Electionate
Tyranny of the Trackers: Relying on Daily Tracking Polls Gives Romney A Leg Up In Pollster
Pollster’s trendlines are making a splash on twitter today, since they now show Romney and Obama moving into a true tie at 46.1 percent apiece. But there haven’t been very many recent polls, and several seem to show Obama doing pretty well. So what’s moving Pollster’s trendlines into a tie? Oddly enough, it’s the absence of recent polling that’s allowing Romney to surge.
With Obama standing in the upper-forties and leading by a few points, Romney’s chances hinge on the verdict of undecided voters. If they break his way, Romney could catch up to Obama in the polls—and there’s a reasonable line of thought contending that’s what we should expect. After all, Obama’s approval rating is beneath 50 percent, so most of these voters harbor misgivings about the president’s performance.
Everyone pays attention to who's winning, but not all leads are created equal: a candidate's standing matters too. If it’s July in a presidential election year, there’s a big difference between leading 46-40 and 50-44. The former could be a toss-up, the latter is probably not. Why? In recent elections, it is unusual for presidential candidates to finish beneath their share of the vote in summer polling. Consider John McCain in 2008. Other than a Palin-induced sugar high, the final few months of the 2008 campaign couldn’t have gone much worse.
Public Policy Polling nailed the 2008 results, but PPP’s polls have sometimes seemed a little strange so far in 2012. First, they leaned heavily toward Obama. Then they came back down to earth, but showed Obama struggling among non-white voters (an unlikely scenario). So what’s going on? It might be education. Since their June 14-to-17 survey, PPP has released educational breakdowns for their DailyKos/SEIU national tracking poll.
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Bad political analysts received a gift today: a new tool to reinforce their worst instincts. Twitter has launched the “Twitter Political Index,” which will apparently provide a daily assessment of political sentiment on twitter. What exactly does that mean? Well, computers will analyze every single tweet and determine whether they're for or against Obama or Romney. Twitter sentiment is then boiled down into a number from 0-to-100, where a score near 100 means that tweets are resoundingly positive.
What the Latest Obama-Favoring Quinnipiac Polls Mean
It’s been a pretty rough week of polling for Mitt Romney. Last week, NBC/WSJ showed Obama opening up a 6 point lead nationally, and Democracy Corps showed Obama at 50 percent among likely voters with a 4 point advantage. This morning’s trifecta of swing state surveys conducted by the venerable pollsters at Quinnipiac added to the fire, showing Obama leading by a substantial margin in the three largest battleground states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. It’s hard to understate just how badly Romney fared in these polls.
The Perils of the Polling Average: How A Basic Election Prediction Tool Is Favoring Romney
The polling average is the essential tool for gauging the state of the race. It's remarkably simple and has an excellent record of performing in crunch time. But while the polling averages are likely to nail the final results yet again, there's an important disclaimer: Two of the most frequent polls, Rasmussen and Gallup, will tend to drag the national polling averages in Romney's direction. Take the RCP average, which only considers the last two or three weeks of polling. As a result, only a handful of polls are usually represented.
If you take a quick look at the electoral map, Ohio really stands out. Here’s a white working class state that Bush carried twice but where Obama still seems to be doing quite well. Not only is Obama competitive, he leads in every poll conducted over the last two months—occasionally by a substantial margin. On balance, Obama’s up by 5 points in the RealClearPolitics average, despite a slimmer national lead and Ohio’s Republican-lean.
A widely-held belief is that voter-ID laws endanger Obama's chances in Pennsylvania, but the campaign's don't seem to buy it. Last week, Romney allies withdrew advertisements from Pennsylvania, and the Obama campaign cut their buy in half. This week, the Obama campaign is going even further: withdrawing advertisements from the Keystone State altogether, making this the first week that Obama has gone without airing advertisements in Pennsylvania.
