Get yer polls, bets, numbers & pretty graphs! Elections 2008

That's Portland though. Remember that the largest one until then was in Philadelphia -- doesn't mean he won Pennsylvania.

"Obama has likely pretty much won the election already. Oregon votes by mail, and he is polling at 59% with the 74% of poll respondents who reported already having cast their ballots."

sozobe wrote:

That's Portland though. Remember that the largest one until then was in Philadelphia -- doesn't mean he won Pennsylvania.

For once, it's a state that I have practical personal experience with that is under discussion; and I know people in several smaller towns who are pretty pro-Obama, and report that this is the general sentiment of their towns. Not worried in the slightest.

Plz remember that NC polling was WAY off as well, showing him close to being tied.

Winner/loser

Margin in the final results was at least 1% more favourable for the candidate who had been ahead than it had been in the last polls in 15 states

Margin in the final results was at least 1% more favourable for the candidate who had been behind than it had been in the last polls in 7 states

No significant difference between result and polling in 2 states.

Meanwhile, SUSA's latest polls are out -- Obama 55, Clinton 42 in Oregon. So that's better (and is SUSA, which has been pretty good -- I seem to remember they were off recently though, Indiana maybe?)

Whoa. That guy's... thorough.

The broadening of Obama's appeal for the nomination seen in Gallup's May 16-18 polling is fairly widespread, with the percentage favoring him increasing among most demographic categories of Democratic voters. However, as a result, certain groups that were already highly supportive of Obama for the nomination -- men, 18- to 29-year-olds, postgrads, and upper-income Democrats -- are now overwhelmingly in his camp. Obama is currently favored among these groups by a 2-to-1 margin, or better, over Clinton.

At the same time, support for Clinton among some of her traditionally stalwart support groups -- women, Easterners, whites, adults with no college education, and Hispanics -- has fallen below 50%.

The only major demographic group still supporting Clinton to the tune of 51% or more is women aged 50 and older. This group's preferences have changed little during May, at the same time that Clinton's support among younger men (those 18 to 49) has declined by nearly 10 points.

Behind the Numbers: More "Sincere" Crossover

Washington Post
May 7, 2008

Republicans made up 10 percent of all Democratic voters in Indiana last night, their highest share of the electorate in any Democratic primary this year other than Mississippi. Not only did Clinton win Republicans in Indiana by eight percentage points, but about six in 10 of those who supported her in the primary said they would vote for McCain over Clinton in a hypothetical general election match-up. (Most Republicans voting for Obama said they would stick with him in the fall.)

A closer look, however, reveals that most Republicans for Clinton appear to genuinely prefer Clinton to Obama, which was the choice at hand. They opted to vote in one of the hottest elections in years, perhaps with an eye to giving themselves more appealing options in the fall.

About nine in 10 GOP Clinton voters said she would make a better commander in chief, and more than six in 10 said she would have a better shot at beating McCain. They were also more than twice as likely as other voters to prioritize an experienced candidate. And three-quarters of these voters said they would be satisfied with Clinton atop the Dem ticket, just 15 percent said so about Obama.

A narrow majority of Clinton Republicans did say that Clinton does not share their values, but more said so of Obama. All politics is comparative.

First, Clinton edged Obama in Indiana's open primary among self-identified Democrats, 52 to 48 percent. And removing all GOP-identifiers from the voter pool does not budge the overall result. Perhaps the focus on non-Democrats is misplaced. [..]

And looking at the Indiana exit poll numbers by race also seems to dampen any "Limbaugh effect." Overall, Clinton won the state's white voters by 20 percentage points. Republicans, 95 percent of those who voted Democratic yesterday were white, broke for her by eight points, but that was much narrower than her win among white Democrats: she outpaced Obama by nearly 2-1 among those voters.

It seems silly to me to look at exit polling data to decide whether or not Republicans are gaming the system to their advantage. There isn't anything to make them more likely to tell the truth to a pollster than on their party preference form.

nimh, re your state delineation lines above for IL and KS being strongly for obama -- those could simply reflect native son attitudes towards 'one of their own'.

MYSTERY POLLSTER
The Poblano Model

National Journal
May 8, 2008

Over the last week, an anonymous blogger who writes under the pseudonym Poblano did something bold on his blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. He posted predictions for the upcoming primaries based not on polling data, but on a statistical model driven mostly by demographic and past vote data. His model predicted a 17-point victory for Barack Obama in North Carolina and a 2-point edge for Hillary Rodham Clinton in Indiana.

Critics scoffed. Most of the public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina. Looking back at Poblano's efforts in Pennsylvania, pollster Dick Bennett decried the models as "stepwise regression run amok." Slate's Mickey Kaus predicted failure for "a sophisticated model that ignores... what's been happening in the campaign. Like Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright."

But a funny thing happened. The model got it right.

Obama carried North Carolina by 14 percentage points (56 percent to 42 percent) and Clinton prevailed in Indiana by exactly the 2-point margin Poblano predicted (51 percent to 49 percent). Moreover, the predictions were more accurate than any of the pollsters' results, as indicated by the graphic below (modified from a chart created by Brian Schaffner of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies). The model was certainly closer to the final result than our Pollster.com trend estimates based on all of the available public polling data (we had Clinton leading by 4 points in Indiana and Obama up by 7 in North Carolina).





I also asked SurveyUSA's Jay Leve how the model would have ranked on the scorecards he created to rate pollster accuracy in Indiana and North Carolina. Had it been a poll, Poblano's model would have been the top ranking "pollster" on 13 of 16 accuracy benchmarks applied in the two states.

How could that be?

When a statistical model succeeds in this way, it is usually because the it manages to quantify reality in some important way. In this case, the fundamental insight captured by Poblano's model is the remarkable consistency of vote preference in the Obama-Clinton race among key demographic subgroups.

Over the course of the primary season, especially since early February, the preferences of Democratic primary voters have been mostly stable. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein put it last week, Clinton has consistently prevailed among a "beer track" coalition of blue-collar whites, Latinos and seniors. Obama consistently dominates Clinton among blacks and younger white voters, and he draws additional strength from a "wine track" coalition of independents and well-educated white voters. What varies from primary to primary is less about the shifting allegiances of voters within these groups and more about differences in the demographic composition of each state.

Consider some specific examples. The outcome of the North Carolina primary was wildly different than Ohio or Pennsylvania, yet non-college white voters favored Clinton by virtually identical margins in each state (+44 in Ohio, +41 in Pennsylvania, and +45 in North Carolina, according to the Edison/Mitofsky National Election Pool exit polls provided by NBC and ABC News). Clinton's margin was far narrower among college-educated whites in each state (+7 in Ohio, +10 in Pennsylvania and +7 in North Carolina). And Obama won near monolithic support from blacks in all three states (87 percent in Ohio, 90 percent in Pennsylvania, 91 percent in North Carolina).

The different overall outcomes owed mostly to the varying demographic composition of each state. Blacks and college-educated whites made up roughly two-thirds of the North Carolina electorate, but only about half of the voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Poblano's model succeeded because it captured the demographic coalitions in evidence from previous primaries and applied them forward to Indiana and North Carolina.

All of which brings us to the underlying story of the Democratic presidential primaries. Since Super Tuesday, it has mostly been the story of what hasn't happened. Over the last three months or so, for better or worse, the underlying coalitions of support for Obama and Clinton have remained largely constant.

So therein lies the bad news and the worse news for the Obama and Clinton campaigns, respectively. The bad news for the Obama campaign is that evidence of an expansion of his coalition is weak.

The far worse news for the Clinton campaign is that evidence that she made "important progress" among white voters in Indiana and North Carolina is weaker still. After weeks of pummeling over the controversies involving the Wright's remarks and Obama's comments about the "bitterness" of rural voters, Obama's coalition remains intact and on track to produce a majority of pledged delegates. The "game-changer" that the Clinton campaign counted on to alter the thinking of unpledged superdelegates did not materialize.

The bad news for the Obama campaign is that evidence of an expansion of his coalition is weak.

More than ever, Poblano was vindicated by the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. In this column, Pollster.com's Mark Blumenthal shows how Poblano's models outperformed all the opinion polls.

In the previous five states where I released projections, I felt pretty darn comfortable with them. [..] But this projection in Kentucky -- I'm not so certain about. [..]

Our model is projecting a 19-point popular vote win for Clinton, with about 7 percent of the vote going to Edwards and uncommitted. That would be worth a net gain of about 95,000 popular votes for her, which would closely match Obama's projected margin in Oregon. [..]

Can Obama actually keep the popular vote margin within 20? I still wouldn't bet on it [..]. I can see Obama keeping things within 25 points, but 20 seems like a stretch.

(and very exhaustive )

Yep, Poblano has been coming up more and more -- I was just there earlier today, got a bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of info, though.

Good news is, this is already out of date:

Quote:

The bad news for the Obama campaign is that evidence of an expansion of his coalition is weak.

(See Gallup info on previous page.)

A separate survey found slightly different results when third-party candidates were mentioned by name. In a four-way race, Obama earns 42% of the vote, McCain 38%, Bob Barr 6% and Ralph Nader 4%. Given those options, 11% were undecided. Barr and Nader were mentioned as candidates of the Libertarian Party and the Green Party respectively.