Romney's Pennsylvania Gambit ...

... is funny.

I woke up this morning to this nonsense about Romney trying to "expand the map" in Pennsylvania. It seems Romney Romney's super PAC has some extra money to burn so they're burning it in Pennsylvania with a media buys of about $2.6 million. The Obama campaign has responded by spending about $600,000.

In defending the move, the Romney campaign has said they think Pennsylvania is in play and Politico (et tu Politico???) reports that "some polls have shown tightening there." Oy.

I have written more posts railing about how Pennsylvania is not in play than I can count. Here's one. Here's another. You can search the blog for more.

I guess it would be helpful if there were some data that could help us determine whether Pennsylvania is in play:



Oops.

It turns out there's been exactly one poll since February that has showed Romney in the lead. That poll was done by ... the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania. Interesting. Rasmussen polled Pennsylvania just a week ago and has Obama over 50% and 5 points ahead.

Perhaps you know all this but you worry because Obama spent that $600,000 in Pennsylvania. Believe me folks. The Obama campaign is not sweating Pennsylvania. They can't literally spend every dollar in Ohio. So why not spend a fraction of what the other side is spending to get a little bit of a counterargument on the air.

Let me leave you with this thought. In 2008, Obama beat McCain by just over 10 points in Pennsylvania. The whole nation has shifted a bit back towards the Republicans since then. Has Pennsylvania shifted by 10 points? No. Will $2.6 million in last-minute spending on Romney make it shift 10 points? No.

Romney has one hope for winning Pennsylvania and it is not $2.6 million in ads. Romney's only hope in Pennsylvania is ... systemic polling failure.

Rasmussen, Systemic Polling Failure, and "Truth"

There's quite a brouhaha spinning around the interwebs with conservatives complaining that Nate Silver is cooking the books in his polling model because he's a liberal shill. Here's the argument in its original full form. It is pure drivel. Silver himself had this brilliant retort today ...

But, anyway, the whole thing got me to thinking about the state of the polls and the state of the race. Conservatives are reading Rasmussen and Gravis and Gallup and celebrating what is sure to be a big victory for Romney next Tuesday. Liberals are reading ... well, everything else and are sweating the national vote polls that have it close (actually, if you take Gallup and Rasmussen out of the naional poll averages, Obama is very slightly ahead) but feeling pretty comfortable about the state-level polls that show Obama leading in more than enough states to win a majority in the Electoral College.

What is the state of the race and whose polls are right? The truth is we don't really know for sure which set of polls is right. But, if I had to bet, I'd say Rasmussen and Gallup are wrong (for different reasons). Let me lay out the case for each side and explain why I think Rasmussen has it wrong but it is important to acknowledge that ...

Rasmussen could be right. Rasmussen has been identified as a pollster that has a "Republican lean" but this is really a mislabeling of what they are doing. It suggests that the pollster is just putting his thumb on the scale and cooking the books. That's not what Rasmussen is doing. At least I'm pretty sure they're not. What Rasmussen does is to use "dynamic party weighting." They weight their sample of voters so that they get to a designated number of Republicans and Democrats in their sample. The party weighting is "dynamic" because Rasmussen comes up with the relative weights of Republicans and Democrats based on some recent previous period of polling. Effectively, Rasmussen is making an educated guess about what the partisan makeup of the electorate will be (nationally or in a state) and then they make sure their sample looks like that.

So is it possible Rasmussen is right? Absolutely, it is possible. If their dynamic weights are accurate, then their polls will be accurate. And the flipside is also true. If their weights are wrong, they'll be wrong.

So what's the case against Rasmussen? A couple of days ago, Nate Cohn wrote that, if the polls stay where they are up to Election Day, Mitt Romney's only hope will be "systemic polling failure." This means that the vast majority of polls must have done something (question wording, poor sampling, etc.) that led them all to the wrong answer. Nate Cohn is right about this.

Systemic polling failure does happen. To understand why it is unlikely, we have to understand what other pollsters are doing differently than Rasmussen to get such systematically different results. First, other pollsters are not weighting by party ID at all. To most pollsters, party ID is something to be discovered in a poll, not something to use to weight the sample. This is because party ID is a fluid construct. People tend to change their response to a party ID question based on how they feel about the competing presidential candidates or based on how enthused they are to vote for their preferred candidate. Other pollsters simply ask respondents who they are planning to vote for and then use likely voter screens (of different varieties) to determine who is likely to vote and who is a non-voter.

It is entirely possible that this methodology will lead to a sample that is not reflective of the population as a whole. One reason is simply statistical variation. Maybe you just happened to get a disproportionate number of Romney supporters in your sample. This happens but we know the precise likelihood it will happen and this problem is corrected for by the various polling averages out there. Only a very small number of polls will be outliers for this reason and, when they are averaged into the rest, they will not have a substantial effect on the overall average number. A second problem is some kind of problem with the way we are sampling. One problem along these lines is the undersampling of certain kinds of populations like cell phone users or Hispanic voters who do not speak English, either of which may not be called by pollsters for different reasons. Some pollsters do call cell phones and some call Spanish-only voters. Here's Stan Greenberg talking about why undersampling of cell phone voters is causing Obama voters to be under-represented in the public polls we see:



Other pollsters who are good at what they do, use some kind of weighting mechanism to try to get a representative sample without calling them. This is increasingly problematic but is done well by some pollsters (like PPP in my view).

The point is that these pollsters are either getting a truly representative sample or they are using demographic weighting (not partisan ID weighting) to make sure they don't have a problem with their sample. The fact that so many pollsters are coming to basically the same conclusions (for instance, that Barack Obama has a small lead in Ohio) is evidence that they are likely right.

Could Ohio (and other states) still shift? Yes, but it is getting very late.

Could Rasmussen be right and the other polls wrong? Yes. I don't think so but it could happen and, if it did, it would be exactly the kind of "systemic polling failure" Nate Cohn was talking about.

We'll know next Wednesday morning.

Sundays Are Not Always Lazy

Sunday has been a very active day for polls coming out and it has been a very good polling day for the President. There was an Ohio poll that came out late Saturday night that had Obama and Romney tied at 49 and that can be considered bad. But everything else has been either good or trending in the right direction for Obama today.

A PPP poll just came out giving Obama a 4-point lead (51-47) in Ohio. That's not only a good number for the President, it is from a pollster that had him up by just 1 last week. PPP found that 36% of Ohio respondents have already voted and Obama leads 63-36 among them. Democrats are heavily unified in Ohio and there is no enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans. These are all tough, tough numbers for Romney if they are accurate (that's the big "if"). Similarly, PPP had Obama down by 1 in New Hampshire last week and today, they have him up by 2 (49-47). Rasmussen and Gallup each moved a point in the President's direction in their national trackers. Finally, Gravis Marketing has a poll out tonight showing Obama up by 1 in Ohio. This might seem like bad news ... except that Gravis has about as strong a Republican lean as anybody (see Simon Jackman's recent discussion of house effects). Add that house effect in to Gravis and their poll looks a heck of a lot like PPP's.

We'll see how the rest of the day plays out (more polls to come tonight) ... but it is a good day so far for the President.

That's ... Good?

Today was one of those mixed, weird days in the polling. Obama had a very good day yesterday (Wednesday) and I said then that it would interesting to see if he could build on that with another good day on Thursday indicating a nice, little bounce out of the 3rd debate.

It didn't happen ... kinda.

What happened Thursday was sort of confusing. A few of the national tracking polls seemed to move slightly in Romney's direction. ABC/WP was the worst of it (since I think they generally know what they are doing) and that tracker now has Romney ahead 50-47. Rasmussen also has Romney up 50-47. Reuters/Ipsos now has Romney up by 1, 47-46. PPP has moved back to a tie after having Obama up by 1. I could go on. But you get the picture. It seems like Romney had a good polling day in these national tracking polls.

So, Obama getting a nice little bounce out of the 3rd debate is bunk, right? Well maybe. If you look at the state polling numbers today, they are largely good for Obama. PPP released a bunch of polls today and all were good for Obama. They've got Obama up by 4 in Colorado, up by 6 in Wisconsin, up by 2 in Iowa, up by 5 in Virginia, and they've got Obama tied in North Carolina. Those are all good numbers for the President. But that's just one pollster. What else?

NBC/WSJ has a tie in Colorado (which is not a bad result) and Obama up by 3 in Nevada. Fox has Obama down by 2 in Virginia but JZ Analytics has Obama up by 2 there. Grove Insight has Obama up by 2 in Florida and up by 3 in Colorado.

So, these state polls are pretty good overall for Obama ... and the national polls are pretty good overall for Romney. What do we make of it.

I don't know either.

Grab Your Magnifying Glass and Take a Look

It was a very solid polling day for Obama and I think I see little green shoots of a tiny Obama bounce coming off of the 3rd debate. The evidence is limited but it is in enough places that it seems real.

PPP's tracker put Obama ahead 49-48 and PPP's Tom Jensen pointed out:

Four polls came out looking at likely voters in Ohio today. Rasmussen had it tied at 48. The other three had Obama up by 2, 3, and 5 points respectively. The poll that had Obama up by 5 (Time) was conducted on the 22nd and 23rd, the night of the debate and the night after.

Two polls were released today looking at Virginia and both had Obama leading (though both are questionable for different reasons). Two polls were released today looking at Nevada and Obama was leading in both. One was Rasmussen and one was PPP. Obama is leading in Nevada folks.

Finally, the Gallup tracker lurched back towards Obama today. I discussed (and largely dismissed) this earlier. But, in the context of these other polls, it may be a sign of a little bit of movement.

Were there any counter indicators today? To put that another way, what were the worst numbers for Obama in any polls released today? There was a Rasmussen poll that had Obama down 2 in New Hampshire (though there was another poll that had Obama up by 3 there). ABC/WP didn't budge today and Romney leads by 1 nationally in their poll ... and that's about it. Those are the good numbers for Romney today.

Put all that together and mix until you see a "sticky" consistency and what do you get?

It is one day. And it isn't a big move towards Obama. It is very small actually. Most importantly, everything I describe above could VERY easily be statistical noise. We'll know more tomorrow. But it was about as good a day of polling as Obama has had since before the first debate.

Post-Debate Interviews Trickling In ... Nothing

We do not yet see any effect in post-debate interviews that are trickling into polls.

PPP's latest tracker includes one day (out of three) that are post-debate interviews. Obama and Romney were tied on that one day but the tracker ticked in Obama's favor as a recent strong day (Saturday) for Romney dropped out of the tracker.

Rasmussen's tracker also showed no change from yesterday as a full day of post-debate interviews rolled into their poll. Obama is still down by 4 there.

Rasmussen also released a new Ohio poll which is either good or bad news depending on what you believe about Rasmussen. They have Ohio tied at 48. If you take that poll at face value, it is not good news for Obama. If you believe Rasmussen has a Republican lean (Simon Jackman has some data on this out today), then Obama is right where we figured he is ... ahead by 2 or 3 points in Ohio.

Put all that together and you've got ... nothing. For those joining us late ...

Rasmussen's Weighting

As it happens, Mark Blumenthal wrote about Rasmussen's weighting yesterday just around the same time I was writing my blog post. It was a piece about the national polls generally and Blumenthal noted Rasmussen's importance as the one firm that has done state-level snapshots before and after the second debate and the fact that they show slight gains for Romney. But Blumenthal explains these gains are related to the "dynamic" party weighting Rasmussen is using:

Rasmussen is one of the few pollsters to routinely weight its samples so they match predetermined targets for the percentage of likely voters that identify as Democrats or Republicans. The catch, as Rasmussen Reports confirms to The Huffington Post, is that its weighting targets are now adjusting on a weekly basis to match the average party identification for likely voters measured on their last six weeks of calling (after weighting for demographics, but not for party). So the party weights for the past recent week may be slightly different than the party weights the week before.

More important, the weight targets for Rasmussen's national samples grew slightly more Republican in mid-October. Although the data are published on pages available to paid subscribers only, Rasmussen indicates that the national interviews for the week of Oct. 8 to 14 gave Democrats a 1-point edge over Republicans (38 to 37 percent). The party balance for the two prior weeks, Oct. 1 to 7 and Sept. 24 to 30, was a 3-point Democratic advantage (39 to 36 percent).

In the past, Scott Rasmussen has explained that the state-level party weighting targets are derived, in part, from national numbers and the "national shifts appear to provide a good indicator" of mid-year changes at the state level.

A 3-point shift toward a more Republican identification would more than explain the one-point shift to Romney in the five states Rasmussen surveyed this week.

Now, here's the thing. IF you're going to weight by party, the shift that Rasmussen appears to have made does make some sense. There was reason to believe, in the wake of the first debate, that a poll should have a few more Republicans in it and a few less Democrats than before. But then, this is why weighting by party ID is a bad idea in the first place.

Anyway, what this tells us is that Rasmussen is shifting their party ID weights slightly over time but they are always doing so in response to last week's polling. And that's problematic. If you are looking for a snapshot of where the public is today (the point of a poll), using their mood from last week as a determinant is really problematic.

Let's Say Rasmussen is Right

Rasmussen is not a terrible pollster but you have to understand what Rasmussen is doing in order to interpret their results.

First, Rasmussen is a robo-pollster. They don't do live-interviewer polls and this means they also don't call cell phones. This is one reason why Rasmussen has a bit of a Republican lean. In general, Nate Silver has argued Rasmussen has about a 2-point Republican lean. Their national tracking poll currently has Romney ahead by 1 point (49/48). So, a 2-point lean would put Rasmussen right about where some other national polls are.

Second, Rasmussen weights by party ID. This has two implications for how we read their polls. First, Rasmussen's polls are going to be less volatile than other polls. When something happens that changes public attitudes about the race, poll respondents don't just change their response on which candidate they support. They also sometimes change their response on their party identification. If you have a fixed number of Republicans and Democrats you're looking for in your poll, you are not going to pick up that shift even though it is real.

How does this play out? Since late September, most pollsters have shown a shift towards Romney in the national polls and, more recently, a tiny shift back towards Obama. Rasmussen's national tracking poll has remained within a very narrow range between Obama ahead by 2 and Romney ahead by 2. For the last couple of weeks, Rasmussen's tracker has been within an even more narrow range between a tied race and Romney ahead by 2. These same things are true at the state level as well: Rasmussen polling is very stable and has a slight Republican lean.

So, let's say all of Rasmussen's polls are right. Who wins? It looks like Obama wins.

Rasmussen's "Electoral College Scoreboard" has Obama ahead in states totalling 237 electoral votes and Romney ahead in states totalling 235 electoral votes. 7 states are listed as tossups. But Rasmussen has done polling in these tossup states (very recently in most of them). Here's what those numbers show:

CO - Obama +1
IA - Obama +2
NH - Obama +1
NV - Obama +3
OH - Obama +1
VA - Romney +3
WI - Obama +2

All of these polls are very close but Obama is winning in more than enough of them that if Rasmussen is right, Obama wins. If Nate Silver's arguments about Rasmussen's lean is right, Obama wins a bit more handily.

Again, we come to the same place: Is it close? Yeah. Is Obama winning right now? Yeah.

Speaking of Pollsters ...

... this looks fishy. The Behavior Research Center has Obama ahead of Romney in Arizona 44-42. There are lots of fishy things in this poll and so perhaps it serves as a good jumping off point to discuss what kinds of things jump out at me as not quite right when I'm looking at a poll:

1) Is the poll an outlier (especially compared with pollsters I think are good)? Yeah, to say the least. PPP did a poll in Arizona BEFORE the first debate and had Romney up by 9.

2) Have I ever heard of the pollster? No, I haven't. Every pollster gets some media attention the first time sometime but when there's no track record to say this poll should be believed, it should be read with a skeptical eye.

3) Are there numbers below that topline that seem counterintuitive? Yes. The gender gap is very narrow here for one and the poll has Obama and Romney tied among men. The poll also has Obama ahead 77-10 among Latinos. There's other things that don't feel right but those are the biggest ones.

4) Are the campaigns behaving in a way that is consistent with the polls? You can figure out that Ohio is close in both campaigns' internal polls by the way the two campaigns are behaving (running a million commercials and campaigning there). We don't see the two campaigns behaving as if Arizona is in play.

5) Is it a live-interviewer poll with cell phones or is it a robo-poll or is it an online poll? The order in which I listed them is in descending order of quality and this is an online poll.

So, this poll has all the hallmarks of a poll that I would not tend to believe. It doesn't mean it can't be right. It just means ... it probably isn't right.

Now, compare all that with this PPP poll in Ohio that was just released that has Obama up by 5:

1) Is the poll an outlier? Not too much of an outlier. CNN had Obama ahead by 4 a few days ago and NBC/WSJ had Obama up by 6. Others have it closer and PPP does have a slight Democratic lean in their polls. But this is not a shocking number.

2) Have I heard of PPP? Yeah, and they have a generally good track record.

3) Are there numbers below the topline that seem counterintuitive? Mostly no. For instance, Romney has a 46/51 fav/unfav. That sounds about right, especially in Ohio. Gender gap? Yeah. Obama leads 54-42 among women and trails 50-48 among men. I'd guess the Obama might be a tad more behind in Ohio but this is not a crazy number.

4) Are the campaigns behaving in a way that is consistent with the poll? Oh yeah, to say the least.

5) Live-interviewer or robo-poll or online poll? Robo-poll. Not ideal but at least it isn't online.

This poll mostly passes the smell test. There are a few things I scratch my head on. PPP says 19% of voters have already voted and those voters went 76-24 for Obama. That's hard to believe. If it is true, Romney is in a DEEP hole in Ohio and NBC/WST had a similar finding in their poll though not quite as big a margin. But look, I think it is clear that Obama leads by a little in Ohio (even Rasmussen has Obama ahead by 1 there) and this poll is not far off if it is off.

Have Voters Changed Their Minds About Obama?

No. That's the short answer.

Much of the criticism of the Pew Poll leveled from despairing Democrats has centered on the partisan makeup of the poll. 36% of likely voters in the poll self-identified as Republicans while 33% self-identified as Democrats. Democrats charge that in 2008 exit polls, 39% of voters self-identified as Democrats compared to 32% who self-identified as Republicans and in 2004 (when Democrats lost a close race), Democrats and Republicans each made up 37% of the electorate. So what gives Pew?

The fact is that the Pew poll is a really well-run poll and there is probably nothing significant wrong with their sampling. As Nate Silver has pointed out many times, party identification is a fluid thing and is more a reflection of where the electorate is at any point than a determinant of where the electorate is. And this brings me to my point.

Romney's post-debate surge is driven by enthusiasm among Republicans (and despair among Democrats) rather than voters changing their minds about the President. More Republicans say they're definitely voting now than before and more voters are willing to say they're Republicans than before. These "new" Republicans have been with Romney all along but were less sure about voting and were less willing to call themselves Republicans. Romney's debate performance energized them and reinvigorated their Republican-ness.

We can see this is the case by looking at some other polls. Gallup has started to release likely voter poll numbers in addition to their registered voter numbers. There is a 5-point swing towards Romney when we move from registered voters to likely voters. That's a BIG swing and it is explained by greater enthusiasm among Republicans. But, what's interesting is that when Gallup breaks out their polling over the last seven days, we see this:

Among registered voters, Obama's standing appears not to have eroded at all. Indeed, Gallup has Obama at a 53% job approval rating, slightly higher than it was before the debate.

We see something similar (from a different angle) looking at the Rasmussen poll. Rasmussen weights their sample by party ID. This means their poll has a consistent number of Democrats and Republicans across time. Not surprisingly, Rasmussen's poll has hardly moved since the debate. It has ranged from Obama ahead 49-47 to Romney ahead 49-47 over the last 10 days. This could be seen as mere statistical noise rather than the effect of a "devastating" (Sullivan's words) debate performance by Obama.

Now, I'm not trying to say that all of this increased enthusiasm among Republicans and depression among Democrats is not a problem for the President. But I am saying that people (I'm looking at you Sullivan) need to be careful about interpreting what's happening as a bunch of undecided voters or a bunch of Obama voters suddenly deciding to vote for Mitt Romney.

The lesson of what I'm saying is that the Obama campaign needs to rally its base. That can be done and the best place to start is with better debate performances from the President and the Vice President that re-energizes Democratic voters. I expect that's going to happen starting with Thursday night.

Sullivan Unhinged

That's how I describe Andrew Sullivan's most recent lengthy post on the President's campaign. The post was sparked by the latest Pew poll which shows Romney leading by 4 points after Pew had Obama ahead by 8 points a few weeks ago. Here's some of Sullivan's rant:

Look: I'm trying to rally some morale, but I've never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week - throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement? And after Romney's convincing Etch-A-Sketch, convincing because Obama was incapable of exposing it, Romney is now the centrist candidate, even as he is running to head up the most radical party in the modern era.

OK, let's start by discussing that Pew poll in more depth.

The Pew poll is upsetting to many in large part because it is a pollster with a good track record and credibility. This top line caused Andrew Sullivan to descend into italics and exclamation points.

Before the debate, Obama had a 51 - 43 lead; now, Romney has a 49 - 45 lead. That's a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama's performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing.

Exclamation points!!! Italics too!!!

I've been arguing that the Romney bounce from the debate appears to have been about 3 points and that it appears it may be receding from that high. That still seems about right. One thing to notice about the Pew poll is that it was in the field on Oct. 4 to Oct. 7. But, as Mark Blumenthal points out, almost all of those interviews were on Oct. 4 to Oct. 6, when the Romney bounce was at its peak:

According to Pew Research, 1,046 of its 1,201 interviews were conducted on Thursday through Saturday. Just 155 interviews were conducted on Sunday. The full sample had a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points, with a 3.4 percentage point margin of error among likely voters.

So, this Pew poll is likely overstating Romney's actual support at this moment.

Also, it is one poll! Rasmussen has the race even (even this morning). Gallup has the race roughly even among likely voters. But beyond the polling, let me make a larger point about Andrew Sullivan's absurd reaction. If you are someone who thinks that 90 minutes of bad debating is going to cancel out 4 years of a record worth defending and months and months of bad campaigning by Romney, then you are someone who believes there isn't sufficient wisdom and virtue among the people for self-governance.

The polling (beyond the Pew Poll) doesn't suggest the race has been "thrown away." Get a grip Andrew.

Gallup's "Latest"

Yahoo News has a story right on their homepage (updated a little over 2 hours ago) that says

The latest Gallup tracking poll conducted in the three days immediately following last week's first presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama shows the race tied - with each candidate currently garnering 47 percent support among registered voters. Tracking conducted in the two days leading up to the debate showed President Obama with a five point lead - 50 percent to Mitt Romney's 45 percent.

This would be breaking news if it were actually now ... ya know, breaking. It's actually almost 2 days old.

Go to Gallup's site and you'll see that their "latest" polling release has Obama up 50-45, better than the 49-46 margin he had yesterday and the day before. Gallup's tracker does not yet have a full 7 days since the debate so Obama's numbers may well deteriorate from here once we get the full post-debate set of interviews. But it is just not true to say that the story above is "the latest."

Rasmussen's tracker this morning shows Obama and Romney tied 48-48, better than Romney's 2-point lead yesterday. I noted yesterday that Romney's post-debate surge seems to have crested. Both these polls are consistent with that view.

Mark Blumenthal is up with an article this afternoon explaining the Gallup mess for laypeople. Read that if what I've said above is unclear. But importantly, he points out that Romney's bounce may well be fading at this point.

Gallup's Monday afternoon update suggests the initial bounce that Romney received from last week's presidential debate may already be starting to fade.

If only Yahoo news could somehow offer the "latest" by being attached to some kind of worldwide network of computers that sends information around at the speed of light. That would be really cool.

In any case, here's where we are. Obama's approval rating for Gallup AND for Rasmussen is now 51%. Those are good numbers for Barack Obama if they're real.

Now, those are tracking polls and I'll be the first to criticize those two polling organizations for being ... well, not good. But, until we see some actual evidence (good polls) showing Romney with some massive surge, I wish news organizations would stop saying it's happening.

Monitoring the Debate Bounce II

I mentioned yesterday that one reason Democrats shouldn't get too panicked about the post-debate polling is that Romney's gains seem to be just that ... gains for Romney rather than a drop in support for Obama.

This morning, Gallup released their tracker which now includes close to 50% of their sample as post-debate interviews and the topline was unchanged from yesterday (Obama leads 49-46). Similarly, Rasmussen released their tracker which now includes 100% post-debate interviews and their numbers were unchanged from yesterday as well (Romney leads 49-47).

If we use these new numbers to extrapolate out the size of the bounce the same way I did yesterday, we find that Romney got a 4-point bounce in Rasmussen's tracker and is headed for a modest 2-point bounce from Gallup. Average the two and you get a 3-point bounce overall.

But, as I mentioned above, the gains seem to be gains for Romney rather than a drop in support for Obama. Obama's job approval rating in Rasmussen's tracker was 49% before the debate and it is 50% today. The President's job approval has ticked down in Gallup's tracker since the debate but it is still 48%.

Overall, today's numbers (so far) seem to suggest a leveling-off of Romney's post-debate surge. Whether it is just because it has reached its half-life or because the jobs report news is starting to mute it, I think it is starting to look more like it is in line with the 1-2 point bounce I initially predicted.

UPDATE: The Reuters/Ipsos tracker is also unchanged from yesterday (Obama leads 47-45) and that tracker is now almost entirely made up of interviews from after the debate. So, the post-debate Romney bounce seems to be cresting at about 3%.

Monitoring the Debate Bounce

Some polls have come out since the debate and all of them show Romney getting at least some bounce from the debate. Obviously, by definition, they don't tell us anything about how lasting a bounce would be but we also don't yet have much clarity on the size of the bounce. Let's take a look at what's been happening:

1) Today, Gallup's tracking poll moved from Obama +5 to Obama +3. Gallup uses a 7-day rolling sample so they've only got essentially 2 nights (Thursday night and Friday night) of post-debate sampling in there. The last Gallup tracker that had (almost) NO post-debate respondents was Thursday morning's release and Obama was up 4 in that poll. So, Romney gained a point in the two days since. Let's pretend for a moment that Romney's gains will continue to be the same in a linear fashion (this is very questionable but let's just go with it for now) as the rest of the sample becomes a post-debate sample and it would mean that Romney would go from Obama +4 to Obama +0.5 by next Thursday morning.

2) Rasmussen's tracking poll had Obama ahead by 2 in their Thursday morning release and Romney is up by 2 points in this morning's release. Rasmussen uses a 3-day rolling sample so, approximately two-thirds of their sample is post-debate respondents at this point. If we extrapolate that data the same way we did with the Gallup data, we would have it going from Obama +2 to Romney +4.

3) Reuters/Ipsos has an online tracking poll (pretty questionable methodologically) and they seem to use a 5-day rolling sample. Their poll had Obama ahead by 5 prior to the debate and now has 3 days of post-debate data and has Obama ahead by 2. If we extrapolate that out, we would have them tied by the time they have a full sample of post-debate interviews.

There have also been some state-level polls that show Romney gaining ground but they are almost all from Rasmussen, We Ask America, and Gravis Marketing and the results are little more mixed in terms of what they tell us about a Romney bounce than their topline numbers suggest. Anyway, taking the numbers above, we see the bounce looking like this:

Gallup - 3.5 points
Rasmussen - 6 points
Reuters/Ipsos - 5 points

Average - 4.83 points

If that's right, that would be about the biggest post-debate bounce ever. Is it possible that that is what's happening? Yes, though it is still not likely. But, even if it does happen that way, here's several reasons Democrats shouldn't panic:

1) Even if the effect of the debate is this large, some of it will fade. Remember how the 47% thing was going to be the end of Romney? The first debate's effect will have its own half-life and all of it won't last through Nov. 6. Other things will happen (more debates for one).

2) Remember that these tracking polls are bleeding out old samples on the back end as new samples come in. What we're seeing could be the effect of overly strong samples for Obama leaving the tracker on the back end as much as Romney getting a boost on the post-debate side. Now, that's not likely to explain all of this bounce. But it could explain a small part of it.

3) Obama was leading by about 4 points in most polling averages prior to the debate. Indeed, as described above, he was leading by 4 points and 2 points and 5 points in the Gallup, Rasmussen, and Reuters trackers. So this would make the race about even nationally. It would hurt, but it would not be the end for Obama.

4) I have emphasized the margins here but the news is less bad when you look at Obama's numbers alone. Here's the movement in the three polls for Obama's numbers:

Gallup - No movement (from 49 to 49)
Rasmussen - Negative 2 (from 49 to 47)
Reuters - Negative 2 (from 48 to 46)

Assuming these trends continue (as calculated above), Obama will end up somewhere between 45 (Reuters) and 49 (Gallup) in all these polls. Ipsos pollster, Julia Clark said,

We haven't seen additional gains from Romney. This suggests to me that this is more of a bounce than a permanent shift

She continued

while the debate was effective in energizing the Republican base and giving Romney a boost, it didn't fundamentally change perceptions of either man a great deal.

Taking everything here together, it seems to me that the calculations I've done above effectively represent a worst-case scenario for the effect of the debate for Obama. I continue to think the effect of the debate will not be very large and that we won't really know for sure until we see some better, systematic, non-tracking polls done. Specifically, I think it will be half or less of what the estimate above indicates and even some of that will fade.

We should know soon enough what the right answer is but, in the meantime, the points I outline above are reasons why people shouldn't panic about the debate just yet.

More Rasmussen

I picked on Rasmussen a bit the other day. Today, Rasmussen has a Michigan poll out that has Obama up 50-42 among likely voters.

So, you've got Romney up by 3 in Wisconsin and Obama up by 8 in Michigan? An 11-point spread? Sorry, but no. One or both of those is wrong and, as I said the other day, there's some reason to believe that Wisconsin poll is just off.

As I've said before, Michigan is not remotely a tipping state. Nate Silver agrees giving Obama (currently) a 91% chance of winning the state and a 0.2% chance Michigan will be a tipping state.

As I said the other day, Rasmussen is generally a decent pollster but there's something wrong with that Wisconsin survey.

Rasmussen!

Generally, Rasmussen is a decent pollster. Nate Silver says Rasmussen has a Republican lean but that is largely because of the likely voter model they use. So long as they are somewhat consistent in what they do and open about their methodology and assumptions, we can assume their results tell us something meaningful.

Today, Rasmussen released a poll of Wisconsin that had Romney up by 3. Those who read here know that is a result that raises my eyebrows so I wanted to take a closer look. I am not a Rasmussen subscriber so I tried to read between the lines of the press release and I did find a few things that jumped out at me.

First, the press release says this:

Though a plurality (46%) of Wisconsin voters recognizes that the government lost money in the bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler, 45% consider the auto industry bailouts a success. Thirty-six percent (36%) regard the bailouts as a failure. However, when told that the government is expected to lose billions of dollars on those bailouts, just 33% consider them a success, and 56% see them as a failure.

Now, there are a couple of issues here. One is that it really isn't quite a sure thing that the federal government has lost money on the auto bailout. To really measure that, you'd have to consider what the counter-factual would be. What would revenues look like if the bailout hadn't happened for instance? There's also another problem with this claim. The federal government still owns 500 million shares of GM. If the government sold them all today, the government would have lost close to $15 billion. But we're not selling today. Not only that, the price of the stock is artificially depressed because voters know Treasury will need to exit. The bottom line is we don't know when Treasury will exit and at what price. So it is not quite right to say this money is lost quite yet.

But there's a potentially bigger problem here. I don't know where in the poll this question was asked relative to the topline question. If the pollster points out that the auto bailout has lost billions of dollars and then asks whether the respondent supports Obama or Romney, that's really problematic.

A week ago, voters in the recall election were asked (in exit polls) whether they support Obama or Romney and Obama came out ahead 51-44. The turnout in November is likely to be a little better for Obama than it was last week. So, either there has been about a 10-13 point shift in Wisconsin in a week or the exit polls were very wrong or the Rasmussen poll is very wrong or some combination of these. The least likely of these explanations is a 10-13 point shift in the last week. I've provided some reasons the Rasmussen poll may be suspect above. That's probably the best explanation but we'll see what other pollsters find in the coming days.

Romney Ahead in Ohio?

I doubt it but we don't really know. Rasmussen has a poll out of likely voters in Ohio showing Romney up 46-44. The margin of error is +/- 4.5 points on the poll plus Rasmussen typically has a bit of a Republican lean so it is hard to draw much of a conclusion from this one poll.

I still see Obama as modest favorite in Ohio. See the post below for the explanation.

Forays in Bad Polling

A Marquette Law School Poll out today reports that Obama and Romney are tied at 46 among "likely voters."

Now, let me preface this by saying I could be wrong in how I'm interpreting this because the way the methodology of the poll is described is not entirely clear. And perhaps that is the first negative thing we can say about this poll. They are not clear about what they are doing. I'll include more specific caveats along these lines in a bit but, IF I'm reading this poll's methodology properly, it is really, really bad polling technique.

A recent Rasmussen poll of likely voters had Obama up by 4 in Wisconsin and Rasmussen is known to have at least a slight Republican lean. A more recent PPP poll, had Obama up by just 1 among registered voters. So it is possible the race is tied as this Marquette Law School poll indicates. But the methodological problem here has to do with the likely voter screen. As you know, there is a high-profile recall election coming up in just a few weeks and the poll also looked at that race. Just as an aside, the poll found that Scott Walker is up by 6 among likely voters so Obama is running ahead of at least Tom Barrett in the state and Barrett is a good proxy (sort of) for a generic Democrat.

So what's the problem here? The problem is that it seems that the likely voter screen is the same for the recall election as for the presidential race. In discussing the methodology at the bottom of the news release, they say:

The poll interviewed 704 registered Wisconsin voters by both landline and cell phone May 9-12, 2012. The margin of error is +/- 3.8 percentage points for the full sample. There are 600 “likely voters,” those who said they were certain to vote, with a margin of error of +/- 4.1 percentage points. Results for vote in the Governor, Lt. Governor and presidential races are reported for likely voters. All other results are for the full sample of 704 registered voters.

While we don't know for sure what the likely voter pool will be in November, I'm quite sure it will not be the same in terms of numbers or makeup as the recall election in a few weeks. Indeed, even if the recall election was going to be held in November on the presidential election day, we would have slightly different voter pools with more voters casting a voter for president. For a mid-year election day with few races on the ballot like the recall, the likely voter pool will be smaller and, more importantly, more Republican than Election Day in November. So I fear what we have here is a "likely voter" screen for the recall election that assumes the mix of voters in November will be the same as the mix of voters in the recall election. I think it is safe to assume that because we've got the same 600 voters in each pool. In addition, the statement indicates these voters said they are "certain" to vote. I have no doubt they will. But there will probably be some other voters voting who are currently "uncertain" they will vote and those voters are not randomly distributed. Good pollsters adjust for this with various methods including weighting sub-samples and other techniques. Here, we seem to have a very tight likely voter screen and that usually (not always) favors the Republican candidate.

In short, I think this may be a decent poll with respect to the Walker recall race but it is very problematic with respect to the presidential race in Wisconsin.

Those Swing State Polls

I said the other day that swing state polls seem to be better for Obama than his national average. Yesterday, a couple more polls came out building on this trend.

PPP has Obama up 51-43 in Virginia on the same day they released a national poll showing Obama up 49-44.
SurveyUSA has Obama up 47-43 in North Carolina.
Rasmussen (which has a Republican lean) sees a tossup in Floria (Romney leads 46-45). In the same timeframe, Rasmussen released a national poll showing Romney up 48-46 though a more recent national poll from Rasmussen has Obama up 47-44.

The reason the national media does not comment much on these state level polls is twofold:

1) It is early. Much will change.
2) Most of these early polls are of registered voters, not likely voters. The reason for this is that it is impossible to get a very good read on the likely voter pool this far out from the election. Indeed, Rasmussen is the one pollster that regularly goes with a likely voter screen this early and that is one big reason why their polls have more of a Republican lean.

Those are fair caveats. But the bottom line is that this is 51 separate races, most of which (like California, New York, Kansas, and Utah) are already decided, not a national race. In the states that are not decided, Romney is in worse position than he appears to be in the national polls.

UPDATE: A Rasmussen poll in Nevada has Obama ahead 52-44.

What's the Matter with Romney in Ohio?

Mitt Romney's got an Ohio problem. When Romney edged Santorum in Ohio, many in the Republican establishment breathed a sigh of relief similar to when Romney edged Santorum in Michigan. It was an important step on the way to Romney locking down the nomination.

But Romney's weakness in Ohio and, frankly, in many of these industrial midwest states like Michigan and Wisconsin seems to be enduring. I have noticed over several weeks and months that Romney seems to be doing a little worse in Ohio than he's doing in his national numbers.

Today, Rasmussen released an Ohio poll showing Obama ahead of Romney 46-42. A week ago, Fox News had a poll showing Obama ahead of Romney 45-39. Let's look at some data. Here is Pollster.com's summary of the race in Ohio:



There have been 10 polls of Ohio with this particular trial heat in 2012 and only one (a Fox Poll in February) showed Romney winning Ohio. The other 9 polls have shown Obama leading by between 2 and 12 points.

Nationally, Pollster's aggregation shows Obama with a smaller lead:



So what's going on in Ohio? I think we can posit a few possibilities: Ohio's anti-union ballot proposition has galvanized union voters to some extent. Additionally, Ohio is home to a lot of parts suppliers for the auto industry and Romney's opposition to the auto bailout hurt him there as much as it did in Michigan. Finally, Ohio's Republicans are more downscale than Republicans in say, New York or California and these are voters more likely to support Santorum than Romney. These same voters won't support Obama and the vast majority of them will vote for Romney in the Fall. But it is not easy for Romney to bring them around and some small number of them staying home can mean big trouble for Romney.

Regardless of the cause of Romney's Ohio struggles, one thing is clear. Ohio is critical for Romney. Romney CANNOT win without Ohio. Obama can win without Ohio though he'd probably have to win Florida and some other states that are tossups and he's not likely to win Florida if he loses Ohio. So Ohio is important and if Romney is going to consistently be weaker in Ohio than his national average, it makes his margin for error in the campaign to come quite a bit slimmer.