Unlikely Voter

Some polls at least deserve some serious scrutiny before they get dismissed as flawed. Others are just so laughable on their faces that I hesitate even to put them in the same posting category as serious works. One of these laughers is This Texas poll from the apparently new firm Azimuth Research Group.

According to Azimuth, Ron Paul runs better for President than Rick Perry statewide among Texas Republicans.

So Fox News put out a new poll of the race for the Republican Presidential nomination. It’s a typical poll in many ways, but Fox’s bit of analysis got me to thinking: Polls like this favor frontrunners and likely skew the race.

I said before that Brad Carson’s own polling looked bad for him to take back his old Congressional seat in Oklahoma.

Looks like I was right: He’s not running after all.

By request, we look at a 2012 House race today. PPP polled Oklahoma’s second district for the Friends of Brad Carson. Carson, a Democrat, of course won this seat previously in 2000 and 2002, giving it up in 2004 in a failed Senate run. Dan Boren, also a Democrat, won the seat in 2004 and has held it ever since. Boren is retiring, so Carson wants to run.

Is he in good shape, like PPP says he is?

By request, I took a look at this poll by PPP for Daily Kos and SEIU. Markos Moulitsas himself is hyping the poll as showing an enthusiasm gap, which of course was one big indicator of the electoral wipeout we saw in 2010.

I think that he’s right, to a degree. However I read the figures as having two conclusions: First, the TEA party effect is still there, and Republicans are slightly more engaged than Democrats at this early point in the cycle. Second, the Union activism of this year is not having the same engagement effect with Democrats, that the TEA party, the ARRA, and the PPACA had with Republicans.

Look, I get that we’re way out from the 2012 elections. The dearth of commentary and analysis here at UnlikelyVoter.com is not entirely due to weeks lost to a horrible cold I picked up in our nation’s capital. But hey, Muhlenberg College and Morning Call: If you’re going to do a poll of the 2012 elections, at least try?

When I get confirmed numbers on reapportionment I will prepare an update of the Electoral College Swingometer with the new Electoral College.

It is likely I will also take the opportunity to update Swingometer on iOS to look nicer on higher resolution displays such as those on the iPhone 4 and the iPad.

Today I started running the numbers to test my theory about why the polling was so wrong in key states this year, and I ran into a snag: my theory was not supported by my data. At least, the normal random fluctuations of polling were drowning out any relationship I hoped to find.

Much as Robert Millikan kept trying when he didn’t like his readings for the charge of the electron, I will press on. I need to find a way to sift through the noise, and I will find it.

Until then, thank you for your patience.

While I do find it amusing that the final Fox poll and the final PPP poll of Washington favor the opposite of what their respective biases are supposed to suggest (Fox shows Murray +2 and PPP shows Rossi +2), today I am content to wait for returns and find what I can in them.

Because starting tomorrow the offseason work begins.

After the primary in Nevada, there was no doubt that Democrat Harry Reid had taken a real lead over Republican Sharron Angle, not when he led six polls in a row, and 10 of 12.

Sharron Angle has now matched that run: She’s won 10 of 12 polls, including the last six.

Continuing Politico’s apparent strategy of linking to obscure polls that say bad things about Republicans for shock and traffic value in this wave year, the site now reports Joe Miller to be in last place.

For several reasons, one has to discount this poll’s predictiveness of the coming election.

By request, I’ve decided to take a look at just what kind of electorate the Public Policy Polling screening of Likely Voters seems to be predicting. To do this I will use recent PPP polls from two states: California, which went for Barack Obama heavily, and West Virginia, where Obama’s popularity has never been that hot.

For some time there the polling in the Connecticut Senate race was rather unstable. We were seeing polls with huge swings apart from each other every few days. I really had no clear path for evaluating it than to average the two and give Democrat Richard Blumenthal a medium lead over Republican Linda McMahon.

But including the new Rasmussen we’ve now seen four good polls in a row for Blumenthal. The race appears to be settling.