Dem wave crested; advantage shrinks

Across the board, in Senate, House and Governor's races, the wave boosting the Democrats crested about 10 days ago. Since then the advantage Democrats have built throughout the year has been reduced by from 1.5 to 3.5 percentage points. While forces are still a net positive to the Democrats, these forces are weaker than they were during the week before Halloween. This implies that the most competitive races will now be harder for Democrats to win and easier for Republicans to hold. This implies that the anticipation of a major surge to Democrats now needs to be reconsidered. While race-by-race estimates still show an 18 seat Democratic gain, and 27 seats as tossups (see our scorecard at Pollster.com here), this reduction in national forces makes it less likely the Democrats sweep the large majority of the tossup seats and could result in total gains in the 20s rather than the 30s or even 40s that looked plausible 10 days ago.

This cresting of national forces has taken place across Senate, House AND Governors races and occurred essentially simultaneously around October 25th. The estimators here, plotted as the blue line in the figures, is a measure of national effects that are common across all races. The estimate uses all polls in all races, but estimates the Senate, House and Governors races independently, yet produce similar results for each in terms of timing, though with some variation in magnitude. (For more on the estimation method, see this earlier post.)
























As of last Thursday's data, the downturn was clear for the Senate but no indication of change had appeared for the House. Adding the polling data from Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the downturn is now apparent there as well. I did not do the Governors last week.
























The congressional generic ballot does NOT show any such change (yet!). In my earlier post I cautioned that the generic ballot might not be reflecting a realistic assessment of the Democratic advantage. It may also not be reflecting the last minute dynamics of the campaign this year.
























So what does this mean? The House still looks likely to go Democratic, but probably by a smaller margin that it might have a week ago. For a while, the Senate looked to come down to who won two of VA, TN and MO. Now MT must be added to that, and TN moved to lean Rep, perhaps requiring a Dem sweep of VA, MO and MT. (Momentum in VA remains pro-Dem, while MO is completely flat and MT is strongly trending Rep.) Possible but more of a trick that 2 of the former 3 states. The shrinking margin in MD may well end with a Dem win, but clearly some races that were viewed as likely Dem pickups or holds are now somewhat more in doubt that before, possibly including RI.

With two days to go there is a time limit on this dynamic. Reps may not have time to profit greatly from this trend, and we've seen sharp changes before so Dems may be able to recover (Republicans had a bad end of the week last week, after John Kerry and the Dems had a bad first of the week.) So no firm prediction here, but the evidence is that the Dems are falling back from their best chance of large gains.

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Gov 06: State of play

Here is a recap of what are (or at least once were!) the competitive Governor's races (AK and ID lack enough data for the analysis and are omitted.) The graph is ordered from the strongest Republican in the lower left corner to the strongest Democratic in the upper right.

Recent action that may affect election day is visible in NV where Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons is facing allegations of sexual assault. The race had looked strong for Gibbons but has now narrowed, with Gibbon's leading by under 5 points. In Maryland a small but consistent lead for Democratic challenger Martin O'Malley has all but vanished, leaving Gov. Robert Ehrlich a chance to hold on to the office. The reverse has happened in Minnesota where Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty has lost the small lead he held over Democratic challenger Mike Hatch, with the race now a dead heat. In Iowa, Democratic fortunes have improved to a small lead, as have those of endangered Oregon Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski. In Wisconins, incumbent Dem. Gov. Jim Doyle has persistently held on to a small but relatively steady lead, making challenger U.S. Rep Mark Green's chances look longer than many (including me) expected.

No other races give any indication of shifts likely to threaten current leaders. The bottom line should be a considerable gain for Democrats. Our Pollster.com scoreboard shows 28 Dem, 20 Rep with 2 races too close for an assignment. This would give the Democrats a majority of Governorships for the first time since 1994, with potential advantages going into 2008 presidential contests.


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WI Gov: New polls, same story

UPDATE 8/21: Rasmussen has a new poll showing Doyle at 49, Green at 41. Blogger is refusing to upload my new graphs, but as soon as it feels better I'll update the graphs here as well. Graphs are now updated.

Two new polls out on the Wisconsin Governor's race tell much the same old conflicting story. (See here and here for previous tellings of this tale.) A WISC-TV/Research2000 poll conducted 8/14-16/06 found incumbent Democrat Jim Doyle with a 48%-38% lead over Republican challenger Mark Green. Green is the incumbent member of the U.S. House from the 8th Congressional district (Green Bay.) But a Strategic Vision survey conducted 8/11-13/06 found a miniscule Doyle lead, 45%-44%. The Strategic Vision poll is exactly in line with their past polling showing the race as a virtual dead heat, with a very slight Doyle advantage. The WISC/Research 2000 poll is in line with other statewide polling that has consistently found a substantial Doyle lead, but which has also shown a slow but steady rise in Green's support. The problem, of course, is which poll to believe, or at least how to understand why they are different.

The top figure shows the trends for Mark Green with Doyle's support as the gray dots. Doyle's polling is quite consistent across all the polls, with support in the mid-to-upper 40s but consistently falling short of the 50% point. Green on the other hand varies widely across polls, with a slow upward trend for the "green" line polls but largely flat (though higher) in the other organizations' polling.

An alternative look is given in the graph below, which plots the margin between Doyle and Green in each poll. Strategic Vision and Zogby's Internet based polls find little or no trend, while Rasmussen's "Robo-poll" finds a larger margin, but also no trend. The other polls find a small downward trend and a larger Doyle lead.

























(Graph updated 8/21 with new Rasmussen poll.)

So why the differences? One reasonable theory now seems less plausible. The "green line" polls from WPRI, WPR, UWM and Badger were samples of adults rather than "likely voters". That made for a nice story-- adult samples include more people who are less interested in politics and therefore know the least about any challenger. The result would be lower support for the lesser known candidate. In contrast Strategic Vision samples "likely voters" whose greater interest and involvement would increase their knowledge of the challenger, making him appear more competitive in their samples.

The problem is that the new WISC/Research2000 poll is also of "likely voters", so the 10 point gap there can't be explained as due to the sample population vs the population producing the 1 point gap in Strategic Vision. Now all firms differ in how they select "likely voters", and they rarely explain their methods (often they are considered proprietary) so there may still be some difference in method here. Still, this is a large and persistent gap.

A further complication is the fact that WISC/Research2000 DOES line up with the previous samples of adults. Why doesn't the more selective likely voter sample produce at least some advantage for Mark Green? (Any comparison across survey organizations is fraught with peril since they differ in many ways. Still we'd expect a systematic difference between adults and likely voters to stand out more.) If we must strain for some explanation of this, one possibility is that the campaign remains low key enough that even likely voters have not yet started paying attention. Us junkies are certainly attending to every word, and streaming the commercials as soon as they come up on the candidates' websites, but "normal" people may still not be that aware of the campaign, even among those regular voters who are captured in the "likely" voter sample. (Of course there is a good deal of post-hoc rationalization there, when the obvious prediction should be that Mark Green does better in LV rather than Adult samples, so make of this story what you will.)

If we accept for the moment that the issue is NOT the sample population, then what might account for the Strategic Vision difference? Democrats have been critical of the Strategic Vision surveys, pointing out that Strategic Vision is a Republican firm that does these statewide "free" surveys as a marketing tool. But I think Democrats are wrong to claim that Strategic Vision is a "bad" pollster. I tracked 1486 statewide polls of the 2004 presidential race, of which Strategic Vision did 196. The Strategic Vision polls average error overstated the Bush margin by 1.2%. The 1290 non-Strategic Vision polls overstated KERRY's margin by 1.3%. Further, the variability of the errors was a bit smaller for Strategic Vision than for all the other polls combined. (That is a little unfair to the other pollsters because it mixes many organizations while comparing to a single survey "house." Since pollsters differ, that increases the variation due to pollster in the 1290 non-Strategic Vision polls.) So the bottom line is that Strategic Vision does not appear, based on their track record in 2004, to be noticably biased compared to others. And they did err in the correct direction of the winner in 2004, while others erred in the direction of the loser.

So what else might explain the differences here? One possibility is the order of the questionnaires. WISC/Research2000 appears to have asked Doyle Job, Doyle and Green favorability and then vote. getting right to the point. In contrast, the Strategic Vision polls have always opened with a lengthy battery of national questions. In the most recent poll they have 11 questions before asking Doyle job approval, legislature job approval and then vote. The 11 opening questions include Bush job overall, on the economy, war, terror and immigration, whether Bush is a "Reagan conservative", amnesty for illegals, building a wall on the border, whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned, whether we should withdraw from Iraq within 6 months, and whether there will be a terrorist attack in the next six months! That's a LOT to think about before getting to the Governor's questions. While they mostly don't deal with state politics, this series seems likely to raise people's partisan and ideological awareness and might well then structure responses more along partisan lines. That could raise Green's votes among Republicans who aren't yet paying attention, but whose Republican loyalties have been activated by the opening 11 questions. In contrast, the WISC poll with little introduction would do less to get people thinking along partisan lines.

Since Strategic Vision always has had this lengthy opening section prior to the state race questions we can't know if the order of questions really produces this effect or not. (If they'd randomize the order for us once we could find out!) But since the sample population doesn't seem to be the key variable, survey question order is the next most likely suspect.

It is great to see WISC sponsoring Research2000 polling. That brings a new and independent pollster to the table, which provides crucial information about why the polls differ. At least now we know it isn't simply the adult vs likely voter difference in the samples.


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When the pollster matters most: WI Gov 06

Go to this link for a more recent update of the Wisconsin Governor's race polling. 7/20.

UPDATED 7/11 with new UW/Badger Poll data. See update at the bottom of the post.

Here in Wisconsin we have a barnburner of a tight Governor's race. Or, the race is close enough to be interesting but not neck-and-neck. Or the incumbent is well ahead. Which is it? Depends almost entirely on which pollster you read.

The graph above shows the polling since Sepember 2005. The Wall Street Journal/Zogby Interactive poll shows it nip and tuck. Zogby averages 46.10%-46.16%, with challenger Rep. Mark Green (R) ahead by 0.06% over incumbent Gov. Jim Doyle (D). That's inside the margin of error, by the way.

Georgia polling firm Strategic Vision sees the averages as 45.0-43.6, with Doyle slightly ahead.

Robo-pollster Rasmussen has it averaging 46.25-40.75, a decent lead for Doyle.

And everyone else averages 45.4-34.0, the incumbent in a walk. ("Everyone else" here includes St. Norbert College for Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR), Diversified Research for Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.)

It isn't unusual for different pollsters to produce consistent differences in repeated surveys on the same subject. These are called "house effects" and they arise from differences in sampling, question wording, interviewer training and whatever else the organization does consistently but differently from what other houses do. Still, it is rare to see differences this large that persist over some 9 months of polling. The trends for each organization are quite stable with little sign of convergence (with the possible exception of Rasmussen.)

The differences are almost entirely about Mark Green, rather than Jim Doyle. The Doyle percentages are tightly concentrated between 43% and 49% regardless of polling firm. For Green, they range from 32% to 47.4%. That large range dwarfs the modest trend upward in Green support.

We might expect this to happen with a challenger. While Green is a well known (and well liked) incumbent in the 8th congressional district around Green Bay, he is not so well known in the rest of the state and, as every challenger, must compete against a much more visible incumbent. The lesser known candidate might be expected to show greater house effects. Subtle differences in question wording or order are less likely to matter with a candidate voters have had four years to make up their minds about. But for a candidate they are just learning about you would expect small differences in wording to matter more. The most obvious case is a vote question that fails to identify the party of each candidate, or worse, one that offers a "or haven't you made up your mind yet" option. But those kinds of differences don't seem to be present here. The question wordings are

Zogby: If the election for governor of your state were held today, for whom would you vote? (Zogby doesn't say so, but I presume the candidates are then listed. Zogby Interactive polling is done over the internet so it is hard to imagine this question not being followed by a list of options to pick from.)

Strategic Vision: If the election for governor were held today, and the choice was between Jim Doyle, the Democrat and Mark Green, the Republican, whom would you vote for?

Rasmussen: Thinking about the 2006 election for Governor, suppose that Republicans nominate Mark Green and Democrats nominate Jim Doyle. If the election for Governor were held today, would you vote for Republican Mark Green or for Democrat Jim Doyle?

WPR/St. Norbert: If the election for Wisconsin governor were held today, and the race were between Democrat Jim Doyle and Republican Mark Green as the major party nominees, would you be more likely to vote for Democrat Jim Doyle, Republican Mark Green, or an independent/third party candidate?

WPRI/Diversified Research: If the election for Wisconsin governor were held today between Mark Green for the Republicans and Jim Doyle for the Democrats, for whom would you likely vote?

UW-Milwakee: The press release oddly did not include the question wording of the vote for Governor question, though it included all other question wording. The release mentions a large percentage of undecided, suggesting that might have been an explicit option. Regardless, the UW-M survey does not appear out of line with WPR/St. Norbert or WPRI/Diversified.

So on the face of it, these questions don't appear different enough to account for the wide spread and the huge house effects we see for the Green vote.

The nature of the sample and the polling technology may be a better explanation.

Zogby's polling for the Wall Street Journal uses a pool of volunteers from the internet rather than a random sample of telephone numbers. The results are weighted by demographic and partisanship characteristics and is supplimented by a small number of phone calls as well. (See his explanation for his methodology here.) There is a good deal of effort being devoted to developing reliable methods of internet-based surveys but the jury is still very much out on the question of how reliable they are. At the very least they cannot rest on the strong theory of random sampling that is the basis for all conventional polling. In the case of political polling, they are also likely to recruit respondents who are much more interested in politics than would be the case in a representative random sample. The result would seem likley to advantage the challenger, since a more interested and involved set of respondents is more likely to know and have opinions about a less well known candidate. And indeed, Green does best in the Zogby internet based poll.

Strategic Vision uses conventional telephone polls but samples "likely voters" rather than all adults or registered voters. Again, we would expect this to produce a more informed and involved group of respondents compared to samples of adults, to the advantage of the challenger.

Rasmussen also samples "likely voters" but uses a recorded voice to ask questions that respondents answer by pushing buttons on their phones. The sample is based on a random sample of phone numbers (avoiding the volunteer respondent problem of the internet) but the response rate is extremely low compared to conventional telephone surveys with live interviewers. We might expect this to drive up interest as well, but there is also some reason to think that the effect might not be as great as with the internet based polls. There is some good evidence that people agree to participate (or more often NOT participate) in polls based on "spur of the moment" factors: I'm in a good mood, surveys are fun, or "I'm bored" versus the baby's crying, supper is on the stove, I've had a hard day. So long as the reason to participate isn't correlated with vote choice, even a low response rate doesn't necessarily bias the results. If respondents participate or not BEFORE they find out this is a political survey (and don't hang up when finding it is) then the Rasmussen poll method could produce reliable results. Since it is a sample of "likely voters", it should resemble Strategic Vision in terms of more interested and informed respondents.

WPR/St. Norbert and WPRI/Diversified Research both sampled "adults" without screening for registered voters or for likely voters. That should produce a sample that is most representative of the state but not necessarily representative of November voters. Certainly these respondents should be on average less involved with politics than the samples of "likely" voters from Strategic Vision or the Zogby internet panel or Rasmussen's "likely" voters. That should hurt the lesser known Green in these samples, and indeed he performs worst in these polls.

The UW-Milwaukee survey sampled "residents who intend to vote". Based on the results they appear not too different from the adult samples of WPR and WPRI.

So the "house effects" appear to line up pretty well with the nature of the sample and the likely effect of sample selection on the level of information and interest in the set of respondents. The challenger does best when the sample is more interested and less well when the sample more nearly captures the adult population.

Of course, this begs the question "which is right"? The Green campaign should prefer Zogby while the Doyle folks should like WPR and WPRI. Unfortunatley, we don't have a lot of DIFFERENT polls to choose from or to compare. Zogby and Strategic vision have done the most with 5 and 8 poll respectively. Rasmussen has done 4 and no one else more than 2. This means that the sample selection effects that appear to account for the differences are also heavily confounded with any other house-specific effects, including the internet vs robo-phone vs conventional phone technologies. This makes it harder than it might be to estimate a "best fit" across all the polling. If we had a range of phone polls from different organizations, all sampling likely voters, we would be in a better position to sort out the house effects from the "real" underlying support for each candidate.

The house effects are not limited to vote choice either. When it comes to approval of the job Jim Doyle is doing as governor, there is a striking divergence as well. The figure below plots these trends.
























Here the striking comparison is between the substantial negative trend in approval in Strategic Vision surveys vs the generally flat trend in the monthly SurveyUSA samples. (SurveyUSA, like Rasmussen, uses a recorded interviewer.) And as before, we see that the "other" survey organizations produce divergent approval ratings, much higher than those of either SurveyUSA or Strategic Vision.

While it was clear why samples with more interested voters would be more aware of Mark Green, it is less obvious why the "adult" samples of WPR/St. Norbert produce strikingly high approval ratings compared to SurveyUSA's samples which are also of "adults". It may be that there is a pro-Republican advantage among likely voters which could account for some differences in the level of approval. But that doesn't seem able to account for downward trend in Strategic Vision surveys compared to the flat SurveyUSA trend.

A further puzzle is that while Strategic Vision has found approval of Doyle declining, they have not found a decline in the Doyle vote, or an increase in the Green vote (except for their most recent poll). We might expect these two series to move in tandem, but so far not so much.

Survey "house effects" and sample population effects are common, but rarely do we see them as clearly defined as in the Wisconsin Governor's race polling. The potential for such effects to cause confusion and conflicting claims about the race is compounded by the concentration of polls among a handful of firms and methodologies, at least two of which (Zogby and Rasmussen) are open to serious methodological questions.

The lack of regular polling by independent media organizations in the state compounds the problem. No Milwaukee or Green Bay or Madison news organization currently sponsors regular, professional and high quality readings of public opinion, with the exception of the widely spaced and small samples from WPR polling. That means not only citizens but reporters and editors as well are left to pick among the widely varying polls that are available because someone else sponsored them for their own purposes. Not, perhaps, the best state of affairs for journalism in Wisconsin.

(Full disclosure: I serve on the advisory committee of the UW Survey Center which previously conducted the "Badger Poll", which was sponsored by the Capital Times in Madison and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. That sponsorship ended last year. Other than my (unpaid) advisory committee duties, I have no ties to the Badger Poll or to the UW Survey Center. Likewise I have no connections to any survey firms.)

Update 7/11: A new UW-Madison/Badger Poll was conducted 6/23-7/2 though curiously not published until today, 7/11. Those data fit very nicely with the story told above, and from a new source not previously part of the data. The Badger Poll has been added to the graphs above, as the last data point in the horse race graph, and with a red highlight in the approval graph.

The Badger poll finds support for Gov. Doyle at 48.6% and for Rep. Green at 35.8% with 15.6% undecided. That is entirely in line with the green line in the top figure for "other polls", a group including Wisconsin Public Radio/St. Norbert College, Wisconsin Policy Research Institute/Diversified Research, and UW-Milwaukee. Those polls have averaged 34.0% support for Green and 45.4% for Doyle. So the Badger results fit right in. What Badger has in common with these others is conventional telephone random sampling (with live interviewers) and a sample of adults, rather than likely voters.

News reports seem to be leading with "double digit lead" but I think that's a questionable interpretation of the data. As the data show, Mark Green is still very much an unknown in the state, outside the Green Bay area of his 8th congressional district. The Badger poll found a whopping 58.7% unable to say if they had a favorable or unfavorable impression of Green. That makes perfectly good sense at this point in the race, though political junkies find it hard to believe how little candidates penetrate the consciousness of the general public this far from election day. Even Doyle, after nearly four years as Governor, cannot be rated by 23.8%.

So realistically, how well can ANY candidate be expected to do when nearly 60% of the public has no impression of him? I'd say doing 35.8% support is pretty good. That support has to be based on a combination of partisanship and dissatisfaction with Doyle, and not a lot because of the attraction of Green. As Green gets better known, he will attract support on a personal basis as well, but that isn't a large part of his support as of today. NOR should we expect it to be at this stage of the race.

The polls that are closer, especially Strategic Vision which uses the same telephone methodology but selects "likely voters" finds a much closer race. But that makes excellent sense. The more interested likely voters are also more likely to have formed an impression of Green, adding that element to their vote choices. Hence a closer race in Strategic Vision.

So why should the news reports NOT lede with the "double digit margin"? Because it is an artifact of name recognition (or lack thereof) rather than a sign of a weak challenger.

If I wrote the lede, it would be "Gov. Jim Doyle, while leading in the horse race, faces an electorate in which 56.6% disapprove of his handling of the job of Governor. Only 37.5% approve of the job he is doing. " Those are remarkably bad job approval numbers for an incument seeking reelection, and provide the basis for a challenger to rise substantially in the polls once the campaign commences. To emphasize the horse race margin is to miss the serious vulnerability the poll reveals.

There is, however, one very puzzling result. While Doyle's job approval is pretty dismal, his favorability rating is a relatively good 46.7-29.5. It seems odd that Doyle gets a favorable rating from nearly half the sample when only 38% approve of his job performance. These two need not track exactly, but that is quite a gap. Perhaps this favorability provides a reservoir of support that is helping overcome the poor job approval numbers.

The job approval also looks bad broken down by party. Dem approval is only decent at 57%, but Independent approval is a disappointing 37.1% and Republicans a predictably low 23%. You certainly can't win Wisconsin with only Democratic support, so Doyle needs to win over a lot of independents who are currently not very impressed with his performance.

One might question whether the approval rating is believable, given the gap between vote (49%) and favorability (47%) and approval (38%) . But here the Strategic Vision polls show a downward trend in approval that ends at a level quite close to the Badger Poll. SurveyUSA's automated polling finds a higher approval as have other polls, though a good bit earlier. At the least, this is a quite unsettling finding for the Doyle folks and source of hope for Green.

Put that together, and the bottom line is that a "double digit lead" doesn't mean much for the fall. Doyle may well win reelection, but it seems very unlikely to be by a wide margin. The nice irony here is that the polls showing a currently close race are most likely wrong, AS OF TODAY, but are probably about right as forecasts of where opinion is heading once the campaign starts activating and informing voters.




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