Here are some poll results to brighten your morning:
A new Franklin & Marshall College poll suggests that Pennsylvania is slipping from Republican Donald Trump’s grasp in the last week of the presidential campaign, with Democrat Hillary Clinton opening up an 11-point lead among likely voters.
Clinton has the support of 49 percent of those who say they are certain to vote, to 38 percent for Trump, according to the survey released Tuesday. The remainder were undecided or planning to support a third-party candidate.
“This state was always going to be an uphill fight for Trump to win,” said F&M polling director G. Terry Madonna. “Pennsylvania is simply trending more Democratic than the other big swing states.”
In Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race, the poll finds Democrat Katie McGinty with a 47 percent to 35 percent lead over Republican incumbent Sen. Pat Toomey among likely voters. Her 12-point advantage is larger than in previous F&M polls and also bigger than the average of recent Senate race polls in the state.
On the one hand, this is about where I expected the presidential race to end up in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, it’s still an outlier among polls, and it’s very optimistic about the Senate race. I said that McGinty would win as soon as Trump won the nomination, but I always expected Toomey to outperform Trump by a wide margin. These polls have the reverse happening, and I just don’t see why that would be the case. She hasn’t been a bad candidate, but she hasn’t been spectacular, either. And there are a lot of Republicans in the suburbs who have little problem with Toomey but have huge problems with The Donald.
On the other hand, Toomey’s refusal to say whether or not he’s voting for Trump may be backfiring. It could be that a lot more Trump voters are not going to support him than moderates are going to split their tickets.
Either way, these numbers look very good, and it doesn’t really matter how much Clinton and McGinty win by so long as they win.
Plus, in my experience, G. Terry Madonna and the Franklin & Marshall College poll are usually pretty accurate.
Harry Reid put the pedal to the metal in Nevada.
Wow, now that’s really good news! That deserves a story of its own.
One never knows with these early voting numbers because we’re making certain assumptions. But this is about as strong as it gets.
The early numbers in both Nevada and Florida have always looked good. While I worried about Florida, I never worried about Nevada because Nevada has……Reid. He’s build a machine. He hates Trump.
.
Political machines are bad. Or so we have been told by misguided Frog Ponders.
Leftists/progressives need to take greater control of political machines, not whine that they exist. Political machines win elections, and we need to win elections.
FSM be praised. Good news at last … even I don’t necessarily believe it.
Key take from the article: “About 80 percent of the interviews were finished before the FBI’s announcement Friday afternoon that it had unearthed and would investigate additional emails possibly related to the private server Clinton used as secretary of state.”
Might just be showing us what might have been had Comey not put his loathsome thumb on the scale.
That’s possible, but I have to say, in my daily life, the Republicans and independent lean-conservative voters I know who aren’t for Trump, have either already voted not for Trump, or are still voting against Trump. Though I’m in Cali, I’m in one of its most conservative districts, and work in basically the reddest part of the state (State of Jefferson territory for those in the know). I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, it’s amazing to me that the conservatives I know who aren’t voting for Trump make more sense than some of the anti-Clinton folks I know on the left.
They hate Clinton, but know she’s going to be pretty normal. Trump’s an idiot who is reckless and terrible at business. Even if they like his tax “plan,” there’s no way they are voting for him. Just way too much uncertainty there. The folks on the left I know that aren’t voting for Hillary are busy spinning conspiracy theories, yelling “neocon!” at every moment, or angry that Bernie’s a sellout now. They only pretend to care about Medicaid expansion, voting rights, the environment, as far as I can see. The system is so rigged, nothing changes–vote Stein! It’s nuts.
I’m still on a Sanders group on FB, and you pretty much nailed my experience with the anti-Clinton faction among what we call a left. I really should just exit the group for my own sanity. Been sort of a keep my enemies closer sort of things, I guess.
F&M is a clear outlier.
There is little evidence that Comey mattered. The polling closed before the announcement.
That poll is five days old. Will F&M do another state poll before the election?
I think Clinton wins PA easily (not so sure about McGinty, though recent polls look good). But if it were a sure shot, I don’t think that they would have Biden and Hillary in state today, and Hillary, Bill, Barack and Michelle in Philly for Monday evening. My guess is that they are concerned about lagging African American enthusiasm+the septa strike.
On the other hand, the reports I’m reading about Hispanic turnout have made me far more optimistic about Nevada and Florida.
Proximity to NY media, proximity to DC (good for BHO, who still has a day job), boots-on-the-ground to handle a potential 500,000 crowd — lots of things animadvert for a Philadelphia mega-rally on the Monday besides worries about PA.
Expecting snark got animadvert for word of the day. Changed prescriptions?
Has it occurred to you that the reason we are in a squeaker with an orang-outang three days out is because we nominated the candidate with a baggage-train longer than Genghis Khan’s?
No. We got an election where one party nominated a generic compromise candidate and the other one nominated its wet dream — a white, hyper-masculine, xenophobic, homophobic tax cheat with no government experience — when government is the problem.
If the Democratic party had nominated undead zombie Eugene V. Debs it’d still be a four-point race — between wet dreams.
Now that would be worth sweating over!
After all the smarmy condescension we’ve endured she’d better win this. Your candidate may very well be the best debater the Democratic party has produced since the dawn of television and I don’t believe one farthing of 1% of all the bullsh*t slung at her and admire her unhesitatingly for her resolution, which is adamantine.
I honestly hope she wins and will forever be grateful if she does. But it didn’t have to be this way.
Actually the dubious nature of the BS brings raises a really good point. Since the media has been admittedly bad distorting Clinton’s actions who can truly say they know what she’d do?
Be fascinating if black turnout lagged and the election was won on the backs of the latino vote.
An absurd outlier.
Taken 10/30
Polls since then include
CNN +4
Monmouth +4
Mourning Call +4
PPP +4
Quinippiac +6
Gravis +2 (they missed by 1 in 2012 in PA)
There is some right wing junk too.
Booman selection of polling is really ridiculous here.
F&M’s record
+4 in 2012 ( was 5), off by 4 in 2014 Gov race
Here is the good news: Since ’96 the polling average as NEVER been wrong with this many polls and this size of an average lead.
I have to agree with you. It is an outlier. I have appreciated your polling posts.
Have seen that several times now, so maybe it actually exists!?
Which could certainly be an appropriate name, depending on reported results.
The Morning (not “mourning”) Call is a really well-respected Pennsylvania newspaper…
a “mourning call” poll?
Damn!
That would be so cool!
the other good news is that Pennsylvania isn’t really a swing state.
I mean, Democrats have to turn out, but they haven’t lost the state in a Presidential since 1988.
My WAG:
Clinton 52 D – 48 R in Senate, House with 6 pickups
The model on 538 is very noisy (lots of variation) with almost a flat line across the distribution from 260 to 360 with a few spikes. So the probabilities of those results in that range are equally possible.
The polls underlying that model seem to be all over the lot across that range.
Interpreting this is complicated by the way each of the model outcomes (a particular set of states for each candidate) are put together.
Bottom line: The polls don’t tell much as compared to past elections. This is not a conventional pattern election.
Is it the different demographics of sampling this year, the difficult of getting those demographics on polling calls, or something else?
It would be nice to have a confidence statistic on 538’s current distribution.
The current distribution is not skewed; it has fat tails (kurtosis), which points to lots of outliers. But neither of those account for the mesa-like appearance of the distribution. Go look at it; it’s the normal-curve looking jaggedy one beneath the firewall snake.
In 10,000 trials of the model, each 1% represents results that occurred in 100 trials.
Why this is important is that estimated value is an interpretation of the central tendency of the distribution (mean, average, the peak of a normal distribution). If the calculated central tendency is not really there, weighting the halves of the area under the curve does not really uniquely estimate anything except the range from 260 to 360 electoral votes.
Someone with more experienced in statistics than I am tell me why I’m wrong to analyze the limitations of polling this year in this way. This year one has to look beyond the plug-and-crank approach to polling. And this goes to the fact that Nate Silver used a large number of polls both in tracking and in comparison to historical patterns.
I don’t have it at my finger tips, but here in Cali, it seems like Republican Reps are facing a huge turnout of Latino voters. Issa is facing a real threat and I would love to see him go down. My congressman is in no real jeopardy though, sadly.
Of all the odious republican/conservative propaganda over the decades, maybe the most loathsome and infurating is this device by which, when we see a big crowd of latino/black voters, we’re supposed to be conditioned to think, “Here’s the Democratic party’s big con at work — here are the dupes showing up for their `free stuff.'” Like, as if it’s not legitimate or American; like it’s some kind of scam being perpetrated.
I absolutely hate them for spreading this idea around (and, of course, this is the year we’re paying for it — when they’ve actually built a national campain around those emotions).
Now the poll trolling has become sport, I read something from a pollster the other day that was interesting.
He said that one of the reasons for fluctuations occurring right at the point of some impactful news event is that when candidate is hurt by a story, their supporters become less responsive to pollsters – essentially they’re in a bad mood and they hang up. The reverse happens for positive events, supporters over-respond to pollsters.
But the underlying trend tend to fall back in afterwards, perhaps with a minor deflection in the overall trend.
By this theory, when you start throwing all of these logs on the fire at the end of an election, it makes sense that the polls start spiking around. Noise, if you will.
I never understood that. When my candidate is under siege I WANT pollsters to call me so I can turn the tide and show the people against him that they are irrelevant as wrong. Opposite of a fight or flight.
It’s amusing to watch the knife fight Sam Wang wages against Nate Silver.
Since it keeps coming up, often contentiously (not endorsing, at least not fully; but found it an interesting take; Stoller, via Avedon at atrios’ place):
Interesting reading. Thanks for posting this.
I know I have recommended this particular article by Sherry Ortner in the past, but since it seems relevant, I will go ahead and repeat myself a little. Ortner provides a reasonable summary of its history, and a couple of the books she draws heavily on are ones that I would strongly recommend to just about anyone. Said it before and will say it again: the terms neoliberalism as a description of a particular set of capitalist theories and practices and neoliberal as a descriptor of governments, think tanks and the like who practice and promote this set of theories are both perfectly legitimate. Using these terms (especially neoliberal) as a means of dissing someone for supporting candidates they hate and so on is another matter altogether.
Good post.
Yeah, I read that this morning and scratched my head; I still don’t understand what the hell neoliberalism is supposed to be. If it’s faith that free markets can do things better than the government, that’s just business conservatism, and there’s no need to make up a new label for it. If it’s something else, this post doesn’t explain it. I think I’ll have to go get Krippner’s book.
was pretty formative for my understanding of what neoliberalism means (and, especially, of the problems with it).
Even wikipedia’s page on it makes a pretty decent primer, though, imo.
Thanks, I’ll look at those too.
Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” is a must read. For a more academic treatment David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” is worth the effort (he writes fairly well for an academic type).