Talk Elections

http://www.scribd.com/doc/103331632/FMWB-Fulmer-Associates-Aggregate-Polling-Study-Report-for-Florida-General-Election?secret_password=1zk6r9l2b6szas5ioh5

So, uhh, yeah. Never heard of the firm, and I certainly don't believe Romney is leading by 14 in Florida. In fact, all of these numbers seem far too good (or far too bad, for some) to be true.

Nelson: 43%
Mack: 51%

58% are at least somewhat more likely to vote for Romney as a result of the Ryan pick. Just 36% are at least somewhat less likely.

54% support "the Ryan plan", in essence, while 44% do not (pg. 5).

Party ID is R+2, btw. And if you look further into the crosstabs, you see the age break-down is WAY out of whack, and VERY heavily skewed to the elderly. On the bright side, could mean that Ryan isn't hurting w/ seniors in Florida.

what is with all these no-name polling outfits. There has been very little big polling outfit post Ryan polling. Maybe  a lot will come out right before the RNC to set the pre bounce baseline

Uh, no.

I agree there's been shockingly little big-name post-Ryan pick polling. Where's Quinnipiac? ABC/WashPo? All the networks for that matter. CNN? Get on it pollsters.

 There has been hardly any polling the last 10 days. Only legitimate polling there has been shows a tied race in all swing states.

Not just decimals but hundreths!!! Just screams credibility.

Seems legit.

More legit than zogby

Touché, haha.

Unknown company, probably junk.

Junk; though, at times, Rasmussen has posted similar numbers for the Senate race.

Definitely seems realistic.

Nate Silver calls this poll out for it's insane age break-down. But he does choose to include it in his forecast model. Read the bottom two or three paragraphs for his explanation why.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/aug-20-when-the-polling-gets-weird/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

It appears that the Pub version of the Jubilee is near. All you need to believe is that the Book of Revelations is inerrant.

About this time 4 years ago, SurveyUSA released this:

https://uselectionatlas.org/POLLS/PRESIDENT/2008/pollsa.php?action=indpoll&id=3720080908019

We know who actually won the state ... ;)

Well, even with this poll as the most recent poll, Romney is only up 2 points.

In the exit poll from 2008, about 22% of FL voters were 65 or older.

This poll has 64% older than 65.

It looks like they polled a retirement community.

I repeat:

WTF ?

LOL, this is a troll poll.

Unlocked it, because the OP wrote a wall of complaint regarding this crap poll.

These are the numbers we are converging towards, but I doubt we are there right now.

Brave yourselves, Obama youth: Huge backlash against Obama for those 30 and older is in the making with youthful apathy back on the rise as a result of the dismal economy.

Romney is a mediocre politician who happens to be in the right place at the right time. Picking the most marketable running mate in history is the icing on the cake, so to speak.

I will be gone for a while, but I'll be back. Don't tell me that I didn't warn you.

You assume something that has no cause to happen. Sure, I have shown models of Obama landslides, but those all come with a little but important word -- if I could also create a model of a Presidential election that has Florida going 14% for Romney... basically, Reagan won Florida by 17% in 1980, and I figure that because Florida is about 3% more R than the US as a whole that would imply a 56-44 win for Romney.

But just as I would use the word if followed by qualifications that might seem absurdities for President Obama winning 450 or so electoral votes I would have to do much the same with a 56-44 scenario for Romney.

The GOP has nothing to offer but 'secret methods' to put the economy back on track. Maybe they are secret because they would offend too many sensibilities. We know that they include tax cuts for the super-rich to be paid for in higher taxes and reduced services for others. They include expanded expenditure on military weaponry. So what could be the secret stuff?

Further destruction of workers' rights. Sweetheart deals with crony capitalists to sell off the assets of the public sector while defaulting on services.

"Dismal economy"? I can imagine far worse. A return to the practices of the 1920s or earlier implies mandatory, unpaid overtime whose benefit goes entirely to elites while wearing down those who do the work.  Impose that along with means to ensure that there could never be any meaningful political opposition in the vote (like putting property qualifications on voting)... and the color "red" might suggest a vastly different sort of republic here.

A hint: you do not want to make Marxism-Leninism politically relevant in America. 

Gee... even Politico thinks Romney is a mediocre politician. What if he is a mediocre president? :p



....and with these sort of threats? I think you will be begging for someone as conservative as Obama 30 years from now.

Tender Branson, I'm very grateful that you unlocked this thread, and thanks. Like I said, it is without question a junk poll based on its elderly sample alone. But given that we're not a poll aggregating site and thus have no "model" that this poll can throw-off, and since we're all largely agreeing nicely this is a major outlier, why not let the conversation continue.

Anywho, thanks again. And I'll edit the title to make it obvious to anyone who clicks here to check the sample before reading.

This poll doesn't say much about the state as a whole but should disspell the older votes in Florida don't like Ryan meme.

Hello.

My name is Eric Foster, President of Foster McCollum White & Associates. I am the lead pollster for our firm and our partnership with Baydoun Consulting and Douglas Fulmer & Associates and I wanted to address a couple of items that may be creating some confusion in our polling release.

First, our polling call list was weighted to the historical weights for age, gender, race, region and congressional district area. Our list is also comprised of voters with previous voting histories in Presidential, state and local elections. We include the moderate and low performance voters, but the call files do contain a significant portion of voters who have a likely history to participate. We do not call voters who have never participated in elections but are registered.

When we call through the list, we report the demographics of the respondents. We viewed the respondents to our data models for Florida and also considered the recent spike in Presidential election rates for the younger age groups and the representative portion that each group makes up of the registered voting base.

Our PVBA model reviews election statistics for age, gender, voting participation pattern, gender and socio-economic factors to determine the likely voting universe for an upcoming election. Our turnout models are based on state based historical turnout statistics provided by the county clerks and secretaries of state’s office for age, gender, party, ethnicity and voting method (early, absentee, poll location) instead of exit polls. We trust the reliability of the election stats from the clerks to give us value data reads on future elections. For example, our PVBA model for the Primary election in Wayne County Michigan (the largest voting county in Michigan.) was within 0.316% of the actual August 7, 2012 primary. We projected a total county turnout of 246,299 voters for all 43 communities including Detroit and actual turnout was 245,450 (after spoiled ballots were discounted for partisan contest).

The reason we take the historical data for a state is to give us a baseline for each precinct within the state and then build models up from there. We work to identify solid trends of turnout over a series of primary and general election contest so that we can remove outliers within turnout, age, gender, partisan (if collected) and ethnicity and determine the true participation base for that precinct. We can then project out for the variable election conditions (type, advertising impact, voter mobilization, outlier ballot issue impact, etc.) that allows us to determine our high moderate and low performing turnout and voter models.

For example, Michigan has a historical Presidential participation variance of 18.4% from the baseline voter model and has an -18.08% historical Gubernatorial participation variance. The swing is equal to 2.3 million moderate and low performance voters in Michigan for every given Presidential election who primarily leave the participation rolls for the Gubernatorial election. The difference between a Governor Snyder and Governor Bernero was the complete absence of the low performance voters and a 15% participation rate among moderate participation voters. If Bernero gets the participation rate of Granholm’s re-election in 2006 (85% moderate performing voters and 25% low participation voters) He defeats Snyder by 200,000 votes and wins 40 counties. This model allows us to help our political clients understand their election audience more clearly than exit polling. We then use it in assessing our polling models to help us gauge data quality and participation models.

Florida’s base of high performing voters for a presidential and gubernatorial election is significantly older. The moderate and low performance voting demographics skew heavy towards the younger age groups. The impact of changing the rules for early voting and a general excitement gap among younger voters could produce a result where a minimum of 70% of Florida’s voters are over the age of 51. It is a trend line that we will continue to monitor. Based on the respondent universes, we made the adjustment weight for the five underrepresented groups. Even though our model projects a lower turnout among primarily voters under 50, we weighted the voters ages 18 to 30 at 12% of the possible election universe and voters ages 31 to 50 at 15%, for a total of 27%. Re-elections for Democrats tend to draw fewer younger and Minority voters then their initial election, per our historical analysis models. We believe that these groups tend to feel that they accomplished the major task of placing their change agent candidate into office and those they should have built enough of a base to sustain themselves.

Our call file was reflective of the projected weight of Florida voters by race. The fact that the unweighted demographics were lower than expected reflects a possible enthusiasm gap for Democrats with these voting groups. Additionally, we found that Obama is trailing among Hispanic voters. Our methods are based in solid historical analytics versus exit polling. The interest of voting groups to participate must be taken into account and we report based on what the respondent identify as their selections to the questions.

Additional factors within our cross tabs relate to the shift in Obama’s fortunes in the state:
•   White Women – He is losing both in Florida and in our Michigan poll
•   People ages 31 to 50 – He won this group handily in 2008, but with the economic challenges and housing struggles, this group is more disenchanted then before.
•   Florida Latino voters – the Cuba community seems to be coming home to the Republican party.
•   People don’t understand Obama’s plan to Ryan’s plan – Paul Ryan has provided Mitt Romney with cover for lacking details about his economic and budget plans. People can at least understand and make sense of what Ryan wants to change about Government. President Obama’s plan still seems vague to most voters. It isn’t in clear easy to understand bullet points.
•   Joe Biden – Biden is not helping Obama with white men, Catholics and seniors anymore. His foot in mouth syndrome takes the Obama campaign off message.


Please let us know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,


Eric Foster, President
Foster McCollum White & Associates

A bit shocked to think this is the real Eric Foster, but the post is very well written, and done by someone who can at least pretend they know what they're talking about when it comes to polling.

Eric, I'd suggest you contact Nate Silver of the New York Times at FiveThirtyEight.com. He was quite critical of your poll yesterday, specifically due to your 66 year-old-and-up sample (http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/aug-20-when-the-polling-gets-weird/). He's a well-known pollster ranker and analyzer, and has a fair amount of clout the field. If you hope to change hearts and minds about your poll, he'd be the place to start.

Stop posting these unknown polls please.

Uhh, no. If they can be sourced, then I'll post them.

If I am around 30 years from now I will be 86.

I am not the one who threatens a Marxist insurgency; it s a corrupt system that enriches and pampers elites but gives the worker no chance that makes a Marxist insurgency possible. Healthy societies do not have an angry and desperate proletariat that falls for a Lenin, Mao, or Castro. Sick societies with somewhat-modern economies with pre-modern attitudes toward working people do.

.....

The best thing possible for America will be for President Obama to become the exemplar of the status quo, and what is generally understood to be the basis of conservatism. By 1970 the Republicans posed as the defenders of the New Deal. The GOP seems to seek to undo about every liberal reform since 1928 except perhaps the abolition of Jim Crow practices. Maybe that will make the current GOP irrelevant. Heck, some have said that they want to abolish the 17th Amendment that allows popular election of US Senators.  

We have no heritage of one of the two main parties going extremist... but that could be one way toward the demise of the GOP. The Federalists and Whigs became irrelevant for very different reasons.

I figure that after the demise of the GOP, American politics would become more similar to those in some countries in western Europe, with the unwieldy Democratic Party splintering into perhaps a Christian Democratic Party and a Social Democratic Party.


 

I said  that I would show what the 2012 election would look like if Mitt Romney could win Florida by 14%. Florida was about R+3 in the 2004 and 2008 elections, so that means a split of the popular vote of about 11%, or 55-44. This pollster has Michigan going to Romney, so you can add that as a data point for this model.  It's your choice on whether Maine splits its electoral votes.

()

Not as lopsided as Carter vs. Reagan in 1980; America is just too polarized for that.

...This is one possible consequence of believing outlier polls.

The problem with your theory, pbrower, is that the GOP isn't extremist in the traditional sense, of being dictatorial and doing things people don't want. Half the country really, honestly supports the GOP and votes for them, which is why there cannot be a revolution against GOP policies. (A successful right-wing revolution in the US is probably more likely than a left-wing one, because generally speaking most rural areas (most of the physical territories) back the GOP and thus the Democrats could be easily defeated in a war in a series of sieges; not that a war will happen, but if alien space bats intervened and it did.) The map you posted below, in a good year for the GOP, is totally plausible. (If 2010 had been a presidential year, it might've been similar, though the Pacific Northwest should be D and Maine, maybe New Jersey R.)

My favorite part of this poll:

(Between 18 to 30 years old): 1.33%

...which would be what? 5-10% turnout or something among that age group?

...but is this a GOP year?

and you are probably right about any insurgency, but those seiges would be tough from rural areas...then again, biological weapons (rural people wouldn't have the infrastructure to deal with a large plague) would be the way to go as a Marxist and nuclear weapons would be the way to go as a White Randian Nationalist (Most Marxists would live in "one bomb territories").

Decimal points = junk poll.

The Republican Party has been a legitimately-democratic party for decades.  It has been taken over by a clique hostile to some of the norms of democracy, including the checks and balances that underpin republican government. A Party Boss dictating how its elected officials are to vote and another dictating who gets the financial support based upon positions on critical legislation, neither of them elected to any public office and not responsible to any elective authority, is democratic only in the sense that "democratic centralism" is democratic.

The agenda could as easily be traditionalist and conservative as Commie -- and "democratic centralism" would indicate that practically no freedom exists within the Party.


Nearly half. But no consistent majority, as shown in 2006 and 2008. The 2010 election shows what can happen when unlimited funds on behalf of stealth candidates has excellent organization  (especially FoX Newspeak Channel, which plugged the Tea Party Movement at every opportunity).

We shall soon see in elections as in the polls whether those stealth candidates remain popular enough to win re-election. I count on well-heeled elites to richly fund anyone who believes that a pure and inhuman plutocracy is the right way for America forever, especially after the Hard Right is able to impose a dictatorship by lobbyist.


Plausible? Sure. But it also portends the sort of America that people emigrate from if they have a chance -- especially if they belong to minority religions or have any tendency toward intellectual independence.