Unlikely Voter

Conservative views on polls, science, technology, and policy

Author Archive

Here we go again with Public Policy Polling. They did a poll for the League of Conservation Voters on the 2013 race for Governor in Virginia, and the electorate predicted by PPP is a strange one.

You see, it doesn’t look like Virginia.

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I know, I never post anymore, but this surprised me. Rasmussen Reports has had a change of management. “Scott Rasmussen left the company last month,” says the firm.

I don’t know what this means. Possibly not much. Possibly a lot.

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New York Magazine was trying to be sympathetic to the popular polling figures on its own side of the political, but let out a secret in the process: Public Policy Polling cooked the books all along.

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I don’t get to do much at Unlikely Voter these days, but this was easy. Meet the Create Your Own Voter Model tool, a.k.a. the Unskewer.

Try out your own party identification assumptions!

Obi-Wan: Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil.

Anakin Skywalker: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.

Obi-Wan: Well, then you are lost.

By request, I’ve updated the Swingometers to include a new feature: Reverse Swingometer! Instead of plugging in a swing in the two-party vote, and getting a result in seats or electoral votes, this new features lets you plug in that result, and get the necessary swing to make that happen!

Enjoy!

Approving comments

By on May 27, 2012

I’ve just realized I’m way behind in approving comments. I’m fixing that now. My apologies to all who commented and never got approved. Except the spammers, naturally.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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. [More]