Regarding Democratic Party Approval Hitting Record Low

The Washington Post's Jose A. DelReal writes:

The Democratic Party's approval numbers have hit their lowest point in at least two decades following an electoral drubbing that gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress, according to a new poll released Wednesday.

The Gallup survey has the Democratic Party pulling a 36 percent favorability rating, a 6-point drop since September.

The same poll shows the Republicans tying a 2-year high in approval at 42%. Further, by a 17-point margin, the public prefers Congress to steer the agenda, not the President.

Obviously, Republicans will be pleased with this poll. However, there are some things to keep in mind.

1. I have long held that, in the wake of a 'big' event, slight changes in response rates for each side of the aisle can have a (temporary) distorting effect on polls. Especially with response rates getting low, just a 1% increase in the chance that a person called will respond due to them being psyched about things can change the measurement tremendously, as can a decrease in the willingness of those turned off by the recent turn of events. This is one of the reasons why there are frequently 'bounces' in approval ratings or horserace measurements after events such as convention acceptance speeches or State of the Union addresses. Such distortions do not reflect a change in the underlying attitudes, and relatively quickly fade. Odds are, part of the results in this survey are due to such effects.
2. Approval rating and electoral success are reinforcing. A party that has a low approval will tend to struggle electorally, but also a party that struggles electorally will lose approval from partisans who are unhappy with the approach that led to defeat. Unlike the transient bounce from above, this effect tends to last longer.
3. Similarly, a party that suddenly has electoral success will gain approval from partisans who had been discouraged.

At this point, it is difficult to discern how much of the swing in Democratic approval is due to a temporary dip in enthusiasm, and how much is due to frustrations with their election day setbacks. My bet is that there is a mixture of both at play; that the Democrats will likely recover a few points over the next couple of weeks, but their approval rate will settle somewhere a few points below the level that had been established through September.

Updated to add: Regarding the above point on response rates, please see the table on this Tom Blumer article, which shows how the response rate in polls has declined from 36% in 1997 gradually over the years to where in 2012 it was 9%. With response rates that low, if 1 in 100 Republican partisans called decides to answer when normally they wouldn't, and 1 in 100 Democratic partisans called decides not to answer when they normally would, that would be sufficient to cause a 9 point swing in the partisan composition of the sample. Weighting for demographics would somewhat mask this in the partisan identification portion, but the Republicans sampled would be over-represented by the enthused partisans and the Democrats under-represented by the discouraged partisans. In other words, the declining response rate can very well be leading to the short-term change in enthusiasm having more of a distorting effect now than a decade ago.

Be Skeptical

Note to political consumers: view all polls released in next 72 hours with great skepticism. Very hard to poll now.

— mike murphy (@murphymike) October 31, 2014

Over the past two months, my home phone has been bombarded. Outreach contacts. Robo-call messages. Pollsters, so frequently as to defy the odds; no way could we be sampled so frequently. The closer we get to election day, the more frequent the phone rings. This past week, perhaps 5 calls a night. Last weekend, maybe 10 per day. I see no reason to think the trend will slow today or tomorrow.

It is always fun (and educational) to extrapolate out from a sample size of one, but I know that my wife refuses to answer the phone now and tells me I should let our answering machine screen things for us. It is easy for me to believe that the cacophony can influence response rates in a distorting fashion, and that the closer to election day it is, the more this is true.

I also find it easy to imagine that, as the election looms near, fewer people want to admit that they have tuned it out, or don't really care. The responses showing such disinterest, which can be used to screen out unlikely voters, may not be as frequent.

It does not take a huge change in either the response rate, nor in the answers to screening questions, to fundamentally change the quality of a poll sample as compared to those gleaned earlier in the cycle.

Throw on top of it that last night was Halloween, which is a night where who is home and who is not is just different than it normally is on a comparable day of the week.

Lastly, for the final surveys, there often is pressure to minimize the undecideds; to either put more effort into pushing leaners in the script, or to use some sort of modeling to allocate the coy.

I don't know which of these effects Mr. Murphy had in mind (or if there are others), but experience tells me he is right. The last election I did comprehensive, day-by-day analysis of the races was 2004, and the very last set of polls, all conducted in the last few days before the election, provided distorting information, not clarifying information. Experience had taught me before to view those with skepticism. I may not know the precise reason why he is, but Mr. Murphy is right. Bake in your perception of the races with the poll information you have on-hand right now, and just sit back until the results come in.

Edited to add: My warning above does not apply to polls that were previously in the field but concluded before the weekend (and just have not yet been published). Selzer, I am looking at you.

No equivalence

.@GerryDales Here's an equivalence: Civil liberties = Civil liberties. One day, they take theirs. The next, they take yours. #Ebola

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) October 26, 2014

Love ya, Ron. But that's something more akin to a Glenn Beck response than one a diligent (mostly) centrist would say. Absolutism is the fodder of extremists.

Trying to say that the forced internment of over 100k people, merely due to their ancestory, for an indeterminate length of time, is even slightly comparable to the forced quarantine, during a medical crisis, for a period of time of a handful of weeks, of a handful due to who they were exposed-- is nutty.

"One day they'll take yours," for a month, with it having nothing to do with who you are. Not comparable. It's really odd that you think it is.

The Candidate Who Promises This Will Likely Get My Vote

The government needs de-lousing.

The IRS scandal is either the first example of it, or the tip of the iceberg; the first glimpse of a massive amount under the surface. But at least part of the government has been weaponized for the benefit of one party. Given what we have seen before, where much of Foggy Bottom has worked against the foreign policy of Republican Presidents, it is likely that the IRS is not the only part. And you have strange things like the Obama administration pulling in-house the Census Bureau.

I want a candidate who will promise, and then follow through on the promise, to de-louse all of the departments under the Executive branch.

I want every canbinet head to either be, or promise to hire as a deputy, an accomplished prosecutor. We need those skills to dig into what's been going on.I want Trey Gowdy for Attorney General. I want a Trey Gowdy at or near the top of every single department.

I want every department to have, as one of its top priorities, a complete investigation into if there have been any employees engaging in using their position for partisan purposes. Any coordination with outside groups. Any selective leaking. And payoffs or preferential treatment to donors to a particular political party.

I want all of the dirty laundry aired.

I want prosecution of any where there is evidence to merit prosecution.

I want everyone found to have abused power, but not to the level of prosecution, gone. If they cannot be fired, I want a branch office opened in Nome, Alaska with them transferred immediately.

I want no phone or internet service at said office.

Central heating, no. Space heaters, yes.

I want the Census Bureau moved back to where it was.

I want hiring decisions to have, as a key point, intellectual diversity. If a division has employees who have donated exclusively to one party, I want preferential hiring for those who have not donated to that party.

I want the nonsense that has been going on, where one party has tried (and mostly succeeded) at taking over the federal government inside-out for their own purposes, to be corrected.

I want all email and data archival policies reviewed. I want those who weakened them, in Nome. I want 20 year contracts with archival contractors that contractually cannot be canceled for a partial refund.

And I want it immediately, once Obama is out of office.

Which candidate will step up and earn my vote?

In Regards to Erick Erickson on MS and Consequences

Erick, I share so many of your sentiments in your piece. That said... you said, “There must be some consequence. I am just not sure what it should be.”

Must there be? Let’s look at the specifics with Cochran. Undoubtedly, his campaign turned to things detrimental to Republicans and to Republican principles, and he won. He won using the perqs of incumbency. He won with pork both delivered and promised. He won with a boatload of campaign cash. He won by smearing a large section of his party’s voters with lies.

But he barely won. He needed all of that, plus a military background he used to better effect than before, to barely win. He needed all of that, against an opponent who had serious flaws as a candidate, to barely win.

And he is old.

The type of Republicanism he exhibited or represents is on its deathbed in Mississippi. Take away the incumbency, the influence of delivered pork, the campaign cash connections developed over decades, and a candidate-just-like-Cochran loses that primary. Take it all away- because time is going to, relatively quickly. In other words, the battle was lost in Mississippi, but the war there is already won. We will get Senators there more in tune with the voters. All we lost was some time, but time is on our side.

The consolation prize is that we will get a Senator who will help us dislodge Harry Reid. That is not a small thing.

Instead of searching for immediate consequences, why not search for immediate opportunities? While the methods used to bringing black voters into the primary electorate were odious, it does not follow therefore that we must attack them for turning the primary.

My career is now in retail, and the hardest sale to make to a person is always the first one.

The new voters may have believed some lies, but at the same time they pulled the trigger for him knowing he is a Republican and knowing his voting record. Say what you will about Cochran, but he votes with the GOP an overwhelming majority of the time. That shows that the majority of the GOP agenda is not seen as show-stopping to these crossover voters. They weren't voting to help the Democrat win, they were voting to help Cochran-- a Republican-- win. We have first time customers here. Instead of focusing on consequences for those who treated us like crap, let’s focus on converting first time customers into long-term customers.

I follow quite a number of black Republicans and black conservatives, not of the celebrity type. It does not take much talk to realize that they see incredible tone-deafness on the right with regards to how to engage black voters. Bemoaning the crossover voters, who apparently mainly were black, is unlikely to change their perception.

We’ve been handed an opportunity here. Let’s expose the lies that have been told about who we are and for what we stand. Let’s convert some of these new voters. It will not be easy. In fact, the only sale harder to make than the second, is the first. But regardless that it was done at our expense, the first sale was made. Set the record straight, and make the sale. Always be selling. Always be closing.

We will convert only a percentage, but the message that will be sent is a powerful one: we are going to win, and we are going to transcend the lies.

MS: Democrat "Statistically Tied" With McDaniel

From this Politico article:

Within the past two weeks, private Democratic polling has shown that the party’s nominee, former Rep. Travis Childers, would start a general election statistically tied with McDaniel. A race against Cochran, who is well-liked by independents and many Democrats, would be difficult to the point of futility.

A few comments:

• It is generally a mistake to ignore polling data.
• The above is not polling data.

We have no idea of the context of the above. For example:

• When (who?) says they were "statistically tied," what is the margin of error? Were the results at the edge of that range, or towards the center?
• What is meant by "within the past two weeks?" Does that mean one poll in that time showed that, or many? How many polls were conducted that show this statistical tie? Were there others conducted that did not show that?

That is not to say that the race, should McDaniel win the runoff, is not closer now than conventional wisdom suggests. However, when I see reference to private poll data without the poll data being released, I cannot help but wonder if there is a reason that the full results were not being released, even if just the topline data. I don't discard the possibility that what is being leaked is accurate, but I also do not take it at face value.

As is often the case with regards to publicly released poll information, more data is needed to help us truly evaluate where things lay.

Some thoughts on Bergdahl

• It is good that Bergdahl is no longer with the Taliban. He belongs to us.
• Since the administration claims that they needed to move quickly due to Bergdahl's "deteriorating condition," a full, unredacted medical report must be issued, preferably to the public, but at a minimum to Congress.
• If the administration lied about his medical condition and simply ignored the law for whatever purpose, then it clearly has less respect for the law than any previous Presidential administration-- including Nixon's. Not just for this matter, but for this on top of all of the other times they have treated the law as malleable or irrelevant.
• A full military investigation needs to happen expeditiously.
• If Bergdahl deserted, he needs to be subject to a court martial and punished as severely as allowed within the code, especially since men died searching for him.
• If it is found that Bergdahl collaborated with the enemy, he should be executed. Honorable men died for him.

Edited to add:

So, if terrorists we're fighting make it a "war" w "POWs" why is Obama regime still insisting on prosecuting al-Qaeda in civilian court?

— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) June 3, 2014

She's right.