About PPP...

A friend gave me this. [not mine after this, although I completely agree]:

Here's some fun numbers.

137 PPP polls in the RCP averages across all SEN/GOV races in 2014, excluding PPP's 2-way polls when it also published a 3-way poll in the same race.

Polls In the Field After September 1:

51 polls. 10 underestimated the Democrat (D-), 41 underestimated the Republican (R-).  So, 80% underestimated the R.

In 13 races won by Ds: 6 D-, 7 R-, average error 1.9 points in the 2-party vote.

In 38 races won by Rs (counting LA-SEN): 4 D-, 34 R-, average error 3.1 points in the 2-party vote.

That's not small - an error of 3 points can mean you had the D up 52-48 and the D lost 51-49.

Polls In the Field May-August:

29 polls. 4 D-, 25 R- 86% underestimated the R.

In 8 races won by Ds: 4 D-, 4 R-, average error 3.4 points in the 2-party vote.

In 21 races won by Rs: 0 D-, 21 R-, average error 4.8 points in the 2-party vote.

Polls In the Field Between 2012 and April 2014:

57 polls. 12 D-, 45 R- 79% underestimated the R.

In 16 races won by Ds: 4 D-, 12 R-, average error 4.7 points in the 2-party vote.

In 21 races won by Rs: 8 D-, 33 R-, average error 5.1 points in the 2-party vote.

Overall, PPP conducted 100 polls of races that Republicans ended up winning.  12 out of 100 fell on the side of underestimating the Democrat.  88 out of 100 fell on the side of underestimating the Republican.  PPP polled NC-SEN seven times and showed Hagan with a lead every time.  It polled FL-GOV eight times and showed two ties and six Crist leads, three of them by double digits.  In five KS-GOV polls and four KS-SEN polls, it had Orman and Davis leading every time.  Its only OH-GOV poll in the averages had FitzGerald winning.

And that's before you look at the races they chose to poll.

-PPP polled McConnell's race 3 times in 2012-13, when a small Mitch lead would be bad news for Mitch.  It polled the race once in August, found him up 5, and didn't poll it again until it was painting the tape the last week of the race, when it had Mitch up 8 (still well under his final margin).

-PPP polled the Maine Governor's race three times in 2013, finding Michaud up twice, but never polled it once in 2014.  It showed two double-digit Martha Coakley leads in 2013, then came back and only polled MA-GOV the last week when Baker was putting it away.

-PPP polled Thad Cochran's race twice, the last time in July 2014 when it had him leading 41-26.

-PPP polled TX-GOV four times but stopped after April.

-Its last poll in WI-GOV was also in April.

-PPP didn't poll the Iowa, Alaska, Arkansas or Louisiana Senate races in October, and didn't have a single poll in the field in any race between October 20-29.

A Letter to "My Side", Regarding Gruber

Yes, note how much of the 'mainstream' media is downplaying the Gruber tapes.

However, it would be a mistake to make the story about that. They've weathered such embarrassments before, and they will this time- without changing.

We have two years to educate, with the assistance of some wonderful videotapes courtesy of an Obamacare insider.

Two years. That's a long time.

It's on us to do it.

Let Me Add A Fourth Theory

Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy have an article up over at Huffpost Pollster wherein they discuss three theories for why polls underestimated the GOP. It’s worthy of reading.

You had to know a “however” was coming, did you not?

I have another theory to throw into the mix, and it is a theory I feel really good about believing is true. Without further ado, let me throw it out there.

The theory is that polls, at any point in time, are not measurements of what will happen, but rather are measurements of what the parties have to work with.

The parties spend a good amount of money on “get out the vote” (GOTV) activities. Some of these activities (voter contacts to spur interest, drives to register voters and/or request absentee ballots) start weeks before the election, and to some extent will get reflected in polls as they are ongoing. However, the late pushes to ensure the absentee ballots yet to be returned, and the Election Day efforts to get people to the polls, happen after most polls have been conducted.

It seems obvious to me that these operations must be capable of "moving the needle", or else the campaigns would not spend time, effort, and money on them.

Further, there is nothing that says that the parties will perform equally well in their respective efforts. In fact, it seems to me to be patently obvious that there will be times where, through skill of leadership and especially through advances in information technology, one party will improve from one election to another more than the other, that at times a party will develop an edge in this regard that can last a cycle or two, and that when that has happened it is inevitable that the other party will eventually catch up.

That dynamic, if my theory is correct, would play out such that in some years, we would see the Democrats outperform the polls, being better at converting their potential voters into actual voters at the end of the campaign than the likely voter screens in polls ‘assumed’ due to the methodology involved. In other years, the same would be true with Republicans. We might even see, for a few years in a row, the same party outperforming the polls, until such a time as the other “ups their game” - and if pollsters had adjusted their models and/or methodologies to try and rectify widespread misses, a party just drawing even would subsequently outperform the polls in a widespread fashion.

We might even see it look like it does in the chart Nate Silver presented here.

We also might see the effects be really big in some states, where field operations had changed more from election to election than in other states. As happened this year.

That the Democrats had developed an edge in micro-targeting and GOTV over several election cycles is broadly assumed to be true. Republicans spent a lot on ORCA, a software system designed to close that gap, but it failed to function on Election Day in 2012. This year, there were instead stories about how the GOP had developed a much improved system.

As Silver wrote in the article linked above, “The polls may be biased again in 2016; we just won’t know much about the direction of it until votes have been cast and counted.” I agree wholeheartedly. However, I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that polls are measuring attitudes and opinions of people, and can never measure the relative efficiency of the respective ground games at the end. That plays out, to a large extent, after the polling is done. If all of the effects of the relative strengths of voter mobilization efforts will be captured in pre-election polling, then my theory is bunk. However, it seems clear to me, since those efforts continue until the balloting stops, and are actually quite different in mechanics at the very end, that pre-election polls cannot ever truly measure it.

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?