I did an hour on Minnesota Public Radio on September 10 discussing polling techniques and issues. Here is a link to the audio. Good callers!
The focus on polling starts at 11:00 minutes into the show.
Cross posted at Political Arithmetik.
By Charles Franklin on September 11, 2008 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
The McCain campaign has gained significant support in national polling since the end of the Republican Convention, but what about the state polls? Has the shift also been reflected there?
State pollsters appeared to go on vacation for the conventions, with very little new polls during the two weeks of conventions (and the week before). Now the pollsters are back, tanned and rested and ready to go. We've added 17 new state polls since the RNC ended, and while we'd love to see more, it is enough to get started with some analysis.
The chart above shows the national trend in blue and the trend based on those states with post-convention polls in purple. Over the course of the year, the two trends have followed each other rather well with some small differences in details but qualitatively similar patterns of up and down movement.
Now in the post-RNC period, the states with new polls match the national polls quite closely, both giving estimates of about a one point McCain lead, with the states maybe a shade less than that.
This post-convention bounce may or may not last, but at the moment the evidence is that it is moving across the states (and these are mostly competitive states) at about the same rate as it is for the national polls.
States for which we have new polls are Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.
Cross-posted at Political Arithmetik.
By Charles Franklin on September 10, 2008 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)
The post-convention bounce is now moving in the Republican direction, but with an enormous spread in estimates. A Gallup/USA Today (9/5-7) has an enormous 10 point McCain lead over Obama, 54%-44%. In contrast, Gallup's tracker over the same days shows a 5 point McCain lead, 49%-44%. Now would be a good time to note that the tracker is a registered voter (RV) sample, while the Gallup/USAT is a likely voter (LV) sample. LV samples typically are more favorable for Republican candidates, so at least some of this difference is probably due to these different sampling frames. We'll no doubt be talking a lot about this issue in days ahead.
But other polls on the same days show a tied race. Diageo/Hotline has the race 44%-44% and CNN has it 48%-48%. And Zogby's Internet poll done 9/5-6 puts the race at 50%-46%.
All of these are much better for McCain than the 5-9 point Obama leads we saw in the immediate aftermath of the Democratic convention.
So it looks like both parties got nice convention bounces.
Our trend estimate is still hungry for more data. The standard, blue line, estimate is now less persuaded that Obama had a convention bounce OR that McCain is getting one either. That is standard behavior of our estimator which is designed to be a bit conservative when faced with conflicting polls and short term changes of trend.
But that is why we have our "sensitive" estimator for comparison. The red line is a trend estimate that is about twice as sensitive a the blue line. It is considerably quicker to respond to short term changes and to fewer polls. The down side is it will often chase random noise.
Since there is good reason to believe convention bounces are real, it is reasonable to think that the red line's indication that the race has indeed tightened is probably a real signal in the data, and not just noise. On the other hand, the Gallup 10 point McCain lead is out of the range of any other current polling data. So "red" may be chasing that outlier just a bit more than is good for him. As the figure makes clear, red and blue usually agree quite closely after enough data are in hand, but can diverge especially when data are sparce.
A prudent approach is to wait for a few more post-convention and post-weekend interviewing polls to see just how big and how sustained the RNC bounce is. But both estimators agree we have ourselves a real horserace now.
Cross-posted at Political Arithmetik.
By Charles Franklin on September 8, 2008 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)
By Charles Franklin on August 29, 2008 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)
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.
By Charles Franklin on August 27, 2008 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)
By Charles Franklin on August 24, 2008 7:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)
[This is Part IV of the recent discussion betwen Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklen called "How We Choose Polls to Plot." For previous posts in the discussion see parts I, II, and III].
"What happens if you leave out 'x'?" is probably the single most asked question at Pollster.com. Everyone has their favorite pollster to hate, and wonders if only that one were removed would the results be closer to the truth. It is a really good question because it goes to the heart of the robustness of our trend estimates and the role of one (or a couple) of pollsters in shaping the conventional wisdom of what "the polls show". The former issue is statistical, the later goes to how shared understandings are constructed. If our estimators are highly sensitive to any one pollster then we have a statistical problem. If one pollster unduly influences shared perceptions, then we better hope they are "right".
Today's question from Mark (and many readers) is what role the tracking polls play in our estimates. This is an issue Mark and I debated quite a lot during the winter when Gallup and Rasmussen began their daily tracking polls. Because they produce so many numbers, including all their data runs the risk that these two dominate our trend estimate to an unacceptable degree. But do they exert that much influence-- there is the question.
And just to be contrarian, take note of the opposite problem: data are valuable. You should never want to ignore information. In that sense excluding data from prolific sources is a mistake unless the data are biased in some uncorrectable way.
The first decision we reached in January was that we would only include each INDEPENDENT sample from tracking polls. This was an easy call. Rolling samples are great for daily updates but Thursday's poll isn't independent of Wednesday's because they both contain Tuesday's and Wednesday's results, if it is a three-day track. In that sense, there isn't as much new information as it seems. So we take only the independent results: Mon-Tues-Wed, Thur-Fri-Sat, Sun-Mon-Tues and so on for a three day tracker. This means we are only including independent data collections, and cuts down on the number of entries in our data that come from any single tracking poll.
Despite this, we get a lot of data in the national track from two primary sources: Rasmussen accounts for 63 of 286 data points in our national trend data. Gallup's tracker provides 41 more. (We keep Gallup's USAToday polls separate from the tracker.) And a third source, The Economist/YouGov's internet poll accounts for 24 data points. (Full Disclosure: YouGov/Polimetrix Pollster.com and supports our work here.) The next most common pollster is Zogby with only 12. So let's take a look at the influence of these top-three pollsters in terms of data. Together they account for 128 of 286 data points, or 45% of our national data.
Let's begin with recognizing that every data point MUST have some influence on our trend estimator. If it didn't then the trend would not be responding to the data! So in that simple sense, the Rasmussen, Gallup and YouGov data must play some role in determining the value of our trend estimate. That really isn't the issue that concerns people. The question is whether these three pollsters DISTORT the trends we would otherwise estimate from all other sources. It would be fine if Rasmussen or Gallup or YouGov had a huge influence on our estimate so long as their trends were exactly in line with everyone else's trends. The concern arises when there is the possibility that one of these is both influential AND out of line with the rest of the world.
We need to look at three things: the overall trend with all pollsters included, the trend only for a single pollster, and finally the trend we'd estimate if we excluded this pollster. If a pollster is different from others, that's a concern. But if they don't substantially change the trend estimate, then we aren't that worried. But if they are different AND shift the trend, then we have to worry.
So let's look at the data. The chart below plots the overall trend (the blue line), the trend for each of the three most prolific pollsters (solid red), and the trend estimate if we exclude that pollster (dashed red line). A fourth plot shows what happens if we exclude all three prolific pollsters and rely only on the 28 different pollsters who've done 12 or fewer polls each (dashed blue).
Over all our polls, we estimate an Obama advantage over McCain of 3.4 points (as of early morning on 8/14). If we exclude Gallup, the trend estimate is 3.2. If we exclude Rasmussen, the estimate is 4.5. If we exclude YouGov the estimate is 3.3. And if we omit all three (and 45% of our data) the trend estimate is 5.1. So it DOES matter which of these we include. By as little as 0.1 points or as much as 1.7 points.
The most striking thing to me about these figures is that all three tracking polls trend a bit below the overall trend, which is why omitting them all produces the biggest change in the current trend estimate. Gallup is only a bit below trend, YouGov a bit more in May but less recently. Rasmussen stands out as the most consistently below trend, with convergence only in June for a while.
At first glance, the worst thing about Rasmussen is that his trend seems much more sharply downward since late June than either other frequent pollster (both Gallup and YouGov see flat or rising Obama margins in that time.) The dashed line without Rasmussen looks flat or possibly rising slighting, while including Rasmussen with all others produces a modest downward slope recently. So is Rasmussen determining our current trend's tendency to be moving down? This is especially relevant given the upward moves by Gallup and YouGov.
The bottom right panel of the figure offers some reassurance. While Rasmussen does look different from Gallup or YouGov, when we take all three tracking polls out, the dashed blue line in the bottom right figure trends slightly down, approximately in parallel with the overall trend estimate using all the polls. To be sure, omitting the tracking polls does produce a higher current trend estimate: 5.1 vs 3.4 for all polls. Clearly the tracking polls are showing a lower margin and that is reflected here. But from my point of view, the happy news is that the trend with or without the three trackers moves in pretty much the same way over the year. Granted some minor differences, both curves move up and down at about the same time and the gap between the solid and dashed blue lines is roughly equal over time. This suggests that the effects of the three trackers may be to lower the estimated Obama margin over McCain, but they don't distort the dynamics of the race. When trends are up or trends are down, they are reflected in both the with and without tracker estimates.
It is reassuring that both the Gallup and YouGov trackers have very little influence on the overall trend estimate. Including or excluding either of these polls has very little effect on the trend estimate.
A final point is what this says about the validity of the polls. If Gallup and YouGov are flat or slightly up, and Rasmussen is sharply down, how are we to know which is "right"? The data here say a bit of both are right. Gallup and YouGov do somewhat better jobs tracking the overall trend than does Rasmussen. But the recent decline in Obama support, even though modest, is not captured by Gallup or YouGov. Rasmussen clearly overstates the decline (compared to other polling) but the consensus of the 158 polls NOT from these three sources is that there has been a little downturn in Obama's lead since late June.
It is easy to exaggerate how large these differences are, especially in light of the intrinsically hard problem of knowing what "the truth" is at any moment. The chart below compares the trend estimates we would get from dropping each of the 31 different pollsters in our our data. Two things stand out. Dropping any single pollster has very little effect on the trend estimate, with one exception. Omitting Rasmussen, who is both the most prolific pollster and the one with considerably more variation than others, does make a noticeable difference in the trend estimate. But the reassuring element of this graph is that even the line omitting Rasmussen still falls within the 95% confidence interval around our overall trend estimate. While there was a time in March when the "without Rasmussen" line moves just outside the 95% confidence interval, this is the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, including now, the trend without Rasmussen is NOT significantly different from the trend over all pollsters (or the trend omitting any individual pollster.)
So what do we conclude from this exercise? I'd say that any individual pollster can have important effects on our trend estimate under the right circumstances. Concentrating a lot of unusual polls in a short time span can shift our estimates. But I am encouraged that while there are important differences in Gallup, Rasmussen and YouGov trends, none of them seem to outright dominate our trend estimates. Even Rasmussen's effects look less important when we see what all the non-tracking polls are showing. We might worry about what the right level of support is, but the shape of the trends looks pretty robust no matter who is included or excluded. While there are differences of as much as 1.7 points in the estimated margin, it is worth taking a deep breath and appreciating the margin of error in these and all other estimates of candidate support right now. The current confidence interval covers an range from +1.1 to + 5.2. That 4.1 point range looks pretty large compared to a 1.7 point difference among estimators. Meanwhile, individual polls range over a MUCH wider spread- over at least 10 points and often more. The trend estimate manages to narrow that range of uncertainty by more that 50%. A good achievement. But not one that is precise to tenths of a percentage point, nor one that is immune to some effects of individual pollsters.
By Charles Franklin on August 14, 2008 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
By Charles Franklin on August 12, 2008 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0) ABC/Washington Post, Charts, Likely Voters, Pollster.com
It's all about who votes. Those that do win. Those that don't lose. The chronic losers in American politics are the young who famously turn out at low rates election after election.
This year, those young people are of great interest. Allegedly they will be mobilized in huge numbers, and allegedly they will vote strongly for Barack Obama. The latest available Gallup weekly estimate (July 28-Aug 3) shows Obama leading 56%-35% among 18-29 year olds, while McCain leads 46%-37% among those 65 and older.
But will the young vote? And how much difference does it make when they don't?
The chart above shows the turnout rate by age for 2000 and 2004, based on the Census Bureau's "Current Population Survey (CPS)", the largest and best source of detailed data on turnout. The most striking result is just how low turnout is among those under 30 compared to older voters. No age group 18-29 managed to reach 45% turnout in 2000, and only two made it in 2004. Not one single age group over 30 fell so low in either year. Despite a little noise for each group, the pattern is a strong rise in participation rates with every year of age at least until the late 60s, after which there is some decline. Yet even among those 85 and over the turnout rate remains above 55%, more then 10 points higher than among their 20-something grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
The second striking feature of the chart is that the young can be mobilized a bit, under the right circumstances. Turnout among those under 30 rose significantly in 2004 compared to 2000. While turnout went up among all age groups, the relative gain was clearly greater among those under 30. While mobilizing the young is difficult, these data show that it is possible to get significant gains, at least relative to past turnout.
Even so, the "highly mobilized" 20-somethings of 2004 still fell behind the turnout of their 30-something older siblings. A supposed Obama-surge among the young may still not catch up with those even a bit older.
The irony is that the young are a large share of the population, but not of the electorate. The chart below shows the population by age in 2004 (it shifts a little by 2008 but not enough to change the story.)
The "boomers" in their 40s and 50s remain the largest group, but for our purposes there are two important points. Those under 30 make up a substantial share of the population, while those 60 and over represent a substantially smaller share at each age.
In 2004 those 18-29 were 21.8% of the population, while those 58-69 were just 13.2%. Add in the 11.5% 70 and up, and you get just 24.7% of "geezers" over 58 vs. 21.8% of "kids". But the sly old geezers know a thing or two about voting. Shift from share of the population to share of the electorate and the advantage shifts to the old: 18-29 year olds were just 16% of the electorate in 2004, while those 58-69 were an almost equal 15.9%. Add in the 70+ group at 13.4% and the geezers win hands down: 29.3% of voters vs 16% for the young. That difference is the power of high turnout. It goes a long way to explaining why Social Security is the third rail of American politics.
High turnout buys "over-representation". Divide share of voters by share of the population and you get proportionate representation. A ratio of 1.0 means a group votes proportionate to its size. Values over 1 are overrepresented groups. In 2004, for example, 55 year olds were represented 20% more than their population would suggest, with a 1.2 score. The youngest voters, 18 year olds, had an abysmal representation rate of 0.49 in 2000, less than half their share of the population.
While turnout rises with age, it is not until we hit 40 or so that we reach "fair" representation (1.0). After that, every age group is over-represented in the electorate. Less than 40, and every age group is under-represented. (Two small exceptions-- so sue me.)
So what are the implications? If you gave me a choice of being wildly popular with the young or moderately popular with the old, I'd take the old any day. They are far more reliable in voting, and while their population numbers are small they more than make up for it in over-representation thanks to turnout differences.
There is much conversation about "youth" turnout this year. Perhaps we will indeed see another rise, as we did in 2004. But unless something truly unprecedented occurs, no one can win on the young alone. The gap in turnout is simply too large.
But is age destiny? If there were constant differences in partisan preference by age, then perhaps so. But there aren't. Despite being supposedly "old and set in their ways", those 60 and up shifted their votes more than any other age group between 2000 and 2004. In 2000, the 60+ vote went to Gore by a 4 point margin. In 2004, however, those 60+ went for Bush by 8 points. That net 12 point swing, multiplied by their over-representation means a lot.
The 20-somethings also shifted, from +2 for Gore to +9 for Kerry. Coupled with their surge in turnout, the younger voters kept Kerry close in 2004 when he was losing in every other age category. But it wasn't enough to win.
The Obama campaign may be right that they can gain votes by mobilizing the young. But the old play a bigger role in elections, and they are not imovable in their vote preferences. Indeed, they make the youngest group seem a bit static by comparison. It is not the candidate's age that will be the key to winning the votes of those 60 and over. Issues and personality will play a large role. Any candidate would be well advised to recognize that the dynamic swings among older voters coupled with their substantial over-representation makes them a potent force for electoral change.
Cross-posted at PoliticalArithmetik.com
By Charles Franklin on August 11, 2008 7:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)
The most common description of polls is that they are snapshots, not predictions. A good way to look at that in the 2008 election is to compare the '08 campaign with the two that came before.
The chart above shows the trend estimates for each of the last three presidential campaigns. I'm plotting the estimated margin between the two candidates, Dem minus Rep, for each year.
With 93 days to go until the 2008 election, Obama holds a 3.3 point advantage over McCain, though that has been eroding over the past six weeks. If we put a confidence interval around today's estimate, we get a race that is just barely leaning Democratic.
But what about the future? The dynamics of the next 92 days are all important for where we stand on November 4. Since we can't foresee those 92 days yet, let's see what happened during the same time in 2000 and 2004. That gives us a better idea how much change we might anticipate in the next three months.
In 2004, Kerry slowly built a 2 point lead by this time, and held a small lead through much of the summer. But then the race took a sharp turn, with Bush making a 6 point run, taking a four point lead with 50 days to go. Kerry gained back 3 points of that in the polling, but less than 2 points of it in the actual vote, losing by a 2.4 point margin.
In 2000, Bush led in most of the early polls, holding a 6 point lead with 107 days to go. Then Gore moved sharply up, erasing Bush's lead and then adding a 3 point lead for Gore with about 56 days left. Bush promptly reversed Gore's gains with a six point move in the GOP's direction, and led by about 3 points over the last three weeks of the campaign. Of course, the 2000 polls were misleading in predicting a Bush win. Gore won the popular vote by 0.6 points.
So far in 2008, Obama has enjoyed a run up of 5.5 points since his low point in late March. That run is on a par with Bush's in 2004 but still a bit less than Gore's 9 point run in 2000, and on par the Bush's 6 point rebound that year.
Judging from the dynamics we've seen in the past it is quite reasonable to expect the current trend to shift by half-a-dozen points. August and the conventions have been periods of substantial change in both previous elections, so if history repeats itself the next 4 or 5 weeks should be pretty interesting.
The bottom line is neither campaign should be complacent or despondent. There is a lot of time left and recent history shows that both up and down swings of 6-9 points are entirely plausible.
As a P.S. here are the three campaigns with educational confidence intervals around them.
The current 2008 estimate is just barely inside the "lean Dem" range, and will move to toss up if the current trend continues for another couple or three polls.
The 2004 estimate was pretty close to the outcome which was well within the 68% confidence interval around the trend.
The polls in 2000 were troubling for having the wrong popular vote winner, but even there the outcome was inside the 95% confidence interval. With races as close as the last two, it is worth appreciating just how wide those confidence intervals are.
Our efforts to characterize races rely on the best estimates of those confidence intervals, but it is all too easy to focus on who's ahead and not remember how much uncertainty there is. That uncertainty is both about where the current estimate says the race stands today and about how the race may change in coming weeks. The data here show that unless one candidate builds a bigger lead than either has held so far, the uncertainty remains pretty big.
Note: My trend here is slightly different from the Pollster National trend because I'm working off the difference between candidates, not each trend separately, and because I've made 2008 comparable to 2000 and 2004, just a slightly different amount of smoothing compared to Pollster's standard estimator this year. None of those differences change the qualitative picture or shift the magnitude of changes I cite above.
Cross posted at Political Arithemik.
By Charles Franklin on August 4, 2008 5:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
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) Barack Obama, Clinton, Exit Polls, IVR, Pollsters, Stan Greenberg, SurveyUSA, Trend lines, Washington Post
Marriage for gay and lesbian couples has been a hot button issue, most especially so in the 2004 election cycle when 11 states considered and passed referendums banning (in various ways) same-sex marriages. In 2006 an additional 8 states voted on marriage ballot measures, with only Arizona defeating the proposal. In all, 41 states have statutes defining marriage as "between one man and one woman", and 27 states have put that definition into their constitutions. Only five states currently have no law banning same-sex unions (MA, NJ, NM, NY, RI). In 2008, Florida will have a "defense of marriage" amendment (DOMA) on the ballot, while California is awaiting certification of a ballot proposal and Arizona may reconsider its 2006 initiative (currently awaiting state Senate approval). (An excellent summary of the status of same-sex marriage in the states is available here.)
Despite this overwhelming majority among other states, the California Supreme Court last week ruled that the state cannot constitutionally withhold the right to marriage from same-sex couples. (Text of the ruling is here. The LA Times initial report on the decision is here.) Supporters of gay marriage hailed the decision as a breakthrough for fundamental rights, in line with the same California Court's decision in 1948 striking down laws banning inter-racial marriage. Opponents of gay marriage argued the ruling puts the issue squarely back on the table for 2008 and confirmed the opponents argument that only constitutional amendments can prevent courts from overturning popular opinion on this issue. In 2000 California passed, by a 61%-39% majority, Proposition 22 affirming that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid and recognized in California."
California has one of the strongest domestic partnership laws in the nation, so the Court's decision has the effect of ruling that by withholding the designation "marriage", such domestic partnership laws still fall short of the equal treatment required by the state constitution.
The California decision follows the Massachusetts Supreme Court's ruling of November 18, 2003 which ultimately made Massachusetts the first, and so far only, state to legalize same-sex marriage. (Rhode Island law recognizes same-sex marriages from other states.) Subsequently, the state Supreme Courts of New York, New Jersey and Washington have each declined to find a constitutional right to same sex marriage. Four states have civil union laws providing full state-level spousal rights (CT, NJ, NH and VT) while six have domestic partnership laws that provide varying degrees of spousal rights (DC, HI, ME, OR, WA plus the California law at issue in this decision).
In light of the California decision, let's take a look at public opinion on same-sex marriage and how opinion has responded to past events.
A typical question asks "Do you strongly favor, favor, oppose, or strongly oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally?" (This is the form used by the Pew Research Center polls. There is considerable variation in question wording, but most polling has used a similar dichotomy between favoring gay marriage or opposing it. I've collapsed "degrees" of support or opposition into a dichotomous measure for all polls.) The earliest use of such a question I could find dates back to September 1985, but it was not until 1992 that the question began to be asked regularly. There was a flurry of interest in the question following the Massachusetts ruling and during the 2004 election campaign.
If we rely on that first poll alone, in 1985 82% of the public opposed same sex marriage, while only 11% supported it. By the early 1990s, when the data become richer, opposition was at about 65% while support stood at about 28%. Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the federal "Defense of Marriage Act" in September 1996, but public opinion trends seem not to have noticed at all, neither rising nor falling around that time. By the week of the California ruling, May 15, 2008, opposition had declined to about 55% while support had grown to 40%. The net effect of some 16 years of public debate was a 10 point decline in opposition and a 12 point rise in support.
But that trend was not uniform. The Massachusetts ruling, and the 2004 election campaign, coincided with a sharp, if relatively short term, disruption of the previous slow but steady decade long shift of opinion. The Massachusetts Court decision placed the issue squarely on the public radar, and the 11 state ballot proposals in the 2004 election created the setting for public debate and political exploitation of the issue.
During the year from November 2003 to November 2004, opposition to same-sex marriage rose by five points, from 55% to just over 60%. Meanwhile support fell by about eight points, from 38% to 30%, then rebounded by a point or so by election day. (These shifts slightly predate the Massachusetts decision, probably reflecting the increased visibility of the issue prior to the Court's ruling.) The impact of these shifts and of the 11 referendums that were passed on the presidential election remains debatable. Initial punditry credited the referenda with helping defeat John Kerry, especially in Ohio. More careful subsequent analysis doubts much of an effect, however.
These sharp shifts in trend reversed direction immediately following the 2004 election, but took more than two years to return to pre-2004 levels. Support returned to 2003 levels in mid-2007 while opposition has only now, in May 2008, declined back to where it stood in mid-2003. Despite this slow recovery from the 2004 "shock", the 2005-08 trend lines make it clear that public opinion returned to its previous trajectory of slowly rising support and declining opposition in the aftermath of 2004. It is also interesting that the 2006 elections, with 8 states voting on referenda, made no discernible difference to the post-2004 trend. In part this may reflect the more limited number of states, but it also reflects some decline in the saliency of the marriage issue.
The California ruling, and the likely campaign over a proposition there to modify the state constitution this fall, will test whether increasing the salience of the issue will result in a replay of the 2003-04 dynamics, with opponents stimulated and supporters in retreat, or if the 2006 experience means that the issue is no longer the motivator it was in 2004. The 2003-04 data clearly show the potential for sharp changes when the marriage issue becomes extremely salient. That the fight will take place in the most populous state in the Union also guarantees national exposure. However, the fact that most states have already settled this issue through law or amendment, and that only three states (so far) are on track to have proposals on the ballot, means that the issue is more localized than it was in 2004.
Opinion now is not much different from where it was in mid-2003, so a similar reaction is possible but there may be an element of "been there, done that" as well. The novelty of the issue is surely much reduced now than it was five years ago, though the record of referenda passing in 7 of 8 states in 2006 certainly demonstrates that opposition to same-sex marriage remained strong even in a very pro-Democratic election year. (Wisconsin, for example, reelected a Democratic governor and flipped a House seat to the Democrats but also modified its constitution to ban same sex marriage or anything substantially equivalent to marriage.)
The big question is whether the marriage issue has any carry over to the presidential vote in 2008. Democratic politicians, including Senators Clinton and Obama, have tried to insulate themselves by opposing gay marriage. Instead, they support civil union or domestic partner legislation. Senator McCain opposes same sex marriage and opposes legal recognition of same sex partnerships, but also opposes a federal constitutional amendment. This line of debate, with both parties opposing marriage, but with Democrats willing to support some legal recognition short of marriage, reflects another way to framing the question, one that is significantly more favorable for limited rights for gays and lesbians.
(Note: This chart is scaled the same as the previous chart so the dynamics and time frame are directly comparable. The large white space prior to 2000 reflects the politically relevant point that in that time period the "civil union" option was not prominent enough to be included in polling questions.)
Beginning in 2004 (with one early exception in 2000), polling organizations began asking a question with three alternatives. The CBS News question wording is representative:
When the "civil unions" option is added, opposition to gay rights drops significantly from about 55% to 40%. Likewise, support for gay marriage drops from 40% to 29%. The "comfortable" middle ground is then some 26% who are willing to support civil unions so long as they fall short of "marriage".
This "half a loaf" approach is acceptable to only some in the gay rights community, but it is precisely the politically acceptable position that Democratic politicians think can move them from the losing side of public opinion to the winning side. If we add supporters of marriage to supporters of civil unions, we get the chart below.
This is now a near mirror image of the balance of opinion in the first chart. Now about 53% support either civil unions or marriage, and a minority of 40% oppose any legal rights for gay and lesbian couples. By assuming supporters of marriage will not punish them for the expedient support of only civil unions, Clinton and Obama (and many other Democrats) have tried to turn a losing position into a winning one.
The remaining uncertainty is whether opponents of any legal recognition are more intense than the supporters of civil unions. If so, then opposition groups may still win the battle between intense minority and lukewarm majority. On ballot propositions, the record is strongly in favor of the opponents of marriage and in some cases of civil unions as well.
The Clinton-Obama position will certainly not win over opponents of any form of legal recognition for gays, but then they probably wouldn't win many such voters in any case (an exception is African-Americans, many of whom are quite opposed to marriage or civil unions.) Whether their position provides them popular support in response to attack ads on this issue remains to be seen.
By Charles Franklin on May 21, 2008 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
Both standard and sensitive estimators are agreed in North Carolina. In Indiana there is a little bit of room between them, but not enough to affect conclusions about the probable outcome (if the polls are right!)
The gyrations the Indiana sensitive estimator for Clinton goes through, thanks to variability in polls and relatively few polls, is a good warning that the sensitive estimator may just be a bit too ready to chase after noise.
Cross-posted at Political Arithmetik.
By Charles Franklin on May 6, 2008 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) 2008, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton