The US Election Polling / Data Thread

[Tinordi]

Barring Trump stepping down this race is going to be all about the down ballot. Democrats' biggest risk right now is complacency. I'm sure they'd want to see a tighter poling environment to motivate turnout and decisively take back the Senate. Meanwhile Republicans are going to simply abandon Trump and divert all resources to Senate seats under threat.

If everything goes right you could see a landslide Hillary victory, Senate majority and three Supreme Court Justices appointed within four years which will change the axes of US federal politics for generations.

[octothorp]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

Barring Trump stepping down this race is going to be all about the down ballot. Democrats' biggest risk right now is complacency. I'm sure they'd want to see a tighter poling environment to motivate turnout and decisively take back the Senate. Meanwhile Republicans are going to simply abandon Trump and divert all resources to Senate seats under threat.

If everything goes right you could see a landslide Hillary victory, Senate majority and three Supreme Court Justices appointed within four years which will change the axes of US federal politics for generations.

Yeah, Senate is going to be interesting, especially in seeing how the repurcussions of the Federal Election are. Even in the last couple weeks, there seems to be some movement at the senate level toward the Democrats... Hassan has gone from +3 to +10 in New Hampshire. Cortez Mastro went from -9 to -2 in just the last week. Toomey and McGinty seem back and forth, and Feingold now seems like a solid pick-up.

If I was a Republican, the thing that would really worry me is that if Trump knows he's going to lose, he could go after everyone, including Republican senate candidates who have mostly stayed at arms' length from him. Which is going to drive his own Trump-first supporters away from supporting down-ballot Republicans and create a very messy scene. The whole 'rigged system' talk may not help senate candidates either.

[troutman]

nm

[octothorp]

I'm not sure which 538 model you're looking at (they have several), but if you're looking at something like this page, keep in mind it's not showing you percentage of votes in polls, it's showing you percentage likelihood that they'll win based on current polling. (In other words, a candidate might have 55% of the support in a state in a polling aggregate, but there might be a 75% chance that a candidate with 55% of support at the beginning of August wins that state).

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/...-forecast/#now

Also, 538 has three different forecasts: polls-plus, polls only, and nowcast (which one of the 538 staff recently described as a squirrel on mountain dew trying to predict the election). The now-cast basically takes the polling data as it stands now and uses that to predict what would happen if the election were tomorrow. Polls and polls-plus both take into account that we're still a long ways out and the numbers can move a lot; the difference is that polls-plus takes into account things like anticipated convention-bounces, as well as economic data and such. Right now polls-only looks a little better than polls-plus for Clinton, because polls-plus is essentially saying "yeah, but this is right after a convention, so we'd expect Clinton's numbers to be high."

In the polls-plus model, you'd need to include every state where Clinton currently has 65% or greater odds to get her to 270.

[Senator Clay Davis]

This might be a slight outlier, but I've never seen either a 15 point lead this early, or a major party candidate closing in on the 20's. Ugly....

Hillary Clinton has surged to a 15-point lead over reeling, gaffe-plagued Donald Trump, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

Clinton made strong gains with two constituencies crucial to a Republican victory – whites and men — while scoring important gains among fellow Democrats, the poll found.

Clinton not only went up, but Trump went down. Clinton now has a 48-33 lead, a huge turnaround from her narrow 42-39 advantage last momth.

The findings are particularly significant because the poll was taken after both political conventions ended, and as Trump engaged in a war of words with the parents of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, killed in the Iraq War 12 years ago.

“This is coming off the Democratic convention, where a bounce is expected,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in New York, which conducted the nationwide survey.

“What you don’t want is to have the worst week of your campaign” – a characterization many analysts use to describe Trump’s recent days.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/poli...#storylink=cpy

[GGG]

Marrist is ranked as an "A" pollster with a .7% republican bias. So while it is measuring a peak Clinton moment in time its likely a reasonable snapshot.

[rubecube]

You do wonder if Clinton is peaking too early though much like the NDP in the federal election last year.

[Drak]

It's still very early. Lots of game left.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by rubecube

You do wonder if Clinton is peaking too early though much like the NDP in the federal election last year.

I think it's a different situation, though. Once it started looking like, "oh crap, the NDP might form government", they actually had to justify the notion that that was an acceptable possibility and fell flat on their faces. They had to campaign like a front-runner. Hillary, on the other hand, can legitimately just hide, as she's been doing through this cycle, and let her army of relatively credible and popular surrogates, including the Presidents and VP, make her case for her, mostly by just attacking Trump. Meanwhile, Trump's just going to keep being Trump, and that's probably not going to help him - his act doesn't get any fresher the more he does it. Even the sort of people who respond positively to his idiocy and trolling have to be getting a bit numb to it at this stage.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

I think it's a different situation, though. Once it started looking like, "oh crap, the NDP might form government", they actually had to justify the notion that that was an acceptable possibility and fell flat on their faces. They had to campaign like a front-runner. Hillary, on the other hand, can legitimately just hide, as she's been doing through this cycle, and let her army of relatively credible and popular surrogates, including the Presidents and VP, make her case for her, mostly by just attacking Trump. Meanwhile, Trump's just going to keep being Trump, and that's probably not going to help him - his act doesn't get any fresher the more he does it. Even the sort of people who respond positively to his idiocy and trolling have to be getting a bit numb to it at this stage.

I do think we see a different Trump. Not a successful Trump, but a toned down one. Yesterday he was asked about Buffet's comments about nathalie being a terrible businessman and person and he simply said "I'm not going to counter-punch". That was a deliberate comment I'm sure and I am also site he wanted to counter-punch.

[Senator Clay Davis]

Originally Posted by rubecube

You do wonder if Clinton is peaking too early though much like the NDP in the federal election last year.

The concern with the numbers suggesting Trump will get destroyed is more about complacency becoming an issue with Dem voters, rather than say Hillary is peaking right now. The thinking of "He's gonna get killed, so I don't have to vote" basically. But I expect the Dems are not going to fall into the trap the GOP fell into, where they basically assumed "this will take care of itself eventually", and then of course it didn't.

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by rubecube

You do wonder if Clinton is peaking too early though much like the NDP in the federal election last year.

It's exceedingly unlikely that Clinton will lose half her support to a third party, like the NDP did to the Liberals. As soon as polls showed the Liberals trending to be better positioned to defeat Harper, they gained ABC strategic voters en masse and cruised to victory. Clinton will not face a similar situation.

[Fozzie_DeBear]

Please listen to the latest War College podcast on the role of the Kremlin in the US election...its mandatory listening if you are concerned with capital D Democracy issues.

In a nutshell...Russians have been caught using cunning social media techniques to disrupt and troll in elections. This technique may have been enough to swing the Brexit outcome (Putin benefits from a weaker Europe), Ukraine and now the US.

Some of the dysfunction in the US electorate is a result of cold-war tactics.

And no...I am not some tin-foil wearing conspiracy nut :-D

[GGG]

If the election was held today Clinton would be favoured to win Arizona and Georgia.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/...ilebar&v=1#now

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

It's exceedingly unlikely that Clinton will lose half her support to a third party, like the NDP did to the Liberals. As soon as polls showed the Liberals trending to be better positioned to defeat Harper, they gained ABC strategic voters en masse and cruised to victory. Clinton will not face a similar situation.

Yep, Conservative poll numbers were pretty much dead on in predicting their vote share. In August they were polling in the 28-32% range and they ended up with 31.9% in October.

The main movement was how the Liberals and NDP would split the 60-65% of voters who didn't vote Conservative or for the Greens/Bloc and it wasn't particularly surprising that that movement went towards the Liberals rather than the NDP once it became clear the Conservatives were in trouble. That dynamic simply doesn't exist in the US.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by GGG

If the election was held today Clinton would be favoured to win Arizona and Georgia.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/...ilebar&v=1#now

That's crazy

[octothorp]

There's one reason I think that the probability numbers that places like 538 generate might actually underestimate Clinton's odds: they use the aggregate numbers right now, and combine them with other factors, to forecast the odds tomorrow or three months from now. But, as I understand them, they do not factor into account polling numbers over the whole campaign. 538 had an article a few weeks back about how Clinton's odds of winning were about the same as Kerry's at the same time in 2004. Which may well be true, when you compare the percentages at that time. But when you take a closer look at the polls from 2004, and compare it with this year's, the differences are pretty stark:

Compare the above to RCP's graph from this year:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...nton-5491.html
In 2004 by the end of July, Bush had seen support from 42% to 47%, and had periods of several weeks at a time where he was leading the aggregate. Kerry had a range of about 42% to 48%. There'd be legitimate reason to think that Bush had the upside to win. Compare that to this year, where Trump has cracked 45% for only 3 days just after his primary, which was also the only time he held a lead. Meanwhile, Clinton's low-mark is 43% and she's hit 50+%, and has almost never trailed. She's spent a good chunk of the summer with a 5%+ lead, something Kerry never achieved. I suspect Clinton's probabilities would actually be higher if you attempted to account for things like high- and low-water marks.

[GGG]

From some of the 538 articles they do look at trend lines for privious polls. So if you are on a continuing downward trend a bad poll makes more of a difference then a bad poll with a history of up and down.

Not quite what your looking for but polls plus and polls only have a memory of what previously happened

Bet fair has Hillary at 78% right now which matches up with 538s model but I wonder if 538 has essentially become the bookie setting the line and the betting markets follow him rather than being an independent data point

[Thor]

This is insane, everyone knows this week has been bad for Trump but to see this on Nate Silvers blog in graph form is stark!

[Street Pharmacist]

The latest Marist poll has Trump with 9% support in the 18-29 year old group and 1% for African American