It's just one poll, and it's not in a state of any enormous amount of electoral significance, but the new Rasmussen poll that shows Barack Obama trailing by 23 points in Kansas -- he had been down by just 10 last month -- is a little ominous. Obama's numbers are bad across the board: he's getting a relatively low percentage of Democrats, trailing by 17 points among independent voters, and his approval ratings are negative. Obama had recently been polling well in other states like Iowa and the Dakotas, and so this may turn out to be some kind of outlier. But the real question is what's going to happen the next time states like Ohio and Indiana are polled, which they haven't been in several weeks and where there's a little bit more at stake. In the meantime, our model is starting to hedge its bets a little more in the Midwest.
Obama has no such problems on the West Coast. Rasmussen has him ahead by 9 in Oregon; the Field Poll gives him a 24-point edge in California, and SurveyUSA has him up by 16 in Washington. Any advantage John McCain might have gained by being a Westerner is being outweighed by his positioning on foreign policy, as the Pacific Coast tends to be the most dovish region of the country.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Yesterday's Polls, 7/16
Monday, June 16, 2008
Today's Polls, 6/16
The headliner tonight is in Virginia, where Rasmussen has Barack Obama moving into a tiny, 1-point lead after having trailed John McCain by 3 points in May. Virginia has been a target of Democrats from the get-go in this campaign, but it's of particular importance to Obama because it enables another series of parlays for winning the election. If Plan A was holding the Kerry states and winning Ohio, and Plan B was winning Iowa and 2-3 of the Southwestern swing states, Plan C is winning the Kerry states plus Iowa and Virginia, which would get him to 272 electoral votes.
Two other polling results also show a bounce for Obama. In Kansas, John McCain leads by 10 in a Rasmussen poll; he had led by 22 a month ago. And in New York (which is polled way more than it needs to be), Obama leads by 18 in a Siena poll, up from 11 last month. If you mapped the states out in n-dimensional space according to their demographic characteristics, New York, Virginia and Kansas would form something of an equilateral triangle. Obama has received a pretty significant bounce in each of them, suggesting that his uptick is fairly widespread.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Etc. Etc. Etc.
I not a big fan of catch-all threads, but a few items of note:
1. There is a Kansas poll out showing John McCain with just a 4-point lead over Barack Obama in the Sunflower State. But we're not going to be listing it as it was an internal poll conducted for Jim Slattery, the Democratic candidate for US Senate. The problem with internal polls is not necessarily that they're bad polls, but that they only become public knowledge under certain circumstances. Slattery is trying to raise money and to build enthusiasm for his campaign -- to some extent, he is competing against other Democrats in order to do so. I'm sure that this poll was conducted honestly and fairly, but would a (strongly-worded) press release have been put out if Slattery had been trailing Pat Roberts by 30 points instead of 12? Probably not. For this reason, we do not list internal polls conducted on behalf of a candidate.
2. I had a longer item posted previously about one of the controversies described at Barack Obama's Fight the Smears. After about five minutes, I decided the issue was old news and took it down. So for the couple dozen of you who might have remembered seeing the post, rest assured that you aren't going crazy.
I did, however, want to encourage people to read Jane Hamsher at firedoglake about the matter of Larry Sinclair and to sign her petition. I am not much of a viral action kind of guy by default, but some things are so ridiculous as to merit an exception.
3. It does look like the CNN interview is going to go off tomorrow, barring further breaking news or natural disasters. My time slot is approximately 8:20 AM Eastern.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Today's Polls, 6/5
We've been in a little bit of a lull for polling, as pollsters, quite understandably, might have wanted to wait for the Democratic nomination to resolve itself before putting new surveys out in the field. But a couple of late-breaking polls this afternoon.
In Missouri, Rasmussen has Barack Obama with a trivial, 1-point lead over John McCain. In Rasmussen's previous survey, Obama had trailed by 6. SurveyUSA had also shown Missouri closing to toss-up status; our regression model is liable to remain a little bit skeptical until Obama can improve his numbers some in other Southern states. But this is a state that's going to be competed in from now through November.
Just across the border, a Research 2000 / Daily Kos poll has John McCain ahead by 11 points in Kansas. The poll also suggests that Kansans are fairly lukewarm about the prospect of Kathleen Sebelius as VP -- though importantly, a 36-24 plurality of independents say she'd make them more likely to vote for the ticket. We're going to have some research out over the next couple of days about the home-state effects triggered by a Vice Presidential nominee.
Finally, in Alabama, a Capital Survey Research Center poll has John McCain 24 points ahead of Obama.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Today's Polls, 5/29
A strange mix of polling data today:
The most significant result is probably the EPIC-MRA poll in Michigan, which shows the same four-point margin for McCain that SurveyUSA showed yesterday. Also like the SurveyUSA poll, this one had a conspicuously high number of undecideds. My sense is that this probably has something to do with Obama not having campaigned in Michigan during the primary cycle and that the state will probably lean his way in the long run. At the same time, Michigan is a state that has a significant amount of affection for John McCain, and his fundraising has been strong there.
I'm quite honestly at a loss as to how to explain the couple of Rasmussen results in Alabama and Mississippi. Demographically, the states are nearly identical. The Obama campaign has made some overtures about wanting to compete in Mississippi specifically, and it rarely hurts a candidate to call out the importance of a particular state. There might also be some lingering bitterness among Mississippians directed at the Republican Party over Trent Lott. But in the long-run, I don't see how you're going to get a 6-point margin in one state and a 28-point margin in the other.
Finally, for those of you wondering what in the hell that Texas poll is, that survey (from Baselice & Associates, Inc.) can be found here.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Today's Polls, 5/16
You know it's a different kind of election season when you're having an easier time getting polling data for Alaska than for Michigan:
The headline today is that for the first time since we started tracking the state polls in early March, we are now rating Hillary Clinton as a favorite against John McCain. One of the big reasons why is that she is starting to consolidate her positions in blue states like Maine and Washington that previously looked like they might be somewhat vulnerable. What she needs now are some better numbers in Michigan and Wisconsin; if she gets those, her win percentage will go way up.
Barack Obama is also polling quite strongly in blue states recently. However, he appears to be backtracking somewhat in red states like Kansas. This is undoubtedly fairly typical for this point in the election cycle, when support begins to revert toward being more partisan. But the reason why we don't yet show Obama getting a surge in his electoral math even as he has improved his standing in national polls is because we haven't gotten a lot of data from key purple states recently, and what data we have gotten -- as in Wisconsin and New Hampshire -- has not been especially good for him.
There should be a lot of polling coming out next week, notably including SurveyUSA's monthly refresh of data in 15 or 16 states, so we should have a better idea by then.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Today's Polls, 4/17: Obama takes a hit, with caveat
SurveyUSA has a new round of polling out in more than a dozen states. Let's run the numbers first and then let's talk.
These are generally, although not uniformly, a poor set of polls for Barack Obama. The ones that are perhaps especially problematic for him are in Virginia and New Mexico, states where SurveyUSA has generally showed him running fairly well. The Ohio result, naturally, is important, although that's consistent with what we've seen in other polling. And SurveyUSA shows a close race for Obama in Massachusetts, as it has all cycle; it would be nice to be able to look at another pollster's numbers on that race.
As you can see, Obama's win percentage against John McCain has declined to its lowest ever number, 41.4%, which leaves him essentially tied with Hillary Clinton, who is presently at 40.2%. When we began this project, the polls indicated that Obama was at a hair over 60% to win an election against John McCain; that number has now fallen by more than 20 points.
But for the Obamaphiles in the crowd who are inclined to panic, a couple of things to keep in mind: Firstly, even in a bad set of surveys, Obama retains some areas of strength. These are, particularly, the Pacific Northwest region and our North Central (e.g. Upper Midwest) region. In Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, as well as in Washington and Oregon, Obama is likely to win fairly easily, whereas all of those states are in play in a Clinton-McCain contest. It's these states, plus neighboring Michigan -- which will not be a slam dunk for Obama but appears to be a better state for him than for Clinton -- that account for why Obama is still at least tied with Clinton overall, in spite of performing worse than her in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
Secondly, notice that the SurveyUSA polls were taken over the weekend, just as the bittergate controversy was hitting the radar. Keep in mind my prediction about bittergate, which is that it would have no real impact on the Democratic primary numbers, but perhaps a couple of points worth of medium-term impact on Obama's general election numbers. So far, that prediction has been pretty well borne out.
The other dynamic in play here is something that I call 'timing bias': pollsters tend to release surveys in the wake of major news events. Consider, for instance, that the last time SurveyUSA released a big set of polls was just as the Jeremiah Wright controversy was breaking. Naturally, pollsters (and the clients they work for) want to gauge the electoral reaction to important events in the news cycle. But really, if you buy one of my fundamental arguments about polling, which is that most bounces are just that -- temporary aberrations in the polling numbers -- these are the very worst times to release polls. And it cuts both ways. If, say, Obama wins Indiana, and essentially concludes the nomination with an 'upset' victory, we'll probably see a lot of polls released in the aftermath of that. Those numbers too, I'm guessing, would likely show a fairly big bounce for Obama -- and that bounce too, I'm guessing, might well prove to be ephemeral. It's helpful to have a pollster like Rasmussen on hand, which releases its polling data in dribs and drabs, rather than in big chunks.
Thirdly, our previous analysis shows that with a unified Democratic party behind him, Obama is likely to have a superior hand to play to Clinton's.
With all that said, there's no doubt that Obama's electability numbers have taken a hit. For one set of advocates, that is precisely the reason to draw the Democratic nomination process to a close, and for the other set, it is precisely the reason to continue it.
p.s. One result I wouldn't worry about for Obama: the TargetPoint poll showing him trailing McCain by 12 points in Colorado. Whatever hit Obama has taken, it does not appear to be in states like Minnesota and Washington, that are similar to Colorado demographically. And TargetPoint surveyed this contest on behalf of a Republican advocacy firm, and over small (~300 voters) sample sizes.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Obama Retains Electability Advantage, but Both Democrats Below 50%
The invaluable Survey USA released a boatload of new polling information today. All of their surveys were conducted over the weekend -- March 14 through 16 -- amidst the height of the Jeremiah Wright controversy.
We also have a new Rasmussen poll for Massachusetts, which -- this is a bad habit of Rasmussen's -- has three different margins listed for Clinton: she's listed as a 15-point favorite over McCain in the text of the survey write-up, a 21-point favorite in the adjoining table, and a 19-point favorite in the headline on Rasmussen's front page. We'll go with the 19-point number but really it doesn't matter; she's not going to lose the state. Let me give you the numbers and then some discussion:
| State | Agency | Date | Obama | Clinton |
| AL | Survey USA | 3/15/08 | McCain +27 | McCain +18 |
| CA | Survey USA | 3/15/08 | Obama +14 | Clinton +18 |
| IA | Survey USA | 3/15/08 | Obama +6 | McCain +4 |
| KS |
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