Polling, Political Science, and elections

Political scientist Larry Sabato and colleagues provide an early look at the electoral vote playing field: "In the current Electoral College battlefield, 40 of 50 states have voted for the same candidate in all four elections since 2000. And, of the 10 exceptions, three were fluky...That leaves just seven super-swingy states: Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia, all of which backed Bush and Obama twice each, and Iowa and New Hampshire, which have voted Democratic in three of the last four elections...This map feels like déjà vu: It’s effectively the same map we featured for much of the 2012 cycle, and it unmistakably suggests the Democratic nominee should start the election as at least a marginal Electoral College favorite over his or (probably) her Republican rival." link

It is important to understand that these are not state-by-state predictions, and that the coming election is likely to be close to a toss-up for a variety of reasons. But what's important here is that the playing field is much narrower than it was in 1976, when 20 state were decided by margins of 5 percentage points or less; in 2012 only 4 states were that close. The short story here is that the GOP candidate probably needs to take both Ohio and Florida to win, and the Dem needs Virginia.

Some useful poll sites:

Five Thirty-Eight

Electoral Vote

Pollster

Gallup

Rasmussen Reports

Latest UMass national poll results are out.

Republicans

Trump - 31

Carson - 22

Cruz - 13

Rubio - 9

All others - less than 5 percent each

Democrats

Clinton - 63

Sanders - 29

Nate Silver explains why polls now are a poor guide to voting in the upcoming primaries/caucuses:

"It can be easy to forget it if you cover politics for a living, but most people aren’t paying all that much attention to the campaign right now. Certainly, voters are consuming some campaign-related news. Debate ratings are way up, and Google searches for topics related to the primaries have been running slightly ahead of where they were at a comparable point of the 2008 campaign, the last time both parties had open races. But most voters have a lot of competing priorities. Developments that can dominate a political news cycle, like Trump’s frenzied 90-minute speech in Iowa earlier this month, may reach only 20 percent or so of Americans.

"We can look deeper into the Google search data for some evidence of this. In the chart below, I’ve tracked the aggregate share of primary-related searches in the 2008 and 2012 presidential cycles, based on the number of weeks before or after the Iowa caucuses.2 As you can see, public attention to the race starts out quite slow and only gradually accelerates — until just a week or two before Iowa, when it begins to boom. Interest continues to accelerate as Iowa, New Hampshire and the Super Tuesday states vote, before slowing down again once the outcome of the race has become clear...

"But maybe you don’t trust the Google search data. That’s OK; exit polls...have historically asked voters in Iowa and New Hampshire when they made their final decision on how to vote. These exit polls find that voters take their sweet time. In Iowa, on average, only 35 percent of voters had come to a final decision before the final month of the campaign. And in New Hampshire, only 29 percent had. (Why is the fraction lower in New Hampshire than in Iowa? Probably because voters there are waiting for the Iowa results before locking in their choice. In fact, about half of New Hampshire voters make up their minds in the final week of the campaign.) By comparison, voters decide much earlier in general elections. In Ohio in 2012, for example, 76 percent of voters had settled on Mitt Romney or Barack Obama by the end of September. This is why it’s common to see last-minute surges or busts in nomination races (think Rick Santorum or Howard Dean), but not in general elections." link

The reason why general elections are less volatile than primaries is simple: party labels matter. Even though the share of voters who claim to be "independents" has gone up over the past several decades, at the expense of both Democratic and Republican identifiers, when you include "leaners" the percentage of voters who cast ballots along party lines remains about as high as ever. Political scientists say that the parties "structure the vote" meaning that they provide important cues that help voters determine which candidate to support. But in primaries and caucuses that signal is missing: all the candidates are from the same party, so one of the most important pieces of information most voters rely on is absent. That's why, as more and more voters become engaged in the coming months, poll numbers likely will shift, often by a lot. This is especially true in the GOP race simply because there are so many candidates for voters to try to sort out. In a sense, Trump's lead now may reflect nothing more than that he's been the most-covered candidate, so when pollsters call voters--most of whom are paying little attention--they respond to his name because it's the name they've been hearing.

Good read.