Pollster.com

June 13, 2008

Tim Russert

By Mark Blumenthal

I'm so glad that Josh Marshall and the folks at TPM captured Chuck Todd's tribute to his boss this afternoon and put it online, because of all the words of tribute spoken today about the late Tim Russert, I found these by far the most moving:

I watched this segment while sitting in my office this afternoon, and afterwards, what I'd been working on suddenly seemed so trivial. I finished up an email, and then headed home a little early to see my family, but especially my young son.

Our condolences to the Russert family and to his colleagues and friends. He will be in all of our thoughts this Father's Day weekend.

By Mark Blumenthal on June 13, 2008 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Trends in Party Identification in Wisconsin

By Charles Franklin

This week my colleague Ken Goldstein and I conducted a Wisconsin statewide survey sponsored by the UW Department of Political Science and WisPolitics.com. So fair warning that I'm a party to this survey rather than an independent observer.

A number of people have commented on the party identification balance in the survey: 38% Dem, 24% Rep, 29% Independent (37% Independent when "no preference/other" are allocated to independent. When this group is asked how they "lean", very few insist on some other party, so this allocation makes sense.) See Alan Reifman's blog on weighting and party id for a good example and discussion of broader issues of weighting to party id.

I want to point out two things here and put our data in the context of other polls in Wisconsin.

The chart above shows party identification trends since 2000 using data from three sources that have done frequent polling in the state. What we see is a relatively stable Dem/Rep parity from 2000-2004, with Dem ID falling a bit around 2004 while Reps moved up slightly.

Starting in 2005, however, there is an initially slow but then sharper shift in partisanship. Republican ID declines from about 30% to about 24% today, while Dem ID rises from about 30% to nearly 40%. After an initial surge of independents, that group has recently fallen off a bit. (You have to squint a bit to see WPRI and Badger after 2005, but they are close to the trend lines during this period, so the changes are not just a matter of house effects or phone vs ivr methods. WPRI, for example, has Rep ID moving from 33% in 2004 to 28%, 26% and 25% in 2005-2007. Their Dem ID rises from 30%-33%-34% then falls to 29% over the same period. The final 29% is a large discrepancy from the trend, of course.)

We did not weight our survey to party identification, and these trends help explain why we have reservations about doing that. While relatively stable, party id does move over time, and by a fair bit, as you can see here. But that said, our unweighted results turn out to be quite close to the estimated trends in partisan categories in any case.

The second point is to compare these trends with those in exit poll measures of party id. In 2000, the VNS Exit poll put Wisconsin pid at 37% Dem, 32% Rep and 31% Ind. This shifted in 2004 to 35% Dem, 27% Ind and 38% Rep. But in 2006 the exit polls found that the balance was 38% Dem, 34% Rep and 27% Ind. Those values all show a smaller share of independents at the polls on election day compared to the polling trend, but that is to be expected given differences in turnout between partisans and independents. The size of the party ID groups grows as a result, but the balance between them is in line with what we see in the trends in the polls, though certainly not an exact match. The polls, after all, are of either adults or likely voters, while the exits are by definition a measure of who actually showed up on election day.

For 2006, the Dem exit percent and the Dem trend estimate are a close match. Republicans gain in the exits, by about 6 points over the 2006 trend estimate. If that holds for 2008, we might expect an electorate more like 38% Dem and 30% Rep. Of course both parties will have very active "ground games" and GOTV efforts to try to change those numbers.

While I'm certainly happy that our party id balance is so close to the trend in all the other polling, the more important point is that party id in Wisconsin has shifted quite a bit over the past four years. The coming campaign may alter that, possibly bringing disappointed former Republicans back home, for example. Likewise a Republican advantage in turnout could bring the exit polls back to closer balance. But as the data show, today the GOP is at the worst disadvantage the state has seen in over eight years.

Let me conclude with a bit of description of the polls used here.

Wisconsin Policy Research Institute ("WPRI") has done some of the longest running polls in the state, usually two a year. Their data here is taken from their annual estimates, which I assume pool the two surveys though they don't say so explicitly. WPRI describes itself as "Wisconsin's Free Market Think Tank".

The "Badger Poll" is conducted by the UW Survey Center. They did more extensive polling in 2002-04 but now do about two polls a year.

SurveyUSA is a well known national pollster that uses "Interactive Voice Response" (IVR) automated interviews. SurveyUSA has done monthly polling in the state since 2005, providing some of the best data on state trends in approval of elected officials and as a byproduct have an excellent data series of party ID.

Finally, there is our new Department of Political Science/WisPolitics poll. Ours uses a commercial call center, not the UW Survey Center or undergrads in a class calling for a grade. WPRI, Badger and our poll all use live interviewers, SurveyUSA uses IVR. Most of these surveys are in the 500-600 respondent range.

Cross posted at Political Arithmetik.

By Charles Franklin on June 13, 2008 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

How Many Pollsters?

By Mark Blumenthal

An astute reader asks:

One critique that many commentators had of Clinton and her relationship with Mark Penn was that it might have been a bad idea to have only one pollster and have that person serve as chief strategist. I read the Obama team has four. But, I was wondering, what's conventional as far as number of pollsters in a campaign. Obviously, it would vary in different kinds of races.

Let's start with that last point. Presidential campaigns, and especially the Obama and Clinton campaigns of 2008, belong in their own special category of "normal." Most campaigns for Senate, Governor or Congress hire only one manager, one pollster, one media consultant because that is all they can afford. Presidential campaigns also have unique challenge of needing to poll in many states at once. For the general election, for example, you can assume that both campaigns will conduct internal benchmark surveys between now and Labor Day in 30 to 40 states, and will likely conduct ongoing tracking programs in at least 20 during the fall campaign.

That is a lot of work, and so the multi-poll structure of the Obama campaign is not unusual. Back in 1992, Stan Greenberg was the lead pollster for Bill Clinton's campaign for president, but he invited four more Democratic firms to conduct surveys in various general election battleground states. Among those was the firm formerly known as Bennett, Petts and Blumenthal (although technically, my name did not go on the door until 1995).

Speaking of which, the Obama campaign is now up to six pollsters, not just four, including my former business partner Anna Bennett. As The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza reports, the Obama campaign is dividing up their advertising, polling and direct mail efforts into six teams:

On the polling front, the changes are more marginal, as Obama had already been using five different firms to conduct the massive amount of survey research required during the protracted primary fight.

Cornell Belcher (Brilliant Corners), Joel Benenson (Benenson Strategy Group), Paul Harstad (Harstad Strategic Research), David Binder (David Binder Research) and Anna Bennett (Bennett Petts & Normington) will all continue to do polling for the campaign. The new addition is John Anzalone (Anzalone Liszt Research), a rising star in the political polling world who has wins in two southern House special elections -- Louisiana's 6th and Mississippi's 1st -- under his belt already this year.

And in fairness, Hillary Clinton's campaign also involved more pollsters than just Mark Penn. Although they famously demoted Penn and promoted Geoff Garin (of the Garin Hart Yang Research Group), Garin had been brought on board already, along with Diane Feldman (The Feldman Group) and Sergio Bendixen (Bendixen and Associates), to assist with the crush of polling needed for February 5 and beyond.

But to come back to the gist of the reader's question, the Obama campaign's relationship with its pollsters and other consultants does appear to be different than Clinton's, even if the contrast is less about the head count than about philosophy. Consider these comments from Penn himself, in the lengthy GQ interview that has had the blogosphere abuzz for the last 24 hours:

Okay, but specifically. What are the one or two or three things that you wish you’d done differently?
I wish in reality that I had a team of people, you know, who was with me, that I organized, as I had in ’96. Look, remember, a big difference between me and a lot of people is that I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I’ve run the successful strategy of a presidential campaign in ’96. I’ve run overseas campaigns like Tony Blair’s and, you know, been through this on the big scale. And in ’96, I had a close-knit team that really ran everything. And this was not organized that way.

Why couldn’t you bring your team this time?
I think this was organized in a way which, you know, some people think is a better organization—to have, instead of a team, almost a group of rivals. And you know, one would say, overall it worked pretty well. Till October.

By contrast, all reports say the Obama team has lived up to the "no drama" mandate set early on by the candidate. In fact, as Chris Cillizza reported, the fact that none of the new names added by Obama in recent weeks leaked, despite weeks of ongoing interviews, "is a sign of the level of discipline the campaign demands." Cillizza also adds this bit of context, which is easily overlooked:

Splitting the media consultants [and pollsters] into teams focused on specific regions is an idea borrowed from the structure used to great effect in the last few cycles by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The goal of such an approach is to take full advantage of the knowledge about a particular state or region accrued by a consultant or group of consultants over a series of past campaigns.

I can add that from what I hear, the DCCC/DSCC team approach that has quietly taken hold over the last two election cycles has made for far less "drama" and more teamwork than in prior years.

By Mark Blumenthal on June 13, 2008 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

POLL: Cooper & Secrest (D) Kansas

By Eric Dienstfrey

Cooper & Secrest (D-Jim Slattery)

Kansas
McCain 45, Obama 41
Sen: Roberts (R-i) 48, Slattery (D) 36

By Eric Dienstfrey on June 13, 2008 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

POLL: Research 2000 Oklahoma

By Eric Dienstfrey

Research 2000/DailyKos.com (D)

Oklahoma
McCain 52, Obama 38
Sen: Inhode (R-i), Rice (D)

By Eric Dienstfrey on June 13, 2008 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

POLL: Rasmussen Oregon

By Eric Dienstfrey

Rasmussen Reports

Oregon
Obama 46, McCain 38
Sen: Smith (R-i) 47, Merkley 38

By Eric Dienstfrey on June 13, 2008 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

POLL: Daily Tracking

By Eric Dienstfrey

Gallup Poll

National
Obama 46, McCain 43

Rasmussen Reports

National
Obama 49, McCain 44

Favorable / Unfavorable
McCain 52 / 45
Obama 55 / 42

By Eric Dienstfrey on June 13, 2008 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

POLL: Rasmussen Minnesota

By Eric Dienstfrey

Rasmussen Reports

Minnesota
Obama 52, McCain 39
Sen: Coleman (R-i) 48, Franken (D) 45
Coleman 39, Franken 32, Ventura (i) 24

By Eric Dienstfrey on June 13, 2008 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 12, 2008

POLL: Rasmussen North Carolina

By Eric Dienstfrey

Rasmussen Reports

North Carolina
McCain 45, Obama 43
Gov: Perdue (D) 47, McCrory (R) 46
Sen: Dole (R-i) 53, Hagen 39

By Eric Dienstfrey on June 12, 2008 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (34) | TrackBacks (0)