Where are the Good Pollsters?

The national polling numbers are not matching some of my predictions about Romney's bounce from the first debate and I've been trying to think about why that is. I had predicted that Romney's bounce would ultimately boil down to 1-2 points after fading but it should have faded by now. The various polling averages do not bear that out. Some possible explanations are:

1) My predictions were wrong / based on faulty assumptions, etc. or
2) The national polling numbers are not right

I'm generally skeptical when I hear other people making argument #2. It is not so much that pollsters are never wrong. Of course, there are bad polls and there are bad pollsters. But when all the pollsters are moving in one direction, there's only one way to argue they're all wrong and that is if they are all doing something systematically incorrect. That's possible but not very likely.

That said, there is one thing that jumps out at me when I look at the national polling numbers and the arguments I've made: I don't think many pollsters are good. This occurred to me as I was looking at the recent national polls. I've listed below all of the national polls recorded by Pollster.com in which either most or all of the sample has been since the first debate:

The pattern here is pretty clear and Obama's not doing well in these polls. If you average them, Romney is ahead by 0.8 points overall. I've said elsewhere though that pollsters who interviewed on 10/4 (the day after the first debate) showed huge bounces for Romney. If we include only polls that were in the field from 10/5 and after, Romney still leads though it is a slightly smaller average lead of 0.4 points overall.

So, what's going on? Am I wrong? Is Romney's bounce really this big and this lasting? Maybe. The one thing that jumps out at me when I look at that list of pollsters above is that there are only two pollsters there that I think do a good job. One of the pollsters I think is good is PPP though PPP generally has a bit of a Democratic lean. Their poll giving Romney a 2-point lean seems like really bad news then, right? True, except it does include some respondents from 10/4 and the poll is getting a little long in the tooth now. The other pollster I think is good is Pew. They have Obama down by 4 points ... but the same problems are there as with the PPP poll.

What's most striking about this list when we look at it this way is that I don't think any good pollsters have been releasing national polls this week. Who are the good pollsters in my view? Aside from PPP and Pew, I think NBC/WSJ, ABC/WP, CBS/NYT/Quinnipiac, and CNN are pretty good pollsters. None of them has any national poll that has been in the field since at least last Sunday. That's very strange to me.

Maybe my predictions are wrong. But I really want to see a national poll from one of those outlets before I apologize.

Random Thoughts ...

... I haven't had much time to write lately but I do have some random tidbits to share. Every blog I read seems to have some entry like this (called "remainders" or "outliers" or some such). I don't do that but here's my version of it.

CBS News reports that Roberts was originally on board with the conservatives to strike down the mandate but not the whole law and then he "switched." VERY interesting article and worth a read. Who knows who the sources are and who knows if it is all accurate? But here's the interesting question for the reporter who broke the story. Does this constitute a switch? No! As I pointed out the other day, Roberts did not uphold the mandate. And the CBS News article indicates that he never quite wanted to strike down the whole law. Here's how the article puts it:

In the court's private conference immediately after the arguments, he was aligned with the four conservatives to strike down the mandate. Roberts was less clear on whether that also meant the rest of the law must fall, the source said. The other four conservatives believed that the mandate could not be lopped off from the rest of the law and that, since one key part was unconstitutional, the entire law must be struck down.

So where's the shift here? Roberts never bought the commerce clause argument or the fact that there even was a mandate. And he apparently never wanted to strike down the whole law.

Obama seems to be doing just a tiny bit better of late. Nate Silver had a typically good piece on this the other day and the latest Gallup Poll (which is generally a very, very bad poll) has Obama doing a bit better. Is there any there there? In other words, is Obama actually doing better and, if so, why? It's hard to know for sure on the first question as it is not a big change and so it could well just be statistical noise. If we assume he's doing better, is it related to the healthcare decision? It is possible. We've also seen a little blip up in the number of people who approve of the law and a significant majority now says the Republicans should drop the issue and move on. But these are all pretty small movements so nothing very significant to see yet.

Charlie Cook is a genius but his recent piece dismissing the "obsessive" electoral vote watching is just dead wrong. One of Cook's main arguments is that we've had 56 presidential elections and the Electoral College has only failed to give the popular vote winner the victory 3 times. Sorry Charlie ... but that's a lot of times!!! And it almost happened in 2004 again. And it obviously happens more often when you have a very close election ... ya know, like in 2012. The Electoral College watching matters. Specifically, watching Ohio and Virginia matters.