We'll keep this an appropriately breezy update for a Friday afternoon. In Washington, Rasmussen has Barack Obama leading by 8 points over John McCain. This is a fairly significant decline for Obama, who had led by 18 in Rasmussen's June poll of the state. Is Washington so liberal that Obama's purported shift to the center is harming him there? Probably not. He's still winning self-identified liberal voters by an 87-10 margin, as well as moderates 62-27. Washington looks safe for Obama and this appears to be a case of a poll regressing back the mean. Oregon, though, might deserve watching. If there's any sort of canary-in-the-coal mine in the Pacific Northwest region, we'll see it there first.
In Florida, the debut poll from Gainesville-based War Room Logistics (PDF) has Obama with a slight lead of 2.7 points (we list the decimal place if the pollster does). This continues the oddly bifurcated polling results in Florida: we have several pollsters showing Obama with a slight lead there but a couple others showing a somewhat more comfortable margin for McCain. The problem with Florida is that it is one of the more demographically unique states in the Union -- you have whole groups like Cubans and Jewish voters that barely register in other states, as well as an overdose of older voters. So you can't make good inferences about it from other states, and when the polling is contradictory, there are few reference points. But at a gut-instinct level, our statistical model, which pegs McCain as roughly a 3-point favorite there, sounds about right.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Today's Polls, 7/11
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Today's Polls, 7/1
Tom Schaller argues in the New York Times that Barack Obama should abandon the South, or at least the South outside of Florida and Virginia. I don't agree with the entirety of Schaller's reasoning. In particular, while I see the same inverse correlation that Schaller does -- the greater the number of black voters in a Southern state, the fewer white voters tend to vote for the Democrat -- I don't necessarily see a causation. Our regression model seems to do a pretty good job of explaining the Southern vote without any reference to some sort of racial interaction effects, by focusing instead on things like the number of white evangelicals in the state and income levels.
Nevertheless, I do tend to agree with Schaller's conclusion: the South (again excluding Florida and Virginia) is fairly likely to disappoint the Democrats again. We have a number of polls today to back that up.
Let's focus first on the results in Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina. Obama did get a bounce from Strategic Vision's last poll of Georgia, where he had previously trailed by 14 points. But he remains 8 points behind, and while Bob Barr is pulling 3 percent of the vote away from McCain in Georgia, it doesn't appear to me that Barr will have the resources to improve that number significantly. In North Carolina, Obama has been stuck at 3-5 points behind John McCain for quite a long time; the PPP poll today confirms that conclusion. And in Louisiana, Southern Media & Opinion Research has Obama 16 points behind, just as it did in April.
It seems to me that Obama's numbers in states like North Carolina and Georgia are liable to come in within a relatively narrow range. He'll do better than a Democrat like John Kerry did there, with substantial support from blacks (although Schaller is right that African-American turnout has not been particularly low), students, information-sector workers, and new migrants to the region -- as PPP notes, Obama is leading by 6 points among people who have moved to North Carolina from outside the state, but trails by 13 among people who were born and raised there. But where Obama is disliked in the South, he tends to be disliked a lot; his "very unfavorables" tend to be pretty high in the region. There just aren't that many swing voters in the South, and the Democrats are left watching the paint dry and the demographics gradually become more favorable to them in states like North Carolina and Georgia. North Carolina could be 2012's Virginia, and Georgia could be 2016's, but it's probably too soon for a non-Southern Democrat to be winning states in the interior of the region.
Florida, however, remains its own demographic entity, and there an Obama win is more plausible. PPP has him leading by 2 there -- a big move upward from their only previous poll of the state, which had Obama 11 points behind in March -- although Strategic Vision has him trailing by 6. The fact is that Florida remains something like Obama's Plan C or Plan D for winning the election, but any state with 27 electoral votes and where the polling appears to be this volatile will need to be closely monitored.
And once we move entirely outside of the South, Obama appears to be doing quite well. SurveyUSA now has him 20 points ahead in New York -- up from 10 points before -- and he's holding onto a 5-point advantage in both major national tracking polls. From everything we can tell, Obama's post-primary bounce has plateaued, but not peaked, though it does appear to be concentrated in particular regions, some of which (like the Rust Belt states of Ohio and Michigan) have been quite helpful to Obama, and others of which (like New York and California) are fairly superfluous.
Finally, one quick methodological aside: the Strategic Vision polls were "leaked" today by Political Wire with a limited number of details. I have filled in my guesstimates of survey dates and sample sizes based on their typical patterns, but we will correct those tomorrow as needed.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Today's Polls, 6/30
There are some good polling results for Barack Obama today -- but not really in the places where he needs them. Take for instance Rasmussen's poll in Alabama, where Obama now trails John McCain by 15 points after having been 28 points behind before. Or the new SurveyUSA poll in Massachusetts; SurveyUSA finally gives Obama a 13-point lead in the Bay State after he had failed to break single digits in any of the six polls they had released in Massachusetts earlier this year. But Massachusetts is too blue, and Alabama too red, to matter in this election.
In Florida, on the other hand, Rasmussen has John McCain holding steady with a 7-point lead. Rasmussen had surveyed Florida barely a week ago, then showing McCain ahead by 8 points. The main problem that Rasmussen seems to be detecting for Obama in Florida is that the Democratic defection rate remains relatively high -- he's losing 20 percent of Democrats to McCain, and 4 percent to "some other candidate". The puma is native to Florida, I would point out. Nevertheless, since Quinnipiac and ARG seem to feel differently about the state, it might be time to get a Mason-Dixon or a SurveyUSA on the case. Hell, I'll even take an Insider Advantage poll.
Rasmussen also sees no movement toward Obama in Georgia, where he trails in their survey by 10 points, just as he did a month ago. Unlike Insider Advantage, which found Bob Barr polling in the mid-single digits, Rasmussen gives him just 1 percent support. I have been a little inconsistent in my treatment of Georgia. It is a state that Obama could win if a number of things go right, but then again, that's true of probably 40 of the 50 states on the map this year.
Lastly, SurveyUSA has Obama ahead by 2 points in Virginia. This brings SurveyUSA into line with Rasmussen and PPP, each of which show nearly identical numbers, but is a step backward for Obama from SurveyUSA's May poll, which had Obama up 7 points in Virginia. As I argued yesterday, if you see a result that looked aberrant before -- and a 7-point lead for Obama pre-unity bounce definitely looked a little weird -- you sometimes have to ignore the trendlines and take the result on its own merits. Virginia is perhaps the closest state on the map at the moment -- the state whose county names we might all learn by heart staying up late on Election Night -- and all the polling is reflecting that.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Today's Polls, 6/19
For the Democrats, it must feel like 2000 all over again. A day after Quinnipiac and American Research Group showed Barack Obama with his first leads in Florida, Rasmussen finds him still 8 points behind. That's a slight improvement from Rasmussen's last poll in Florida, which had shown Obama trailing by 10 points, but obviously a long way from something that would get the job done in November.
We talked a little bit yesterday about the differences in accounting for party identification between the different pollsters. Those differences seem as though they're particularly large in Florida, where Rasmussen has consistently had Obama way down, but Quinnipiac more competitive.
At the end of the day, however, what matters is not so much the Florida result in the abstract, but where it stands relative to other states. Our model calls Florida a toss-up -- but it's also giving Obama credit for about a 5 point lead nationally. If the election tightens, is Florida still a state in which he wants to invest resources? Were I running his campaign, I'd commission some internal polling of the state, as Florida is so resource-intensive that a decision may need to be made on it relatively early.
That's about it insofar as the polling goes today. Rasmuseen's national tracker still has Obama ahead by 3 points; Gallup will not be releasing numbers today. Economist/YouGov also has some national numbers out that I'd failed to be mindful of; Obama leads by 3 points in their poll conducted this week, and led by 4 last week, after having trailed in most of The Economist's polling throughout the month of May.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Afternoon Polling Update, 6/18
So many polls, so little time! This is everything that's been released today, including the results from our morning edition.
Let's begin in Ohio, where Rasmussen's latest data contradicts the notion that Barack Obama is surging in the state. He still trails John McCain by one point in their polling; McCain had also led by one point in their May survey. There are several factors to consider here. Firstly, this poll postdates the Quinnipiac poll by a few days. I'm not yet convinced that Obama's bounce is receding, in part because there haven't really been any intervening news events to give some momentum back to John McCain, but that's always something to keep in mind. Secondly, some of the pollsters (like SurveyUSA and PPP) that had shown Obama leading in Ohio by fairly large margins tend to have a more fluid/less grounded conception of party identification than does Rasmussen. In Ohio, they're finding a huge shift in party identification, with as much as 50 percent of the state identifying as Democrat, and running with those numbers as is. Since SurveyUSA and PPP identify a lot more Democrats in their sample, and since much of Obama's bounce appears to be in the form of bringing Democrats back home to their party, it is not surprising if they are showing more movement toward him.
Unfortunately, there are no definitive answers about how one should measure party idenitifaction, and we won't really know who got it right until November. At a gut-feel level, it's hard not to imagine Ohio being somewhat close. At the same time, Obama's problems in the state had stemmed from his poor performance in Southern Ohio, which is part of Appalachia. And this is the region in which his bounce appears to be most profound: his polling has improved by 12 points in Kentucky and 15 in Arkansas, and he took some huge steps forward in Southern Ohio in Quinnipiac's regional breakdown.
Other Rasmussen polling does show a bounce for Obama. In Maine, he's ahead by 22 (up from 13 a month ago), and in Alaska, he trails McCain by just 4 points (down from 9 a month ago). There is certainly some novelty value in the notion of a Democrat competing in Alaska. But it's a state that the Obama campaign ought to be taking reasonably seriously: Alaska is the the youngest state in the country in a year where we have the largest-ever age gap between the two nominees. Indeed, it's probably time for Obama to visit Alaska. I don't have any numbers on this, but I would guess that candidate visits make more difference in smaller states, and particularly those that are out of the way geographically. If Obama visits Alaska, it will create a ton of earned media, and McCain will probably have to follow him to defend the state.
The notorious A.R.G. (American Research Group) is out with their first general election polling of the year; they have Obama leading by 5 points in Florida, and 12 in New Hampshire. You probably know that I don't have the highest opinion of ARG, but in their defense, their general election polling has tended to be pretty decent -- it's their primary polling that has been a mess. I do not, incidentally, find the New Hampshire result implausible, precisely because New Hampshire has some history of overreacting to current trends. With few New Hampshirites fitting into hard-and-fast demographic categories, and many of them identifying as independents, there is probably a higher fraction of swing voters there than any other state in the country. So as the country swings, New Hampshire swings twice over.
Finally, two results that tend to confirm our current impressions in a couple of states. In Virginia, Public Policy Polling has Obama ahead by 2 -- this is their first poll of the Commonwealth -- and in Wisconsin, SurveyUSA has Obama ahead by 9, up from 6 last month.
Today's Polls, 6/18
A little more than two months ago, I ran through a scenario that predicted what might happen if half of the Hillary Clinton Democrats who said they were going to vote for John McCain instead gravitated back to Barack Obama. The prediction was that the so-called "unity bounce" would be worth 4-5 points to Obama in the popular vote, bringing him northward of 320 electoral votes and making him roughly a 3 to 1 favorite to win the election.
That is almost exactly where we have Barack Obama's numbers after a series of new polls from Quinnipiac. In Pennsylvania, Obama leads by 12 points -- up from 6 last month. His Ohio lead is 6 points -- he had trailed McCain by 4 points before. And then there is Florida, where Quinnipiac has Obama ahead by 4 points. Barack Obama has never before led a Florida poll -- not against John McCain, nor against Hillary Clinton -- so this is something of a watershed moment.
If Florida is in play, then John McCain's defense is completely broken; it was the one traditional swing state that always had looked off-limits to Obama. More frustratingly for McCain, he had spent the better part of three days in Florida earlier this month, hoping to raise doubts about Obama among Jewish voters. Although Quinnipiac does not break out the Jewish vote, Obama holds a 61-31 lead in Southeast Florida, where most of the state's Jewish population is concentrated.
Obama's surprisingly strong lead in Ohio isn't any better news for McCain. As recently as a week ago, McCain's strategy looked pretty simple: target Ohio and Michigan, and hope to win one if not both. But now, Ohio looks tough for him, and even if McCain can steal Michigan, Obama has so many other places he can pick up electoral votes -- Virginia, the Mountain West, Iowa, Missouri and now possibly Florida -- that McCain still might have trouble winning a close election.
Obama's lead nationally is still relatively small -- we have it at somewhere between 4 and 5 points -- but looks to be an unusually robust one in terms of the Electoral College. Rick Davis can probably give these numbers about another week or two to settle down before he has to start thinking about some fundamental changes in his candidate's messaging.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Michigan's turnout
Harold Ickes keeps shouting about 600,000 votes in Michigan being thrown out. But as I've pointed out before, the turnout situation in Michigan wasn't remotely normal. According to Jay Cost's spreadsheet, turnout in Michigan was equal to 24 percent of John Kerry's vote in 2004. However, the average in other states with open primaries was 79 percent. In other words, turnout was only about one-third as much as it should have been. The judgment of two-thirds of the voters in Michigan was essentially that the primary didn't matter and wasn't worth their time.
Florida was a little bit more normal. Turnout was equal to 48 percent of John Kerry's vote; the average in other closed primary states was 59 percent.
Obama's new magic number: 63? 64?
Chuck Todd is reporting that the Rules and Bylaws Committee is very near to a decision. It seems based on his reporting that:
- Florida will be seated based on the primary results and treated as half-delegates.
- Michigan will be seated 69-59 (the state's compromise plan) and treated as half-delegates, meaning a split of 34.5-29.5 for accounting purposes. Since the 69-59 would represent a departure from the primary results, that would imply that uncommitted delegates would explicitly be designated as Obama delegates. Obama will also receive Michigan's two add-on superdelegates.
If I'm doing the math correctly, this would give Obama 2,054 delegates, with 2,117 2,118 required to clinch the nomination. That would leave him 63 64 delegates away. Obama should pick up something like 41 pledged delegates between Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana, meaning that he'll need around 20-25 more superdelegate endorsements to clinch the nomination.
This assumes, by the way, that Michigan and Florida *super*delegates are also treated as half-votes, which is something I'm not certain about. Also, Todd seems to think that a bunch more of the Florida Edwards delegates are for Obama than I'd seen reported elsewhere.
"A fair reflection of a flawed primary"
The Clinton campaign appeared to have lost the Ickes-Levin exchange, and there's a pretty good reason why. You can't argue for being a stickler for the rules, as Ickes claimed to be on the disposition of
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