Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts

Friday, November 16, 2012

2012 Electoral College Wrap Up, Part 2

FHQ will have much more on this later, but we wanted to get the final results through the lens of our map and the Electoral College Spectrum up before too much time passed.



The 2012 Electoral College Spectrum1
HI-4
(7)2
IL-20
(163)
IA-6
(243)
IN-11
(154)
KS-6
(59)
VT-3
(10)
ME-4
(167)
PA-20
(263)
SC-9
(143)
AL-9
(53)
RI-4
(14)
WA-12
(179)
CO-93
(272/275)
MS-6
(134)
KY-8
(44)
NY-29
(43)
OR-7
(186)
VA-13
(285/266)
AK-3
(128)
NE-5
(36)
MD-10
(53)
NM-5
(191)
OH-18
(303/253)
MT-3
(125)
AR-6
(31)
MA-11
(64)
MI-16
(207)
FL-29
(332/235)
TX-38
(122)
WV-5
(25)
CA-55
(119)
MN-10
(217)
NC-15
(347/206)
LA-8
(84)
ID-4
(20)
DE-3
(122)
WI-10
(227)
GA-16
(191)
SD-3
(76)
OK-7
(16)
CT-7
(129)
NV-6
(233)
MO-10
(175)
ND-3
(73)
WY-3
(9)
NJ-14
(143)
NH-4
(237)
AZ-11
(165)
TN-11
(70)
UT-6
(6)
1Follow the link for a detailed explanation on how to read the Electoral College Spectrum.

2The numbers in the parentheses refer to the number of electoral votes a candidate would have if he won all the states ranked prior to that state. If, for example, Romney had won all the states up to and including Colorado (all Obama's toss up states), he would have gained 275 electoral votes. Romney's numbers are only totaled through the states he would have needed in order to get to 270. In those cases, Obama's number is on the left and Romney's is on the right in italics.


3
Colorado is the state where Obama crossed the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidential election. That line is referred to as the victory line.

Final FHQ projection.



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Monday, November 12, 2012

2012 Electoral College Wrap Up, Part 1

This is the first part in a two part look at how FHQ's weighted average stacked up in examining the 2012 electoral college. We'll first take a global look at FHQ in the context of the other models out there. Part two will take a micro view of the FHQ model in relation to the electoral college results.  

Now that we are nearly a week removed from the re-election of President Obama, FHQ thought it would circle back around and take a look back at how we did in examining the state of play within the electoral college. The answer is not too bad. What was 49 out of 51 correct state-level projections based on our simple weighted average in 2008 morphed into a perfect 51 out of 51 score in 2012.

FHQ was not alone. Drew Linzer (Emory) at Votamatic and Simon Jackman (Stanford) blogging for the Huffington Post and Sam Wang (Princeton) at the Princeton Election Consortium all were either right on or in Wang's case cautiously calling a tie in Florida. [And truth be told, Florida was a tie, but one that consistently -- around FHQ anyway -- ever so slightly favored the president. Again, we're talking about a decreasing fraction of a point as election day approached.] Oh, and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame pegged it at 332-206, too. This was a great thing for the so-called "quants".

Despite that, there are a couple of notes that are floating around out there and are worth mentioning.

1) FHQ won't take any victory laps because of this.1 Don't get me wrong. It is nice to be a dart and not, say, the board itself, but this actually has very little to do with what FHQ was doing under the hood -- or what any of the above folks were doing, for that matter. If we were all making sausage, then FHQ and the others were merely turning the crank on our various sausage making apparati. The filling -- the polls -- was what really nailed the election projection on the state level.2 Drew first published his model in June. FHQ followed in July. The polls, even through our different lenses. told the story then. 332-206. Over the course of the summer and into the fall, that changed very little. For FHQ, Florida got as close as 0.04 points in favor of the president, but then took a turn back toward Obama. That was it. The Sunshine state was always the only state that ever truly threatened to jump what FHQ calls the partisan line into the Romney group of states. The polls were not only right on the money, but they were overall, pretty consistent. Jim Campbell's argument/observation that the September polls are a better predictor of November election outcomes came to pass. What we got in October was just noise before state-level polling reverted or began reverting to those post-convention, pre-October numbers.

As FHQ asked throughout October, were we witnessing a movement toward Romney in the polls or the typical sort of narrowing (Campbell 2008) that tends to mark the late campaign polls. The latter may not have been the true answer but it was closer than simply talking about Romney's momentum. Tom Holbrook's (1996) equilibrium theory of candidate support through the polls seems to have been the correct lens through which to view the dynamics of the race as election day drew nearer.

Score this one for the polls, then.

2) But where does that leave the models? After all, the sausage maker has some utility, too. Well, FHQ's natural inclination is to piggyback on the above point and state the obvious. The polls were right on and you didn't really need a statistical model -- complex or otherwise -- to accurately project the electoral college. In true self-deprecating fashion (Bear with me. I'll get there.) -- something FHQ is good at -- our little ol' weighted average was accurate enough to get all but two states right in 2008 and every last one in 2012. Again, it was the polls. In fact, if you removed the weighting and took the raw average of all the publicly available polls released on and before election day in all of 2012 you would come up with the same thing: 332-206. As I told Drew over the summer in a brief Twitter exchange, my hope was at that point just after the conventions that the race would tighten up so that we could, in fact, get a true measure of the utility of the more complex statistical models projecting the electoral college. As it stood then -- and how it ended up even with some narrowing -- there was a lot of overlap between the Bayesian models and the more pedestrian averages.

Mind you, I'm not saying that there is no place for these models. Boy, is there. I'm with John Sides on this one: The more models we have, the better off we all are on this sort of thing. Rather, my point is to suggest that the simple averages are a decent baseline. As November 6 approached and the FHQ numbers did not budge in the face of changing information following the Denver debate, I began to think of the FHQ weighted average like the Gary Jacobson measure of congressional candidate quality. Now sure, there have been herculean efforts littering the political science literature to construct multi-point indices of candidate quality, but they don't often perform all that better than Jacobson's simple test. "Has challenger/candidate X held elective office?" That simple, binary variable explains most of the variation in the levels of success that various candidates -- whether challenging an incumbent or vying for an open seat -- have enjoyed across a great number of elections. The multi-point indices only slightly improve the explanatory power.

Now, lord knows, I'm not trying to draw definitive comparisons between the work here at FHQ and Jacobson's oft-cited body of work. Are there parallels? Yes, and I'll leave it at that. Sometimes the best models are the simplest ones. Parsimony counts and to some extent that is what FHQ provides with these electoral college analyses. And again, the reason I was hoping that the polls would tighten as we got closer to election day was to demonstrate just exactly how much better the more complex models were. My expectation was that there would be a noticeable difference between the two. But there wasn't; not in terms of projecting which states would go to which candidates. By other measures, the more complex models wiped the floor with FHQ (as, admittedly, they should have).3

--
The tie that binds all of these models -- if you really want to call the pre-algebra that FHQ does a model -- is a reliance on polling. And that raises a different question as we shift from reviewing 2012 to looking at 2016 and beyond. The quants "won" this one. But it was not without a wide-ranging -- and fruitful, I think -- discussion about the accuracy of polling. The one question that will continue to be worth asking is whether the seemingly perpetually dropping rates of response to public opinion polls continue to drop and what impact that will have. If that continues, then there would almost certainly have to be a tipping point where phone-based polls begin to more consistently miss the mark. The good news moving forward is that the online polls -- whether YouGov, or Google Consumer Surveys or Angus-Reid -- performed quite well in 2012; offering a ray of hope for something beyond phone polls in a time when cell phones are hard to reach and landlines are disappearing.

Still, we are now at a point where pollsters are talking about the "art of polling" as a means of differentiating from other pollsters instead of the overarching science of polling. That has implications. If all pollsters guess wrong about the underlying demographics of the electorate, all the polls are wrong.  Of course, the incentive structure is such that pollsters want to find something of a niche that not only separates them from the competition to some extent but helps them crack the code of the true demographic breakdown of the electorate. [Then they can all herd at the end.]

The bottom line remains: these projections are only as good as the polling that serves as the sausage filling. If garbage goes in, then garbage is more likely to come out. On the other hand, if the polling is accurate, then so too are the projections.

--
1 I won't take any victory laps, but I will extend to all of those who have been both loyal and happenstance readers alike a very sincere thank you for spending some or all of election season with us. And yeah, that stretches back to late 2010. Thank you.

2 This is something Harry Enten of the Guardian mentioned via Twitter on Saturday and AAOPR more or less confirmed today.

3 One factor that should be noted here that may separate FHQ from the more involved models is polling variability. 2008 was witness to a great deal of polling variability. The margins in that open seat presidential election jumped around quite a bit more than in 2012 when an incumbent was involved. 2016, in some respects is shaping up as a repeat of 2008. That is even more true if both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden pass on runs for the Democratic nomination. Both races would be -- at least from our vantage point here three years out -- wide open and influence the polling that is conducted across firms and across states. Yet, even with that unique situation, FHQ lagged just one correctly predicted state -- North Carolina -- behind FiveThirtyEight.



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Thursday, November 8, 2012

332-206



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Tuesday, November 6, 2012

2012 Election Night Live Blog

12:30am: Waiting on speeches from the candidates and "537 votes close" Florida to wrap this thing up.

12:11am: Virginia to Obama.



12:00am: Alaska to Romney.



11:49: Obama wins Colorado.



11:43pm: Nevada to Obama.



11:17pm: Missouri to Romney.



11:16pm: Networks start calling Ohio for Obama. That's all folks.



11:15pm: Oregon is Obama's.



11:10pm: Iowa to Obama.



11:04pm: North Carolina held out this long. As I said earlier, the longer the Tarheel state played out -- no matter who won -- the better it would be for the president.



11:00pm: California, Hawaii and Washington are all Obama states as we hit the West Coast. Idaho is Romney territory.



10:50pm: Minnesota to Obama. Another Lean Obama domino falls toward the president.



10:42pm: Arizona to Romney according to NBC. Montana has moved that way too. New Mexico is blue.



10:00pm: And Utah slips into the Romney column.



9:52pm: New Hampshire to Obama. The path is squeezing down to nothing.



9:39pm: Pennsylvania is also big. The paths to 270 are increasing for Obama; decreasing for Romney. Romney is going to need to carry North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Ohio and either Iowa or Colorado to take this.



9:31pm: Wisconsin to Obama is a biggie.


9:00pm: That Michigan call is pretty big.
Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Texas all are in for Romney.

New York, New Jersey, and Michigan all go to Obama.



8:41pm: Alabama is Romney's.



8:31pm: Arkansas and Tennessee move into the Republican column.



8:14pm: Georgia to Romney.



8:00pm: Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Illinois Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine (3) and Rhode Island all go to Obama at the 8pm hour. Oklahoma goes to Romney. Obama 64, Romney 40.



7:41pm: South Carolina to Romney. Romney 33, Obama 3.



7:30pm: West Virginia is in Romney's column as the 7:30 states close. I'll take this opportunity to remind everyone that it was just a few cycles ago that the Mountain state was reliably Democratic.



7:23pm: Indiana to Romney. My, what a difference four year makes. Regression to the mean in the Hoosier state.



7:02pm: Kentucky to Romney. Vermont to Obama. Just like four years ago. ...and every year before that.



7:00pm: Here we go.




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What to Watch for Election Night

Oh no, not another one of these guides.

Yeah, I know. They're a dime a dozen at this point.

However, FHQ did want to reiterate a point we made recently. Call it a one state guide to the early part of election night.


This one hinges on how things go in the early going in North Carolina. The Tarheel state is a state that Mitt Romney should win. That isn't what this concerns. Instead, we should be looking at how early and how comfortable the networks are in calling North Carolina. If a call is able to made early and it is a 2-3 point margin for Romney, then the governor may be overperforming the polls there and perhaps -- perhaps -- elsewhere. But there are two other possibilities that if we extrapolate from the North Caroline situation, could have implications.

  1. If Romney outperforms the polls by more than 5 points and a call is made very early/quickly in the Tarheel state, then we may have some early evidence that there is in fact a tide behind the Republican candidate.
  2. If, however, North Carolina drags out into the night in a manner approaching what happened in the state four years ago, then that may alternatively bode well for the president. 
No, this is not a definitive guide. And yes, FHQ is well aware of the fact that idiosyncrasies within one state may prevent generalizing to other states. It is also true that the campaigns have both backed off just a little in the last week here in the Old North state. Yet, North Carolina is something of an early signal in this presidential election. Obviously, Virginia closes its polls early too and there may be indications there as well. But Virginia is a little more competitive than North Carolina and likely won't be able to be called as quickly.



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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

If Virginia is tied, Obama wins1

Despite the fact that the FHQ weighted average formula does not reflect it, I am sympathetic to the notion of the state of Virginia being if not tied, then very close to it at the moment. As FHQ has mentioned over the last several days the polling in the Old Dominion has been back and forth in the time since the first debate in Denver.

But if we are talking electoral strategies, Virginia being the closest state on November 6 translates into an Obama reelection considering the order of states that has been established based not only on historical precedent but also via state level polling throughout 2012. If the partisan line -- the line separating both candidates' shares of states -- is drawn on the Obama side of Virginia (see the Electoral College Spectrum below), then that is enough to get Governor Romney to 257 electoral votes, but pushes Iowa, Ohio and New Hampshire into the president's column and additionally hands him victory with 281 electoral votes.

The Electoral College Spectrum1
VT-3
(6)2
WA-12
(158)
NH-4
(257)
MT-3
(159)
MS-6
(58)
HI-4
(10)
NJ-14
(172)
OH-183
(275/281)
GA-16
(156)
KY-8
(52)
RI-4
(14)
CT-7
(179)
IA-6
(281/263)
SD-3
(140)
AL-9
(44)
NY-29
(43)
NM-5
(184)
VA-13
(294/257)
IN-11
(137)
KS-6
(35)
MD-10
(53)
MN-10
(194)
CO-9
(303/244)
SC-9
(126)
AR-6
(29)
IL-20
(73)
OR-7
(201)
FL-29
(332/235)
NE-5
(117)
AK-3
(23)
MA-11
(84)
PA-20
(221)
NC-15
(206)
ND-3
(112)
OK-7
(20)
CA-55
(139)
MI-16
(237)
AZ-11
(191)
TX-38
(109)
ID-4
(13)
DE-3
(142)
WI-10
(247)
MO-10
(180)
WV-5
(71)
WY-3
(9)
ME-4
(146)
NV-6
(253)
TN-11
(170)
LA-8
(66)
UT-6
(6)
1 Follow the link for a detailed explanation on how to read the Electoral College Spectrum.

2 The numbers in the parentheses refer to the number of electoral votes a candidate would have if he won all the states ranked prior to that state. If, for example, Romney won all the states up to and including Ohio (all Obama's toss up states plus Ohio), he would have 281 electoral votes. Romney's numbers are only totaled through the states he would need in order to get to 270. In those cases, Obama's number is on the left and Romney's is on the right in italics.

3 Ohio
 is the state where Obama crosses the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidential election. That line is referred to as the victory line.

Now, the obvious response here is, "Well, sure, but how good are the polls or a [weighted] average of them at accurately predicting the order of states (based on margin) on election day?" The answer is pretty good and especially good in the case of toss up states. That latter point is a function of the fact that the toss up states are the most polled states more often than not. [There is some variation within toss up states based on how many electoral votes each has and thus their likelihood of altering the outcome of the election.]

Where this potentially breaks down is when states are very closely jumbled together as it appears some or are now in 2012 or when there is late-breaking but insufficient information to predict a swing toward one candidate or another. Looking back four years ago, for instance, the FHQ averages correctly identified that Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina were a distinct cluster (and all on the McCain side of the partisan line), but did not get the election day order right. The best example of a state where late information changed the positioning in the order is Nevada, where signs late in the race four years ago pointed to a wider Obama margin, but there was not enough data to move the averages enough to reflect the reality on the ground (...though the Silver state did move out of the toss up category in the very last election day map).

All this is to say that the order of states is pretty well baked in two weeks out from election day. Given the information we have gathered to this point in the race, if Virginia is tied or if Romney wins the commonwealth by one vote, then it will not be enough to get him north of 270 in the electoral vote tally. However, if the post-Denver compression of the average margins continues it could -- could -- disrupt the tiers of states that have formed. Right now there is a very clear Virginia/Colorado/Florida tier (Tier 1), a New Hampshire/Ohio/Iowa tier (Tier 2) and a Wisconsin/Nevada tier (Tier 3). If Tier 1 leans to Romney and Tier 3 leans to Obama, then the next two weeks in New Hampshire, Ohio and Iowa will be a lot of fun.

...or something less than fun to anyone who is not counting electoral votes.

--
1 If the election was held today.


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Monday, October 22, 2012

2012 Debates: Third Presidential Debate (Foreign Policy)

Tonight's third and final presidential debate will get underway at 9pm from Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. This will be the first debate featuring a sit down format (like the vice presidential debate) and will focus on foreign policy issues. Bob Schieffer of CBS News will moderate and has chosen the following topic areas to cover this evening:
  • America's role in the world
  • Our longest war - Afghanistan and Pakistan
  • Red Lines - Israel and Iran
  • The Changing Middle East and the New Face of Terrorism - I
  • The Changing Middle East and the New Face of Terrorism - II
  • The Rise of China and Tomorrow's World
The format tonight is similar to the first debate in that a broad question will be asked, the candidates will have two minutes each to respond and then the discussion will continue for the remainder of the 15 minute block set aside for each "pod". Mr. Schieffer will have the opportunity to follow up as Martha Raddatz did in the vice presidential debate. Jim Lehrer had that same power in the first debate as well, but gave the candidates more latitude.

The same rules apply as last week. Feel free to weigh in with comments and other observations in comments section. I'll pop over periodically respond, but I'll be most active on Twitter (@FHQ). Feel free to follow along there using the hashtag #fhqdebate.


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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

2012 Debates: Second Presidential Debate

Tonight's second presidential debate kicks off at 9pm (EST) from Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. This debate will be the sole debate to utilize a town hall format and will be hosted by CNN's Candy Crowley. It really isn't any mystery as to what to look for tonight. First of all, Crowley has bent the rules somewhat and will be asking follow up questions once the undecided voters chosen by Gallup have had their chance to pose a question. Beyond that change, all eyes are on the president following his lackluster performance in Denver almost two weeks ago and how each candidate will fare in the town hall format.

The same rules apply as last week. Feel free to weigh in with comments and other observations in comments section. I'll pop over periodically respond, but I'll be most active on Twitter (@FHQ). Feel free to follow along there using the hashtag #fhqdebate.



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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

2012 Debates: 1st Presidential Debate Open Thread

Tonight's debate from the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado will focus on issues from the domestic front. The forum will be divided into six 15 minute segments with pre-defined topic areas (the economy for three segments, health care, the role of government and governing) chosen by moderator Jim Lehrer.

Things kick off at 9:00pm, but feel free to weigh in with thoughts and other comments on what you are expecting and what is happening in real time in the comments section below. You can also follow along on Twitter by using the #fhqdebate hashtag.


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The Links (10/3/12): 2012 Debate Season

A couple of things to set the proper context for tonight's opening to debate season:

1) Tom Holbrook, indispensable as always, on the (limited) impact of debates over time.

1a) John Sides and Jon Bernstein also throw cold water on the idea of debates as game changing events in the campaign.

2) Emma Roller at NPR has another take.

[Eh, I'll side with the political scientist on this one.]

3) Alex Speigel had a nice story on question dodging in debates on Morning Edition this morning.

4) If you have the time before the debate tonight, the PBS documentary, Debating Our Destiny, is always a worthwhile view.

NOTE: FHQ will try to embed a Twitter conversation in a post for the debate this evening. I'll be most active over there, but will try to pull double duty and respond to any comments that may come up over here in response. If you are on Twitter either reply directly to one of my tweets and/or use the #fhqdebate hashtag to insure that your comment/response is included in the feed.


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Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Ohio Arm of Obama Campaign Gets Involved in Battle Over New Election Law

Jim Provance at The (Toledo) Blade is reporting that the state director of the Obama administration's reelection effort in Ohio, Greg Schultz, is mobilizing supporters against the recently passed changes to the Buckeye state's election law. Ohio Democrats' initial efforts to put the issue of the elections changes on the ballot were rebuffed due to inaccuracies in the petition they submitted. Their do-over simplified the petition seeking to overturn not parts of the new law but instead the law in its entirety. That includes the portion of the legislation that shifted the Ohio primary from the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in May.

This is all very interesting because their are competing strategic interests involved here.
1. The Obama administration -- or at least the president's reelection campaign -- is concerned that the new restrictions on early and absentee voting will disproportionately impact Obama voters in the general election. And in a swing state like Ohio in an election that looks to be -- from our view of things at the end of August 2011 -- close, every vote counts.

2. However, the Obama folks are playing with fire here to some extent as well. Many are talking about how the Republican nomination race could stretch into May or June (or to a brokered convention), but that is not a certainty at this point in time. If Romney or Perry can wrap up the nomination earlier than that May to June window -- say toward the end of April when a host of northeastern states will hold a regional primary -- an Ohio primary back in March puts the state into the window of decisiveness. That also potentially puts Ohio into a competitive campaign environment in which Perry and Romney energize and mobilize a great many Republican voters who are apt to stick with the party in the general election.

The Democratic nomination race from 2008 is a perfect example of this. The battle for the right to be the Democratic nominee impacted registration efforts in suddenly relevant states like North Carolina and Indiana -- two typically red states that Obama later carried in the general election by narrow margins. Now this could happen to Ohio in 2012 whether the primary is in March or May, but it is more likely within the window of decisiveness in March as opposed to May.

Now, the flip side of this is that a protracted or semi-protracted Republican nomination race will veer off into Carter-Kennedy territory as opposed to a repeat of the Obama-Clinton race. If Perry vs. Romney turns, to borrow a word from the Texas governor, ugly, that divisiveness could impact the party's chances in the general election. That angle is not getting much play in the political press at the moment, but it represents a very fine line in any evenly-matched or competitive nomination race: When does the balance tip from positive energy within the Republican electorate to discontent among two Republican camps? We are an eternity away from gathering an answer to that question, but it is worth throwing out there as this nomination race continues to develop.
The Obama campaign appears to be signaling that the potential problems in the general election from supporters lacking a certain ease of voting is a greater problem than the unknown of what the Republican nomination process may produce -- whether in terms of a candidate or a unified/divided Republican Party.


Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The 2012 Candidates: Obama's In

Well, it was bound to happen at some point.


Add President Obama to the list of candidates vying for the White House in 2012. And though he may have to do it again, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) once again reaffirmed his plans not to seek the Republican nomination the week before last. Obama is now officially in -- the only Democrat -- while no Republicans have officially jumped beyond the exploratory committee level.

Democrats:
Barack Obama (announced: 4/4/11)

Republicans:
Michelle Bachmann
Haley Barbour
John Bolton
Jeb Bush
Herman Cain (exploratory: 1/12/11)
Chris Christie
Mitch Daniels
Jim DeMint (3/24/11)
Newt Gingrich (exploratory: 3/4/11)
Rudy Giuliani
Mike Huckabee
Jon Huntsman
Bobby Jindal
Gary Johnson
Sarah Palin
George Pataki
Ron Paul
Tim Pawlenty (exploratory: 3/21/11)
Mike Pence (1/27/11)
Rick Perry
Buddy Roemer (exploratory: 3/3/11)
Mitt Romney
Rick Santorum
John Thune (2/22/11)



Saturday, July 31, 2010

Obama v. Pawlenty (2012 Trial Heats, July '10)

[Click to Enlarge]

The next series of updates are for candidates with only three polls (or less) conducted in hypothetical 2012 general election match ups against President Obama. As such, the trend analyses for Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul and Jeb Bush are more susceptible to wild fluctuations given the relatively scant level of data available compared to the four candidates (Gingrich, Huckabee, Palin and Romney) covered thus far. These are clearly cases where other variables -- presidential approval and state of the economy -- may be helpful in balancing out polls like the Politico internet poll. In the midst of many other polls, that survey merely appears as an outlier. It is still an outlier for a candidate with just a few polls against Obama, but in such a case, it serves as a distinct statistical anchor. In such cases, the straight average "feels" more trustworthy for the three candidates with more than one survey conducted against Obama.

That is true for Tim Pawlenty. The Politico survey underestimates both Obama's and Pawlenty's shares of poll respondents given the other data available. It is difficult to fathom, for instance, either Obama below 40% support or Pawlenty, despite a lack of national name recognition, mustering just more than 20% support. Now, to be completely honest, a simple average is just as susceptible to outliers, but the numbers for Obama are much closer to the range in which they lie against the Big Four prospective Republican candidates. Similarly, Pawlenty's numbers, while still low, are at least closer the level of support an unknown, yet named, Republican candidate.

More than anything, this may have been what spurred Pawlenty and his inner circle to produce and release the video FHQ mentioned on Thursday. The timing was a bit abnormal, but the intent is clear, despite nary a mention of a presidential race or 2012. And hopefully, it will serve as an impetus for other polling outlets to include Pawlenty in future surveys. Political junkies thinking of 2012 can hope so at least. Trips to Iowa certainly aren't hurting those chances either.

2012 Presidential Trial Heat Polling (Obama v. Pawlenty)
Poll
Date
Margin of Error
Sample
ObamaPawlentyUndecided
Politico [Internet]
July 9-14, 2010
+/- 3.1%
1011 likely voters
392140
Public Policy Polling
Dec. 4-7, 2009
+/- 2.8%
1253 likely voters
483517
Public Policy Polling
Oct. 16-19, 2009
+/- 3.5%
766 likely voters
5030
20
Average


45.6728.67
--
Regression Average


38.320.99--


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