Today's Polls, 7/15

After a slow couple of weeks, the pollsters have been very busy in the past 48 hours:



So, what's going on here? A pretty decent set of results for Obama -- but also not ones out of line with our expectations. South Carolina and South Dakota are relatively competitive? We knew that based on how North Carolina and North Dakota had been polling. Iowa looks out of reach for McCain? It's looked that way all year, with the exception of one or two polls taken during the flooding. Obama's numbers look pretty good in the CBS/NYT and ABC/WaPo national polls? Those pollsters have tended to show relatively favorable results for the Democrats all year.

So what looks like a pretty interesting set of polling is really more of the same. Obama is polling a bit of his peak numbers (note that the trendline adjustment now tweaks his numbers downward in states like Florida), but he retains a meaningful lead in the popular vote and some structural advantages in terms of the electoral math.

(Full disclosure: I also caught a small bug that was failing to roll in the trendline adjustment properly in recent days and also overstating the third-party vote. This was inflating Obama's popular vote margin by half a point or so. It has been corrected.)

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Shock and Awe, Paid Organizer Version

Amid on the ground reports that McCain is outspending Obama on the air at least 2-1 in places like Missouri, we learn that Obama’s team is betting on a different strategy – overwhelming ground organization early and often.

In Missouri, Obama will have 150 paid organizers and maintain a 12-1 paid organizer edge in my native state. Show-me, indeed. In Michigan, Obama will put an unprecedented 150 field organizers on the ground. In Ohio, why not go for 300 field organizers? That sounds like a nice, absurdly large, round number.

This is the campaign equivalent of invasion with overwhelming force. In the coming days, we should be hearing more reports like these from other battlegrounds (here's Iowa, for example), giving us a clearer and clearer picture of each campaign’s voter contact strategy. Already, however, Marc Ambinder has pointed out that:

The polls don't account for the force multiplier effect that Obama's campaign will almost certainly bring to bear with its millions of volunteers and thousands of paid staffers. Whether that effect is 1.01, 1.05 or even 1.3 -- we don't know yet. But even the McCain campaign acknowledges its existence.

Those paid organizers are each recruiting underneath them volunteers and precinct captains (themselves responsible for recruitment and management of volunteers). As I’ve said before, it’s a pyramid scheme aimed at massive voter-to-voter contact. Millions and millions and millions of voter contacts, all knocked out 5, 10, 50 at a time by volunteers. The info gleaned from the contacts is re-looped into the voter file, and repeat contacts are thereby more informed (undecideds can be persuaded; supporters can be urged to early vote; banked early votes allow campaigns to use resources more efficiently in the closing days, etc.). The principle is: voters persuade other voters more personally and powerfully than a 30-second TV ad. Ads give impressions; real people close the sale.

Consider for a moment an oft-discussed example that directly relates to ground organizing – the burgeoning power of the Latino vote. High-information voters like you and I read stories about Obama or McCain each speaking to this or that Latino group, each man arguing why he is the better candidate to implement policies that will improve quality of life for Latinos. But which campaign is more likely to do the actual on-ground registration and one-to-one voter contact in places Latinos live, such as Nevada?

Whatever the ultimate election outcome, it’s clear the Obama campaign believes it knows what it’s doing and a wise investment of resources when it sees one. An “almost preternatural self-confidence about their strategy” is how Ambinder describes it.

And it makes sense; Obama’s team has been vindicated after undergoing months of second-guessing previously during this campaign. In the months before Iowa, outsiders and even supporters were questioning the campaign’s strategy in view of the consistent polling showing Obama lagging behind “where he should be.” Obama’s team remained confident that those polls were Charmin-soft and Obama himself trusted his sense of meeting the moment, that the Democratic electorate was so hungry to turn the page that it would even turn the page on its biggest brand name.

Yet without the deep, well-planned and executed advance work, without having recruited and built the best on-ground political organizations in the key early states, this confidence would have been a false front. Obama likes to say he "made a bet" on the American people by entering the primary despite doing so as a conventional-wisdom prohibitive underdog, now he is making another bet, that the summer's silly season mini-narratives will be washed away in convention and debate drama, and that chance will favor the better organized in the end.

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Today's Polls, 6/20

A new Rasmussen poll in the state of Nevada has John McCain leading Barack Obama by 3 points. This is a slight improvement for Obama from Rasmussen's previous poll, which had shown McCain ahead by 6. Nevertheless, Nevada remains one of those states where our regression model thinks that Obama's numbers have significant room to improve. Obama has outfundraised McCain by better than 4:1 in the Silver State, and Nevada has a highly secular population, a group that has performed well for Obama in other states.

So what gives? Nevada has historically been an apathetic state politically. It's turnout rate in the 2004 election was among the lowest in the country by any and all measures. And not that the following metric is the end-all, be-all, but when I rank the states from 1 to 50 in terms of the amount of per-capita traffic they contribute to FiveThirtyEight.com, Nevada ranks just 36th (the top three states, FWIW, are Massachusetts, Washington and Oregon; the bottom three are Mississippi, West Virginia, and Oklahoma). If Obama wants to win Nevada, he is probably going to have to rattle the cage a little harder than he might in another state.

In New Hampshire, which is anything but apathetic politically, Rasmussen has Barack Obama increasing his lead to 11 points; last month he led John McCain there by 5. Remember my rule of thumb about New Hampshire: its numbers tends to move about twice as much as the national average. So if Obama is leading by 11 points in New Hampshire, that would imply a 5.5 point lead nationally, which is just about where we have him.

Also two new polls out from SurveyUSA. In California, Barack Obama leads John McCain by 12 points, up from 7 points in their tracking last month. In Iowa, however, he leads by 4 -- down from 9 last month. I would be a little bit cautious about reading too much into either of the Iowa polls released within the past week as Iowans presently have bigger things to worry about.

Finally, while we don't usually focus on national polls, that's where a lot of the action has been today, with no fewer than seven of them released within the past 24 hours.

Newsweek's poll is the attention-getter, showing Barack Obama leading John McCain by 15 points. Is Barack Obama actually ahead by 15 points? Of course not. Newsweek's data tends to be fairly volatile, and we have a whole bunch of polling on both the state and national level that implies that Obama's real margin is closer to 5 points. Nevertheless, he has broken through a barrier of sorts. The last instance I can identify when a Democrat held a 15-point lead over a Republican nominee in any individual November trial heat poll is from November, 1996, when CBS News gave Bill Clinton an 18-point lead over Bob Dole on the eve of the election.

Other national polling, CNBC-style: Gallup Tracker: Obama +2; Rasmussen: Obama +4; USA Today/Gallup: Obama +6; FOX: Obama +4; Ipsos: Obama +7; and Harris Interactive, Obama +11.

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Today's Polls, 6/12

Beginning today, I will be cross-posting the daily polling thread at The Plank. For those of you who don't know me, I am the proprietor of FiveThirtyEight.com, which is sort of a self-help group for polling junkies. Most all of the rest of my blogging will remain exclusive to FiveThirtyEight, except when I feel like making fun of Jonathan Chait. We are, however, also contemplating a weekly, graphics-intensive feature in TNR's print edition.

It's a good day to get started, because the pollsters are up bright and early. Yesterday, we noted that Obama had experienced about a 5-point bounce in his state-by-state polls since Hillary Clinton's withdraw from her campaign, and today we are continuing to see some favorable results for him in other states.

In Wisconsin, Obama leads John McCain by 13 points in a University of Wisconsin / WisPolitics.com poll. Strictly speaking, this is the debut edition of this poll, and so we have no trendlines against which to compare. But the poll is conducted by Charles Franklin of pollster.com and his colleague Ken Goldstein, and so should be pretty solid. The continuum of Midwestern states goes something like Michigan- Ohio- Pennsylvania- Wisconsin- Iowa- Minnesota in order of most competitive to least competitive (one can argue that the order of Michigan and Ohio should be inverted). In each of these states, the Democrats have a pretty strong advantage in terms of party identification, and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are the two that might come off John McCain's board if Obama's bounce has some legs.

Meanwhile, Rasmussen shows Obama with an 18-point lead in Washington. We have gotten used to seeing double-digit leads for Obama on the West Coast, but this is nevertheless an improvement from his 11-point lead in Rasmussen's May poll. We now show Obama as having a 98 percent chance of winning Washington. For the sake of comparison, Obama is roughly as likely to win Mississippi or Wyoming as he is to lose Washington.

In Massachusetts, a Suffolk University poll shows Obama with a 23-point lead. While it's not intrinsically surprising to see a Democrat with a large lead in Massachusetts, the state had not been polled that much, and one of the two pollsters who had polled it (SurveyUSA) was showing a relatively close race. Massachusetts has a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters, so it should not be surprising to see Obama's numbers improve there as he consolidates their support.

The modest exception to all of this is in New Jersey, where Quinnipiac shows Obama with a relatively tepid 6-point lead; Obama had led by 7 points in Quinnipiac's February poll of the Garden State. Other New Jersey polling has shown Obama with a somewhat larger lead. Whether the state becomes a fall battleground may depend as much on the Senate race, where some polling has shown Frank Lautenberg surprisingly vulnerable, as anything that takes place at the Presidential level.

Overall, our simulations give Obama a 54.9 percent chance of winning the election; this is his highest figure since March 18. As new polling begins to roll in from states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, that lead is likely to get larger before it gets smaller.

UPDATE: More late-bouncing developments in Iowa, where Rasmussen has Obama ahead 45-38. That 7-point lead is an improvement from a 2-point lead that Obama held in Rasmussen's prior Iowa poll.

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Today's Polls, 5/27

Not much to look at today, but we have two somewhat contradictory results from the heartland.

In Iowa, SurveyUSA has Obama 9 points ahead of John McCain; Hillary Clinton was not surveyed. Obama has held a lead over McCain in all 12 Iowa polls released since the first of the year, and the state would appear to be about as safe as can be for a state that went for George W. Bush in 2004.

But in Nebraska, a Research 2000/Daily Kos poll has McCain up by huge margins: he leads Obama by 28 points and Clinton by 30. Nebraska awards some of its electors by Congressional District, but this poll doesn't have Obama particularly close in any of Nebraska's three CDs. In NE-2, the Omaha-based district that we thought might be relatively competitive for Obama, he trails McCain by 30 (small sample size caveats apply).

Other Nebraska polling has shown that state closer -- sometimes a lot closer -- so it's too early to discard the possibility that Obama can pick off an electoral vote or two. Nevertheless, the Obama-McCain map continues to consolidate itself, and look more like the one that most people were expecting from the outset. While Obama's polling situation has improved recently in states like Missouri and Virginia, more exotic plays like Montana and Nebraska appear to be less likely for him.

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Today's Polls, 5/15

In Iowa, Rasmussen has Barack Obama beating John McCain by 2 points, and Hillary Clinton trailing McCain by 3 points. Obama's result is consistent with previous Rasmussen polling of the state, whereas Clinton's position has significantly improved.

In Arkansas, it's Clinton +14 and Obama -24 against McCain. That's one of the more dramatic differences you're likely to see in any given state. Rasmussen is now in line with other polls in Arkansas, which show Clinton with a safe-looking lead in the state; she had actually trailed by 7 in Rasmussen's previous poll. Believe it or not, this is also an improvement for Obama from Rasmussen's last poll of Arkansas, which had him down by 29.

In Washington, SurveyUSA has Obama +12 and Clinton +4. McCain has made some nosies about wanting to compete in the Pacific Northwest region. That might be a decent idea against Clinton, but it's a poor one against Obama, who runs very strongly in the Pac Northwest.

Finally, we've figured out how to accommodate yesterday's Georgia poll, which showed Obama trailing by 14 and did not poll the Clinton matchup. Clinton's result will be listed as "no poll" in our tables and the result will not affect her averages.

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The Early Bird still got the Worm

If you're Indiana or West Virginia, you're probably feeling pretty good right now. Your usually-irrelevant primary just got a week's worth of national attention, and you had Democrats criss-crossing you from border to border. But guess what? You'd still rather be Iowa.

Below is a listing of the number of events that were scheduled in each state by one of the two leading Democratic candidates, as according to the Washington Post candidate tracker. A caution: there is no such thing as an official register of events, and one of the campaigns (Hillary Clinton's) tends to be much more aggressive than the other about publishing their schedule, including events run by the EX-POTUS or the DOTEXPOTUS. Nevertheless, this will have to suffice.

The number of events is divided by the number of delegates that were at stake in that contest. There were, for example, 2.52 events for every delegate in Nevada, but just 0.12 for every one in New Mexico.



It would probably be more useful to sort these in the order that the primaries took place:



Iowa and New Hampshire absolutely blow everything else way, with more than 7 candidate visits per delegate -- and that's not even counting all the mileage accumulated in those states by candidates who since dropped from the race. And the next two states on the docket, Nevada and South Carolina, were well ahead of anything that came afterward, although Indiana came somewhat close. The Super Tuesday states, on the other hand, collectively screwed themselves over.

If we were doing this more scientifically, we might need to account for some kind of diminishing returns. Barack Obama's 12th visit to Bettendorf, Iowa probably wasn't going to make as much difference as his first. Nevertheless, there is a huge benefit to going early, which is why Michigan and Florida gambled (and lost). On a per-delegate basis, there was about 11 times as much candidate attention paid to Nevada as to California.

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This Morning's Poll, and a Regression Model Makeover

In Iowa, a Research 2000 / KCCI-TV / KCRG-TV poll shows Barack Obama leading John McCain by 8 points, and Hillary Clinton leading him by 1. Although the topline number is better for Obama -- who has always polled fantastically in Iowa -- this represents a mild breakthrough for Clinton, as this is the first Iowa poll that has shown her with a lead of any magnitude since the caucuses were concluded in January.

More interestingly (?), I've also given the regression model a makeover. The number of candidate variables that the model considers has been expanded from 8 to 16, and these are:

Political

1. Kerry. John Kerry's vote share in 2004. Note that an adjustment is made in Massachusetts and Texas, the home states of Kerry and George W. Bush respectively, based on Al Gore's results in Massachusetts in 2000, and Bob Dole's results in Texas in 1996.
2. $_Obama (Obama model only) and $_Clinton (Clinton model only). The ratio of the amount of funds raised by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, respectively, to those raised by John Kerry in each state (once again, an adjustment is made in Massachusetts). This turns out to have a little bit more 'juice' than the way that I had been applying the fundraising data before.
3. $_McCain. This is the corollary to #2 above: the ratio of John McCain fundraising to George W. Bush fundraising. An adjustment is made in Texas.
4. Partisan ID index. Per 2004 exit polls, the number of self-identified Democrats less the number of self-identified Republicans.

Religious Identity

5. Evangelical. The proportion of white evangelical protestants in each state.
6. Catholic. The proportion of Catholics in each state. Yes, Barack Obama is somewhat underperforming John Kerry's numbers among Catholics, while Hillary Clinton is slightly overperforming them.
7. Mormon. The proportion of LDS voters in each state, a.k.a. the Utah reality check (which presently isn't working for Barack Obama, since the only Utah poll showed him performing relatively well there).

Ethnic and Racial Identity

8. African-American.</