McCain, Obama and Clinton Favorability

A little interesting movement in views of the candidates has taken place since the end of the primaries in June. All three candidates, McCain, Obama and Clinton, have seen rises in their favorable ratings and an initial decline in unfavorable views though with a slight upturn recently. McCain and Obama are enjoying essentially identical ratings, with 60% favorable and only 35% unfavorable. Even after a significant amount of negative portrayals of him in RNC and McCain ads, Obama's rating has risen over the summer, and so has McCain's. (According to the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which monitored and coded all 100,000 ad airings in June and July, one third of McCain's ads contained negative information about Obama and 100% of RNC ads were negative. In the same two months, 10% of Obama's ads mentioned McCain.)

Whatever happens after the conventions, both candidates enjoy an enviable standing with voters as attractive figures instead of a pair of lesser evils. The fall capaign may alter this, but even after a hard fought primary season the nominees remain attractive figures.

Meanwhile, Senator Clinton has also enjoyed an upturn in favorable ratings and a decline in unfavorable ratings since the end of the primary season. While improved, Clinton remains a more polarizing figure than either McCain or Obama, with slightly lower favorable but noticeably higher negative ratings.

Senator Clinton is far more popular among Democrats than among either Independents or (especially) Republicans. In that sense, her speech to the Democratic Convention last night was an example of speaking primarily to the party and her supporters, rather than to the broader public. The contast between former Virginia governor and now Senate candidate Mark Warner's speech and Clinton's is a good example of this difference. Warner stressed unifying themes and appeals across political groups, which was greated warmly but which fell short of electrifying the Democratic delegates. In contrast, Clinton played to the party and produced a predictably enthusiastic response within the DNC convention hall. Conventions contain both elements. Monday, the party celebrated Sen. Kennedy's life and family legacy, primarily an inside the family affair, perhaps touching some independents but not likely to attract Republicans. In contrast Michelle Obama's speech could have easily been given at the Republican convention, with its themes of family, hard work, pulling oneself up from working class circumstances. Hers was a speech designed to reach out beyond the party.

The one remaining question from the Clinton speech is whether her supporters also resepect her enough to follow her lead. For Clinton to be a power in the party includes the requirement that she be able to deliver her supporters for Obama. If any significant number of her supporters refuse to be delivered, they reduce her status as a result. This is hard to judge from the cable news coverage, who can easily find individual delegates willing to say they are unpersuaded. But what effect the Clinton speech has with her supporters outside the convention hall will be critical.

Zogby Internet Poll Trial Heats are Odd

A new Zogby Interactive poll, conducted using volunteers over the internet, has produced some odd results for trial heats involving Senator Clinton against all four top Republican opponents. What makes this especially odd is that the results are not equally unusual for Obama.

This poll was reported by Reuters' John Whitesides, who also reports on the Reuters sponsored polling Zogby does by conventional telephone methods. The similarities in the reports make it hard to tell, but apparently these results are not part of the Reuters-Zogby polling partnership, but are independent work by Zogby Interactive. Likewise Zogby's website posts the results without mention of who sponsored the work, so presumably Reuters did not.

The Zogby poll was conducted 11/21-26/07 with 9150 respondents who had agreed to take part in Zogby's online polling. This is not a normal random sample of the population. More on the technical issues below.

The hugely surprising result is that the Zogby poll finds Sen. Hillary Clinton losing to all four top Republicans in head-to-head trial heats. What makes that surprising is that Clinton LEADS all four of those Republicans in the trend estimates based on all other polling by between 3.8 and 11.6 points. Zogby also has Clinton losing to Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee by 5 points. There are too few Clinton-Huckabee trial heat polls from other organizations for me to compute a trend estimate for that comparison.

The chart above shows all the trial heat data from national polling and the estimated trend lines for each pairing. The data points for the new Zogby data are indicated in the charts as "Zogby Inet" in blue for Clinton and red for each Republican.

What is immediately clear is that the Zogby Clinton numbers are well below the estimated trend for Clinton in each of the four comparisons. Clinton is consistently 8-10 points below her trend estimate based on other polling.

In contrast, the Republican results are quite close to the trend estimate in most cases: Giuliani is at 43 in Zogby, with a trend of 44. Romney is 43 in Zogby, 38.3 in trend; Thompson is 44 in Zogby, 41.3 trend, and McCain is 42 Zogby, 42.7 trend. Those Republican numbers are about the kind of normal noise we see around the trend estimate, so don't seem out of line.

Why then is Clinton so far down in comparison to other polls? The Reuters story doesn't note that these results are far from other polling, and instead uses the theme that Clinton is declining to frame these Zogby results:

The results come as other national polls show the race for the Democratic nomination tightening five weeks before the first contest in Iowa, which kicks off the state-by-state nomination battles in each party.

Some Democrats have expressed concerns about the former first lady's electability in a race against Republicans. The survey showed Clinton not performing as well as Obama and Edwards among independents and younger voters, pollster John Zogby said.

While this is certainly a theme of recent reporting, boosted by a pre-Thanksgiving ABC/WP poll showing Obama leading Clinton in Iowa, it is striking that no other poll has found recent results as far from the trend estimates as are Zogby's results and that the Reuters story fails to note that fact.

One answer to why Clinton does so badly MIGHT be that the poll has too few Democrats and thus biases its results. But if that were so, we'd expect Obama to also underperform his trend estimates. That doesn't happen, as the chart below makes clear.























The Zogby results for Obama are all quite close to his trend estimate from all polls:
Zogby has Obama at 46% vs Giuliani, while the trend puts him at 44.3. Against Romney Zogby has Obama at 46%, while trend says 46.6. Against Thompson Zogby has Obama at 47, while trend is 47.0, and against McCain Zogby has Obama at 45 while trend puts him at 43.4.

This is clearly not consistent with a general anti-Democratic bias in the Zogby Internet poll. It is also clear from the graph that the Obama pairings find Republicans doing quite close to the trend estimates as they did against Clinton.

(Trial heats against Edwards are not very common recently, so the Zogby results for him lack much polling for comparison.)

And so we are left with a puzzle: What is it about these respondents that so strongly affects Clinton support but no one else?

We can probably rule out one easy explanation: That Clinton has suddenly collapsed and Zogby is just the first to find it. The reason is internal to the Zogby result. If Clinton really has suddenly become 10 points less attractive, we'd expect all four Republicans paired against her to do BETTER than their trend estimates when facing her. But what happens is Clinton goes down and they don't do any better. That is hard to reconcile with a real change in Clinton's support. (A tortured version would say Clinton must have collapsed among Dems who now say they are undecided while refusing to move towards any of the Republicans. But that isn't usually what happens in real data when one candidate declines sharply. Usually the other moves up at least a bit, drawing not only from unhappy partisans but especially from independents who now are disenchanted with the former front-runner. So while you could make the math work with this story, it doesn't seem very well supported by the data.)

The Zogby Internet polling has a questionable track record in statewide races for Senate and Governor in 2006, where they often far over-estimated the competitiveness of races compared to conventional phone polls taken at the same time. One way to make sense of those problems turns out not to help much here. It is reasonable that the people who volunteer to take political polls over the internet are considerably more interested in politics (and likely more strongly partisan) than is a random sample of likely voters. That should be expected to lead to fewer people with "don't know" responses as better informed and more partisan respondents are likely to both know more about the candidates and to have made up their minds sooner than a proper random sample. That helps explain why Zogby's 2006 internet polls looked as they did.

But this does no good in Clinton's case. What we see is that MORE internet respondents are undecided about their vote between Clinton and four Republicans than the trend estimates based on less involved and partisan phone samples show. The Zogby undecided rates for the Clinton pairings are 20, 17, 17 and 16% (plus 17% undecided in the Huckabee comparison.) The comparable undecided rates based on the trend estimates are 8.2, 12.8, 9.0 and 10.6. That is an average undecided rate of 17.5 in Zogby vs 10.15 in the trends. Likewise the undecided rate is slightly lower for Obama pairings than it is for Clinton: 17, 13, 14, 13, and 14 for Huckabee. How could it be that a sample that is almost certainly more involved, knowledgeable and partisan can be LESS decided about Cinton, the single best known figure in the race? Again, a tortured story might be constructed, but I think a simpler explanation is that this result is not consistent within the Zogby data itself, or in comparison with outside polling.

Where does this leave us? Puzzled. If these results came from voting machines, I'd suspect that something in the ballot design or the recording mechanism caused a modest but consistent undercount of the Clinton support. The effect seems confined only to that one candidate, and not to any others, Democrats or Republicans. And there was no boost in support for the Republicans paired against Clinton. In this case, I'm similarly inclined to wonder if there is the possibility that the Zogby online survey had a glitch that caused a systematic "undervote" for Clinton. Certainly if my research assistant brought me these results, I'd want to check the software for mistakes before I published it.

Let's assume the Zogby organization has checked for any such possible mistakes or glitches and has ruled that out. (One would assume they were as surprised by the data as anyone and since their reputation is on the line, would have checked very carefully before releasing the data.) Is there any reasonable model of how candidate preferences are evolving that might explain this result, and the stability of Republicans paired against Clinton AND the stability of Obama support and that of his Republican pairings?

Without access to the raw data it is impossible to test any speculation here. But here is one possibility: Internet polls, presumably including Zogby's, use weighting to adjust for non-representativeness in their volunteer respondents. (There is a huge debate about whether this, and more sophisticated approaches, can produce generalizable population estimates with good statistical properties, but we'll leave that for another day.) Clinton has more support among women and somewhat older people. Both those groups are likely to be underrepresented in any pool of internet respondents. As a result the responses of those with these characteristics who ARE present in the sample are likely to be weighted up quite a bit to reach population proportions in the weighted sample. If the relatively few older women who are in the sample are ALSO atypical in other ways that both make them volunteer for internet surveys AND be less disposed to support Clinton than are non-internet volunteering older women, then weighting these respondents up won't properly capture Clinton's support and will lead to a systematic underestimate of her support.

That could do it, but it sounds pretty tortured to me.

I'd check the software one more time.

And based on the large outliers the Clinton results produce, I'd hold off on the Reuters headline until I saw some confirmation from other polls.

Hillary Clinton, Favorable/Unfavorable, 1993-2007

(Click on graph for full resolution)

Hillary Clinton has served in the Senate for only six years but she has one of the longest polling records in American politics, going back over 13 years to the beginning of her time as First Lady in 1993. No other Presidential contender has this long a track record of public opinion readings. As a result we have an unparalleled record of the ups and downs of public response to Sen. Clinton.

There was considerably more variation in favorable/unfavorable ratings during her time in the West Wing than there has been since Sen. Clinton became an elected official in 2001. The White House years describe the downturn in favorability during first two years, which included the failure of her leadership of the health reform initiative. Sen. Clinton's favorability rebounded during and following the 1996 presidential election. The effect of the Lewinsky scandal was largely favorable to Senator Clinton, if not to President Clinton.

The decision to run for the U.S. Senate in 2000 produced a new downturn in favorable opinion (and upturn in unfavorable views). However, since she took office in 2001, Senator Clinton has enjoyed relatively stable favorable ratings of around 50%, while unfavorable ratings have averaged in the mid-40s. This sharp split is, of course, one of the more widely remarked aspects of Sen. Clinton's public image.

Most recently, there has been a modest upturn in favorable ratings, especially since the fall elections.

The figure above plots and estimates the trend in favorable/unfavorable ratings after removing the poll to poll variation, also known as "house effects". These are effects due to the standard practices of different polling organizations that introduce systematic differences in results. For example, some polls make it easier for respondents to say they "don't know" their feelings towards a political figure, while others produce lower rates of "don't know" response, pushing more survey respondents to pick a positive or negative response. In the plot above, I've used an iterative estimation procedure to remove the "house effects" and norm the results to those of the Gallup organization. This provides better comparability because it adjusts all polls to a common standard. However, it changes the observed poll results to fit the model. Some may wish to see the raw data. They are presented below.

The figure below plots the raw, unadjusted, data. The greater spread in the gray data points is due to the house effects. In particular, you can see the "don't know" response has considerably greater variation in the unadjusted data. The broad outlines of Senator Clinton's favorable and unfavorable ratings are similar to the adjusted ones. The late upturn in approval, however, is largely only visible when house effects have been removed. The raw data suggest less recent movement.
























(Click on graph for full resolution)

The bottom line of these data is that Senator Clinton remains a public figure who has both a large following of supporters and one who suffers from a substantial antipathy. At the moment, the Senator enjoys more supporters than opponents. Whether than margin is enough to win a national contest or now is, of course, what Democrats (and perhaps the rest of the electorate) will have to decide in the coming months.

Hillary's image, 1993-2006

(Click on figure for a larger view.)

Hillary Rodham Clinton's public image is very much in the news with this week's Time cover story, so let's take a quick look at one of the longer running public figures. Sen. Clinton is an unusual public figure both in terms of the length of the time series of data we have on her, and in her changing roles in politics. These changes stand out pretty clearly in her favorability ratings above.

After a typically positive view of the new first lady, favorability fell quite a bit as Sen. Clinton took on a policy role (which failed) with the health care reform initiative in 1993-94. Her favorability actually declined a bit more by the end of 1995, before starting a sustained recovery through out 1996 and 1997.

The amazing Monica Lewinsky scandal gave her further boosts in favorability, in contrast with views of her husband. This trend peaked just as the impeachment trial ended.

As Sen. Clinton turned to running for the Senate from New York, public perception again changed from the positive views of 1998 to a balance more typical of political office seekers in 1999 and especially 2000. Now a candidate in her own right, favorability shifted from around 65% to slightly over 50% as she ran for office. For the most part, favorability towards Sen. Clinton has remained close to the 50% mark, with some recent rises in 2005 and most recently in 2006 some modest decline.

Sen. Clinton is often described as an intensly polarizing figure, and there is some evidence for this in the levels of her "unfavorable" ratings. These rose sharply in 1993-94 as she took on non-traditional policy roles while first lady. But having reached 40% unfavorable by 1995, they have rarely dropped below that. Only during the Lewinsky scandal did unfavorable drop to around 30%. Since then it has remained in the ball park of 40%, but at times rising to around 45%. While not a measure of the intensity of these feelings, the data certainly show that Sen. Clinton has been viewed unfavorably by a consistent 40% of the population for the last six years. This of course is one of the difficulties she faces in a race for national office.

Those national favorability numbers set the stage for a possible run for the White House in 2008. But how has she fared in the state she represents in the Senate, New York? Below are job approval figures from samples of New York state since she became Senator.
























Here Sen. Clinton's success at winning over voters is clear. After initially withholding judgement, New Yorkers have come to approve of her handling of her job as Senator by better than 2-1 margins. The rise has been slow but steady until 2005, when approval peaked at just over 60%. Since then there has been some fall off of approval, to about 55%.

As with her unfavorable ratings, there is a steady contingent of about 30% of New Yorkers who have consistently disapproved of the her handling of her job. This has varied by as much as 8 points, but represents a stable resevoir of opposition.

Given that Sen. Clinton seems to be coasting to reelection, the decline in approval is worth watching. Is that due to presidential ambitions hurting her at home, or is it her support for the war or is it simply renewed partisanship as the Senate election draws nearer? And how will a big win in November translate into both state and national perceptions of Sen. Clinton as she considers a 2008 bid for the White House? Ahhh.. wait for more data.


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