by Tom Schaller @ 1:07 PM I don't doubt or have anything to add to Nate's
various polling analyses, but as he noted to me by email, there remains a very real chance of
non-response bias in these polls. Still, the swirl of last-minute reports about this or that external or internal poll result confirms that we can be certain tomorrow's results will
not be a typical Democratic blowout in Massachusetts.
So what will win or lose this tight race for either Martha Coakley or Republican Scott Brown?
A lot of the chatter surrounds intangibles. And on balance, most of the intangibles in the contest seem to point to a Brown victory:
*Coakley's fumbles. She's made two--not one, but two--Red Sox-related gaffes. Though most people who get their political information from Curt Schilling were probably not going to vote for Coakley anyway, calling Schilling a Yankees fan is beyond dumb. And in a short-sprint, low-information race, such moments are ideal fodder for "out-of-touch" narratives. Knowing who the heck Curt Schilling is won't lower healthcare premiums or pay for grandma's medication, but geez. One Sox gaffe ought to be enough to shut up a candidate on the subject. (Unless I missed something, John Kerry didn't compound his "Manny Ortiz" blunder in 2004.) But a second gaffe?
*Brimming conservative confidence. Conservatives are also chirping about big buzz at Brown rallies. And however much liberal nerves are soothed by President Obama's last-minute visit to the state, his inability to draw crowds like those he did 2008 is causing further crowing.
*The combination of anti-incumbent sentiment and anti-Democratic sentiment. Coakley is not literally an incumbent, of course. But as a stand-in for Teddy Kennedy she actually has it worse than an incumbent because at least endangered incumbents have deep connections to voters, a track record of porkbarreling and constituent service to point to, and related brand name advantages.
*A chops-licking opportunity. As if all the above were not enough to stoke conservative excitement, taking Kennedy's seat at a moment when the healthcare package is still not passed would for Republicans be like finding both a bike and a pony under the Xmas tree. The fact that voting is taking place in a mid-January special election in an midterm election season helps, too. This is a perfect storm for Massachusetts Republicans.
So...stick a fork in Coakley, she's done--right? Not so fast.
First of all, any chance Brown had of sneaking up on her is now gone. The closeness of the race is generating high passions--cautious excitement on the right, worry bordering on panic on the left. But in Massachusetts you don't want high passion and level of attention on both sides if you're a Republican; you want an asymmetrical level of passion favoring your side. You want to catch the Democrats napping all the way through to Election Day. That almost happened. But Coakley and state Dems--especially the unions--and the White House all awoke before it was over. We'll see if they rose from their collective slumber too late.
Second, intangibles make for good copy but campaign media narratives tell an incomplete tale. Whatever unions and the Democratic machine are doing, and whether it will be enough or not, their actions are simply less newsworthy than a Sox-Yankees comment, or a Schilling blog post, or whatever Scott Brown did or said at a Tea Party rally.
Third, we'll finally get a certifiable test of whether the Obama political machine has applicability for Democrats other than himself. As Mother Jones' Nick Baumann reports, the White House has gone all in with the Organizing for America list Obama built in 2008.
All of which is not to say Coakley will pull this out. I think it would be crazy to make a wager either way. There are too many unknowns. At this point, a Coakley victory would be the "surprise" outcome, which shows how much the tables have turned in the Bay State. But it would not be that surprising. Intangibles matter but they aren't everything. There's More...
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by Nate Silver @ 10:07 AM The National Review's Jim Gergahty
tweets: "Can Obama really save Coakley if PPP puts his approval/disapproval split at 44/43?"
If the electorate which turns out tomorrow is this indifferent about Obama, I have little doubt that Coakley is headed for defeat. But I think we have to place into context just how lopsided turnout would be if indeed we see an electorate that is split 44/43 on Obama. Here are some of the relevant numbers, both in Massachusetts and nationally.
Three pollsters -- Suffolk, MRG and PPP -- all place Obama's approval between a net +1 and a net +5, and each have the raw approve number under 50 percent. Those numbers are basically identical to how Obama's polling nationally at the moment -- and this is Massachusetts.
Of course, some of those national polls are of registered voters or adults rather than likely ones, which is the whole rub. But in New Jersey this November, the electorate which turned out was +15 on Obama, basically identical to the +16 margin by which he carried the state in 2008. The news was much worse for Democrats in Virginia; Obama was a -3 there, after having carried the state by +6 -- producing a 9-point "turnout gap".
Obama carried Massachusetts by 26 points in November 2008. (His approval among registered voters there also appeared to be about +24 as of November 2009). So, if Democrats suffered from the same turnout gap in Massachusetts that they had in Virginia (which was billed as catastrophic at the time), Obama would be at a +17 or so. Instead, you have several pollsters showing him at a +1 or a +5 -- which would imply a turnout gap of 20 or 25 points, more than twice as bad as the one Democrats suffered from in VA.
Sure, a lot has happened since November. But Obama's approval ratings are basically unchanged since then, both among all voters nationally and the liberal ones who populate Massachusetts.
Of course, there are other differences between Massachusetts and NJ/VA. In particular, special elections generally have lower turnout than odd-year ones, and Coakley is arguably a worse candidate than either Jon Corzine or Creigh Deeds, which is quite a feat to pull off.
Nevertheless, if Coakley loses, I tend to think it will be more along the lines of the Rasmussen scenario, where Obama's approval rating is somewhere safely into the 50s but a lot of voters are just turned on by Brown or turned off by Coakley and don't want to reward her for having run such a lousy campaign. It's fine to ask whether Obama can save Coakley if his approval split is 44/43 -- but in addition to using polls to ask questions about the political environment, we should also use the political environment to ask questions about the polls. There's More...
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by Renard Sexton @ 7:00 AM Coming off three straight electoral victories in 1997, 2001 & 2005 under the leadership of Tony Blair, the governing Labour party in the U.K. is in real trouble. Behind in the polls by about 9-10 points and limping along with their smallest majority since they took power of the House of Commons in the 1997 landslide, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just a few months to engineer a radical turnaround. Indeed, some observers have remarked that the real question is not whether Labour will win (they won't, many say) but instead how long they will be out of power.
At the same time, the Tory opposition has had a relatively difficult time capitalizing on the weakness of Labour. Opinion polling numbers for the Conservatives have been steadily rising since the end of 2007, following the close of Gordon Brown's honeymoon with the British public after he became P.M. in June of that year. However, the 2009 expenses scandal, which triggered a cratering of public support for both the big parties, slowed most of the Tories' momentum. In addition, the leader of the Conservatives, David Cameron, has yet to "seal the deal" with many British voters. Born, bred and educated in quite privileged environs (he's an Eton & Oxford man), Cameron's charismatic style often comes across as suspect to the voter. Though clearly a talented leader, he nonetheless sometimes seems very much the snake-oil salesman.
This post launches FiveThirtyEight's coverage of the U.K. general election, where we will follow the campaign numbers and narrative from Her Majesty's domain for the next few months. Of course, we must intentionally be vague regarding the time frame for the election and our coverage, as the date of the polling has not yet been set.
By law, the current Parliament must end by midnight on the 10th of May and a general election must be held within 17 days (not including weekends or official holidays). This means that 3 June is the latest that the 2010 election could occur, barring unforeseen official days of mourning or celebration (luckily the USA v. England World Cup match will not take place until 12 June). On the other hand, though quite unlikely, Brown could call a snap election today and with the Queen's consent, the UK public would be voting mid-February.
The new Members of Parliament (MPs) will be elected to the House of Commons from 650 geographic constituencies (up from 646 in the 2005 election), a system that was mimicked in the creation of congressional districts in the United States. Based on population distribution and allocated by a series of "Boundary Commissions," 533 MPs will come from English districts, 40 from Wales, 59 from Scotland and 18 from Northern Ireland.
About 65 thousand people are represented by each parliamentarian, with the MPs from the smaller UK nations -- Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland -- tending to have slight overrepresentation. In contrast, in the United States, the average district of a member of the House of Representatives contains more than 650 thousand people, with smallest states also having significant overrepresentation. The last time population per Representative in the U.S. Congress was as low as it is now in the House of Commons was after the 1840 census.
Similar again to the U.S. (or should we say, the U.S. system is similar to this), the House of Commons districts use a "first past the post" system, where only the vote totals in each constituency are considered, as opposed to any national vote share number. As seen in systems of this sort, first past the post voting tends to push out third parties except where they are highly regional, sometimes called "Duverger's law." Accordingly, British politics have long been dominated by the push and pull between the Labour party and the Conservatives.
However, with strong regional identities (including language and national boundaries), third parties have an important role to play in U.K. elections. Unlike in the U.S. Congress, third parties hold a significant number of seats in the House of Commons; currently 104 MPs (16 percent) come from parties other than Labour or the Conservatives.
The largest third party, and indeed the most influential, is the nationally-competitive Liberal Democrats. Established in 1988 through a merger of the Liberal party and the Social Democratic Party, the "Lib Dems" regularly pull 20 percent or more of the national vote in general election, as compared to 30 to 40 percent for the big parties. However, they have never won more than 10 percent of the seats.
Other minority parties that are more regionally centered have been able to capitalize on their small level of support because it is focused in just a few districts. Here are the 2005 numbers for all the parties who got at least 100,000 votes and won a seat (the far-right British National Party and the Greens both got about 200,000 votes but no seats for the above reasons).
With the two biggest parties under-whelming the voting public with their programmes and politics -- for example, a few rogues in Labour recently tried to remove Gordon Brown as the head of the party -- the chances of result where no party has a majority of the chamber's seats is increasingly possible. If the Lib-Dems creep above 20 percent, regional parties perform strongly, and the race between Labour and the Tories tightens further, the chances of a so-called "Hung Parliament" are increasingly likely. This has not occurred since the 1974 election, where a botched coalition building attempt by the Conservatives allowed the Labour government to remain in power, call and narrowly win a new election and govern until the end of the decade.
At the same time, huge anti-incumbent sentiment among the public, particularly after the messy expenses scandal, major economic impacts of the recession, and general frustration with the two big parties, has prompted a huge wave of retirements, particularly from Labour. More than 120 members are expected to retire, nearly 20 percent of the chamber. I guess they are trying to avoid being part of a hung Parliament -- that is, Parliament hung out to dry by the voters.
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Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com There's More...
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by Nate Silver @ 5:33 AM Charles Franklin has a typically articulate analysis up at
Pollster.com which comes to a somewhat different conclusion than
mine about the state of play in Massachusetts. His analysis works by lumping polls together into different bundles (e.g. "non-partisan", "Republican + non-partisan") and producing the following graph:
This certainly looks persuasive. But I'm not sure if it's as robust as it appears. What happens, for instance, if instead of bundling together different
types of polls, we instead let each poll speak for itself?
Clearly, Scott Brown is in a much better position than he was two weeks ago, and probably in a better position than he was one week ago. But otherwise the story is somewhat more ambiguous. There are two pollsters, Coakley and Pajamas, that in fact show some kind of movement back toward Coakley in the last couple of days (note that I'm taking advantage of one data point that Franklin didn't have, which is that Coakley is supposedly now up by 2 in her own internals, according to the Boston Herald).
Yes, in Pajamas' case it's from a -15 to a -9 and is possibly just reversion to the mean; and no, I'm not entirely comfortable with taking Coakley's internals at face value (that holds for the Pajamas numbers too). But keeping those caveats in mind, it's not that difficult to draw an übertrendline that is roughly consistent with the story told by each of the individual trendlines. It would probably look something like this:
This would have Coakley losing ground fairly steadily through about the 14th, and then perhaps having added back 2 or 3 points since then. It does a good job of staying parallel with all four trendlines formed by the individual pollsters. Note, for instance, that the decline in Coakley's PPP numbers actually wasn't that significant (-4 points) considering that there was a 9-day gap between their polls; if you buy the übertrendline's story, this may be because they didn't poll at Coakley's bottom.
The übertrendline is less successful at tracking the red diamonds, which are the orphans -- the pollsters that have only surveyed the race once. But, for varying reasons -- turnout is hard to model in special elections; a lot of these pollsters are dodgy; some of them are partisan -- we have seen very large house effects in the polls of this race and some of what looks like a trend may just be different pollsters with different slants on the race happening to have weighed in at different times. What's unusual is that, if you took the orphan polls and drew a trendline through them, it would be about twice as steep as the übertrendline, which a composite of actual trendlines. In other words, those orphan polls make Franklin's trendline both appear both steeper and more linear than it perhaps actually is.
The concept of the übertrendline -- the trendline of trendlines -- is pretty much exactly what our Presidential election model attempts to calculate. What it's trying to discern, essentially, is this: if every pollster surveyed every state every day, what would the average look like? If, for example, the Boston Globe, which previously had the race at Coakley +17, weighed in on the race this morning, what we expect it to show? Surely not Coakley +17 again -- you'd have to subtract some points for the übertrendline and possibly also for reversion to the mean. But I'm guessing that it would probably show Coakley ahead, and possibly outside the margin of error. Conversely, if Pajamas, which has a huge house effect in the other direction, had polled the race back on January 4th when the Globe did, what might they have found then? Perhaps something close to a dead heat, I'm guessing.
Guessing, guessing -- I'm using that word a lot, guessing. When we're looking at a Presidential race, we don't have to guess as much, because we can look not only at polls in a particular state, but also at polls from other, similar states, as well as national polls, including several daily trackers. Under those circumstances, this method can be quite robust. Here, it is less so.
But this is also true for the Pollster.com approach. If you take the Pajamas Media polls out of their average, for instance, their characterization of the race goes from Brown +7.9 to Coakley +1.2! That's not especially robust, either.
This race and NY-23 have been exceptionally challenging to polling analysts; I unapologetically hedged about as much as I could in NY-23, and that's my attitude again here. There is definitely more than one storyline that you can tell about the polling in this race, as well as more complicated storylines that involve figuring out in which direction the polls might be off. That is why I continue to characterize the race as a toss-up. It's not necessarily that I'm predicting a super close finish or recount or anything like that -- there's certainly a decent possibility of that, but I I could envision a double-digit win for either candidate. It's more that our point estimates of where the race stands is swamped by the uncertainty.
As the remaining polls come in, you should image how they might impact the übertrendline. If the Rasmussen poll comes in somewhere between Brown +1 and Brown +3, that would tend to validate that the übertrendline is correct. If they come in at Brown +6 or something, that would suggest that the any late uptick in Coakley's numbers is probably illusory, and something closer to Franklin's impression of a more linear decline may be correct. And if they hold at Coakley +2, that would obviously be a good data point in her favor. There's More...
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Here is what my "traditional" Senate
model now says, updated with new polling from
PPP and the
potentially dubious firm known as CrossTarget.
Scenario 1:
Under its original assumptions, the model now projects a very slight Brown edge, 49.3-48.7, which maps to a 55 percent chance of winning. Earlier today, it had given Coakley a 57 percent chance of winning. However, because the odds are under 60 percent, we still call this race a "toss-up" per our nomenclature, as we did before.
But what if we made different assumptions?
Here's one that Democrats will like: let's remove the CrossTarget poll and keep everything else the same. This is basically the best defensible Democratic case.
Scenario 2:
That brings Coakley's odds up to 68 percent.
But now, let's do a couple of things that Republicans will like instead. We'll put the CrossTarget poll back in the mix. We'll place more weight on more recent polls, reducing the half-life of a poll from 14 days to 7. And we'll get rid of the result from the regression model (the reason you might not want to do that is explained here.)
Scenario 3:
Coakley drops all the way down to 17 percent!
Next, let's make a middle-ground set of assumptions that I'm personally somewhat inclined toward. We'll keep the half-life at 7 days to place more weight on the most recent polls, but leave the CrossTarget poll out and the regression result in. We'll also increase by 50 percent the uncertainty parameter, owing to the fact that special election polling is harder than regular Senate polling. Coakley bounces back up to 58 percent under these assumptions:
Scenario 4:
However, even if we're emphasizing the more recent polls, Coakley is still benefiting from sort of middle-aged Rasmussen and Research 2000 polls, when some pollsters have observed a further decline in her numbers since those surveys came out. Suppose that both pollsters come out tomorrow (as both are rumored to be in the field) with a new poll showing a 5-point decline in her numbers. That would mean Rasmussen shows Brown ahead by 3 points (rather than trailing by 2), and R2K shows Coakley ahead by 3 points (rather than 8). Warning: the following two charts contain hypothetical polls that don't yet exist. I have no idea what the Rasmussen and R2K polls might say, or whether they're in the field at all.
Scenario 5:
Now that's really a toss-up: Coakley at 52 percent to win and Brown at 48.
Finally, let's restore the original assumptions of Scenario 1, but include the hypothetical polls that we introduced in Scenario 5.
Scenario 6:
Coakley down to 41 percent to win, Brown up to 59, putting the contest just on the fringe of "toss-up" and lean GOP.
To state the obvious, one's assumptions matter a lot! Any of these are reasonable and defensible sets of assumptions. And I'm sure that you some the more creative among you could come up with other wholly reasonable and defensible sets of assumptions, including some that fall outside the goalposts of the scenarios contained herein.
On the heels of the PPP poll, the consensus of other analysts is liable to be that Scott Brown is favored (which I might agree with in the most literal sense), and favored by a large enough margin to characterize the race as something other than a toss-up (which I don't yet agree with.) That's fine; I can see how they get there. The only thing I'd really caution against is that, because our minds are wired to detect patterns, and the story of this race has been Brown! Momentum! Rawwr! it's perhaps easy to forget about some of the polls that did show Coakley ahead, like the Research 2000 poll (which is no less recent than the Suffolk or ARG polls), the Rasmussen poll (at least until they come out with a fresh one), and the Boston Globe/UNH poll, which is definitely old but showed a 17 (!) point lead. It's also easy to forget that all of these polls have their hitches: with the possible exception of Ann Selzer's polling in Iowa, there's no poll anywhere that should be thought of as the gold standard. There's More...
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