obama is still winning.

“In all the battleground states, we continue to see all our pathways there,” he told the White House pool at an Obama fundraiser in Milwaukee. “We’re either tied or in the lead in every battleground state 45 days out.”

(more…)

The following is a fairly vivid example of why people want to see crosstabs whenever possible when it comes to polls:

The above is from a just-released AP-GfK poll; as you can see, it shows Obama up by one (47-46) over Romney in a poll of likely voters.  Bad news for Obama, as the intent was that he was supposed to be opening up a lead at this point; not so great news for Romney either, since the D+4 sample is a lot more likely to be reflective of the actual voting electorate in November than the D+7 or higher nonsense that we’ve been seeing lately.  But that’s another post. (more…)

Spoiler warning: ‘mixed.’

Michael Barone has taken a look at two non-battleground states – New Jersey and Connecticut – and sees something interesting:

In three recent polls in heavily affluent suburban Connecticut, Obama leads Romney by only 52%-43%. He carried the state 61%-38%. Obama is running 9% behind his 2008 percentage; his 23% margin is now 9%. Polling in New Jersey, also heavily affluent suburban, is averaging 50%-40%, down from Obama’s 57%-42% in 2008. Neither state is a target state (though south Jersey gets Philadelphia TV, with any Pennsylvania-targeted ads) or likely to be one on these numbers. But if the apparent CT and NJ trends are happening in affluent suburbs in target states, assumptions based on 2008 benchmarks could prove to be unjustified.

Barone goes on to note a what he (and I) consider to be too-good-to-be-true poll of Cook County, IL; but even if Cook County is not in play it still remains unlikely that Obama will make his 2008 numbers there, either, which is largely Michael Barone’s point.  But let’s go back to CT & NJ for a moment. Specifically, the Senate races in both. (more…)

Well, troublesome for Barack Obama.

The Daily Caller reported on a poll today that gave a rather remarkable result: it showed Barack Obama ahead of Mitt Romney 49 to 37… in Cook County, Illinois: which of course includes the City of Chicago.  Being under 50% in what can be considered the ultimate Democratic stronghold is not good news for the President.  In 2008 Cook County went for Obama over McCain 67/32; in 2010 it went for Quinn over Brady 54/40… which helped make the difference from Obama’s blowout 62/37 win statewide in 2008, and Quinn’s squeaker 47/46 win in 2010.  Put another way: if this poll is accurate, Obama’s got trouble in Illinois.

Since this report has been making the rounds of the Internet, I thought that I’d look into it a bit.  It turns out the poll comes from McKeon & Associates, which has been polling in Illinois since at least the 1980s.  A quick call to Michael McKeon got me access to the poll itself, which I’ll be talking about after the fold.

(more…)

A helpful suggestion for Quinnipac University: there was something weird – and, worse, apparently inconsistent – going on with its last round of state-level polling.  Take a look at this chart:

(Originally noticed by @NathanWurtzel) Key: M is McCain, O is Obama.  The above compares the difference between the ratio of McCain/Obama voters in Quinnipac’s latest poll (which had Obama by six in Ohio and Florida, and by eleven in Pennsylvania) by the actual ratio of McCain/Obama voters from 2008.  As you can see… yes, Quinnipac at least found Obama voters.  But it wasn’t finding McCain voters in Florida and Ohio; and while I take Sean Trende’s point that people tend to ‘forget’ that they voted for the loser I have to note that they apparently didn’t forget in Pennsylvania. I would also suggest that the fact that Ohio and Pennsylvania flipped its state government (including governorships) to the GOP in 2010, while Florida increased its Republican majorities, suggests that the electorate in none of those states has gotten more Democratic in the last four years.  (more…)

While I see Ed Morrissey’s point (I don’t know if I agree with it, but I see it) about whether it’s a big deal right now whether or not Barack Obama comes out in favor of same-sex marriage or not…

…it’s unimaginable that enthusiasm for Obama among black voters would suffer much, even if he reversed himself on gay marriage.  Even a slight reduction in turnout would be a rather doubtful assumption.  If Obama’s hold on this demographic is that fragile, he’s already lost the election.  The swing-state vote is a more realistic concern, but the current vacillation won’t help if those voters are keying on this topic, either, and they almost certainly aren’t.

(more…)

The Christian Science Monitor, blinking through the sudden pain:

The poll by Gallup Inc. and USA Today showed Obama with 47 percent support in the 12 states and Romney with 45 percent, well within the survey’s margin of error of 4 percentage points. That is a tighter race than in March, when it found the Democratic president with 51 percent and Romney with 42 percent.

…You don’t say?

Moe Lane

PS: Interesting contrast with this, in some ways.

I just had to throw out four hours of work on a post on Virginia’s Romney/Obama Head-to-Head situation because I don’t really have the data to answer the question What percentage of the white vote can Obama reasonably expect in Virginia in 2012? This is important because (what follows is very much back-of-the-envelope calculating, based off of the NYT exit polls) if Obama gets 40% of the white vote (the percentage he won in 2008) and nothing else changes, he wins Virginia; if Romney gets 68% (the percentage Bush won in 2004) and nothing else changes, then he wins Virginia, by about the same percentage that Obama did*. Unfortunately, it’s still too early to make any kind of confident statement about which percentage of the white vote each candidate will get.

But it’s looks like it’s going to be that demographic that’s going to be the key to VA…

Moe Lane (more…)

Triggered by flipping through this Hot Air post… STOP MUCKING ABOUT WITH THE SAMPLE’S PARTISAN ID PERCENTAGES.  That trick doesn’t work any more.  Everybody knows by now to look to see whether the partisan breakdown of the poll matches the actual voter percentages in the last few elections; and when they don’t (like they didn’t in the last National Journal poll) the impact of the poll is thus diminished.  Also: it’s not like skewed polling makes a difference, either: there were a lot of polls in 2010 that effectively failed to downplay just how badly the Democrats were going to do that year.  Finally: don’t just not release the partisan ID numbers, either.  People WILL ask where they are.

Seriously, all that using skewed polls is doing at this point is convincing half the country that you’re not to be trusted as far as you can be thrown.  Keep that in mind.