04.30.08

Insider Advantage SUCKS

Posted in North Carolina, analysis, poll result tagged , , , , , at 10:31 pm by Elliot

I’m sure that Clinton zombies… er… supporters are using Insider Advantage to somehow say that Clinton is going to MAGICALLY BEAT OBAMA IN NORTH CAROLINA…. the only problem with this is they are a crappy pollster.

It’s either that, or this is an accurate projection of what happened:

CLINTON WINS IOWA

IT’S A TIGHT RACE IN ALABAMA

OBAMA ONLY GETS 40% IN SOUTH CAROLINA

TIGHT RACE IN MISSISSIPPI

CLINTON SCORES 20% OF AFRICAN AMERICAN VOTE IN PENNSYLVANIA

The real funny thing about this, is that whenever IA has erred, it’s been in Hillary Clinton’s favor (they said that it would be 52-38 in Virginia for Obama, it was 64-35, underestimating Obama’s total by 12 points; in South Carolina, Obama was supposed to get 41% of the vote, he got 55%; in Alabama he was supposed to get only 45% of the vote, he got 56% of the vote. What’s really funny is that they say that they’re “America’s most accurate non-partisan pollster”. Really? You could’ve fooled me…

Insider Advantage has never been able to get their totals right, of course that won’t stop the Hillzombies from bragging, which is fine by me, because now Hillary Clinton will get a taste of what raised expectations are like.

UPDATE by X Stryker: Don’t forget Tennessee. Clinton won TN by 13 points, but IA had her winning by 33.

UPDATE by Elliot: And let’s also remember that IA showed Clinton getting 45% of the African American vote in Tennessee (which would likely be news to a LOT of African Americans)

Shooting Darts (an initial West Virginia delegate projection)

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:18 pm by Elliot

Stryker mentioned that trying to guess what the final outcome in Kentucky is like throwing darts, well that may be true, but in the state of West Virginia there’s almost no doubt as to what the final outcome will be.

CD-01 (6 delegates at stake) Clinton 4, Obama 2
CD-02 (6 delegates at stake) Clinton 4, Obama 2
CD-03 (6 delegates at stake) Clinton 4, Obama 2

At-Large (7 delegates at stake) Clinton 5, Obama 2
PLEOs (3 delegates at stake) Clinton 2, Obama 1

Clinton will easily win 58.35% in all three congressional districts to get a 4-2 split in each one (but she’ll still have a very hard time getting 75% in any of them for a 5-1 split). Furthermore, Clinton will easily get 64.3% of the vote statewide to get a 5-2 at-large split, and will easily get a 2-1 split for PLEOs. The final delegate outcome here is not in question, it will definitely be Clinton 19, Obama 9.

Edit: On further inspection, CD-03 has the possibility of Clinton forcing a 5-1 split, which would turn the delegate counts to Clinton 20, Obama 8, my delegate margin of error is basically +/-1 depending on how CD-03 goes.

Latest Indiana, North Carolina, Kentucky Polls

Posted in Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Presidential Primaries, poll result, presidential primary forecast tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , at 7:51 am by xstryker

Latest Indiana primary polls:

Pollster Date Obama Clinton
PPP 4/27-4/28 43 50
SUSA 4/25-4/27 43 52
Howey-Gauge 4/23-4/24 47 45
ARG 4/23-4/24 45 50
Research 2000 4/21-4/24 48 47
Selzer & Co./Indianapolis Star/WTHR 4/20-4/23 41 38

Howey-Gauge is the new poll here. So, how shall we read this? First, forget ARG, they suck. What you’re left with is three local pollsters showing a close race and big ‘ol SUSA saying Clinton by 9. Is this California all over again? Or is it more like Iowa? If you actually look at what happened in California, Clinton had long been leading by about 10. Suddenly, in the last week, Zogby, Rasmussen, and the Field Poll reported movement to Obama, with Zogby hillariously predicting a double-digit Obama win, Rasmussen showing a very narrow Obama win, and the Field Poll showing a very narrow Clinton win. Meanwhile, ARG showed a 5 point Clinton win, Mason-Dixon showed a 9 point Clinton win, and SUSA showed a 10 point Clinton win. The final result was an 8 point Clinton win. The point is, SUSA wasn’t alone. In Iowa, Selzer & Co.’s turnout model beat all the other pollsters. No pollster is perfect, and SUSA could be right and Selzer wrong, but right now, discounting the ARG poll (they’re garbage), the consensus backs up Selzer. Obama will win Indiana by less than 5%.

UPDATE: I just saw and added the PPP poll, and now this race is impossible to predict. SUSA and PPP agreed in nearby Ohio and got it right. These polls are too contradictory to make a prediction just yet. And weirdly, SUSA predicts Obama slightly leading with both Republicans and Independents, while PPP more sensibly predicts Clinton sightly leading with Republicans and Obama leading with Independents by double digits (52-37). PPP, however, strongly underestimates Obama’s support with African-Americans (73-21). My gut says that they’re both wrong here and that the race is much closer. But I’m waiting for more data before I make a call.

Side note from Elliot: Something about PPP which I don’t buy is that Republicans will make up more of the vote than Independents. I was looking at the exit polls from Mississippi where it seemed pretty obvious that Republicans were purposely meddling in the primary and Independents still outnumbered Republicans (the former had 17% the latter only had 12%). Even though Clinton should still have a lead, I think it’s lower than what PPP is showing.

Latest North Carolina primary polls:

Pollster Date Obama Clinton
SUSA 4/26-4/28 49 44
Rasmussen 4/28 51 37
ARG 4/26-4/27 52 42
PPP 4/26-4/27 51 39
SUSA 4/19-4/21 50 41

What is up with SUSA’s results favoring Clinton? They seem to be more accurate in states where Clinton wins and less accurate in states where Clinton loses (Missouri by far was their worst call). Conversely, PPP is more accurate in Southern states, and Rasmussen backs them up here (and so does ARG, whatever that’s worth). Obama wins North Carolina by 10%-20% with a median of 15%.

Latest Kentucky primary polls:

Pollster Date Obama Clinton
SUSA 4/26-4/28 27 63
SUSA 4/12-4/14 26 62
SUSA 3/28-3/30 29 58

Once you’ve established that someone’s going to win a race by more than 20%, it’s virtually impossible to accurately predict the size of the blowout. Clinton will win by more than 20%. Any prediction or poll beyond that is just throwing darts.

04.29.08

Latest North Carolina Polls – Clinton gets Pennsylvania Bump

Posted in North Carolina, Presidential Primaries, poll result tagged , , , , , , , , , at 4:36 pm by xstryker

Latest North Carolina primary polls:

Pollster Date Obama Clinton
Rasmussen 4/28 51 37
ARG 4/26-4/27 52 42
PPP 4/26-4/27 51 39
SUSA 4/19-4/21 50 41
PPP 4/19-4/20 57 32
ARG 4/14-4/15 52 41
LA Times/Bloomberg 4/10-4/14 47 34
InsiderAdvantage 4/14 51 36
PPP 4/12-4/13 54 34
TelOpinion Research/Civitas (R) 4/9-4/10 45 27
SUSA 4/5-4/7 49 39
PPP 4/5-4/6 54 33
Rasmussen 4/3 56 33

Let’s look at the trending here.

Rasmussen – Obama by 14, down 9 since the beginning of the month.
PPP – Obama by 12, down 13 since the prior week.
ARG – Obama by 10, down 1 since the middle of the month.

Now, undecideds usually break for the leader, so Obama is likely to outperform these numbers by about 3-5%. Also, there still one full week to go. So even though the polls are currently showing an Obama win by 9-16%, I think the actual margin will be in the 15-25% range.

04.28.08

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (NM) Endorses Obama

Posted in Super Delegates, Uncategorized tagged , at 2:24 pm by Elliot

New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman has officially endorsed Barack Obama, giving him another super delegate:

“Our nation faces a daunting number of critical challenges: reasserting America’s leadership in the world, meeting our needs for energy independence, addressing global warming, making healthcare accessible and affordable, positioning our economy to effectively compete globally, and extricating ourselves from the war in Iraq, to name a few.

“To make progress, we must rise above the partisanship and the issues that divide us to find common ground. We must move the country in a dramatically new direction.

“I strongly believe Barack Obama is best positioned to lead the nation in that new direction.”

I’m a native New Mexican, and I’m glad that Sen. Bingaman decided to endorse Obama. We should be reaching an end-game pretty soon.

 

UPDATE by X Stryker: North Carolina Governor Mike Easley has endorsed Hillary, while Representative Ben Chandler of Kentucky has endorsed Barack.

Latest North Carolina and Indiana Polls: Obama by 10 in NC, Clinton by 9 in IN

Posted in Indiana, North Carolina, Presidential Primaries, poll result tagged , , , , , , , , , , , at 12:50 pm by xstryker

Latest Indiana primary polls:

Pollster Date Obama Clinton
SUSA 4/25-4/27 43 52
ARG 4/23-4/24 45 50
Research 2000 4/21-4/24 48 47
Selzer & Co./Indianapolis Star/WTHR 4/20-4/23 41 38
SUSA/Downs Center (RV) 4/14-4/16 50 45
LA Times/Bloomberg 4/10-4/15 40 35
SUSA 4/11-4/13 39 55

Just like the previous race’s SUSA poll showing Clinton up by 18 in PA, this looks like another early outlier from SUSA that is far outside the consensus. I guarantee you the race is closer than this.

Latest North Carolina primary polls:

Pollster Date Obama Clinton
ARG 4/26-4/27 52 42
SUSA 4/19-4/21 50 41
PPP 4/19-4/20 57 32
ARG 4/14-4/15 52 41

Very little change from the previous ARG poll. ARG’s final Pennsylvania poll had Clinton winning by 16, a difference of 7% from the actual result in Clinton’s favor. The same Clinton-favoring pattern has emerged with ARG’s North Carolina results, and thus I expect Obama’s numbers to be considerably better than ARG indicates. Expect Clinton supporters to point out how far off PPP was in Pennsylvania; however, PPP was very accurate in Ohio and Texas, and outperformed its peers in Wisconsin and South Carolina. North Carolina is their backyard, so they should be the yardstick pollster in this race.

All in all, good numbers for Hillary today, but neither fits very well with prior data. Expect tomorrow’s round of polling to be more conclusive. I’m withholding my predictions until then.

04.27.08

North Carolina: Clinton is not going to get single digits here

Posted in North Carolina, Presidential Primaries, analysis tagged , , , , , , at 3:23 pm by Elliot

You know something, I’ve found it incredibly interesting that Clinton and Obama supporters alike have been under the misguided impression that somehow Hillary Clinton will be able to do in North Carolina what Obama did in Pennsylvania (be able to close the gap significantly). The reason I find it interesting is because if they would listen to themselves, they’d understand that the reason why Obama was able to close the gap, despite Clinton controlling the political machine in the state is because he outspent Clinton 3-1 there.

First of all, I want to get this out of the way: even if you take Clinton at her word over the $10M haul in a day, if you assume that before Pennsylvania’s primary, Obama and Clinton were raising the same average amount per day as in March (about $1.3M for Obama and $622K for Clinton), that would mean that Obama would’ve raised about $27.3M and Clinton would’ve raised about $13M. Let’s say that Clinton raised $10M that day, and Obama was only able to raise the same average as he had in March ($1.3M) that would mean Obama would be at $28.6M and Clinton would be at $23M. Let’s also say that Clinton, for the rest of the month, raises $1.4M per day (which would basically mean making over twice as much on average as the previous month) and Obama’s average stays the same (which would mean that his fundraising has stalled, which is probably the worst-case scenario), that would mean that Clinton would’ve raised $34.2M for the month, while Obama would’ve raised $39M (so even though Obama has had a stalled fundraising, and Clinton’s fundraising nearly doubled for the month, he still would’ve outraised her by $4.8M). This, by the way, does not take into account that Obama had 5x as much primary cash on hand as Clinton at the beginning of the month.

In North Carolina, Obama has every advantage that Clinton had in Pennsylvania, demographics, a semi-open primary, and the control of local machines. Unlike Obama though, Clinton can’t hope to build up enough of an organization to overcome Obama’s inherent advantages in the state. This becomes obvious when looking at the number of field offices each one has in the state (Obama has thirty-three offices there compared to only eleven offices for Clinton). Even though Clinton getting blown out of the water in North Carolina is probably fatal to her, the fact remains she can’t hope to match his field organization in the state anymore, in fact, it’s pretty obvious that Clinton understands that which is why she’s going for broke in Indiana (Clinton has twenty-eight field offices up and running in Indiana, while Obama only has twenty-six offices). Whatever Obama’s margin in North Carolina will be beside the point if Obama wins Indiana, so Clinton is being forced to put far more effort in Indiana while Obama badly out-organizes her in North Carolina. This might let people understand exactly why I seem so optimistic about North Carolina.

04.25.08

SUSA underestimates Obama’s support in North Carolina (Demographic projection)

Posted in analysis tagged , , , , , at 7:15 pm by Elliot

Yep, you read that title right, Survey USA, probably the best pollster this election season, is probably understating Obama’s support in the state of North Carolina. I’ve been looking at some polling which they’ve done in southern states, and there is a real trend which has emerged, SUSA has fairly dramatically understated Obama’s support there. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this stuff:

Poll released 2/2 (Alabama) SUSA: Obama 49 Clinton 47
Actual result: Obama 56 Clinton 42 (Obama outperformed SUSA’s expectations by 12 points)

Poll released 1/25 (South Carolina) SUSA: Obama 43, Clinton 30, Edwards 24
Actual result: Obama 55, Clinton 27, Edwards 17 (Obama outperformed SUSA’s expectations by 15 points)

SUSA also polled Virginia, and while they were easily the closest to the mark, they still underestimated Obama’s support there by 7 points.

It might seem a bit unfair for me to use South Carolina (considering that no one got it right) but in SUSA’s case, they weren’t really wrong because of their polling method, they were wrong because they screwed up the demographics. SUSA projected that African Americans would make up only 41% of the vote in South Carolina, but in reality, they made up 55% of the vote. The same thing happened with Alabama, SUSA projected that African Americans would make up only 42% of the vote, they made up 51% of the vote.

SUSA wasn’t the only pollster to make this mistake, but there were pollsters who did get a closer demographic projection. In South Carolina, for example, PPP was probably the only pollster to correctly guess that African Americans would make up over 50% of the vote in South Carolina. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that they are based out of North Carolina.

I’ve been working on a voter turnout model to try and figure out what the turnout will be for North Carolina, specifically what the racial demographics will be. Working out a turnout model, I’ve determined what percentage of Kerry’s support was black and what support was white (for example, in Mississippi, over 75% of Kerry’s vote consisted of African Americans, while only 25% consisted of whites). On average, African Americans in southern primaries consisted of 81% of Kerry’s African American support in the state, while whites have made up 132% of Kerry’s white support in the state. Knowing this, the most likely turnout model will be African Americans making up 37%-42% of the primary, while whites will likely make up 45%-50% of the vote (the remaining will be Latinos, Asians, etc.) SUSA shows African Americans making up only 30% of the vote, while whites making up a massive 65% of the vote. PPP, on the other hand, shows African Americans making up 37% of the vote, while whites make up 58% (which, while still a little off for me, are a lot closer to my turnout model)

For this reason, I would probably say that, despite PPP’s lackluster Pennsylvania polling, they are probably the pollster to look at for a better picture than SUSA. This is not to say that SUSA isn’t a worthy poll to look at, and they will be especially valuable in Indiana, but with that in mind I don’t believe they are accurately portraying the North Carolina race.

04.24.08

Latest Indiana Poll: Obama by 1

Posted in Indiana, Presidential Primaries, poll result tagged , , , , , , , , at 11:14 pm by xstryker

Latest Indiana primary polls:

 

Pollster Date Obama Clinton
ARG  4/23-4/24  45  50
Research 2000 4/21-4/24 48 47
Selzer & Co./Indianapolis Star/WTHR 4/20-4/23 41 38
SUSA/Downs Center (RV) 4/14-4/16 50 45
LA Times/Bloomberg 4/10-4/15 40 35
SUSA 4/11-4/13 39 55
ARG 4/1-4/2 44 53
Research 2000 3/31-4/2 46 49
SUSA 3/29-3/31 43 52

As I’ve said previously, Indiana is a toss-up, and an exciting one at that. Hillary’s gained a bit since the last R2K poll (and the SUSA/Downs Center one), probably due to her PA win. However, she is not going to like seeing this race tied – Obama’s numbers steadily improve over time in every state, and he still has a huge money advantage. Clinton’s numbers usually only get short-term bumps from debates, winning races she was expected to win, and silly media distractions like Ayers and Wright. She’ll need to pull some big BS scandal out of her hat to win this one, because complaining about the cancelled debate will work as well as it did in Wisconsin, which is to say it won’t at all.

Hillary’s lead with whites here is only 52% to 43%. Obama needs to improve his numbers with middle-aged voters. Marion County currently stands at 60% to 35% in Obama’s favor – can he crack 70% with a strong campaign?

UPDATE: Added Selzer & Co. poll. It’s more fsvorable to Obama, but the undecideds are much higher and most of the poll was conducted before the Pennsylvania results were known.

UPDATE II: Added ARG which shows Clinton ahead by 5 (which is down from Clinton +9) but then again it’s ARG, so take it for what it’s worth.

Chris Bowers is too much of a pessimist

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:23 pm by Elliot

First of all, I have no problem with anyone keeping track of the delegates from Michigan and Florida, since there is a slim possibility that they could be made an issue. But on the other hand, it is folly to presume that they will naturally be an issue at the convention, as Chris Bowers seems to believe:

With Clinton + Edwards coming within four delegates of Obama, the possibility of a convention fight looms. In order to avoid fights at the credentials committee, rules committee, or floor of the convention, it is important for Obama to secure the as many of the 28 remaining uncommitted delegates from Michigan as possible, and to improve on the delegate projections for states and territories yet to hold nominating contests. It is also important that the remaining superdelegates commit to a candidate, just as almost every primary voter or caucus goer has already had to commit to a candidate. I still don’t see a way for Clinton to pass Obama, short of Edwards moving his delegates to her in a block. Remarkable that Edwards still has an important role to play in the campaign, even at this late date.

First of all, I reject this whole “Edwards + Clinton” nonsense which Bowers pushes, since 10 of Edwards’s remaining delegates are in states which Clinton has bad blood (and in Iowa, there is already a disposition for Edwards supporters to break for Obama). This also means that in South Carolina and Florida, even if Edwards were to specifically endorse Clinton and ask his delegates to back her, there’s a good chance that a number of them would not follow that (one of the things which hasn’t really caught up to a lot of people is that, by far, the activists who were backing Edwards have almost uniformly gone to Obama, that isn’t an accident). Edwards’s delegates should be considered a non-issue, unless there is verifiable proof that Edwards’s delegates are predisposed to supporting Clinton.

Secondly, if Clinton wants a floor fight, then she’ll force a floor fight whether Michigan and Florida are issues or not. This whole idea that moving the goal-post from 2025 to 2205 is somehow going to solve anything is a joke, since there are always reasons to pick a fight. Florida and Michigan, one way or another, will not change the ultimate outcome of this primary, Bowers needs to stop accepting the premise that Michigan and Florida need to be “solved”, they don’t.

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