Politics

Every election cycle has its winners and losers: not just the among the candidates, but also the pollsters.

On Tuesday, polls conducted by the firm Rasmussen Reports — which released more than 100 surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign, including some commissioned under a subsidiary on behalf of Fox News — badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates.

Other polling firms, like SurveyUSA and Quinnipiac University, produced more reliable results in Senate and gubernatorial races. A firm that conducts surveys by Internet, YouGov, also performed relatively well.

What follows is a preliminary analysis of polls released to the public in the final 21 days of the campaign. Our process here is quite simple: we’ve taken all such polls in our database, and assessed how accurate they were, on average, in predicting the margin separating the two leading candidates in each race. For instance, a poll that had the Democrat winning by 2 percentage points in a race where the Republican actually won by 4 would have an error of 6 points.

We’ve also assessed whether a company’s polls consistently missed in either a Democratic or Republican direction — that is, whether they were biased. The hypothetical poll I just described would have had a 6 point Democratic bias, for instance.

The analysis covers all polls issued by firms in the final three weeks of the campaign, even if a company surveyed a particular state multiple times. In our view, this provides for a more comprehensive analysis than focusing solely on a firm’s final poll in each state, since polling Read more…

There are various ways to measure the “enthusiasm gap” that was manifest on Tuesday night. For example, exit polls suggested that an equal number people identifying as Democrats and Republicans turned out on Tuesday night. By contrast, Democrats led by 7 points on this measure in 2008.

Polls of registered voters, meanwhile — although there are differences from firm to firm — had generally given Democrats about a 5-point edge in party identification over the past several months, rather than showing the electorate evenly divided, as it was among actual voters.

That would point toward an enthusiasm gap – which compares party affiliation to actual turnout – of 5-7 points, which is exactly what the consensus of pollsters thought it would be. (The Gallup poll, whose traditional likely voter model pointed toward an enthusiasm gap in the double digits, indeed proved to be an outlier.)

Another way to measure the enthusiasm gap is to compare the actual presidential vote in 2008 to the presidential candidate for whom Tuesday’s voters claimed they had voted, according to exit polls. Nationally, for instance, Tuesday night’s voters told exit pollsters that they had split their vote 45-45 between Barack Obama and John McCain (some said they had voted for a third-party candidate or had not voted at all.) Since Mr. Obama won the election by about 7 points nationally in 2008, this would again point toward an enthusiasm gap in the 5-7 point range that we have been describing.

This measure of the enthusiasm gap, however, varied quite significantly from state to state. And there is something very interesting about the states where it was larger.
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The two Senate races where the actual winner was different from the leader in our polling-based projections were Colorado and Nevada (it’s also probable that we’ll miss Lisa Murkowski’s victory in Alaska once all her write-in votes are — eventually — counted).

The miss in Colorado wasn’t bad — our forecast had Michael Bennet as about a 1-point underdog, and he won by 1 point instead, although there are still a few votes left to count.

In Nevada, however, where most polls showed Sharron Angle ahead and Harry Reid instead won by almost 6 points, the polls were pretty far off the mark. Errors like that occur quite frequently in primaries and in House races, where the polling landscape is tougher. They also occur sometimes in lopsided races, which are more difficult to hit on the nose. It’s fairly unusual, however, to have the consensus of polls off by 7 or 8 points in an extremely competitive Senate or gubernatorial general election.

I riffed a little bit last night on why the public polls might have been wrong in Nevada; I speculated, for instance, that the fact that Mr. Reid is the sort of candidate whom one votes for unenthusiastically might have skewed the turnout models.

There is another theory, however, which was proposed to me last night by Matt Barreto of the polling firm Latino Decisions.

“There is one overarching reason why the polls were wrong in Nevada,” Mr. Barreto wrote in an e-mail to FiveThirtyEight. “The Latino vote.”

His firm, which conducts interviews in both English and Spanish, had found that Latino voters — somewhat against the conventional wisdom — were relatively engaged by this election and for the most part were going to vote Democratic. Mr. Barreto also found that Latino voters who prefer to speak Spanish — about 40 percent of Latino voters in California meet this description, he told me — are particularly likely to vote Democratic. Pollsters who don’t conduct bilingual interviewing at all, or who make it cumbersome for the respondent to take the poll in Spanish, may be missing these voters.

Mr. Barreto had noted to me earlier this year that he felt polls might be overestimating support for Republican candidates in California. Indeed, the polls in that state called the right winners — Democrats Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer — but underestimated their eventual margin of victories.

Colorado, the other state where most polls picked the wrong winner, is also a state with a fairly heavy Latino population.

As a back-of-the-envelope test of Mr. Barreto’s theory, I compiled results from the eight states with the largest share of Latinos in their population: these are Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, New York and Texas. There were 15 gubernatorial and Senate races last night between these states.

The table below compares the results from FiveThirtyEight’s simple weighted polling average (not the fancier version we use to make our official projections, although the differences are usually slight) against the results from last night.

(Note: in the two races in the chart where a third-party candidate finished in second place — the Colorado gubernatorial race and the Florida Senate race — we count Tom Tancredo as being a Republican and Charlie Crist as being a Democrat, respectively.)

In 10 of the 15 races, the polling average underestimated the Democrat’s margin by at least 2.5 points. There were 5 other races in which the Republican somewhat beat his polls.

Overall, however, the Democrats outperformed their polls by 2.3 points in these 15 races. There’s enough state-to-state variance in the results that we can’t come to any firm conclusions about whether inadequate sampling of Latino voters was the cause. Still, if you look at the presidential polling in 2008, it also underestimated Democrats’ performance in states like Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, where they won by larger-than-expected margins.

So, we have at least the beginnings of a pattern — and considering how rapidly the Latino population is growing, it’s one that pollsters are going to need to address in states like Nevada, California and Texas if we’re going to be able to take their results at face value.

Republicans captured control of the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Following is a live blog from Election Night.

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As you buckle in for tonight, here is FiveThirtyEight’s hour-by-hour, district-by-district guide for watching the election returns, updated with our latest House forecast.

(All times listed here are Eastern Daylight Time.)

Of the 37 governor’s races on Tuesday’s ballot, only 12 are in much degree of doubt. Democrats should win the races in New York and Arkansas and — barring abnormally bad polling — also those in California, New Hampshire and Maryland.

Republicans have a much longer list of likely or near-certain victories. Alphabetically, it goes: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming. They are at least 90 percent favorites to win each of these races, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecasting model, although Nathan Deal’s race in Georgia may require a run-off.

Governor’s contests can often go overlooked when control of Congress is at stake, as it is tonight, but these wins will be extremely helpful to Republicans in a couple of ways. First, governors often have tremendous control over redistricting, which will take place throughout the country before the 2012 elections. Second, they will help Republicans, a party with few popular national figures, rebuild its bench. Some of the Republican governors that voters will elect today may become future presidential or vice presidential candidates. Read more…

While Republicans retain a plausible path toward taking control of the Senate on Tuesday night, it would involve their winning at least two seats in which they appear to be underdogs, while simultaneously avoiding upsets in several other races in which they are narrowly favored. Unless the Republicans have a significant wind at their backs and are overperforming in most parts of the country, their chances of doing so are slim.

The state that appears to have gotten away from Republicans is West Virginia, where Joe Manchin III, a Democrat running far to his right, appears to have created some space in the polls between himself and his Republican opponent, John Raese. Mr. Manchin has leads of 4 and 5 points in two new polls released within the past 24 hours, margins which — in recent years — have held up quite reliably on election day.

Mr. Raese’s chances are perhaps greater than the typical candidate in his position — in part because of the unusual dynamics of the election (Mr. Manchin has a 70 percent approval rating, but President Obama is overwhelmingly unpopular in the state) and in part because polling has been thin in the state, so the two surveys cannot quite be considered a consensus. Nevertheless, both polls showed Mr. Manchin’s position improving after he distanced himself from President Obama and virtually every major policy program on the Democratic agenda, and he now appears likely to win on the basis of his personal popularity: he has an 89 percent chance of doing so, according to the model.

Should Republicans be unable to win West Virginia, they would probably have to win both Washington and California to take over the Senate. Read more…

Republicans are well-positioned to win control of the House of Representatives in tomorrow’s elections, and quite possibly to achieve the largest gain made by either party in a Congressional election since World War II.

Our forecasting model, which is based on a consensus of indicators including generic ballot polling, polling of local districts, expert forecasts, and fund-raising data, now predicts an average Republican gain of 54 seats (up one from 53 seats in last night’s forecast), and a median Republican gain of 55 seats. These figures would exceed the 52 seats that Republicans won from Democrats in the 1994 midterms.

Moreover, given the exceptionally large number of seats in play, the Republicans’ gains could be significantly higher; they have better than a one-in-three chance of winning at least 60 seats, a one-in-six chance of winning at least 70 seats, and have some realistic chance of a gain exceeding 80 seats, according to the model.

However, the same factors that could provide Republicans with extraordinarily large gains if their turnout is strong tomorrow could also cut against them if Democrats turn out in greater numbers than expected, or if the polling has underestimated the Democrats’ standing.

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While our forecast and a good deal of polling data suggest that the Republicans may win the House of Representatives on Tuesday, perhaps all is not lost for the Democrats. Here’s one possible scenario for how things might not end up as expected.

It was hard to pinpoint exactly when in the night things started to go wrong. But at some point, a trash can was knocked over in John A. Boehner’s office in the Longworth House Office Building. A half-hour later, a hole was punched in the wall at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters.

Republicans didn’t really have much reason to be upset. They were going to pick up somewhere between 29 and 34 House seats from Democrats, pending the outcome of a recount or two and the receipt of mail ballots in some Western states. They gained five Senate seats from Democrats, and won the governorships in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida, among many other states. It had been a wave election, indeed — but a wave on the magnitude of 2006, rather than 1994.

For most of the evening, Republicans had still seemed quite likely to pick up the House, perhaps by some margin. Exit polls that (erroneously, it turned out) suggested a nine-point generic ballot win for the party colored the early coverage. So, when Baron Hill, the vulnerable Democrat in Indiana’s 9th district, held on to win his seat by a surprisingly robust nine point margin, it was mostly ignored. Instead, coverage was focused on the dozen or so Democratic incumbents who lost their races early in the evening — some of them as expected (like Alan Grayson and John M. Spratt Jr.), but others of which (like Gerry Connolly of Virginia and Chellie Pingree of Maine) were more surprising.

But in states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Democrats held up surprisingly well. Mary Jo Kilroy, who had been all but written off, held her seat in Columbus, as did a trio of Democrats — Christopher Carney, Bryan Lentz and Patrick J. Murphy — in Pennsylvania. Ted Strickland won the gubernatorial race in Ohio, and Joe Manchin III was elected to the Senate in West Virginia (by double digits, in fact). Joe Sestak appeared to have upset Pat Toomey in the Senate race in Pennsylvania, although the Associated Press had yet to call the race because of accusations of irregularities in Philadelphia.

New York was another problematic state for Republicans: their gubernatorial nominee, Carl P. Paladino, was defeated by almost 40 points, and of the six or seven House seats they had hoped to win there, they had instead picked up just one, while another — the upstate 20th district — remained too close to call.

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There’s a lot of consternation in my inbox and Twitter feed tonight about the generic congressional ballot.

Gallup’s generic ballot poll has Republicans up 15 point among likely voters, or at least their traditional model does; their higher-turnout model has Republicans up 10 instead.

Fox News, whose models haven’t had a Republican lean in the past but have something of one this year, has Republicans up 13. CNN has them up 10. Rasmussen, up 9. YouGov, plus 8.

The CBS/New York Times poll has them up 6, as does the survey from Pew Research, as does an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that asks voters which party they’d prefer to see control Congress (not technically a generic ballot poll, but the questions usually produce similar results.)

The Politico/Battleground poll has Republicans up 5. The ABC News/Washington Post poll has them 4 points ahead. Bloomberg has them up 3. Marist shows a tie. Newsweek, somehow, actually has Democrats ahead 3 points among likely voters.

Some of these polls have Democrats gaining a point or three, and some show just the opposite. Some show the enthusiasm gap widening; others have it narrowing.

You might think all of this has to do with different likely voter models, since each company has its own ’special recipe’ to separate likely voters from unlikely ones. But that only explains some of the difference.  Read more…