NYT LIVE POLL THREAD:

[GeorgiaModerate]

Perhaps this is what happens when you put faith in a mediocre pollster that has a small sample size, while using 2014 as the baseline for the demographics used. You get buggy numbers.

Freaking Siena is a mediocre pollster?

I've seen it all in this place.

Zaybay is a gigantic D hack. He is a world class contortonanist who tries to twist anything as good for dems, or discredit anything that isn't good for dems.

Sure pal, if you want to blindly believe polls without diving in to see the gears underneath, go right ahead.

Call me what you want, that doesnt change the quality of the polls.

Its odd, everyone seems focused on a choice of words "mediocre", and not my reasons for using them(small sample size, using 2014 voting numbers, still using RV)
 

I think people are taking issue with your blanket characterization of Siena as a mediocre pollster.  Criticizing these particular polls for their methodology is reasonable.

[GeorgiaModerate]

A sound take on TX-23 from Nate Cohn:

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1039308049423458305

[GeorgiaModerate]

Complaining that the sample size for a single CD is around half of what we'd get for a statewide or national poll is... an interesting media strategy.

Like, Nate Silver understands basic error band calculation, right? Is he just being opaquely misleading for his dumber followers?

Anyway, these polls all seem about near expectations so far. I don't know what the big fuss is.

I think Nate's just trying to point out that these CD polls are inherently going to be more error prone than ones from larger jurisdictions typically are.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Complaining that the sample size for a single CD is around half of what we'd get for a statewide or national poll is... an interesting media strategy.

Like, Nate Silver understands basic error band calculation, right? Is he just being opaquely misleading for his dumber followers?

Anyway, these polls all seem about near expectations so far. I don't know what the big fuss is.

I think Nate's just trying to point out that these CD polls are inherently going to be more error prone than ones from larger jurisdictions typically are.

But that's not how statistical error works. A smaller population naturally demands a smaller sample size for a given error bound. He's being deliberately misleading by implying that the relatively-smaller absolute sample size lessens the significance, unless he's really much less versed in his own industry than we've all assumed. (I won't rule out the latter possibility. He doesn't impress me.)

Not at the population sizes we're talking about.  The average CD has what, 700K people?  Let's guess that there are 300K voters.  A sample size of 250 is going to have about the same MoE for a population that size or one much bigger.  The absolute sample size DOES make the difference.  With a sample size of 250, MoE is about +/-6.2% whether the population is 300K or 30 million.  With sample size of 500, MoE is about 4.4% for either population.  With sample size of 1000, it's about 3.1%.  The difference in MoE created by the population size differences is insignificant compared to that created by the sample size differences.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Nate Cohn answers a number of methodology questions in this thread: https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1039594928257617921.

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1039627190822944770

[GeorgiaModerate]

Interesting(?) that WI-01 has a much better response rate (about 3.5% so far) than the others.

[GeorgiaModerate]

They appear to have finished the poll of TX-23.

That means we can... download the microdata!!!

https://int.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2018/live-polls-2018/races/elections-poll-tx23-1-microdata.csv

They ended up having a sample of 19 18-29 year olds, and the age 18-29 crosstab ended up 65-32 Republican for Hurd.


Now, some details about these 19 people polled, from the microdata:

1)

4 out of the 19 people (21% of them!) self-reported in the poll that they were not actually age 18-29, but were older. 1 of those self-reported that they were in the 35-49 age group, 2 of them reported they were age 50-64, and 1 of them reported they were age 65+.

One possibility here is that they were lying about their age in the poll. An alternative possibility is maybe there were 2 people at the same phone number (e.g. a "Jr." and a "Sr.") that have the same name, but have different ages, and they are actually the Senior, not the Junior.


2)

Of those 19 people, 10 of them said they were voting for Hurd, 7 for Ortiz, and 2 undecided. Without weighting, that would come out to a 53-37 Hurd lead, but the weighting transforms that to the 65-32 lead that is actually shown in the age 18-29 crosstab.

From their methodological description, the weighting sounds like it will be partly based on turnout scores, and partly based on demographics. The issue here is that the turnout scores seem to be particularly heterogeneous for the age 18-29s. There are just a few voters with high turnout scores (80%+) whereas most of the 19 people have turnout scores that are much lower (13 of 19 are below 50%, and 8 of 19 are below 25%).

Now, the issue is that the person with the 2nd highest turnout score (highest is 92.25%, 2nd highest is 85.25%) happens to be that same voter who said that they are not actually age 18-29 at all, but self-reported that they were age 65+ (the voter with the 92.25% turnout score is also voting Republican). So that voter, who may well not in fact be 18-29 at all, seems to be getting disproportionate weight in the 18-29 category. And in turn, the age 18-29 sample gets disproportionate weight in the poll overall due to the horrendously low response rate from age 18-29s.

Also, only 9/19 of the age 18-29s included in the sample said that they were Hispanic.

It’s the black-18-year-old-for-Trump problem all over again that YouGov (?) was getting flak over in 2016 in their panel polling. (Not certain it was YouGov but was someone with an online panel that didn’t change.) They had huge swings to and away from Trump based exclusively on whether that person was responding to the poll that round. It’s a major hazard of modern polling. They should be dropping anyone whose self-reported age is inconsistent with their registration data from the poll.

I believe it was the LA Times.

[GeorgiaModerate]

There's a live poll in my WI congressional district RIGHT NOW, and they polled me!! Best day of the week thus far for me!!!

Which district?

[GeorgiaModerate]

Any predictions for WI-01?

You should be telling us that.   But I'll guess it ends up as D+1.

[GeorgiaModerate]

LOL:

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1040009568078716929

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1040030622926995457

[GeorgiaModerate]

FL-26 just hit 400 calls without a response yet.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Guesses on how long it takes to get a response?  I'll say 617.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Looks like it was around 550.

[GeorgiaModerate]

All the current polls except NM-02 are active again.  Current status for those who might not be able to access it:

TX-7: 0 responses (26 calls)

FL-26: 181 responses, Mucarsel-Powell (D) 51, Curbelo (R) 44

KS-2: 238 responses, Watkins (R) 45, Davis (D) 44

ME-2: 438 responses, Poliquin (R) 47, Golden (D) 43

NM-2: 20 responses, too early to report

[GeorgiaModerate]

Trende wrote that based on these polls he sees Democrats picking up 30 seats. So I guess these polls aren't very favorable for Democrats.

What? If Democrats gain 30 that's a majority, so they win. That's a pretty good result for them imo.

Yeah, but most people were/are predicting around 40 seats. So Trende's prediction is on the low side.

FWIW, The Economist's model is currently D+29.

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/1040962624928792577

[GeorgiaModerate]

KS-02 is now closed with the final result Davis+1.  Under various turnout models:

People who say they are almost certain to vote, and no one else   Davis +2
The types of people who voted in 2014   Watkins +2
Our estimate   Davis +1
People whose voting history suggests they will vote, regardless of what they say   Davis +1
People who say they will vote, adjusted for past levels of truthfulness   Davis +1
The types of people who voted in 2016   Watkins +2
Every active registered voter   Davis +6

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1041046405748613120

The districts at the end of the list are the ones suffering the most from weighting issues (you may need to click on the tweet to see the whole list).

[GeorgiaModerate]

Fletcher is down 6 right now.

But muh suburbs are trending D! Muh Fletcher will win MODERATE, REASONABLE Republican suburbanites with COLLEGE DEGREES!!!

Hey it's no worse than most of this thread.

Wow, that really shows how volatile these polls are.  Fletcher was down 15 not that long ago.

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1041063138622402560

[GeorgiaModerate]

So I'm not misunderstood as someone who doesn't follow each individual house race myself, - that so far these polls have been very underwhelming for Democrats?

I'd call them a mixed bag; some good for D's, some bad, some neutral.  For those who were expecting a great D performance across the board (which IMO is an unreasonably high expectation), then yes, they're probably underwhelming.  But they're by no means awful.

[GeorgiaModerate]

So I'm not misunderstood as someone who doesn't follow each individual house race myself, - that so far these polls have been very underwhelming for Democrats?

On the whole they haven't been good or bad for either party compared to the conventional wisdom.

Out of the 16 polls, they Republicans lead by an average of 1.2% (46.0-44..
But some in some of these races, the Republicans were already seen as the favorite.
In the 11 races rated by Cook as a Toss-Up, the Democrats lead by an average of 0.4%
In the 5 races rated by Cook as Lean Republican, the Republicans lead by an average of 4.6%.

It is very strange to me how the FL-26 race went from Dem +10 with 300 respondents to GOP +1 with 380 respondents.  It would indicate that Curbelo won more than 2/3 of the decided vote among those last 80, which should happen and 1/1000 times in close race.

Not necessarily 2/3 of the last 80.  Because of their weighting, a series of responses from voters with some demographics will move the result much more than others.  Nate Cohn has tweeted a few times about this.  So it may be that the last batch of pro-Curbelo responses were from voters with strong weights.

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1041746937249234944