2018 Congressional Generic Ballot and House Polls Megathread - Part 3

[Florida Man for Crime]

Now this is what you call a SHOCK POLL. Every pundit has this as likely R, and Civitas is a Republican pollster...

It does fit the sort of district where the wave could be especially large though. Suburban Raleigh certainly has plenty of educated whites who will turn out and could easily swing greatly Democratic.

Plus particularly strong backlash caused by the craziness of the NC GOP.

Plus there are ancestral Dems in the more rural parts.

[Florida Man for Crime]

CNN (LV):

52% Democrats
42% Republicans

Source

The last CNN poll in early August was 52-41, although that was with RV, not LV.

[Florida Man for Crime]

DEMOCRATS IN DISSSSSARRAY!!!111!!11!11!111!!111

I just realized that earlier poll was RV, so we should compare to the RV in this poll for the trend.

[Florida Man for Crime]

BLUE WAVE INCOMING 1000+ SEAT VICTORY PERMANENT DEM MAJORITY!11!!1

RVs are 52-40.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Yeah, it seems like every single high quality phone poll at this point is pretty much giving Dems a double-digit lead in the GCB.

The only one that is not is Selzer, but her reputation was built on Iowa caucus polling, not national general election polling.

[Florida Man for Crime]

This is an interesting graphic. I knew the pundits way underestimated the wave throughout the summer of 2010, but I didn't remember that it went into September as well.

Things not included in that graphic that favor 2010 Republicans in comparison to the situation currently faced by 2018 Democrats:


1) Low hanging fruit - There was much more "low hanging fruit" for 2010 Republicans to pick. By this, I mean that there were lots of R+ PVI seats with Dem incumbents which they could win merely by getting the Congressional vote to reflect the Presidential vote

http://electoral-vote.com/evp2010/House/house.html.

Just compare this to the list of Dems who lost to see how many R+5, R+10, R+15, and even R+20 seats were easy pickings for the GOP. By contrast, there are currently very few D+ PVI, and the ones that do exist tend to be more like D+5 at the most (e.g. Valadao, Katko, Curbelo, FL-27, and I think there are literally 0 more significantly D+ districts to win besides those!)


Republican gerrymandering - Probably more than cancels out the fact that Dems are currently doing a few points better on the generic congressional ballot than Reps in 2010 were.


Republican voter suppression laws, control of Secretaries of State/Election Administrations and willingness to use them for partisan vote suppression purposes - So some of the Dems giving the leads on the GCB will end up in some instances not able to vote at all.


Senate map - This is also related to the gerrymandering of the Senate, but Republicans had a much better Senate map to work with in 2010 than the Dems in 2018. Even so, they whiffed on a lot of pickup opportunities in 2010.


In short, the elections are systematically rigged in favor of Republicans.


If all that mattered were the will of the people as expressed by their votes, there would be much less of a problem - Dems would be in great shape. Of course, if that were the case, then Hillary Clinton would also be President right now as well. And Al Gore would have been President in 2000. And Dems would have won back the house in 2012 after having lost it in 2010 (Dems won the 2012 House popular vote - winning the popular vote by a margin of 1.2% translated into losing the # of seats by a margin of 7.6%).

It is extremely likely that Dems will win the House popular vote, and most likely by quite a large margin. But people's votes are only one of a number of factors determining the results of US elections.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Gerrymandering is like a sea wall. It can blunt small waves, such as D+5 or something along the lines. But against a large wave, such as the one we are seeing, and suddenly, it all falls apart. The VA, NC, and NJ gerrymanders are already falling apart, and a larger D wave may be able to peirce OH, MI, WI, among others.

This is nonsense. A gerrymander can only be said to be "falling apart" or "failing" if it actually backfires - that means that it ends up producing more Dem seats than a neutral/fair map would. With the seats that are currently rated as competitive, we are not at that point in any of these states (except for NJ, but see below).

As for NJ, it is not a Republican gerrymander, it is a bipartisan incumbent-protection map. The purpose of drawing it was not to maximize partisan GOP gain or partisan safe seats, but rather to give the best districts they could to the people who happened to be incumbents when the maps were drawn (which happened to include a lot of long-term incumbents who were holding down territory that had drifted towards Ds even by 2010).

As for NC, Dems have 3/13 seats there. In the best case projected at the moment, they could (possibly) gain maybe 3 seats (say, NC-02, NC-09, NC-13). But a neutral/fair map in NC. So Republicans definitely benefit from their gerrymander, and it is in no way as though their gerrymander is coming back to bite them. For it to backfire, Dems would have to win more than would be achievable in a fair/neutral map - something like 10 seats, which is just beyond the current realm of plausibility.

As for VA, it is only "falling apart" in the sense that it has been redrawn by courts. For example, VA-07 would not be as competitive as it is if it were not redrawn as a result of the VRA lawsuits affecting neighboring districts. VA-10 is of course a likely Dem pickup, but the GOP knew that seat was a ticking time bomb when they drew it - they were just trying to squeeze out one more winnable seat for as long as it could hold.

In OH/MI/WI, Dems may pick up 1 or 2 seats, but they are not currently projected to win any more than they would get in a neutral/fair map. For example, in Ohio Dems would need to gain more than 3-4 seats for that to be the case (even 4 seats, which is pretty darn unlikely, would only bring Dems up to having 50% of the seats, which is hardly unreasonable for a neutral map in a competitive state like OH!). Hence, those gerrymanders are not "falling apart."

[Florida Man for Crime]

Just to note - Virginia's Congressional districts were redrawn in 2016 by a federal judicial panel. They were only fixing the district(s) in question, which is why the rest of the map is the way it is.

This includes VA-07. The map drew Hanover county out of VA-07. Hanover County is where the college he taught at before running for Congress is located, and is the most heavily Republican county with a reasonably large population in the area.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/irony-and-glamour-in-virginias-redrawn-7th-district/2018/05/18/bd68de26-5860-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html

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If the district was still as it was before, Spanberger would have a tougher time, and who knows, perhaps wouldn't even have run.

[Florida Man for Crime]

I kind of want Shalala to lose just to teach her, her friends and future candidates that stupid vanity candidacies, probably just so she can burnish her legacy, are incredibly reckless and unacceptable in a year when every seat needs to be contested as strongly as possible to check an increasingly unhinged presidency.

All of this reminds me of people like Menendez and his backers.

I do too, except I really don't, because her actually losing would be incredibly reckless and unacceptable in a year when every seat needs to be contested as strongly as possible to check an increasingly unhinged presidency.

[Florida Man for Crime]

https://twitter.com/MonmouthPoll/status/1042790579900440577?s=19

That's interesting in light of the NYT Live poll currently showing Lance up by 4 (with only 299 responses so far, though).

Yeah, it will be interesting to see if the NYT/Siena poll ends up breaking towards Malinowski also with more responses, or not. Even if Lance ends up ahead, he is (so far) under 50 in both polls and it is clear from the Monmouth one especially that Malinowski can easily win.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Is there historical evidence to back up the idea that Siena is biased toward incumbents in September? It's certainly not the case that all of their polls are rosy for incumbents.

Yes, I have heard this claim repeated often. What I have not seen, though, is a serious/comprehensive analysis that actually establishes that as a fact.

Nor moreover, have I seen anything that establishes that if it is true, it is something that specifically truly applies just to Siena specifically. It is plausible that this could be true but also apply to other polls, if it is simply a reflection of the fact that challengers have lower name recognition than incumbents until close to the election.

Also, incumbents at 45% is bad news for them, especially when undecideds lean Democratic.

This is true and a good caveat to the above (although we cannot know with any certainty in advance how undecideds will break in any given race). We have seen lots of polls with incumbents at around 45% and sometimes even below, and those are definitely bad news for GOP incumbents, even if they are nominally ahead.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Is there historical evidence to back up the idea that Siena is biased toward incumbents in September? It's certainly not the case that all of their polls are rosy for incumbents.

Yes actually.

https://scri.siena.edu/category/political/page/25/

This is the section that has most of the 2010 polls. As you can see, some of these results gathered before October are rather crazy:
-the 24th had the R, Richard Hanna, down by 8, 48-40. A poll released in the last week had a more modest win for Democratic incumbent, Mike Arcuri, of 48-43. The R won 52-48.

-In the 20th, Chris Gibbson won 55-45, Siena gave the incumbent D, Scott Murphy the lead, by 17 points no less

-One of the worst offenders, Siena gave, in October, the incumbent Democrat Dan Maffei a large lead in the 25th district, 51-39. The republican challenger, Ann Marie Buerkle, won by .5%

(Siena did NY polls most of the time)

2014 is similar
-Tim Bishop, the incumbent, was given a 51-41 lead against challenger Lee Zeldin, halfway through September. Siena later corrected this in the last week of the election, giving Zeldin a 5% lead. He won  53-44.

-A similar story, Siena gave incumbent Dan Maffei a lead, 50-42, in NY-24. Katko got a more favorable poll, 52-42, in the last week of the election, and won 58-38.

Even in 2018, there has been a similar trend, with its NY polls having a much more Republican sample, and finding much higher approvals than, say Monmouth, or other pollsters have found. There is definitely an incumbency bias in Siena.

Edit: this took a while to get, so I apologize for not getting it sooner

So just eyeballing this quickly, you have a sample size of 5 polls you are working with here, and only over 2 elections. That is not a large amount of data from which to draw valid conclusions.

And for this analysis you seem to be selecting polls that had large differences between the poll and the results, but ignoring other polls.

In addition, all of the polls you mention were in New York. An alternate explanation (or partial explanation) for sharp divergences/swings could be that New York is simply very swingy and elastic, particularly upstate. This would definitely be consistent with actual election results, where there have been very sharp differences in results between different years and in different races. Democrats have often carried upstate NY counties in landslides (especially incumbent dems in statewide races), but on the other hand they have also voted in landslides for Republicans (Trump being a recent case in point, but also earlier Republicans have done so). In fact, if you had to pick out a single region of the United States as the most swingy/elastic, upstate NY would be a prime contender.

And even if your analysis is correct, in order for it to say anything particular about Siena, you need to compare it to other pollsters to show that it is actually a Siena-specific effect.

[Florida Man for Crime]

To be noted, Cohn is not using Sienna for all of these polls. I think there are 4 or 5 other call centers scattered around the country.

Call center is not the same as pollster. Pollsters can contract out a call center to conduct the actual calls, but still they set up the poll, questions, analyze the data, etc.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Most people want answers to simple binary questions like "who's going to win?" or at least "who's ahead right now?"  Political polls don't answer those questions; they measure how many people say they'll vote for a particular candidate, which is not the same thing, for several reasons:

1. What people say may not match who they actually vote for.
2. Margin of error as a result of sampling.
3. Outliers (even with a carefully designed poll, you'll get an outlier outside MoE 5% of the time).

Good post. To the 3 reasons you posted, I would propose adding a few more:

4. By definition of "undecided," polls do not measure who undecided voters will vote for (if indeed they do vote).
5. Even if everyone in a poll votes for who they say they will, and there is no statistical error, the weighting/proportions of people included in the poll may not match the weighting/proportions of people who actually turn out to vote.
6. Polls ask the question of who you will vote for in a different way than a ballot does - a ballot may (or may not) have straight party voting, and lists any 3rd party candidates and write-ins in a particular way, which cannot be replicated by a pollster either including or not including 3rd party candidates as explicit options in their poll questions.

[Florida Man for Crime]

I believe Siena is only fulfilling the call center function (as are some other call centers), and the question design, etc., is coming from NYT/Upshot.  See the tweet below.  If this is the case, all the arguments about Siena's supposed incumbent bias are not relevant to these polls.

Yes, that too. Cohn also confirmed a week or so ago on twitter that although the methodology and weightings are similar to what Siena has used in its own polls, it is not the same methodology (something which should have been obvious from reading the methodology description articles on the NYT site).

[Florida Man for Crime]

If I were Phillips, I would start plans to cancel some of my TV ad reservations to start building up my warchest for my re-election bid. Makes things easier to start the next cycle with a nice pile of cash on hand.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Some Florida polls from PPP, commissioned by Save Our Care:

FL-18:
Brian Mast (R) - 46
Lauren Baer (D) - 43
http://floridapolitics.com/archives/275350-baer-within-three-mast

FL-25:
Mario Diaz-Balart (R) - 41
Mary Barzee Flores  (D) - 36
http://floridapolitics.com/archives/275349-poll-barzee-flores-closing

FL-26:
Carlos Curbelo (R) - 45
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D) - 46
http://floridapolitics.com/archives/275351-curbelo-trailing-newest-poll

Those are definitely good results for Dems, with all incumbents well below 50, but keep in mind... If they polled all those, they probably also polled other races such as FL-15, FL-16, FL-27, and maybe FL-06. Let's see if any of those get released.

[Florida Man for Crime]

How is the GOP doing this well? In 2012, there were several Republicans who made rape comments and got destroyed in the polls (deservedly so). The whole Kavanaugh controversy is like that 10 times over, yet they're still doing as well as they are?

The Kavanaugh news is very recent, still very much developing, and hasn't had much time to sink in, and there are not a lot of polls yet after it started to break.

[Florida Man for Crime]

OH-1 CLF (R) internal: Chabot (R-inc) 46, Pureval (D) 39

https://www.congressionalleadershipfund.org/memo-oh-01-polling-update/

Always knew it.

It's a GOP internal.

So it aligns perfectly with my thought that Chabot pulls through by about 4.

No way, that is a great poll for Aftab given that it is an R internal. I mean, even if that were a nonpartisan poll it would not be too bad a result for this stage in the campaign, with plenty of time for name recognition to increase still.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Nate Cohn mentioned that PA-07 and NJ-03 would be the first polls of theirs to find more Democratic-friendly results than Monmouth, so it's not a surprise that Monmouth found a tie in VA-07.

Yeah, I don't see the surprise/shock that some posters seem to be expressing at this poll. We knew from the Siena/NYT poll (which had Brat +4, 47-43) that it was a close and competitive race. That is very close to this poll (47-47 standard LV model), and can easily be explained just by MOE alone. Then on top of MOE, you have differences in methodology and the plausible possibility that there has been a bit of movement to Spanberger as her name ID continues to go up in the time between the 2 polls. This poll shouldn't change anyone's view of the race who was aware of the NYT/Siena poll.

[Florida Man for Crime]

We have inexplicably failed to run even a B-list candidate against Valadao thus far.

It is because no Democrats participate in the political process enough to actually vote in CA-21, much less run for office.

[Florida Man for Crime]

CA-21 SUSA: Valadao (R-inc) 50, Cox (D) 39

https://abc30.com/politics/political-insider--valadao-leads-cox-in-new-poll/4339229/

OK, there is actually one interesting thing in the crosstabs...

Cox actually leads Valadao among voters that were contacted by cell phone (41% of the sample) by 42%-39%.

Valadao leads with the 59% of the sample that was contacted by landline by 58%-38%.

The thing is, it seems at least offhand to me like 41% of the sample to be cellphone may be a little low. In the NYT/Siena, polls, the percent of the samples contacted by cell phone is generally much higher than that.

And in particular, Latinos are more likely to be cell-phone only, so this could have an especially large impact in this district.

So if there is some way for Valadao to potentially lose, it could be from the polls underestimating turnout from cell-phone only voters. Remember that Latinos are not easy to poll, especially in a district like CA-21.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Actually, we have a top-shelf A-list potential candidate in Rudy Salas (who I suspect is [wisely] waiting until 2020 to run) and several other decent potential candidates (though none as strong as Salas would be) such as Henry Perea.  There are a variety of reasons why none of these folks have run, but I think Valadao is probably gonna lose once he faces a solid opponent in even a neutral year. 

I'd say it takes a neutral Presidential year in particular, not just a neutral year, for the reason of higher Latino turnout in Presidential years. Yes, 2020 is the best shot at Valadao.

[Florida Man for Crime]

How is it possible for Pew's poll to have Democrats up 58 - 39 with white college grads, but then only 57 - 38 with college graduates of all races? Non-white college grads are significantly more Democratic than white college grads, even if they are slightly less Democratic than non-white non-college voters.

Shouldn't the total college grads (white/non-white) be > white college grad %?

White college grads also includes postgrads, whereas the regular college grad excludes postgrads (that is another category in that crosstab).

[Florida Man for Crime]

How is it possible for Pew's poll to have Democrats up 58 - 39 with white college grads, but then only 57 - 38 with college graduates of all races? Non-white college grads are significantly more Democratic than white college grads, even if they are slightly less Democratic than non-white non-college voters.

Shouldn't the total college grads (white/non-white) be > white college grad %?

White college grads also includes postgrads, whereas the regular college grad excludes postgrads (that is another category in that crosstab).

That would explain it. Postgrads are quite a Democratic group, and have been for a while. Does anyone know why postgrads have always been significantly more Democratic than "normal" college educated folks (like those with bachelor degrees)?

Quick facetious one-liner answer - because they are smarter than regular college grads

Real answer - because the same factors that make college-educated voters more likely to be Democratic also make them more likely to be Democratic, such as being more likely than 4 year college grads to have jobs as "knowledge-worker professionals" which is associated with voting Dem.