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Beyond the Margin of Error (6): The Curious Incident of the Young Republican...
In the last post I ended with the phrase 'Beware the crosstabs.' Today I will expand on that.Here's what happens if you break down the aggregated Daily Kos/SEIU/PPP polling to date by race and age....
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Beyond the Margin of Error (7): How to Stop Worrying and Love the Toplines
In the last few posts of this series we've seen how some of the numbers for minorities in the PPP polls are unreliable. But their toplines are right in line with other polls this year, and, on average,...
View ArticleBeyond the Margin of Error (8): Compromised Demographics
So as we have found out over the past few days, PPP's crosstabs aren't very helpful when it comes to the actual opinions of youth and minorities, despite accurate topline numbers. Is there a way to...
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DKos Polling Aggregate: Is This Why Republicans Hate Education?
This summer, the DailyKos/SEIU/PPP polls started including a question about educational attainment. So how does education relate to political views? With a whole summer of data at hand (10,000...
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DKos Polling Aggregate: Unions and Support for Obama
The 2008 exit polls showed Obama receiving 59% of the vote among union households, and 51% among non-union households. While certainly an advantage, that doesn't seem like a huge difference, at least...
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Red States, Blue States, and Swing States: The New DKos Poll Crosstabs in...
With the introduction of the new crosstabs showing the Daily Kos/SEIU/PPP weekly poll split into Red States, Blue States, and Swing States, I thought it would be informative to look back at the spring...
View ArticleOld White People More Likely to Watch Debates; CNN Poll OK
The composition of the debate-watching audience is somewhat older and whiter than the electorate as a whole. At least, it was in 2008.So, when CNN publishes a poll of debate watchers, and it's full of...
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Daily Kos/SEIU poll: Obama voters are still excited
With this week's DailyKos/SEIU/PPP poll conducted mainly on the Thursday and Friday after the debate last week, we might have expected excitement levels of Obama voters to plunge while the excitement...
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Predicting the House Using Historical Data
It turns out there is a very strong relationship between the number of seats Democrats gain in the House and the change in the popular vote margin from the previous House election. Using a regression...
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Senate Predictions - Democrats Get Boost From Polling Errors?
If the past is prologue, the polling averages will be off by a few points again this year in many races, but that error may be predictable, at least averaged over many races. And if we could predict...
View ArticleThere Was Probably No Debate Bounce - And No Convention Bounce Either
Or rather, I do not think it means what it is commonly thought to mean.The polling numbers have changed significantly in response to events, this much is true. But these bounces we've seen do not seem...
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If Minorities Vote, Romney Can't Win: Gaming Out the Popular Vote Possibilities.
Let me be more specific: If turnout and support is as high among minorities as polls indicate, and if President Obama gets at least as much support from white voters as Democratic House candidates did...
View ArticleShattering Myths With the Numbers: Obama Voters Are Excited, Turnout High
We keep hearing certain things again and again - Obama voters are not enthusiastic, they won't turn out, especially minorities, and Obama's support just isn't that strong this year. Here's a last...
View ArticleElection Predictions Based on Past Polling Errors
Recently I introduced a simple model for predicting election results from current polling averages and past polling errors. This post presents final predictions for all statewide presidential, senate,...
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Dear Republicans: You spoke. Women listened. No Senate for you.
Composition of new Senate:Update: The gender gap generally increased in 2012 compared to 2008 or 2004. Republicans need say no more.
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More accurate than Nate Silver or Markos—and simple, too
Earlier we learned that Markos predicted the results of the closest 2012 presidential races with more accuracy than Nate Silver at 538, who was the best of the polling aggregators and/or modelers.But...
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A closer look at changing demographics
Earlier this month, Republicans were shocked to find out that, no, the diversity of the 2008 electorate didn't decrease, it increased. Some Republicans did seem to at least understand the long-term...
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The great grey hope of Republicans
Do people get more conservative as they age?Some people answer this question with a resounding 'Yes!'Fortunately, we have 40 years worth of Presidential exit polls to use to try to poke around at this...
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Can you trust political trends?
If you plot up the presidential results since Reagan came along, you get something interesting: a nice little regression. Using results from 1980-2008 (excluding 1992), you would have predicted that...
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Taking back the House and the popular vote
What with the recent attention the House of Representatives has brought upon itself, it is a good time to bring back House prediction models. Sam Wang has been busy over at Princeton Election...
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Beyond the Margin of Error: The Virginia polling errors in context
A few weeks ago there was an election in Virginia where the polls were off by a fair amount—the margin of victory for the Democrat in the governor's race was about five points less than the polling...
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Party favors: The Democrats aren't popular, but the Republicans are much...
The recent shutdown debacle had a large effect on the net favorability for Republicans, bringing their numbers to levels far worse than Gingrich's shutdown did and even worse than what we saw with the...
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Marriage equality leaves opponents in the polling dust
With six recent polls showing support for same-sex marriage at 59 percent, 56 percent, 55 percent, 55 percent, 54 percent, and 53 percent, it seems like a good time to make anothergraph of the polling...
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Marriage equality and judicial unactivism
While searching for old polling data on the topic of marriage equality, I found Gallup's marriage page, and right below the data for same-sex marriage are the numbers for the question Do you approve or...
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How Mitch McConnell's worn out his welcome with Kentucky voters, in one...
Senator Mitch McConnell is not very popular in Kentucky. He's in far worse shape than six years ago, when he won with 53 percent of the vote. His job approval ratings took a real hit this fall,...
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40 years of changing attitudes towards LGBT neighbors, one relationship at a...
Polling data from the past 40 years shows a growing acceptance of gay and lesbian individuals in our society in the United States. In the last twoposts, I've focused on polling regarding same-sex...
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Mapping Eric Cantor's epic loss
Because this loss will never get old. And maps are fun. Brat's base of support in Hanover County, a solid block of purple, really stands out. Cantor's strongest counties, in the North of the district,...
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Yes, thousands of Obama voters did vote against Eric Cantor
Last Tuesday evening I sat down to write a post conclusively showing that Democratic crossover voters couldn't have provided the winning margin for Dave Brat, the college professor who beat Eric Cantor...
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Is Mississippi's map more favorable for Chris McDaniel?
As the run-off primary between incumbent Senator Thad Cochran and State Senator Chris McDaniel nears, I thought it would be interesting to see some more details from the results a few weeks ago and...
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More than 10,000 Democrats saved Thad Cochran's bacon
Another week, another dramatic Republican primary, this time a runoff. Senator Thad Cochran eked out a narrow win against Chris McDaniel by appealing to Democrats in general and African-American voters...
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Third-party candidates are polling unusually well this year
If you look in the Daily Kos Elections oh-so-handy polling database, you may notice about a third of the races polled have a third-party candidate polling at 5 percent or above.As David Nir noted the...
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Why 2014 is not 2010, in one very clear chart
At the beginning of the year, we heard a lot of talk about how 2014 was going to be another Republican wave year, like 2010, or bigger. Now, however, it's clear that 2014 has not followed the same...
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The year of the crappy pollster
Sometimes it seems like we've been inundated with a flood of lousy polling this year. So I checked out the numbers—and it's not just a feeling. Looking at just Senate polling, there's been quite an...
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Polling scatter and volatility
We're now getting polls left, right (a lot of those) and center. In my last post I showed that this is The Year of the Crappy Pollster. But in order to document their crappiness, we need to know a...
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How much error do today's polls have?
Yesterday we talked some about what can cause polling errors. But let's cut to the chase: we really want to know how well today's polls can predict election outcomes in November.This has an easy...
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The errors of polling averages
Previously, we saw that today's Senate polls, on average, will have an error of about seven points in the margin, if they are anything like the polls in 2010 and 2012.What about polling averages? Many,...
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New Hampshire polls show mostly harmless noise
On Tuesday, a new Granite State Poll of the two House races in New Hampshire was released. The results showed Democrat Carol Shea-Porter with a three-point lead in NH-01, and Republican Marlinda Garcia...
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The South Dakota Senate race is Schrödinger's election
Democrat Rick Weiland All eyes are now turning to to South Dakota, as what was long thought to be an easy win for Republican Mike Rounds is suddenly a messy three-way race with a fourth candidate...
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Delving into the CBS/NYT/YouGov polls
This week featured the release of 437 pages of polling data from all 50 states via the CBS/NYT/YouGov polls. While there were a handful of oddball results, it was not too many more than might be...
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Most of the data on Latino voters is bogus. Here are the real poll numbers.
Recently, there was a story claiming Republican candidates were winning among Latino voters in Georgia. The entirety of this story was based on a small portion of a SurveyUSA/11Alive poll that...
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The polls will be wrong.
There is one thing I can be sure will happen next Tuesday: lots of polls will be wrong. Some will be very wrong. Of course, we know better than to pin hopes on an individual poll; but as it turns out,...
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We said the polls would be wrong. We had no idea they'd be this wrong
So a few days ago I wrote a post about how the polls can be wrong. I showed how over the past ten years, polls have more often than not overestimated Republican performance. And I warned that we...
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How the GOP can lose its remaining support from Latino voters, in one easy step
The numbers above, are, quite frankly, amazing. Latino voters are a diverse group, and like any diverse group, it's hard to get nearly uniform opinion on anything. But immigration does it. A whopping...
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These Democrats voted to weaken Wall Street reform and build the Keystone...
(click to enlarge)The year 2015 is off to an interesting start in Congress, with two votes on key topics that let us see what stuff our current Democratic congresscritters are made of.On the left are...
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A quick guide to the potential Democratic candidates for Senate in California
Click to enlarge.For those who want to keep score at home, here's a quick guide to who's who among the Democrats mentioned in connection with a run for Senate in California. For a more detailed list,...
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Here are the Senate Democrats who voted to move forward on building the...
Click to enlarge.One of the first things the new Republican-led Senate has done is moved a bill forward to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline. Ten Democratic senators and independent Angus King of Maine...
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Oregon's not-so-pretty racist past is not yet history
If your impression of Oregon as a quirky island of tolerance is formed by its blue-state status and its history of progressive ballot measures (or by watching Portlandia), you should check out a...
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These are the Democrats who voted against abortion coverage, Wall Street...
Click to enlarge.A little while back, we showed you the House Democrats who voted with Republicans on two key topics: the environment and Wall Street reform. Today we add a third topic:...
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95% of anti-abortion Democratic House votes disappeared in just five years
Click to enlarge.Last week, we noticed that of the 64 House Democrats who voted for the anti-abortion Stupak Amendment, only 12 remain. And of those 12, only three (Cuellar, Lipinski, and Peterson)...
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