Non-Gallup/Rasmussen tracking polls thread

[Gustaf]

RCP (for what its worth) says -5.0

Does that include Zogby and Kos.

Zogby, not Kos.

FWIW -

Rasmussen O+6 (O+1)
Gallup O+3/O+7 (O+1/O+3)
Hotline O+7 (nc)
IBD/TIPP O+5 (M+2)
Zogby O+3 (M+1)
Kos O+7 (nc)
GW/Battleground O+4 (old)

Average:  O+5.29

You would think with the huge Obama money advantage, the market woes, and the general environment for Republicans, Obama would be up by a lot more then 5.

If McCain could pick up another 2 points in the average, election day could be interesting.  I'm not betting on it or expecting it though.

The should be argument is ridiculous.  I could say that running against a liberal black guy during a time of war, a moderate war hero should be up too.  Usually these arguments are made by ridiculous partisans spinning the facts

Whether it is ridiculous or not depends on how it's framed.

[Gustaf]

We should remember in the midst of glorifying 538 that all his talk about cell phones and young voters emerging turned out to be bull.

But, JJ, there clearly wasn't a Bradley effect to be noted this time around. That is pretty obvious. If anything, Obama did slightly better than the polls predicted but they were generally just pretty much spot on.

[Gustaf]

Wait, so the Bradley Effect was contingent upon the place in the election cycle?

Besides, the weighting was done in such a way that polls in the last week were hugely over-weighted relative to earlier ones.

Alcon, what I am looking at is basically the number of voters who don't answer the polls accurately.  In many cases, they answer undecided.  There were also true undecideds out there, but they tend to make up there minds before election day.  For this reason, I look at ending polls and really don't want to to include polls that are 30 days old, or 15 days old, or 10 days old.

There were also legitimate shifts in opinion within the last 30 days.  PA is a good example.  The polls closed about a week out, then bounced back.

No weighting just the last snapshot.

Gustav,  in the national tracking, there was.  We had three national tracking polls (out of six) that over counted Obama and did so outside outside of the MOE.  Two of them were not Zogby.    I suggested that there would be a small Bradley Effect, 1-2 points.  That small effect seems to be there.  Now, did it make a difference?  No.  Was it a polling artifact?  Yes.  A large one? No.  An effect that has been measured over time and is declining?  Yes.

If I had to say what it was, at this point, 1-3 points, in this election.

There are plenty of reasons why the polls were wrong. Gallup obviously just screwed up. There isn't as of yet any obvious reason as to why the Bradley effect would show up in some trackers and not in others.

The relevant fact is to look at the state level, imo and possibly at subsets like white blue collar workers. If there was a Bradley effect it should have been evident in states like PA, OH or NC imo. And it clearly wasn't. If anything, Obama did a tiny bit better in those states than the polls predicted.

I'm not saying there weren't one or two Bradley voters somewhere but it was completely insignificant.

[Gustaf]

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...