Pollster.com

September 28, 2007

Remainders

By Mark Blumenthal

Gary Langer remembers the numbers for Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker.

Frank Newport looks at Gallup's numbers on the Democratic presidential race with and without Al Gore.

Jennifer Agiesta looks at what the Fox News poll has to say about how closely Americans followed the Moveon.org "General Betray-Us" controversy.

Jay Cost considers how voter inattention combines with horserace coverage to drive early trial-heat poll numbers.

Marc Ambinder and Jonathan Martin report the latest poll memo from the Romney campaign.

David Hill looks back at what polls in 1994 had to say about Hillary Clinton's health care initiative.

Mark Mellman looks at how much results can change when pollsters weight the data.

Ben Smith has video of a verbal smackdown between Clinton pollster Mark Penn and Romney media consultant Alex Castellano.

And Pollster.com reader "sjc" notices something I overlooked: How many more respondents are opting for the Democratic primary in New Hampshire in the latest CNN/WMUR/UNH poll now as compared to 2000.

By Mark Blumenthal on September 28, 2007 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Disclosure Project Update

By Mark Blumenthal

Since kicking off our Disclosure Project on Monday, we are pleased to report some very favorable early mentions and links from a variety of bloggers including The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, Time's Ana Marie Cox, USA Today's Memmott and Lawrence, Politico Ben Smith, MSNBC's Clicked, DailyKos' DemFromCt, MyDD's Jerome Armstrong and Jonathan Singer, The Democratic Strategist's Ed Kilgore. Other names you may not recognize have left comments or endorsed the efforts on their blogs.

As of yesterday, we can add an important name to that list: My colleague Nancy Mathiowetz, the current president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), left the following comment here at Pollster.com:

As President of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, I believe that this is an excellent opportunity for public opinion researchers to help improve the public understanding of polling methodology and interpretation.

Pollster.com is to be applauded for this effort.

More information from AAPOR about disclosure:

http://aapor.org/disclosuresfaqs

Regular readers will know that I serve with Mathiowetz on AAPOR's Executive Council, but it is nonetheless an honor to have her support.

I want to recognize the prompt and complete replies we have already received to our queries from the pollsters at ABC News/Washington Post and LA Times/Bloomberg and Time. Other organizations have requested more time to gather and report the data we requested. Given that we are doing something new here while also "debugging" our own process, we are going to allow as many organizations as possible to respond before publishing the first set of replies (and before sending out similar queries for polls done in New Hampshire, South Carolina and the nation as a whole).

I have also been in contact with the pollsters at Quinnipiac, Mason-Dixon and InsiderAdvantage regarding my post last Friday on their recent polls in Florida and will have more on that subject very soon.

I can say that all of those that have responded appear to be making a good faith effort to be transparent and, as Nancy Mathiowetz put it, "help improve public understanding of polling methodology and interpretation." For that we are grateful.

However, not all of the pollsters have responded to our queries, which is your why your support is important. As Ana Marie Cox put it:

The questions will probably seem unbearably wonky to many, but the reason for wanting the answers is important: They'll help reporters (and readers) better judge the accuracy and importance of these primary state polls.

Or to quote DemfromCT from DailyKos:

The bottom line is that if you want better data to analyze, then we, the consumers of all things political, ought to support pollster.com in asking for it. And if we expect and appreciate the analysis done by pollster.com, Swing State Project, Open Left, Slate, Real Clear Politics or any of the other sites that digest and analyze polling data, let's help make the data a bit more "open source" and transparent.

If you can comment or blog your endorsement of this, we would greatly appreciate it.

By Mark Blumenthal on September 28, 2007 9:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

POLL: Fox National Survey

By Eric Dienstfrey

A new Fox News/Opinion Dynamics national survey (story, results; OJ story, results) of 900 registered voters (conducted 9/25 through 9/26) finds:

• 34% approve of the job George Bush is doing as president; 58% disapprove.

• 45% of Republicans are "hoping there is someone new who you haven't heard about yet who may enter the 2008 presidential race;" 49% are not. 36% of Democrats are hoping for it; 60% are not.

• General election match-ups
  
  Clinton 46%, Giuliani 39%
  Clinton 42%, Giuliani 32%, Bloomberg 7%
  Clinton 48%, Thompson 35%
  Clinton 46%, McCain 39%
  Obama 41%, Giuliani 40%
  Obama 45%, Thompson 33%
  Obama 40%, McCain 38%

By Eric Dienstfrey on September 28, 2007 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

POLL: Research 2000 Texas Senate

By Eric Dienstfrey

A new Research 2000 statewide survey of 600 likely voters in Texas (conducted 9/24 through 9/26 for Daily Kos) finds:

• If the 2008 election for U.S> Senate were held today, 40% would re-elect Republican Sen. John Cornyn, 15% would consider voting for another candidate, and 35% would vote to replace him.

• Cornyn leads Democratic state Rep. Rick Noriega (51% to 35%) in a hypothetical general election match-up.

By Eric Dienstfrey on September 28, 2007 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 27, 2007

Exploring the Internals of the CNN/WMUR/UNH Poll

By Mark Blumenthal

If polls are political crack, than I've been happily snorting the latest from the CNN/WMUR New Hampshire primary polls conducted the University of New Hampshire (also known as the "Granite Poll") for the last 24 hours or so. I've become a fan of this survey because of the "internals" included in their questionnaire and the very helpful set of crosstabs (for the Democratic and Republican samples) released as always by University of New Hampshire Survey Center.

Our original posts on the two surveys highlighted the same trial heat numbers that virtually everyone else is focusing on: Clinton's lead has increased since July, while support for Mitt Romney has fallen off so that he now runs neck-and-neck with Rudy Giuliani.

However, to elaborate on a point I tried to make a week ago, the trial heat numbers in such polls (yes, the ones we track here at Pollster) may be the least useful at this stage, particularly if you interpret them as a prediction of what voters will do several months from now. Surveys are good at telling us what voters think and who they currently prefer, but those preferences are always subject to change. The latest survey of Democrats from UNH/CNN/WMUR helps put some of those preferences in perspective. Here a few highlights:

1) A preference is still not a final decision -- Just before asking the likely Democratic primary voter who they would vote for "if the election were held today," the UNH pollsters ask them how close they are to making a final decision.

So even though 91% can name a candidate they would support, only 17% are "definitely decided," 28% are just "leaning to someone" and more than half (55%) "still trying to decide." Of course, voters may ultimately decide to support their current preference, but by their own report most have not yet made that final choice.

I wrote the last two paragraphs before the Republican results had been released, but those numbers show even more evidence of uncertainty. Although 84% of Republicans express a candidate preference, 66% say they are "still trying to decide" while only 13% are definitely decided and 21% are leaning to a candidate.

2) A Big Shift on "Can Win"- One of the biggest and most noteworthy shifts on the Democratic poll involves the question about which candidate "has the best chance of beating the Republican nominee in the general election next November?" Although. Hillary Clinton's share of the vote has increased four points (from 39% to 43%) since June, we see a 17-point increase (from 37% to 54%) in assessments that she has best chance to win in November:

These results are consistent with similar findings from the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal national survey of Democrats, which show the percentage choosing Clinton as the Democrat with the "best chance to defeat the Republican candidate" growing from 39% to 54% from April to September. Also, the Pew Research Center shows 53% of Democrats now naming Clinton as the candidate with the "the best chance of winning the general election against a Republican" (although they had not asked the question previously).

I noticed something interesting buried in the cross-tabs. Most of the shift on this measure in the UNH polls has occurred among the roughly 60% of likely Democratic primary voters that are less than "extremely interested" in the primary. That suggests a common pattern: Less attentive voters reacting mostly to the dominant campaign news story, "horserace" coverage relentlessly portraying Clinton as front runner consolidating her lead.

One thing to keep in mind though. Electability ratings are not always a great predictor of, well...of electability. The 2004 National Annenberg Election Study (NAES) tracked electability ratings of each of the Democratic candidates (how likely respondents considered each candidate to beat George Bush in November) among likely Democratic primary voters from October 2003 though February 2004. In a paper presented to the American Political Science Association annual meeting in September 2004), Annenberg's Kate Kenski reported:

Dean's electability and viability ratings were higher than those of Kerry until the Iowa caucuses. After the Iowa caucuses, Kerry's electability ratings surpassed those of Dean. Impressions of Dean's electability against Bush reached a high point of almost 53% around November 19. Two months later, on the evening of the Iowa caucuses, this perception had decreased eight points.

3) A McCain Resurgence? Support for John McCain among likely Republican primary voters, which had fallen sharply in New Hampshire as elsewhere, has increased to 17% on this survey from a low of 12% in July. McCain's support had hovered around 30% in UNH polls conducted during 2006 and early 2007.

An outlier? Perhaps, but dig deeper and the survey yields evidence of some underlying strengths for McCain in New Hampshire that may provide a foundation for a future resurgence there. His favorable rating now (63% favorable, 24% unfavorable) is slightly but not significantly better than it was in February (59% favorable, 27% unfavorable) when he had 28% of the vote and ran a point ahead of Giuliani. And McCain now leads the Republican field (with 32%) on the question of which candidate has the "right experience to be president."

It bears repeating: Eight years ago, John McCain defeated George Bush by a huge margin in New Hampshire (49% to 30%) among these same voters. Voters have a way of falling back to past preferences.

4) Favorable Ratings - Talk to campaign pollsters about the value of the trial heat results and most will tell you a similar story: Vote preference is usually the last thing to change. If you want to see evidence of the campaigning and paid advertising that candidates do, look to the movement in their favorable ratings. The table below shows the most vivid evidence of the real progress that the candidates are making in New Hampshire, starting with the Democrats:

And the Republicans:

By Mark Blumenthal on September 27, 2007 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)