2020 election polling

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Good Axios article, short and to the point.
Pollsters spent a lot of time figuring out why Donald Trump's win was such a surprise in 2016 — but the reality is that there isn't going to be a radical change in most election polling for 2020.

Why it matters: Everyone should be more cautious in 2020 about what the polls can tell us and what they can't. There will be some improvements in state polls, which is what really mattered in 2016. But polling experts warn that state surveys in general are still a weak spot, and other aspects of election polling are still a challenge.

"The jury's out for 2020. Everyone's smarter after the fact," said Republican pollster Glen Bolger.

The backstory: Most pollsters agree that the national polls weren't wrong in 2016. They showed Clinton ahead by a few percentage points, and she won the popular vote by about 2 percentage points.

But, of course, Trump won in the Electoral College by squeezing out victories in the upper Midwest — which you're not going to see in national polls. You need reliable state polls to tell you that.

The three main reasons the Trump win was a surprise, according to a postmortem report on the 2016 election polls by a committee of pollsters:

1 Some state polls weren't weighted to get the right mix of educational levels. (They had too many college graduates, who were more likely to support Hillary Clinton.)
2 There was a late break for Trump among voters in Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania in the last week of the campaign.
3 Some people didn't identify themselves as Trump voters until after the election (which could have included some who decided late).

What's changed and what hasn't:

State polls are more likely to weight their samples for education — but it won't be all of them.
It's still hard to predict who will actually vote, and it may be getting harder. "In pre-Trumpian times, one side would surge and the other side wouldn't. Now both sides surge," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.
State polls are still more likely to be underfunded than national polls. "I don't see an infusion of high-quality state-level polls that weren't there in 2016," said Courtney Kennedy of the Pew Research Center, one of the members of the committee that wrote the postmortem.
Voters can still decide at the last minute — and what we don't know yet is whether 2020 polls in the battleground states will run later than they did in 2016.

The good news, pollsters point out, is that the 2018 midterm election polling was largely right — especially on control of Congress. And not all pollsters are convinced that there were major problems in 2016, if you knew what to look for.

Their main advice for 2020:

Pay attention to who did the poll. If you haven't heard of them before, and you don't know if they have a reputation for reliable polling, watch out.
Look at the sample size and margin of error. If it's only a few hundred people, the margin of error will be too big. A thousand or more is better. And if it's a subgroup — like Democrats only — it's a smaller group and the margin of error goes way up.
They should be transparent about what they're measuring. If you can't see breakdowns by age, gender, race, education, party identification and ideology, "that should be a red flag," said Republican pollster David Winston.
Think about who's paying for the poll. If it's a campaign or a group with an agenda, that's a red flag, too.
Read multiple polls, not just one. In the last week of the 2016 election, the trend across multiple state polls in Pennsylvania and Michigan was "clearly moving toward Trump," said Joel Benenson, a former pollster for Clinton and Barack Obama.
Don't just follow the horserace — look for the reasons why one candidate is gaining or losing."The dynamics about why it's changing, who it's changing with — those measures are much more valuable," said Benenson.
Don't use polls for predictions. They're good at showing trends and snapshots of public opinion, but "what [polling] doesn’t do as well is 'predict' who’s going to win/lose," said Republican pollster Neil Newhouse.
The bottom line: Will polling be better in 2020? Some of it will be. Is another surprise possible? Definitely.
https://www.axios.com/2020-election-pol ... 83f3a.html
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: 2020 election polling

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A new poll out from Washington Post-ABC News, it's a national poll not state polling like another thread.
The new poll highlights the degree to which most of the country already has made a judgment about the president’s performance and their voting preferences next year. Among the 39 percent of registered voters who approve of Trump’s job performance, Trump is winning at least 95 percent support against each of five possible Democratic opponents. But among the 58 percent of voters who disapprove of Trump, he receives no more than 7 percent support.
Former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) run strongest against the president nationally, with Biden leading by 17 points (56 percent to 39 percent), Warren by 15 points (55 percent to 40 percent) and Sanders by 14 points (55 percent to 41 percent). South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the other two Democrats tested against Trump, also lead the president among registered voters, with Buttigieg up by 52 percent to 41 percent, and Harris ahead by 51 percent to 42 percent.
National margins of the size in the new survey, if they were to hold for another year, would probably result in a popular-vote victory for the Democrats, possibly larger than the nearly 3 million-vote margin which Hillary Clinton earned over Trump in 2016.That means Trump’s path to victory next year is to replicate the electoral college majority he fashioned by narrowly winning Florida, North Carolina and three states that had long been Democratic presidential strongholds — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — while easily winning Ohio and Iowa, which had been swing states in recent elections.
Run up the popular vote and lose the Electoral College, another winning strategy for the Democrats. :sarcasm:
Thus far in the campaign, Trump has worked to enthuse his past supporters rather than try to extend his reach beyond already-loyal elements of the electorate. But the poll shows he is faring worse now than in 2016 election polls among non-college white voters as well as political independents, both groups that helped power his victory. In 2016, he won non-college whites by a 36-point margin, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, but he leads Biden by half that — 18 points — among registered voters in this group in the latest Post-ABC poll.
Trump narrowly won self-identified independents in 2016 (46 percent to 42 percent) according to the National Election Pool exit poll, but in the latest Post-ABC poll he trails Biden by 17 points among this group.
But people ages 18 to 29 are slightly more likely to say they could skip the vote if the nominee were Biden or Warren — 34 percent and 38 percent, respectively — than if the nominee is Sanders (22 percent). Voters in other age groups say they are less likely to skip voting next year.

Biden builds his national margin over Trump with the support of female voters. He and Trump currently run evenly among men, at 47 percent. But Biden is swamping the president among women, 64 percent to 33 percent. Every Democrat tested gets at least 59 percent among women. Among whites, all five Democrats are winning among those with college degrees, helping to blunt Trump’s advantage among those without college degrees. Among nonwhites, the Democratic candidates are running far ahead of the president.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: 2020 election polling

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Image

The Democratic presidential contest in California remains extremely fluid — but not enough, at least so far, to provide an opening for Michael Bloomberg, who entered the race two weeks ago and was banking on winning big in the delegate-rich state, a new poll for the Los Angeles Times has found. The survey by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found that both Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — the commanding front-runner in a September California poll — and former Vice President Joe Biden have lost ground among the state’s likely Democratic primary voters over the last two months. That erosion has benefited Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who narrowly tops the primary field, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., who doubled his support since the September poll.

With less than two months before voting starts in Iowa’s Democratic caucuses and three months before California’s March 3 primary, “the race is really unusually fluid,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS poll of voters likely to go to the polls in the Democratic primary. “Voters are struggling and not sticking with their candidates,” he said. “They are moving around from candidate to candidate.”

Bloomberg appears ill-equipped to break into the mix. The poll, which was taken Nov. 21-27, just as Bloomberg started advertising in California and elsewhere on Nov. 25, found that he began his campaign with the most negative image of any candidate in the field. About 40% of the likely Democratic primary voters surveyed viewed him negatively, and just 15% had a positive impression. “That’s a hole he’s going to have to dig out of and reintroduce himself to voters,” said DiCamillo. “It’s going to be tough.”

The upshot of the poll is that the field’s most liberal candidates, Warren and Sanders, are in a statistical tie for first place. The leading candidates making a more moderate pitch, Biden and Buttigieg, are lagging and essentially tied for third place. Sanders is in the nominal lead, as the first-choice pick of 24%; Warren is the first pick of 22%. That is a big change from September, when she led the field with 29%. Biden is the first choice of 14%, down six points from September. Buttigieg is preferred by 12%, up six points from September.

The poll was taken before California Sen. Kamala Harris dropped out of the race. It asked whom her supporters would name as their second choice if she quit and found that Warren and Biden would benefit the most. If Harris voters were reallocated based on those responses, the race would tighten at the top to Sanders, 25%; Warren, 24%; Biden, 17%; Buttigieg, 13%.
Among the top-tier candidates, the opinion shifts among Californians are similar to trends found in other polls nationally and in key early-voting states. Warren is coming back down to earth after a heady run-up in polling this summer and fall; Sanders is regaining traction after an October heart attack unsettled his campaign; and Biden is facing increased competition from Buttigieg among voters who think Warren and Sanders are too far left.
Biden led the field when California voters were asked which candidate had the best chance of beating Trump and which was best qualified to serve as president: 29% said he was the most electable, and 28% said he was best qualified, compared with Sanders’ second-place ranking on those points, with 22% and 24%, respectively.

But Biden drops to single digits behind other candidates on other qualities: Just 6% said he was the candidate with the sharpest mental abilities, compared with the 24% who picked Warren, who leads the field on that attribute. Sanders tops the field on three other attributes — being the candidate who would bring the right kind of change to Washington (28%), the one who comes closest to sharing voters’ values (27%) and the candidate who best understands the problems of “people like you” (28%). The poll found that the four septuagenarian candidates — Sanders, 78; Biden and Bloomberg, 77; Warren, 70 — faced differing levels of concern about their age.

The poll found increasingly stiff three-way competition in California for older voters, a part of the electorate that has been especially important to Biden’s national standing. Both he and Warren lost ground among those 65 and older over the last few months, while Buttigieg gained among that group, a prized bloc because it tends to vote in large numbers. Biden narrowly leads with 22% of the over-65 vote, down from 26% in September. Warren’s share dropped to 18%, from 32% in September. Buttigieg supporters, meanwhile, increased to 17% of those seniors, from just 7% in September.

Sanders’ campaign, by contrast, hinges on his ability to turn out younger voters who are less inclined than their elders to vote: He barely registered among older voters but was the first choice of 46% of voters ages 18 to 29. That contributes to the advantage Sanders has among Latino voters, who tend to be younger as a group than other ethnicities. In California, 32% of Latino Democrats favor Sanders, a solid 13-point margin over the next closest candidate, Biden, who has 19%.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/ ... ornia-poll

Interesting shifts, it's one poll in a blue state but the largest and most diverse state in Super Tuesday with the most delegates. But there are 49 other states that look different. It's still a shifting campaign.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: 2020 election polling

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Another wish for Warren and Sanders to run as mates and we can get down to the business of getting out the vote and clarifying/unifying instead of having a plethora of feuding Democrats ripping each other to shreds.

A Warren/Sanders ticket blows all the others out of the running with the announcement.

VooDoo
Tyrants disarm the people they intend to oppress.

I am sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Re: 2020 election polling

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Iowa's polling is pretty good. Most states don't have the polling groups to conduct meaningful polls. It is usually a best guess until election day.
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