Talk Elections

Gold standard of Iowa polling:

TRUMPUBLICANS
Trump 28
Cruz 23
Rubio 15
Carson 10
Paul 5
Christie 3
Bush 2
Fiorina 2
Huckabee 2
Kasich 2
Santorum 2
Gilmore 0
Not Sure/Uncommitted 5

HILLOCRATS
Clinton 45
Sanders 42
O'Malley 3

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RUBIOMENTUM!!!!!!!!

Sheesa win ^-^

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Lol it's a 3 point lead Shillarys calm down.

As a reminder, DMR's final pre-Iowa poll in 2012:

Romney 24
Paul 22
Santorum 15
Gingirch 12
Perry 11
Bachmann 7
Huntsman 2

About what I expected. Not quite comfortable enough to feel confident. But it's great to know that Quinnipiac is out on a ledge now.

You know, it's not exactly a disaster for Bernie.

Yes it's all about momentum.

Sucks to be Bush.

The talking heads (and Selzer) said that Rubio is doing well as a second choice. He could over perform like they said. Take a few percent here and there and suddenly you're within 5% of the lead. I'm still leaning Trump in terms of who will win.

A 3% lead is within the MoE for Dems. 3% for O'Malley could be the deciding factor. I'm still ever so slightly thinking that Bernie will win. My odds: 51 Bernie, 49 Hillary

For all the hype for this poll, it doesn't seem to tell me anything new about the race.

Their last poll had Clinton up 2. Unless you're referring to the Republican side.

The poll shows Clinton's supporters as more firm in their support and more enthusiastic.

New York sweep on Monday imho

From DMR's previous poll:

Trump +6
Rubio +3
Santorum +1
Paul 0
Christie 0
Kasich 0
Fiorina 0
Gilmore 0
Carson -1
Huckabee -1
Cruz -2
Bush -2

Clinton +3
Sanders +2
O'Malley -1

Selzer: "No discernable direction that O'Malley supporters will go, due to extremely small sample size (15 people)."

When was the fieldwork done?

So now you know what people look like freaking out about Overtime. Except, you know, this lot know Iowa and it's still important. But it's still IA and no one knows how this BS will turn out.

Nobody has ever freaked out about Overtime. Give me one example.

"Gold standard"

lmao 15 people

That really stood out to me too. I'm trying to open the PDF, but it won't load. Does anyone know how firm and how enthusiastic Bernie's support is?

Christie ahead of Bush! But Trump.......

They weren't far off. They just overestimated Bachmann/Huntsman and underestimated Frothy.

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Wulfric sure seemed excited.

Damn, President Trump just one step closer.

Imagine if Rubio actually beats Cruz.

There's more info here:

http://media.bloomberg.com/bb/avfile/r1OvZ1NeDjnY

but not the full crosstabs.  For example, on the livestream, they were talking about how Cruz and Trump were close to even in the 4th congressional district.  Do we have crosstabs anywhere for all of the congressional districts?

Santorum clearly had the last second momentum. If anyone has momentum this time, it's Trump.

Comparing the 2012 GOP poll numbers to the Democrats' numbers today is like comparing apples and oranges. It's true that anything can happen and that the race shifted quickly between the time of the Republican DMR poll and the actual caucuses last cycle, but there's no discernible momentum in the Dem race at the moment. Bodes well for Hillary, especially since it sounds like she has a built-in delegate advantage.

Their numbers were - statistically-speaking - pretty much dead on for everybody but Santorum. The difference between (Romney minus Santorum) in the poll and (Santorum minus Romney) in the final result = the undecided number.

Over 60% of trump supporters in this poll say they have never attended a caucus.

Yes, I think barring some major screw-up by Selzer or a huge event at the last minute, Clinton wins IA by a comparable number in voters and a slightly larger amount in delegates. Sanders is hurt by the fact that the caucus system penalizes his demographics - who are clustered on college campuses and in urban areas in general - while Clinton benefits from a larger than proportionate share of delegates being allocated to rural counties and caucus sites. Sanders would need to win by 3-5 points in order to eek out a plurality/majority of delegates in all likelihood.

Actually, they do a three day set of polling and it showed Santorum's last minute surge. But the headlines for 2012 presented the three-days worth of data, not the day by day data.

The Clinton enthusiasm number is important. And it'll be a huge test of their organisation.

Is it true that, college towns aside, Sanders's support is more concentrated in urban areas than Clinton's support is?  I haven't seen evidence that it is.  See the discussion in this thread:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=227529.0

45% OF RESPONDENTS ARE STILL UNSURE OF WHO THEY WILL VOTE FOR.

TRUMP ONLY GETS 7% SECOND CHOICE

If the Republican caucus were like the Democratic caucus, then Rubio would be right on the edge of massively overperforming or massively underperforming, haha. 15% but with everyone having you as your second choice is very dangerous.

But luckily the Republican caucus is not like that and we'll have PRESIDENT TRUMP.

Not to mention 7% legitimately undecided. This year's 2% doesn't give that much hope.

I think a better thing to consider rather than "urban center vs. rural/suburban" is the amount of young, college students. In terms of urban centers, can see Clinton being strong in the counties and cities along the Mississippi river (save Dubuque) and in the Des Moines metro area, and maybe Council Bluffs, but Sanders is probably strong in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Ames...

And who knows, Sanders is probably strong in some random rural areas as well. It'll be interesting to see the map.

TRUMPUBLICANS
Trump 28 +6 net change Trump +8
Cruz 23 -2
Rubio 15 +3
Carson 10 -1
Paul 5 nc
Christie 3 nc
Bush 2 -2
Fiorina 2 nc
Huckabee 2 -1
Kasich 2 nc
Santorum 2 +1
Gilmore 0 nc
Not Sure/Uncommitted 5 -1

40% first time caucusers seems kinda high for the caucuses considering the registration numbers are slit lot lower now than they were in 2012.

That did seem kind of low to me, I expected 15 people to be more like 2% support. Turns out he just BARELY rounded to 3.

fav/unfav % among their own party:

Sanders 82/12% for +70%
Clinton 81/17% for +64%
O’Malley 46/13% for +33%

Carson 72/22% for +50%
Rubio 70/21% for +49%
Cruz 65/28% for +37%
Trump 50/47% for +3%
Kasich 28/27% for +1%
Paul 40/41% for -1%
Christie 40/44% for -4%
Bush 41/53% for -12%

Would you be enthusiastic in your support for this candidate if they became the nominee? (yes/no %)

Clinton 73/26% for +47%
Sanders 69/30% for +39%

Carson 58/40% for +18%
Rubio 58/40% for +18%
Cruz 56/43% for +13%
Trump 44/56% for -12%
Paul 31/63% for -32%
Kasich 23/56% for -33%
Christie 31/65% for -34%
Bush 30/69% for -39%

Looking at the initial numbers in the OP, I'm not convinced what I said isn't true. Relative to population distribution, Sanders will have a larger than average share of his voters in actual urban areas, based largely on the fact that the generational gap appears to be the largest determining factor in the poll (older people tend to stay in rural areas; younger people leave them). Sanders may be doing better in the west than he is in the east, but there are fewer voters overall in the west than in the east.

I'd really need to see what specifically are their defining boundaries for each region, as there are probably suburban and rural areas that get counted as part of "Eastern Cities" and so forth, naturally inflating Clinton's dominance there when compared to my hypothesis. If the 64% of Iowa that is classified as "urban" was actually urban in a real sense, then I'd expect more than 64% of his vote to come from there. Based on that 64% urban definition, however, it's possible that less than 64% of his vote comes from "urban areas". However, in terms of what I'd consider to be urban, I imagine a larger percentage of his vote will come from those places than they comprise as a share of the state's population.

I wonder if it's ever happened before that the Iowa caucuses are won by a candidate for whom 47% of their own party have an unfavorable opinion of them?  :P

What are you talking about?

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It looks like Clinton is getting better approvals among Democrats than she had. Damn...

Honestly if Clinton and Trump pull it off here, the subsequent primary and caucus schedule looks so favorable for the both of them (save New Hampshire for Clinton) that it doesn't even matter how favorable or enthusiastic people are for them, they'll very likely be the nominees.

So they'll be a lot of unenthusiastic Republicans regardless of who is the nominee.

That's the price of an overtly negative campaign. For all the talk about how Hillary and Bernie are at each other's throats, compared to the GOP side they're playing by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.

In other words, I imagine that if the definition of "urban" is the area in gray (or even larger, god forbid), then my original statement wouldn't hold true. If the definition of "urban" is along the lines of what I would consider it to be (the areas in black), then I don't see how a disproportionate share of his vote doesn't come from inside of it.

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It matters not. TRUMP draws a lot of his support from the Democrats.

The number of registered republicans is 17000 lower than in February 2012, post caucus. 612k now vs 629k 2012.

People can flip their registration at the caucus. In reality, considering how many apathetic independent TRUMP supporters are likely to show up and do just that...it's not a terrible position number-wise to be just 17k off of 2012.

I'm glad that you pointed that out. I'm not going to say that Bernie will sweep the rural areas, but it wouldn't surprise me if he picked up a fair amount of small counties.

Yea that's true. I'm just wondering how many get off the couch and caucus for an hour with the snowstorm in southern Iowa taken into account.

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-01-30/bloomberg-politics-des-moines-register-iowa-poll-democrats

Only one in three likely Democratic voters in the survey are first-time caucus-goers, who break decidedly toward Sanders. That compares with 60 percent in the final pre-caucus survey of 2008

In addition, the survey finds Clinton’s support is deeper and sturdier than Sanders’ across many areas

“Most of the ways you look at it, she’s stronger than the three-point race would suggest,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer.

Sanders does not have as broad a reach as Obama did.
In the final pre-caucus survey of 2008, Obama led in many categories, with both definite and probable caucus-goers and decided as well as persuadable voters.

What I do find interesting in the poll, however, is that Hillary is within the margin of error of being toppled yet again in IA with only 34% of intended caucus-goers being first-timers, whereas it took 60% to dethrone her in 2008. This tells me that Clinton, in some ways, is even weaker than she was in 2008. However, it's worth noting that there is an eight-point difference between now (Clinton +3) and 2008 (Obama +5), and the difference between 34% and 60% isn't that large of one when you consider that it might be a 60/40 split in both years in terms of first-timers' preferences.

It didn't necessarily take 60% to "dethrone" her. She got beat by 9 points. You're better with data than I am: what would the results have been if 2008 was 34%? Or 2016 being 60%?

The thing is, Selzer picked up the upcoming huge wave for Obama. She doesn't see it for Sanders. And with 60% being so huge, absent large population growth, 60% again might not even be possible.


http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/ia/iowa_democratic_caucus-208.html
She only led 2 out of the last 5 polls in 2008.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/ia/iowa_democratic_presidential_caucus-3195.html
She's leading 5 out of the last 7, including in the DMR that predicted her demise last time.

It's pretty interesting that the only 2 pollsters to show Hillary ahead in 08 (ARG and CNN) show Sanders ahead this time.

does anybody really have any sort of gauge on likely results out of Des Moines?

It seems like the only parts of Iowa with a lot of African-American voters are in Des Moines, Waterloo and some in Davenport. So, that'll diverge from the numbers for Obama in 2008.

As for the R side... Trump's looking like a solid pick, unless the non-Trump voters can stomach voting for Cruz.

If Rubio was already in 2nd, he'd have a chance.. but having Cruz 2nd to Trump is one hell of a buffer for Trump.

After the latest Weather.com poll and weather forecast, it seems Hillary will win.

I'll ask again, since no one answered the first time: Have they released the full crosstabs for this poll?  Because all I can find is this:

http://media.bloomberg.com/bb/avfile/r1OvZ1NeDjnY

which includes results on a number of questions, but doesn't tell you how each demographic group is breaking.

The one I have seen was Hillary with a 12% lead among women or something? But... that doesn't seem like enough.

Considering Clinton was losing to Sanders among women under 45 by something like 15 points and was ahead with women over 45 by like 20 points (I saw these numbers mentioned in the live feed), that doesn't sound terribly far off.

Well, in 2008, she lost to Obama by 5 points as best I can tell. Today, she's up by 3. It's totally possible that if 60% of voters were first-timers in this caucus, that she'd be exactly where she was.

If we assume that it's 59/39 for Sanders among first-timers (34%), then it'd be about 57/40 Clinton for the rest (66%). This would give us a 51/48 Clinton result (Clinton +3, as in the poll).

If I've done it correctly, then a 60% first-timer crowd/40% repeat caucus-goers group would be:

52% Sanders, 45% Clinton

Which means she would lose by 7 (as opposed to losing by 5 in 2008). So, not very significant movement in one direction or another, but one could make the argument that she is possibly a bit weaker than in 2008, or at the very least, just as weak, when it comes to this one metric.

^^^ It's also worth noting that I edited my original post in between the time you quoted it and the time you posted it, explaining that the difference likely wouldn't be as monumental as I initially had thought.

Um, she lost by 8 (37,6 to 29,5).

I see the 30 paid staffers Jeb! has in Iowa have really paid dividends.

Here are some data-points from the Democratic side:

18-35: 63-27 Sanders
65+: 65-27 Clinton

Those earning >$100k: 57-28 Clinton

"The system works reasonably well for those who work hard to get ahead": 60-29 Clinton
"The system is rigged against all but the very rich and powerful": 50-39 Sanders

First-time caucusgoers: 53-34 Sanders

Men: Sanders +5
Women: Clinton +10

No religious affiliation: 67-27 Sanders

Independents: 55-30 Sanders
Liberals: 51-41 Sanders

Ugh, why does IA have two caucuses and a primary? I was going off of the numbers Leip has listed and I'm assuming his are correct in some context. Are those numbers Leip has for the county delegates or what?

there's also not an infinite number of first time voters. It'd be a nice split to see how many 2016 voters are first-timers from 2008.

I'd guess virtually everybody 25 or younger (born in 1991 or after) is going to be first time for the Dems, unless somebody caucused for the uncontested Obama candidacy as their first time in 2012. That universe seems to be kinda lower than you'd think.

But then again, an age breakdown of the 60% first timers in 2008 seems helpful here and idk if that got split by the surveys.

Eh, there might be some Paul 2012 first timers switching to Sanders.  But yeah, you make a good point that many of the 2008 first timers are going to be voting again.

LOL, according to the poll Rubio's support DROPPED the last two days of the survey, after the debate he "won".

Nate Cohn has a good story on Selzer's methodology:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/upshot/why-this-is-the-iowa-poll-that-everyones-waiting-for.html?_r=0

This table is interesting:

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^^^ Interesting. There are two schools of thought in regards to which is more accurate, but I tend to believe that voter file sampling is the superior method in all but the most unorthodox and/or high-turnout scenarios (like 2008):

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yeah, I wasn't counting 2012 Republican caucusers. I'd think that number is gonna be pretty low. Those voters are probably gonna have to get used to the differences between D and R caucuses.

comparing the 2 Selzer polls, it moved from 42/40 Clinton to 45/42 Clinton. Kinda suggesting that there might be a ceiling on the PV support for Sanders. Considering the IA Dem Caucuses aren't a PV contest, there's a potential that Bernie gets 40%+ in a bunch of places that he loses. Topping out in the mid-50s or such in Johnson Co (where the non-IC vote is gonna cancel out parts of the IC vote)

but muh surge

If he does finish strongly, we'll see first hand how much influence untrue media spin can have.

5% Unsure, 4% Uncommitted, 3 % O Malley - That is 12% up for grabs.

Plus this only considers registered voters. There will be a pretty decent number of registrations on caucus day among which demographic Sanders has a good lead. O'Malley's supporters prefer Bernie 2-1.

So I think this could be anywhere between a Clinton, 5-6% point victory, to Sanders 5-6% victory, with likely result as a neck & neck.

With such huge (12%) open voters & new registrations coming in for Bernie, this is TOO close to call

Those individual days have huge MoEs.  It's not that that unlikely that a candidate could be improving (although not dominating) over these days and yet the poll would show a decline.  Selzer is a great pollster, but statistics are statistics.

Wow, that is interesting. And not too much variation within the 2 groups. Except go home, Loras, you're drunk.

i'm not as inclined with these numbers to view Trump winning compared to earlier this week. evangical and tea party turnout in IA is a lot more reliable than Trump's bastion of first-timers and generally unengaged voters. for once, weather could actually have an impact here.

gun to my head i very reluctantly say Trump.

I can't find the crosstabs for the polls, however I found this in the officially released numbers:
As such, as long as the numbers for this year match up with elections in the past, this should be pretty accurate.
http://media.bloomberg.com/bb/avfile/r1OvZ1NeDjnY

I also have a fairly significant question regarding the meaning of late Jan-16 and early Jan-16. All of the polls have that weird wording to them when they are compared to the polls conducted earlier in the campaign cycle (all of those have specific dates). I do not question that these polls were conducted over the period of the 26th to the 29th, but what does that wording even mean?

She conducted two polls in January, 2016. To differentiate them, she termed the first one "early Jan 16" and the second one "late Jan 16."

Thank you. I guess I'm more tired than I thought (1:45 AM here); I thought it was referring to January 16th 2016...

Anyway, to add something new here, they polled more than just the three people running for president of the Democratic side for favorabilities. Here's a full list:

Person — Favorable-Unfavorable (Net)

Barack Obama — 90-9 (+81)
Bill Clinton — 86-11 (+75)
Bernie Sanders — 82-12 (+70)
Joe Biden — 81-11 (+70)
Hillary Clinton — 81-17 (+64)
John Kerry — 65-18 (+47)
Elizabeth Warren — 47-7 (+40)
Martin O'Malley — 46-13 (+33)
Michael Bloomberg — 17-26 (-9)

Obama is so widely liked, I wonder if his endorsement would be able to shift voters away from Sanders.

Edit: I emphasized the word "would" to make it clear that although he has not endorsed anyone (yet), I think that that endorsement would have an impact.

Obama never endorsed anybody yet. I would give my personal opinion on the Obama endorsement situation, but I'd probably be ripped apart by Hillary and Bernie hacks together.

Obama has done everything short of endorsing Clinton, because it's pretty poor form for a sitting president to endorse in the middle of the primary of their own party.

Harry Enten looks at Selzer’s history in Iowa going back to 1988, finding that she’s only incorrectly called the winner once (Santorum beating Romney in 2012), and that the average error per candidate in the poll’s predictions across all years is just 3.3%.  However, with so many candidates running each year, you can be really close on most of them, but way off on one or two, and still manage a 3.3% average:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-final-des-moines-register-iowa-poll-is-out-how-accurate-will-it-be/

Of course if she's off 3.3 points on both Hillary's and Bernie's support (those would tend to be very anti-correlated) in Hillary's favor, that means that Bernie leads by 3-4 points.

Or Hillary leads by 9 if it's not in her favour.

Either way, it's better to see these results if you're Hillary than if you're Bernie Sanders.

I think we just witnessed the death of the Sanders campaign. jfern actually turning a poll that shows a 3 point lead for Clinton into a 4 point win for Sanders. :whew:

Come on, I'm just saying Bernie could be leading, even the gold standard of polling can't avoid random statistical noise.

My guess:

Dems: Slim win to Clinton, probably in the 1-4% range.
One might believe that Sanders will underperform due to him having lots of young voters, but I think his ground operation will be fairly strong, keeping the results close, but probably not enough to overtake Clinton.

GOP: Very slim win to Cruz, probably in the 0-3% range.
Unlike Sanders, I don't think Trump has got the ground operation to pull off the win in a caucus state. His lead in the polls in sustantial and it might be enough to carry him over the finish line, but I believe that Cruz' ground operation is far better and likely enough too squeeze out a win. Will be very interesting to see how Trump reacts if that happens.

I agree that there is some elements that could be problematic for Clinton but this is a MASSIVE test for the machines and how they get their people out in the right places and in the right numbers. This isn't about pure raw voters, but where they are.

Scanning through the thread, I don't think this has been mentioned yet, but they also polled a hypothetical 2-man race on the GOP side.  If it was just Cruz and Trump running, then you get:

Cruz 53%
Trump 35%

Well it just illustrates that this is, in so many ways, a mess of the GOPs own making.

First and second choices, and candidate favorability, over time:

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I'm going to say that it won't be particularly narrow and Clinton will secure a good amount of delegates. It goes back to her having a better distribution of votes geographically, which is what this caucus is all about.

Sorry to be nitpicking, but I don't think this causus is about that at all. Infact, I think delegate allocation for Iowa is close to being irrelevant. The ENTIRE significance of the Iowa caucus is symbolic. I'm 100% positive that any candidate would rather win Iowa and receive ZERO of the delegates, than come in second and receive 100% of the delegates.

In other states this is true, but Iowa doesn't report votes totals on the Democratic side, so here, it is about delegate count.

Junk poll.

The closest to the result and better than any pollster was actually the Atlas poll average.

48-47 Clinton/Sanders

https://uselectionatlas.org/POLLS/PRESIDENT/2016D/polls.php?fips=19

It actually looks like that sh**tty ISU poll was the closest.

Selzer/DMR/Bloomberg - gold standard my ass :)