Pollster.com

August 31, 2007

Where is Ron Paul's Name?????

By Mark Blumenthal

As this already slow Friday afternoon before Labor Day winds down, I seem to be on the receiving end of a glut of eerily similar emails about Ron Paul. Here is a sampling (and other than salutations, I'm leaving nothing out):

Is Ron Paul on another page?

How come you do not track the popularity of Ron Paul?

Where's Ron Paul's Name ????????????? We appreciate you!

Well, thank you! We received similar spate of messages in June and July:

Where's Ron Paul on your charts? I guess someone made an error. Please do something about this problem. Ron Paul has more support and cash on hand than John McCain already.

I am curious...where is Dr. Ron Paul on this poll? You do know he is running for president, correct? Also that he has a decent sized internet following, which has translated into real ground support more than a few times. If you could be so kind as to add Dr. Paul to this poll, or contact someone who can. Thank you.

I recently found your polls of those running for President in 2008 and to my suprise I've found that Ron Paul is not anywhere to be found on this polls. This is interesting since he has won almost everyone online poll and is dominating the internet. I think its sad your site is picking only those "serious" candidates. Every candidate is a serious candidate, thats the point of having democratic elections. I urge you to change your site to include everyone running for president not just the few and the rich.

Why is Ron Paul not an option on your polls? He has more web traffic than any other GOP canidate and has won EVERY debate to date by popular vote? I am offended by his disclusion. . . Please do the right thing and include Ron Paul in your polls. It IS your responsibility.

How can there be any kind of fairness or objectivity to your polls when they leave out the leading Republican Presidential candidate - Ron Paul? Check it out! The public wants a free America and only one person leads that direction - Ron Paul. It is hard to take your polling seriuosly as the degree of bias seems to exceed any honesty.

And thank you again! As I suspect we will receive more queries in this vein, here are some answers to try to clear up the confusion:

1) We do not conduct polls. We aggregate the results from surveys released into the public domain by media organizations, polling companies, campaigns and interest groups. As such, we have no role in deciding what goes into, or gets left out of, any poll.

2) Where is Ron Paul's name on Pollster.com? Well, for starters, try here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Our goal is to collect and aggregate every result for every candidate choice on every trial heat question of every poll, good, bad or indifferent. On both the large charts and HTML tables that appear on Pollster for any race, we display the results for the five or six candidates leading candidates. We do so because of limits on space (for the tables) and legibility (for the charts). However, for each race and state we also include a PDF table with results for all active candidates and a second set of charts that plots a line for each candidate, including Paul (and those are the links listed above).

For brevity's sake, our "poll update" blog entries also typically highlight the percentages for just those candidates that garner 5% or better, although those updates always feature links to the source documents that include full results.

3) Why aren't the media pollsters asking about Paul? Actually, virtually all of the national pollsters have been including Paul and the list of choices in Republican trial heats during 2007. Check out our PDF for the national polls. If a candidate's name was not included among the answer choices a dash "-" will appear under their name. Ifthe result for Paul is "0%," that means that his support was less than 1%.

4) Why don't you include online reader polls or straw polls like those that sometimes appear on network web pages and blogs? Our goal is to include any survey that purports to provide a representative sampling of all adults, registered voters or likely voters nationwide or in a given state. We exclude explicitly "non-scientific" ballots done for "entertainment value." For more information on the shortcomings of these online ballots, see this recent column by ABC News Polling Director Gary Langer (whose organization does include Ron Paul on national trial heat poll questions).

Hopefully, that will answer the many questions. We appreciate you!

By Mark Blumenthal on August 31, 2007 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (23) | TrackBacks (0)

Bush Approval: 3 New Polls, Trend at 32.6%

By Charles Franklin

There have been three new polls since my last update of approval of President Bush. The USA Today/Gallup poll done 8/13-16/07 found approval at 32%, disapproval at 63%. A Pew Research poll taken 8/1-18/07 got approval at 31%, disapproval at 59%, and the Fox News poll done 8/21-22/07 put approval at 33%, disapproval at 56%.

With these three polls, the trend estimate is 32.6%, a small continued gain over the previous batch of polling.

The plot below shows the six most recent polls in relation to the trend estimate.

None of the recent polls qualify as outliers, with all comfortably within the 95% confidence interval.

Cross-posted at Political Arithmetik.

By Charles Franklin on August 31, 2007 9:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Effect of ARG Polling on Iowa Trends

By Charles Franklin

American Research Group (ARG) does a large amount of state primary polling and is therefore potentially influential in estimating candidate support because they contribute more polls than most other organizations. This week we saw conflicting results from ARG and Time/SRBI polls of Iowa. (See Mark Blumenthal's analysis here.) The discrepancy of ARG polls from others in Iowa has been an issue here before, as has been the question of how much any single poll influences our trend estimates. Today we take another step towards systematically answering that question.

In the Democratic race, ARG has consistently found support for Clinton well above that of other polling organizations. In the chart above, ARG polls are in purple, the blue line is the trend estimated with all polls, including ARG, while the red line is the trend estimate without ARG. The light blue points are all non-ARG polls, while the purple points are the ARG polls.

This lets us compare three things: ARG polls to other polls, ARG polls to the trend, and the trend with ARG to the trend without ARG.

In the case of Clinton, ARG polls are consistently far above the results of other polls. This has been widely remarked upon already. And in the Clinton case, the ARG polls have shown some decline in support in Iowa, while other polls have shown an increase in her support. This is also the case in which ARG exerts a significant influence on the trend estimator. The blue trend line (with ARG included) is well above the red trend estimate which excludes ARG. This was especially true early in 2007 when there were few polls and several from ARG, giving them an extra influence due to lack of non-ARG data. As polling frequency has increased the two trend estimates have converged, but the non-ARG estimate remains a couple of points below the overall trend.

Blumenthal has talked about possible reasons for this, and I encourage you to see his post here.

I'm more concerned with the magnitude of difference and their effects here, so will leave it to Mark to explain the "why".

It is clear that ARG's estimates for Clinton have consistently been out of line with others, and that this has had an effect on my trend estimates, making Clinton appear more competitive in the first half of 2007.

But let's also look at the other candidates. ARG is less consistent in over- or under-estimating Edwards' support. Some ARG polls have put Edwards below trend, but others have him above trend. While ARG has disagreed with other pollsters in individual polls, the effect of ARG on the trend estimate for Edwards is negligible.

On the other hand, ARG has consistently had Obama below the support found in other polls, and well below the trend estimate. Despite this, the effect of ARG on the trend estimates has been small for Obama, with the blue and red trend estimates consistently quite close to one another.

Finally, Richardson has been a bit underestimated by ARG, but again with little influence on the trend estimates.

Bottom line: ARG has had a substantial effect on the Clinton trend estimate until recently. Still, the substantive effect is not trivial. Estimates including ARG put the trend at 26.2% for Clinton, 24.2% for Edwards, a Clinton lead of 2.0 points. But excluding ARG from the trends we get Clinton at 24.6% and Edwards at 25.9%, a 1.3 point Edwards lead. Of course both estimates say the race is close in Iowa, and perhaps we should stop there. But the consistent ARG overestimate of Clinton has influenced perceptions and estimates for this race.

If we switch to the Republican side, there is a consistent ARG overestimate of McCain support until very recently. ARG is also a bit high on Giuliani and a bit low on Romney. The Thompson numbers are relatively few and jump around.

Unlike the case of Clinton, the trend estimates are not much affected by the ARG data. The blue and red trend estimates lie very close to one another for all four Republican candidates, despite the high ARG readings for McCain.

There are two bottom lines here. Any pollster can experience consistent house effects that lead to over- or under-estimating support for some candidate. These may be due to sampling methods, filtering for likely voters, question wording or order, weighting methods, or perhaps to mysterious gremlins. ARG is an example of house effects, at least for Clinton and McCain and probably Obama. House effects are important because they give us a way of estimating what a poll would be if we adjust for those house effects. That gives better perspective than the raw numbers might. But house effects also allow us to say which polls are more in line and which more out of line with others. A house effect is not in and of itself evidence for bad polling methodology. There may be good reasons for choices that lead to significant house effects-- for example deciding to interview likely voters rather than adults or a decision not to push undecided voters or to push them for a preference. So we should be careful here in how we interpret the results. That said, it is crucial to know which organizations are consistently high or low for candidates (or any other variable.) The ARG lines in the figures above give a clear reading of that for the Iowa polling.

In the next few days we'll be rolling out a series of posts that look at house effects for all polling organizations across state and national polling. We'll have a systematic look at this, with estimates of the effects for each organization. I hope that will help clarify things.

The second bottom line point is that the trend estimates are pretty resistant to the effect of a single polling organization when there are plenty of other polls taken around the sample period, but that, as in the case of Clinton and ARG, this effect can be quite a bit larger when polling is sparse and a single organization contributes a substantial share of the polls while at the same time exhibiting a significant house effect. In one sense this problem goes away as we approach elections because the density of polling increases as does the heterogeneity of polling organizations. But as Iowa illustrates (and we'll see again in other primary states with limited polling) it is not always possible to be sure which polls are misleading us when the evidence is limited.

Stay tuned next week for the next step in examining the house effects in primary polling.

Cross-posted at Political Arithmetik.

By Charles Franklin on August 31, 2007 7:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

POLL: Diageo/Hotline GOP Primary

By Eric Dienstfrey

A new Diageo/Hotline national survey (release, results) of 604 self-identified Republican registered voters (conducted 8/22 through 8/26) finds:

• Among 547 who say they "typically vote" in the Republican primary, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani leads former Sen. Fred Thompson (27% to 17%) in a national primary; former Gov. Mitt Romney trails at 15%, Sen. John McCain at 12%. All other candidates receive less than 5% each.

• 54% are "generally satisfied with the candidates now running for the Republican nomination for President;" 38% "wish there were more choices."

View all National Primary poll data at Pollster.com:

Democrats	Republicans

By Eric Dienstfrey on August 31, 2007 7:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

More on ARG and Iowa

By Mark Blumenthal

Following up on yesterday's post, in which I speculated - wrongly, as it turns out -- about the incidence of eligible adults selected by the American Research Group (ARG) as likely caucus goers for their most recent surveys of Democrats and Republicans in Iowa. I emailed Dick Bennett, and can now report on how their surveys compare to the others that have provided us with similar details.

First, according to Bennett, I was incorrect in speculating that they use only one question to screen for "likely caucus goers." They start with a random digit dial (RDD) sample of adults in Iowa in households with a working telephone and then ask four different questions (although they provide only the last question on the page reporting Iowa results):

• They ask whether respondents are registered to vote, and whether they are registered as Democrats or Republicans. Non-registrants are terminated and not interviewed.

• They ask registrants how likely they are to participate in the Caucus "a 1-to-10 scale with 1 meaning definitely not participating and 10 meaning definitely participating." Those who answer 1 through 6 are terminated and not interviewed.

• They ask unaffiliated registrants ("independents" registered as neither Democrats nor Republicans) whether they plan to participate in the Democratic or Republican caucus. Registered Democrats and independents who plan to caucus with the Democrats get the Democratic vote question; Registered Republicans and independents who plan to caucus with the Republicans answer the Republican question.

• After asking vote question, they asks the question that appears on the web site: "Would you say that you definitely plan to participate in the 2008 Democratic presidential caucus, that you might participate in the 2008 Democratic presidential caucus, or that you will probably not participate in t