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What Those Texas Polls Really Mean

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The following post for members is by G. Elliot Morris of The Crosstab.

See if you can spot the pattern in these three recently released polls in the Texas Senate race between Beto O’Rourke (D) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R):

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Democrats May Have More Polling Upside

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Harry Enten: “What’s important to keep in mind is that district polls at this point in the cycle can underestimate the party benefiting from a wave election.”

“I went back since the 2006 election and looked at how much the polls from roughly within a month of this point in the cycle performed. (That is, polls completed from about 52 to 82 days before the election.)”

“The immediate thing that jumps out is the side that has won the national House popular vote has always done better on Election Day than the polls indicate right now. The average overperformance was a little over 3 points.”


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Why Polls Alone Aren’t Good Predictors for the Midterms

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The following post for members is by G. Elliot Morris of The Crosstab.

Polling is hard. Who do you ask? How do you ask them? What do you ask them? Etc. For a few years the survey research industry has also been tasked with answering one big question: should we ask people to take our surveys online?

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Three Ways to Forecast the Midterm Elections

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This piece is only available to Political Wire members.

There are basically three ways to forecast elections and each of them now concludes that Democrats are favored to win control of the House of Representatives this November.

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The Difference Between Forecasters and Handicappers

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The following post for members is by G. Elliot Morris of The Crosstab.

Prominent midterms handicappers and oddsmakers currently put the chance that Democrats take the House at about 65% on average, while quantitative forecasters (like myself) put the odds between 75 and 80%. The difference between 75 and 65 may seem trivial, but if you think about the odds of Republican House control the divergence is stark: a 1-in-4 chance that Republicans hold the House is about 150% less likely than a 1-in-3 chance. What explains these differences?

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Making More Sense of the Generic Ballot

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The following post for members is by G. Elliott Morris of The Crosstab.

How many times have you seen a variant of the following headlines this year? “Democrats reach new high in midterm race” or “Democrats’ 2018 advantage is nearly gone,” or maybe even “New poll shows GOP now leads in 2018 generic ballot?”  These angles are a product of either bad data analysis — pundits and prognosticators crafting narratives from too few data points — or a focus on too-quick-to-move averages of generic ballot polls when we’re still 156 days (!) away from the November 6 midterm elections.

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New Poll Averaging Method Would Have Predicted Trump

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A new polling aggregation technique explained at Science Direct would have come much closer to predicting Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election.

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The Polls Are Actually Fairly Accurate

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Nate Silver: “With the 2018 midterm elections approaching, we’ve updated FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings for the first time since the 2016 presidential primaries. Based on how the media portrayed the polls after President Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton later that year, you might expect pollsters to get a pretty disastrous report card.”

“But here’s a stubborn and surprising fact — and one to keep in mind as midterm polls really start rolling in: Over the past two years — meaning in the 2016 general election and then in the various gubernatorial elections and special elections that have taken place in 2017 and 2018 — the accuracy of polls has been pretty much average by historical standards.”

Here’s What’s Going On with the Tightening Generic Ballot

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This piece is only available to Political Wire members.

At the start of the year, Democrats led in the congressional generic ballot polling average by double digits. However, that gap has narrowed to about five points in recent weeks, according to FiveThirtyEight.

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What the Polls Mean at This Point

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With just under six months until the midterm elections and the primary season in full swing, we’re going to start seeing a lot of polls testing general election match ups.

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The AP Plans to Replace Exit Polls

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The Associated Press said that “it will begin conducting an elaborate election voter survey designed to replace the traditional in-person exit poll, which has been criticized in recent years for inaccuracy and failing to keep up with changes in how Americans vote,” the AP reports.

“The new AP VoteCast service, developed with NORC at the University of Chicago, uses a combination of online and telephone surveys conducted four days before Election Day and through the close of polls. In all, AP expects to conduct more than 85,000 interviews with voters for this year’s midterm election survey… That’s far more than the roughly 19,400 conducted by the exit poll in 2014… allowing for a deeper and more accurate understanding of the electorate.”

Why Don’t Democrats Have a Bigger Generic Ballot Lead?

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The following post for members is by G. Elliott Morris of The Crosstab.

Democrats are up seven points in my average of generic ballot polls, but they’ve overperformed by an average of 17 points in federal special elections since 2016.

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A Real-Time Polling Dashboard

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This is great: Civiqs lets you track public opinion on dozens of issues, candidates, and campaigns, so you can see how events affect public opinion in real time.

The dashboard is updated daily with current measures of President Trump’s job approval rating, the 2018 generic House ballot, favorable ratings of the Democratic and Republican parties, attitudes towards gun control, and much more. There are no gaps between polls because polling is done daily. All of the results can be filtered and tabulated by age, race, gender, education, and party identification.

No, Polling Is Not Broken

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Despite the perceived failures in recent high-profile elections, a  new study in Nature Human Behaviour — conducted across 45 countries over the last 75 years — finds that there is no evidence that election polling is any less accurate now than it was in the past. If anything, polling may be becoming more accurate.

Why Trump’s Tax Law Bump Wasn’t as Big as It Seemed

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This piece is only available to Political Wire members.

The latest CNN poll shows President Trump’s approval rate tying its all time low of 35%, but the polling averages don’t show much of a dip at all. In fact, since the beginning of the year, Trump’s approval has bounced back from it’s low mark in December. This has generally been attributed to Republicans passing a tax bill.

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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