Non-Gallup/Rasmussen tracking polls thread

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

In 2004 for fun, I wrote up a random generator program in Python to randomly generate the electoral map. Of course the map was completely crazy, but some of the states were correct. If I ran the program once a day for 100 days before the election, no doubt would I at some point come up with a map that looked somewhat realistic for the time.

By J. J.'s logic, on that day my methodology for predicting the map is perfectly valid.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Doesn't J. J. frequently argue polls don't matter because they supposedly oversample Democrats or whatever?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Where was the Bradley Effect in Tennessee in 2006?

Something like that isn't just going to temporarily disappear in a state like Tennessee for one election. Its absence shows that there were other factors at work: factors that could be at work in any case where a candidate over or underpolls.

Let's look at other examples in 2006. Phil's least favorite election ever was even worse for his hero than polling indicated. Also ignoring garbage uni polls, Doyle looked to be a lot less safe in Wisconsin than he actually was, and the garbage uni polls had him way too safe. Based on polling the Idaho gubernatorial race looked possibly close, it wasn't.

So why were they wrong? There's plenty of reasons that can be discussed. And this applies in every race. The Almighty Bradley Effect is not some unshakable truth of American politics that overrides everything else. It's just one of many factors, and a factor that doesn't appear to be too major in recent years, and is somewhat dubious in ever existing.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Obama now leads nationally by 6.7%

Which is still out of the MOE.

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No, but it looks like thre was one in OH, MD, and MA in 2006, but not in PA or TN.  Wait until I finish, but a good clue is AZ.    And keep this in mind, the Bradley Effect is not a voting phenomenon, but a polling phenomenon.

...and there's the problem. You just can't cherry-pick results like this to show the almighty power of the Bradley Effect. It either happens across the board, under certain verifiable factors, or not at all and discrepancies are explained by other factors. It can't just pop up at random like some weather pattern.

As for the states you mentioned:

OH-Last four polls: Blackwell gets 38, 37, 31 and 37
Result: Blackwell gets 36.65%

MA-Patrick gets 55, 54, 53 and 56
Result: Patrick gets 55.56%

MD-Steele gets 46, 44, 47 and 45
Result: Steele gets 44.2%

So in none mentioned did the black candidate overpoll outside the MoE. Even your cherry-picked results fail.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I think he's referring to black Republican CANDIDATES. It is a valid point though.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

oops, my mistake

Well J.J. says it doesn't matter whether he's Republican or Democrat.  If he overpolls and he's black it's because voters lie to pollsters motivated by race.


Also, it doesn't apply to primaries.

Also it happens in states at random, and there's no discernible pattern to the states it pops up in. That's just the crazy power of the Bradley Effect!

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Something just hit me as to how even more inane J. J.'s arguments are. His three referenced examples of the Bradley Effect in 2006 are all states where no one would argue it happened in 2008. So basically apparently these states changed so much in only two years that the Bradley Effect disappeared. But it then popped up again in states like Iowa and Arizona for some mysterious reason.

That is beyond laughable.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Something just hit me as to how even more inane J. J.'s arguments are. His three referenced examples of the Bradley Effect in 2006 are all states where no one would argue it happened in 2008. So basically apparently these states changed so much in only two years that the Bradley Effect disappeared. But it then popped up again in states like Iowa and Arizona for some mysterious reason.

That is beyond laughable.

There is 0% change that polling in Iowa happened because of dissatisfied Republicans in the primaries claiming to be undecided or bad polling weights and 100% chance it happened because Obama was back and people were afraid of appearing racist.

Arizona, I don't have any idea what could be up with that.  I suppose with any same size of 50 there are guaranteed to be outliers, especially those polled by only a few firms and most of them are god-awful, creating automatic error.  Other than that, any ideas as to why Arizona might underpoll McCain?  Any at all?  Any kind of connection with McCain they might have to sway undecideds?  Ok, nevermind, I'll assume it's because of race.

I assumed that there were a lot of CarlHaydens who hated McCain but grudgingly voted for him anyway. There may also have been some moderate/Democrat voters who liked McCain and wanted to vote for their guy but didn't like to admit it in polls or something. But I honestly wasn't surprised at McCain over-performing in Arizona. It was one of the few things I saw coming...

What, you're saying there are reasons other than race that a black candidate can overperform in the polls? No, that can't be!

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

So Alaska and North Dakota have Bradley Effects but no state in the south except Georgia does. And the Bradley Effect has magically vanished in the three states it supposedly appeared in in 2006. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. This is clearly the Bradley Effect as there is no other possible explanation for polls being wrong.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

And those crosstabs have very high MoEs, usually double digits.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

J. J.'s new favorite logical fallacy: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/questionable-cause.html

To compare: I have a magical T-shirt. It prevents tiger attacks. I know it works because I've never been attacked by a tiger while wearing it.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Bottom line on the Bradley effect is even if we could prove it has existed for every black candidate (which of course we can't) the sample size would still be too small to prove it was because of race as opposed to the 50 million other reasons why polls can be wrong. We'll have to wait until there's been several hundred black candidates all with sufficient polling data on their elections before we can reach any definitive conclusions one way or another.

If I was cynical, I'd say that the people who invented the concept of a "Bradley effect" did so because they didn't want black candidates to be nominated for office by the political parties. Since I'm not, I won't say that.

Actually, that is not quite the case.  Wilder underpolled, but won.

what does that have to do with the theory?

Nothing. He's just doing his standard pattern of ignoring all the counter-arguments he knows he can't rebut, so he responds to one of the less expansive ones with a red herring, and still doesn't offer any response.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

At best he have this, and I'm looking for an effect that does not appear to be uniform nor large

As Lunar has pointed out a million times, that means it's not an effect, it's just basic polling error!

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

By J. J.'s logic:

I haven't been following this too closely, but why would they Bradley Effect show up in certain states but not others? Especially when the states where it does show up in don't seem to have any sort of logical connection?

We don't know. That's just how magical and mysterious it is!

And what exactly is the definition for the Bradley Effect to occur? Obama underpolling by how much? Because otherwise there's no way to tell if it isn't just MoE noise, or even some other factor entirely.

J. J. basically defines the Bradley Effect as "A black candidate underpolling by any number."