The Most (and Least) Accurate Polls

As we head into the final stretch of the campaign, we're likely to be inundated by a spate of poll results from all kinds of different organizations, and if, well, everything is any indication, then different pollsters are likely to show very different things about the state of the race in key swing states. There may be no point in trying to make sense of mind-bogglingly contradictory survey results, but in case anyone is interested, I took a look at the polling done in the run-up to the 2010 midterms and constructed a little table on which pollsters came the closest to foretelling the election results in states that are now considered "battleground" territory and which missed the mark.

I measured polling accuracy by looking at the results of the last public poll of each race by each pollster and comparing the margin between the two highest-polling candidates (sometimes the only two candidates) to the eventual winner’s margin of victory over the second-place finisher. If there was more than one poll tied for most or least accurate by this metric, then I compared each candidate’s individual poll position in the survey results with their eventual share of the final vote. This is why PPP is listed as having the most accurate poll of the Florida governor’s race despite the fact that their final pre election poll had Alex Sink (D) leading Rick Scott (R), the eventual victor, 48% to 47%. This was rated "most accurate" notwithstanding Scott’s victory because it underestimated Scott’s eventual share of the vote (48.9%) by only 1.9 percentage points, while overestimating Sink’s vote share (47.7%) by only 0.3 points. The next-most accurate survey of this race was conducted by Rasmussen Reports, which had Scott leading by three points heading into Election Day.

Race	Most Accurate Poll	Least Accurate Poll
Ohio Gov.	Columbus Dispatch*	CNN/Time
Pennsylvania Gov.	Rasmussen Reports	Franklin & Marshall
Florida Gov.	PPP (D)	Suffolk University
Colorado Gov.	CNN/Time	Magellan Strategies (R)
Colorado Sen.	Denver Post/SurveyUSA	McClatchy/Marist
Florida Sen.	Rasmussen Reports	TCPalm.com/Zogby
Iowa Sen.	Des Moines Register	KCCI/Research 2000
Nevada Sen.	Suffolk University	Rasmussen Reports
New Hampshire Sen.	WMUR/UNH	ARG
North Carolina Sen.	PPP (D)	SurveyUSA
Ohio Sen.	PPP (D)*	Suffolk University
Pennsylvania Sen.	Susquehanna	McClatchy/Marist
Wisconsin Sen.	McClatchy/Marist Rasmussen Reports	PPP (D)
Wisconsin Gov.	McClatchy/Marist	Rasmussen Reports Reuters/Ipsos
Nevada Gov.	PPP (D) Suffolk University	CNN/Time
Iowa Gov.	KCCI/Research 2000	Rasmussen Reports
New Mexico Gov.	Daily Kos/PPP (D)	SurveyUSA
Michigan Gov.	EPIC-MRA	Rossman/Team TelCom
New Hampshire Gov.	WMUR/UNH	ARG

*Nailed it! (Poll results conformed exactly to election results.)

Of course, not all these races were as close as the presidential race is this year. The Senate races in Florida, Iowa and New Hampshire, and the gubernatorial elections in Colorado and Michigan, were all blowouts. Take that however you like. Also notice that the above table does not include any data from Virginia, which had neither a U.S. Senate race nor a gubernatorial election in 2010. In the 2009 race for governor there, SurveyUSA was right on the money; its final poll before Election Day showed Bob McDonnell (R) leading his Democratic opponent, Creigh Deeds, by eighteen points 58% to 40%. McDonnell won that election with 59% of the vote to 41% for Deeds. That was three years ago, however, so it may not be worth much.

Finally, there are a handful of states that are assuredly not up for grabs in the presidential election but are experiencing heated U.S. Senate and/or gubernatorial races. For those who are interested, here are my findings on polls of 2010 races in those states.

Race	Most Accurate Poll	Least Accurate Poll
Connecticut Governor	CT Capitol Report/MRG	Suffolk University*
U.S. Senate – Connecticut	PPP (D)	Rasmussen Reports
Maine­ Governor	PineTreePolitics/MECPO	Critical Insights
Massachusetts Governor	Suffolk/7News	Rasmussen Reports
U.S. Senate – Washington	FOX News/POR-Rasmussen	PPP (D)

Obama's Post-Convention Bounce Is Gone

Earlier today, I had an experience I honestly never thought I would have. It involves a former member of Congress and violating the law, but that's not what I wanted to blog about.

If you watched any news show with a panel or round-table discussion in the past week and a half, then you've probably heard something about the Obama-Biden ticket getting a "bounce" in the polls following a hugely successful Democratic National Convention. Well, as of today, we can definitively state that that post-convention bounce is g-o-n-e.

As of today, Obama is back to his pre-convention poll positions in both the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls. (As of right now, Gallup and Rasmussen are the only two pollsters conducting tracking surveys of the pesidential race and publicizing the results.) The president leads Mitt Romney by one point, 47%-46%, in the Gallup poll and trails him by two, 45%-47%, in the Rasmussen poll. That's exactly what these two polls showed two weeks ago, right as the Dems were starting their convention in Charlotte.

Beyond these national poll numbers, the news today was mixed: Rasmussen also published the results of a survey showing Romney up two points on Obama in Colorado, 47%-45%, which is not good news for the president, who won the Centennial State by nine points in 2008. Gravis Marketing, which has been regularly polling voters in select swing states more frequently than any other independent pollster since the conventions, has Romney leading Obama by a statistically insignificant point in Florida, 48% to 47%. More significant than that, perhaps, is that their poll shows the U.S. Senate race there to be a dead heat, with Rep. Connie Mack (R., Fla.) leading Sen. Bill Nelson (D) by one point, 43%-42%. (This is one race that may hinge on which party's presidential candidate carries the state.)

The good news for Obama came from a Washington Post poll that gave him an eight-point lead in Virginia and an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that shows him leading Mitt Romney by five nationally (50%-45%). The Virginia results are especially stunning--and suspicious--as they are out of line with what every other poll of the race in that state has shown. Rare is the case when such a salient outlier is correct, but the same could be said about the Gravis Marketing survey that gave Romney a five-point lead over Obama, 49%-44%, in Virginia last week.

In my view, two states have been severely underpolled in the last week: Iowa and Wisconsin. Only once in the last six presidential elections has a Republican ticket carried either of these states, but the most recent polling data we have shows that they are both very much in play this election cycle. Now that the effects of the Democratic National Convention have worn off--at least as far as polls reflect--survey results from these and other swing states should be considered more accurate. Ordinarily I advise people with strong preferences in an election to avoid fixating on poll numbers, but from this point forward, I think it's worth it.

The "TEA Party"/"Washington Insider" Overlap

For nearly four years now the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party has been a force in American politics. Granted, in its cradle, it was barely a ripple in a sea of money, incumbents, special interests and power elites, but by 2010 it grown into a massive tidal wave that swept out incumbents of both parties, in national, state and local races, in primary and general elections.

After such a showing in the 2010 election cycle, whatever modest activity the TEA Party could generate in the off-year elections of 2011 would seem to be a letdown, but the grassroots activists and deep-pocketed donors who joined forces in '10 really spent much of last year gearing up for the next big round of elections in 2012, when they would get the opportunity to show their strength in a presidential election.

No candidate for president this year was able to win over TEA Partiers en masse (not even Ron Paul, the so-called "godfather" of the movement), but the TEA Party was able to score a historic win in arguably the second-most important election this year when they helped Wisconsin Gov. and champion of the taxpayer Scott Walker (R) survive a recall election, the first governor in U.S. history to pull off such a feat, and they proved critical to the upset victories of Nebraska State Sen. Deb Fischer, Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock and former Texas Solicitor Gen. Ted Cruz in their respective U.S. Senate primaries this year. In Indiana, certainly, anti-Washington sentiment played a role in the downfall of six-term Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) in May and a smattering of other entrenched incumbents in congressional races two years ago. Disdain for politicians who have been in Congress so long that they succumb to that awful mentality that manifests itself in the form of reckless deficit spending, backroom deal-making and that insufferable I-know-best hautere has fueled the TEA Party since its genesis in the Winter of '08-'09. The tactics of branding a candidate with the epithet of "Washington insider" and campaigning as an "outsider" predate the TEA Party movement but have proven effective in advancing so-called "TEA Party candidates".

Of course, every once in a while, we are reminded that there is some crossover between Washington "insiders" and the TEA Party. There are constant reminders, such as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and the aforementioned Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), as well as various TEA-Party-affiliated groups like FreedomWorks founded and/or run by former members of Congress. Take last night's primary election results, for example: Four states held primary elections yesterday: Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washington. In two--Michigan and Missouri--Republicans chose their candidates to take on vulnerable Democratic incumbents in hotly contested Senate races (Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) is also up for re-election this year but faces a considerably less daunting challenge.), and in both, they nominated candidates who had spent over a decade in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In Michigan, former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, whose 2010 bid for governor had floundered, handily defeated a slew of weaker candidates and will take on two-term Sen. Debbie Stabenow in the general election. Hoekstra, a Dutch immigrant and former Herman Miller executive, represented Michigan's 2nd congressional district (a shard of the lower peninsula along Lake Michigan's eastern shore) for eighteen years. Last month, some super PAC called Prosperity for Michigan released an ad attacking Hoekstra for "voting for millions in earmarks, raising his own pay, adding trillions to the debt" and "raising the debt ceiling repeatedly." This stupid waste of money failed to propel the group's favored candidate, Clark Durant, to victory in the primary and may have just weakened Hoekstra's chances of winning the Senate seat.

Republicans are better positioned to knock off Sen. Claire McCaskill in Missouri. McCaskill won her seat by a razor-thin margin in 2006 and is arguably the most vulnerable U.S. senator running for re-election this year, so it's no surprise there was a spirited contest in the GOP primary. The TEA Party splintered in that race, and the result was victory for Rep. Todd Akin, who has represented Missouri's 2nd congressional district (west of St. Louis) since 2001. (Interesting factoid: Akin's predecessor in the House, Jim Talent, was elected to the U.S. Senate and lost his re-election bid to McCaskill.) Akin's win came as a disappointment to supporters of former Missouri State Treasurer Sarah Steelman, who were hoping for a younger, more attractive nominee, and the family of businessman John Brunner, who spent over $7 million of his own personal fortune on his failed campaign. The latest polls out of the Show Me State have Akin leading McCaskill, albeit within their margins of error.

So, is being a "Washington insider" not the political liability it used to be? Of course not, but this week's primaries show that a candidate can convince voters he's the right choice to take on an entrenched incumbent senator and really change Washington, even if he's been in Washington just as long as--or, in the cases of Hoekstra and Akin, longer than--his opponent...

Pols & Polls: Scott Walker, John Kasich, Rick Scott are "No longer the least popular people in politics" - The Washington Post

Yesterday, Aaron Blake reported for the Washington Post on a cluster of recent polls from what he called "the nine crucial swing states The Fix has identified as key to the 2012 election". Here's the headline: Walker, Kasich and Scott--all first-term Republican governors--have seen their poll numbers improve after  voters in Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida, respectively, turned on them for administering the harsh medicine necessary to improve their states' business climates and get their fiscal houses in order. Kasich and Scott are each at 41% job approval--not stellar, but a significant rebound from where they were a year ago--and Walker, who survived a recall election earlier this month, is enjoying a 51% approval rating, according to Marquette University.

A little over a year ago, I blogged about how several newly elected GOP govs, including Walker, Kasich and Scott, were having a rough go of it with a seemingly large chunk of the voters who had just elected them. I pointed out that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels had also drawn the ire of voters during his first couple years in office, but once the effects of his policies were felt, his poll numbers turned around; he was handily reelected in 2008 and is now one of the most popular governors in the country.

Blake may have buried the lead, however, as his post also lists The Fix's latest "Line" of gubernatorial races (a countdown of the five governorships most likely to change parties this year). Every race on the Line is in a state with a Democratic governor, meaning there is virtually no chance of Democrats winning the governor's mansion in a state with a Republican gov this year, but Republicans are poised to flip a handful of governorships in states where Democrats are retiring.

Good News for Wisconsin

This past Tuesday, Democratic primary voters in Wisconsin picked their candidates to challenge Republican Gov. Scott Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and four state senators who are facing recalls next month. As expected,  Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who lost the 2010 gubernatorial election to Walker, won the right to challenge him in a rematch. The Democrats also nominated firefighter-turned-union boss Mahlon Mitchell to take on Kleefisch and several other union puppets to run for the state senate.

The good news for the Democrats is that they've now got the primary behind them and can move forward with a unified front. The bad news is that Walker has a huge fundraising advantage over Barrett, and the polls don't indicate that the Dems will be celebrating any time soon. (By "polls", I mean both the primary election results and the results of the latest survey of Wisconsin voters.) Despite the lack of any serious primary challengers to Walker or the other GOP incumbents, voter turnout in the Republican primary on Tuesday outnumbered turnout in the Democratic primary. The huge turnout even surprised Governor Walker, who received more votes than Barrett and Falk combined. Walker may have also been pleasantly surprised by the results of a Rasmussen Reports survey of 500 Likely Voters released Thursday that showed him leading Barrett by five points, 50 to 45 percent. That's quite a turnaround from last month, when another Rasmussen survey found that 52% in Wisconsin supported the effort to recall the Governor.

Wisconsin is also one of many states with a very contentious Senate race this year, and there's good news for the GOP there as well. Rasmussen Reports has former Gov. and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson leading Rep. Tammy Baldwin, who's running unopposed in the Democratic primary, by a stunning twelve points, 50% to 38%. That dwarfs the statistically insignificant two-point lead former Rep. Mark Neumann holds over Baldwin, who leads Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald by four in the same poll. The bad news is that the Senate primary isn't until August 14th.

Democrats Fall Short in Wisconsin Recall Effort

Click here to read Sean Trende's excellent write-up on the results of yesterday's recall elections in Wisconsin.
Dan Cantanese also reported on the story for POLITICO.