In this late post below, I discussed the now very consistent polling errors overestimating Donald Trump’s margins over Nikki Haley. I get why some analysts are quick to dismiss the larger import of this phenomenon: people assume you can draw direct, linear conclusions about a general election from polling anomalies in a primary election. And you can’t. But as I said last night, it’s a mistake to say this means nothing. G. Elliot Morris, the new head of 538, has a good piece up about this. The gist is that because of a mix of those sampling and modeling issues discussed in yesterday’s Backchannel, pollsters seem to be having a hard time finding normie Republicans. Needless to say there aren’t many of them these days. And that is part of the polling challenge. But these primaries show they are there and that pollsters seem to be missing a non-trivial number of them.
Schiff Beats Out Split Progressives On Glide Path To California Senate Seat
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), using ruthless tactics belied by his cherubic face and upstanding public persona, has won the California Senate primary, according to the Associated Press.
Continue reading “Schiff Beats Out Split Progressives On Glide Path To California Senate Seat “More Trump-Haley Polling Errors
Outside of Vermont, which Haley appears to have won, Haley is getting beaten just about everywhere tonight. That’s 100% expected. But we are seeing that polling seemed to dramatically overstate Trump’s margins. So for instance 538 had Trump up 49 points over Haley in Virginia. But it looks like it will be just under 30 points. Needless to say these are still very lopsided defeats. But that’s also a pretty big polling miss.
Continue reading “More Trump-Haley Polling Errors”Big Freak
Folks, North Carolina Republicans just chose this whack-job as their nominee for governor.
A Bit More on Polling
There’s one point I didn’t get a chance to get into in the post below about polling, though I allude to it in the part about crosstabs and subgroups. One thing people do when they don’t like what a poll is telling them is they dig into the crosstabs and find things that just don’t add up. Maybe the party mix seems kind of off. Or they’ll show a very Democratic group favoring Republicans or vice versa.
Basically, don’t do this.
It’s just too good a way to fool yourself.
Continue reading “A Bit More on Polling”Kyrsten Sinema Drove Herself Out Of Politics
Just one Senate term into the political career of a once-promising young politician, a series of self-inflicted, often baffling, missteps left her with no choice but to announce her impending departure.
Continue reading “Kyrsten Sinema Drove Herself Out Of Politics “Biden Polling: A Guide for the Perplexed (and the Freaked Out)
Over the weekend, Democrats or Dem-adjacent persons watching polling of the 2024 presidential election got knocked over the head with a metaphorical anvil: a batch of polls collectively showing Joe Biden 2 to 4 points behind Donald Trump. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about these polls and polling generally, ranging from the technical, to the what does it mean, to please talk me off the ledge. So I wanted to try to address them here.
First: Are these polls accurate? In an age when no one answers their cell phones let alone landlines, how do we know whether these polls are representative. Who has a landline? etc.
This is a complicated question. Without getting into deep technical details, yes, the pollsters definitely get that landlines are old news and most people don’t even answer unknown numbers on their cell phones. The same applies to text requests for political surveys. Response rates — or, rather, non-response rates — are awful. But pollsters know all of that and they’ve come up with pretty smart ways to deal with it. Without getting too far into the weeds, it comes down to increasingly sophisticated ways of modeling the electorate, using those models to weight the results, and in so doing backing out a representative sample from the data.
Continue reading “Biden Polling: A Guide for the Perplexed (and the Freaked Out)”Feds Slap 12 New Counts On Bob ‘Gold Bars’ Menendez
For the third time in six months, federal prosecutors have brought charges against Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), tacking on to his indictment 12 counts including new allegations of obstruction of justice and failure to register as a foreign agent.
Continue reading “Feds Slap 12 New Counts On Bob ‘Gold Bars’ Menendez”The Ghost of Super Tuesday Past
On March 3, 2020, a fluid and dynamic Democratic primary was calcified.
Continue reading “The Ghost of Super Tuesday Past “The 5 Most Pressing Threats To The 2024 Election
The last presidential election flipped democracy on its head after conspiracy theories and Trump’s desperation to stay in power helped fuel a violent insurrection, an attempted legal coup and the spread of election disinformation at a national and local level. Heading into 2024, experts who spoke to TPM warn those same threats, and more sinister outgrowths of them, will plague this year’s presidential election too.
Continue reading “The 5 Most Pressing Threats To The 2024 Election”