Hey look, a post!

While I’m sure everyone involved is so proud of Vanderbilt’s data filtering app for its recent poll of Tennessee showing Barack Obama still losing in one of the two states he ran behind John Kerry in, but the problem is that the details are made less transparent.

What a shame.

Some pollsters put out lots of information. I’m going to single out Public Policy Polling and SurveyUSA. They put out big, beautiful tables full of information. That serves a dual purpose: It not only lets us study what’s going on with the poll to find out what it’s saying about the public, but it also lets us analyze the poll itself to see if we should trust what it’s saying about the public.

The Vanderbilt poll makes it very difficult to try to figure out just what it’s saying about the basic demographic and political makeup of the voting public in Tennessee. Without that information, we have a difficult time evaluating the poll’s validity and its results.

I hope this doesn’t become a trend.

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The Washington Post found that among Registered Voters, Tim Kaine and George Allen are tied at 46 in the Virginia Senate race.

Virginia Virtucon’s Riley thinks that’s a bit misleading, though.

I guess in theory the poll could be accurate, but when the poll is apparently projecting a sharp (more than one quarter) drop in the Republican share of the vote, driving it down below 1964 levels, I’m skeptical.

Whether it’s just an outlier, or a greater methodological problem, I can’t say. But I’m not about to call the race tied based on this poll.

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• March 20, 2012 -- Conflicting polls in the Massachusetts Senate Race
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For those who doubt or may have forgotten the difference between Registered Voter and Likely Voter polling for some polls, here’s a chart of every CNN/Opinion Research Generic Ballot poll from 2010, showing Republican lead or deficit per poll, with the RV and LV polls separated.

Clear difference, I’d say.

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Rather than look at just one state, I thought it might be interesting to see what Swingometer has to say about a national poll, and as it turns out, the most recent national poll is the tracking poll from Rasmussen Reports.

This one is much better news for Mitt Romney than the North Carolina poll was.

The result is Romney 48, Obama 43, which turns out to be a two-party split of Romney 52.7-Obama 47.3 (R+5.4). The actual 2008 popular vote was McCain 45.7, Obama 52.9 (D+7.2). Together, that’s a swing of R+12.6, a large change from 2008.

Asking Swingometer, we find that a swing that large results in a clear win for Mitt Romney. He picks up Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, as well as NE-2 and ME-2.

It’s terribly early of course. It’ll be a while before we get other pollsters trying a likely voter model. But while we wait, what else do we have to look at?

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North Carolina was President Obama’s narrowest win in 2008. I’ve long thought that the state would be the quickest, easiest pickup for Republicans in 2012. As the final matchup between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney shapes up, early polling begins to confirm that guess.

500 likely voters, MoE 4.5. Rasmussen Reports finds that North Carolina is still pretty close, with a result of Romney 46, Obama 44. Still though, that’s a swing of a few points right off the bat. In a two-party vote, that’s a swing from 50-50 to 51-49, or R+2.

By itself, that swing is not enough to change the final vote though. According to the Swingometer, 2 points only flips Indiana, North Carolina, and Nebraska’s 2nd district. That still results in a 332-206 win for the President.

Mitt Romney needs a larger nationwide swing, or at least a larger swing in close Obama states, in order to be the next President. But, it’s early yet. Republicans will take some time to unify I suspect, and when that happens, I expect North Carolina to be out of reach for the President.

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I’m back. The last ten days have seen me move cross country and start to settle in to a new home and a new job.

While I was gone, we had some primaries. So it’s high time we took a look at the delegate situation. Of course, since I started writing this post, word has come out that Rick Santorum is exiting the race, so let’s see if that was the right idea.

April 3 was a night of winner-take-all races. It was also a night that was good for Mitt Romney, so the result was a delegate wipeout. Despite Santorum gaining more Louisiana delegates in the handy RCP delegate count, Romney’s 86-9 wipeout on the 3rd was damaging. That result took Romney well over the zero barrier, which means he’s again won an absolute majority of delegates awarded to date.

Any Momentum Santorum had late last month is gone. Romney truly does seem like the inevitable, presumptive nominee at this point, even if Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul contest this all the way to Tampa. So I have to say it’s smart for Santorum to quit, because then he can gain respect in the party for giving up when he’s beaten, to help the Republican Party begin to unify.

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Quinnipiac University put out a pair of polls this week I thought were interesting to note. Now, I have and still do think that it’s too soon to test general election Presidential matchups, so don’t think I’m reading a lot into these. But apart from that, I find it odd that Mitt Romney is doing better in Pennsylvania than he is in Ohio.

Ohio and Pennsylvania may border each other, but their electoral histories differ. Ohio has gone for the winner of every Presidential election starting with the 1964 wipeout. Ohio picks winners. The state’s rarely been wrong. It favored Nixon over Kennedy, Dewey over Roosevelt, and didn’t like Cleveland (favoring Harrison and Blaine over him), but backed every other winner since Abraham Lincoln and the establishment of the Republican Party as one of the two leading parties in the country. That’s 34 winners and 4 losers.

Pennsylvania in recent years has been more loyal to one side, backing the Democrat every time since 1992. Pennsylvania has taken on a partisan leaning, different from the swing state status of its neighbor to the west.

That is why I find it odd that Quinnipiac put out a pair of polls showing Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by 3, 45-42 in Pennsylvania (1232 registered voters, MoE 2.8), even as a companion poll shows Obama ahead of Romney by 7, 47-40 in Ohio (1246 registered voters, MoE 2.8).

Sure, with an MoE of 2.8, There’s about a 1/3 chance Obama’s yet doing better in PA than he is in OH despite this poll. Likewise that figure holds for Romney actually doing better in OH than he is in PA. So it could be nothing.

But even so, if we believe these polls, the two states are close. If the two states are following history, and Pennsylvania is close to Ohio, then this election has the possibility of being a Romney landslide.

But that’s if we believe general election horserace polling during a contested primary.

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Forgive me for venturing out from strict horserace poll analysis, but given the the administration’s recent moves on coal power, I couldn’t help but wonder how that might affect the President in swing states, should prices rise in coal-burning states.

A check I made this morning suggests that the answer is yes, if coal is an issue in this election, it could swing close states.

Here’s a simple chart of the closeness of a state’s 2008 Presidential election result vs the state’s coal use as a percentage. Source for coal use: the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, but they also cite their sources too if you’d like to dig in. Election margin source: the final column of the Wikipedia chart.

I asked OpenOffice to throw in the trend line. Additionally, the Pearson coefficient is -0.37. That means that the correlation is not small, and not strong, but medium, according to common Pearson interpretations.

Considering I’m not in any way predicting that coal use caused the 2008 gap, that’s an interesting finding. By chance, the closer a state was in 2008, the more coal it uses, on average. Of the states at 5% or less of a 2008 gap, only Florida doesn’t get a majority of its electricity from coal.

Again, I must stress the modesty of this find. I’m not predicting that the administration’s policies necessarily will cause shifts in coal energy prices soon enough or large enough to swing votes in coal-burning states. Nor am I predicting that the issue would necessarily be decisive of people’s votes.

I’m merely checking that if both of those things do happen, whether they would be happening in states where it would make a difference. The answer to that question is yes. Unluckily for the President as it may be.

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Since we last looked at the delegate situation, Rick Santorum has won two state primaries, and Mitt Romney picked up a state caucus, a territorial primary, and a territorial caucus.

Santorum showing the ability to win state primaries is good news for him, but he must now convert that ability into delegates, or this race may be effectively over anyway.

From the chart above (click for full size version), we can see that Mitt Romney is still hovering very close to an absolute majority of the delegates so far. In fact, if we add up all the delegates allocated so far, plus the ex officio state party delegates that have endorsed, we find Romney to be 10 delegates short, at 516. Rick Santorum at 236 delegates is far off the pace. He’s slowed the bleeding, and distanced himself from Newt Gingrich, but he’s still 280 delegates behind Romney.

Fortunately for Santorum, the next four days will allocate 115 delegates, and at the start of next month, 98 more are up. Rick Santorum must take a clear majority of those 213 total delegates. If he is to make a comeback, he has to start gaining on Mitt Romney instead of just falling behind more slowly.

If that orange line for Rick Santorum doesn’t trend upward over the next two weeks or so, pulling Romney substantially below the majority zero line, then I’ll start to suspect Romney effectively has the Republican nomination.

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I’m happiest when all the polls in a race match up. It means we have a very good idea of how a race is going for the candidates in it.

So, naturally, I’m not happy about the Massachusetts Senate race right now. Seeing a 10 point swing from poll to poll, giving both candidates opposing 5 point leads, means we have to dig deeper to figure out what’s going on.

I’m reminded of March of 2010 here. Here we go again with Rasmussen’s likely voter polling (500 LVs, MoE 4.5) putting Republican Scott Brown ahead 49-44, while PPP’s registered voter polling (936 RVs, MoE 3.2) has Elizabeth Warren up 46-41.

Rasmussen’s details are behind a paywall, but that’s the older poll anyway (2/29 vs PPP’s 3/16-3/18). So I’ll focus on the PPP’s specifics to see what we can make of it. First, the poll asked about the voter’s 2008 Presidential vote. A whopping 11% claim they don’t remember or voted for someone other than John McCain or Barack Obama. That’s a rather high number when the actual fraction that voted for someone else was just over 2%.

Between Obama and McCain, the actual two party vote was Obama 63.2, McCain 36.8. In the poll, the two party vote is Obama 64, McCain 36. So the poll favors Obama voters slightly more than the actual 2008 electorate did, but it’s very close. Which is odd, as turnout was far from 100%, with 3 million votes cast of 4.2 million registered voters, for a registered voter turnout of about 71%. PPP seems to project that the 30% who don’t vote have no particular lean.

Further, in 2008 the partisan registraion went 1.6 million Democrats, 0.5 million Republicans, and the rest other or independent, a split of 38 D/12 R/50 other. The poll shows 41 D/14 R/45 other or independent. That’s outside of the Margin of Error for the Democrats. PPP seems to project that Massachusetts has grown more partisan and leans more toward the Democrats now than 4 years ago.

So if we believe PPP’s projections of the partisan make up to hold true, and that there’s no partisan lean in who votes or who doesn’t vote, then Warren could be ahead in this race, despite the three previous polls all putting Brown ahead.

But right now PPP looks like the odd man out.

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