Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Virgnia Democrat SURGING To Reelection!!

A new poll from Survey USA shows that despite the huge swing in public opinion against President Obama and the Democrat agenda one Virginia Democrat is riding a wave of Democrat enthusiasm that may sweep him back into office.

Confused?

I am too.

I had decided to wait on blogging about the recent Survey USA poll of the Virginia 5th until they also released their poll of the Virginia 9th. Two polls are better than one! I'm glad I waited. The results of the VA09 poll seem so messed up it's undercut my initial enthusiasm for the VA05 results.

Look at the numbers behind the poll showing Rick Boucher up 52% to 39% over Morgan Griffith. Survey USA is projecting that 33% of voters will be Democrats, 35% will be Republicans, and 29% Independent. Back in 2006 (Boucher was unopposed in 2008) Survey USA had a poll with 38% Democrats, 35% Republicans, and 25% Independents. This is a shift between the Democrats and Republicans of only five points, despite a huge wave nationally and in Virginia (Governor Bob McDonnell!)

Something isn't right.

This made me curious about VA-05. Here's 2010. Here's 2006. The two are virtually identical!

Now I'd usually say that this should mean that Perriello is even MORE behind Hurt, but I noticed some other funky numbers. I expect black voters to be coming out less than in 2008, but Survey USA is assuming they'll be even smaller as a group than in 2006!

And what about 2008? I think that a lot fewer Democrats will come out in 2010 without Obama around, but Survey USA is predicting a 17 point swing in favor of the Republicans if you look at their 2008 poll versus their 2010 poll! I expect a swing, but that seems absurd!

Something doesn't add up.

I've said before that we can make a few assumptions based on the knowledge that both Hurt and Perriello have polled. If Hurt was ahead by this much in his poll he would have released the data. If he was up by this much he wouldn't be treating Jeff Clark like a jerk and keeping him out of the debate. He'd be working hard but magnanimous in victory.

So I don't think Hurt's own polling agrees with Survey USA.

The fact that Hurt's campaign before this poll was questioning the validity of Survey USA also makes me concerned. I think Survey USA showed some strength in 2009 in polling the Governor's race, but it's a lot easier to approach an entire state with major metropolitan areas that try to pick up on a large sprawling House district with a lot of different communities. That's true of both VA09 and VA05.

Right now, Survey USA is trying to tell us that VA09 will be MORE DEMOCRAT than VA05. Republicans outnumber Democrats in VA09 by two points (35% to 33%). They are ahead of Democrats in VA05 by FIFTEEN POINTS (43% to 27%). Everyone knows that VA09 is the more Republican district. This just seems utterly absurd. I think Survey USA got it wrong in VA09, in favor of Boucher. I think they got it wrong in VA05, in favor of Hurt. Until I see more convincing data I'm going to continue to treat this race as a dead heat.

4 comments:

  1. You will not be the only one to analyze the 5CD poll. While I would love to believe that Robert Hurt is indeed up by 20+ points, I doubt his lead is this great.

    But. I suspect Robert Hurt is ahead in both his internals & in Perriello's internals.

    This Robert Hurt's race to lose.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Everyone knows that VA09 is the more Republican district."

    Wrong.

    They have elected Boucher forever. VA05 has had a republican in congress within the last 10 years....

    The poll in Va09 simply reflects the voters desire to give Boucher a break because he has brought home the bacon and the fact that Morgan is not from there.

    Morgan out raised Boucher last period slightly.

    Again your logic about releasing internal polls is flawed. Why would they do that? Internal polls are internal for a reason. Releasing them gives you little politic advantage. See what happened in the primary between Fimian and Herrity when they released internal polls.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, as to the reliability of the pollster, here is some evidence that they rank well above other , more commonly-known pollsters as to their accuracy:

    From.......
    http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/pollster-ratings-v40-results.html

    we have the following:

    Pollster Ratings v4.0: Results
    by Nate Silver @ 6:13 PM


    For a complete methodological discussion, see here. I'm just going to reiterate just a few very high-level bullet points.

    -- These ratings pertain to just one particular type of poll: those for which the field work was conducted within the 21 days preceding a public election, which surveyed people about their voting intention in that election, and which was released into the public domain in advance of the election.**

    -- These ratings reflect polling for President (general and primary elections), U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and gubernatorial races since 1998. More recent cycles are weighted more heavily. This is a truly massive amount of data: roughly 4,700 polls.

    -- The variable called rawscore is the most direct measure of a pollster's track record. However, it is much inferior to PIE -- or Pollster-Introduced Error -- for evaluating the effectiveness of different pollsters on a going-forward basis. Because polling involves a great deal of luck in the near-term, rawscores must be substantially regressed toward the mean. However, different types of pollsters are regressed to different means. In particular, pollsters that have made a commitment to transparency and disclosure have been shown to have superior results over the long-run. The way we measure this is whether the pollster was a member of either the NCPP or the AAPOR Transparency Initiative as of 6/1/10.

    -- PIE is expressed as a positive number and reflects the amount of error that a pollster introduces above and beyond that which is unavoidable due to things like sampling variance. The lower a firm's PIE the better.

    The list below provides ratings for all firms with a minimum of 10 polls. A complete list of ratings (including for firms with fewer than 10 polls) follows it below the fold.

    ***** The ratings will not copy here! Please go to link above to see the rankings.

    Suffice it to say that this pollster ranks 3rd Best amongst a lot of big players in the poll business!

    ReplyDelete
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