Patterico's Pontifications

8/26/2019

Bad News/Good News and a Complaint

Filed under: General — JVW @ 9:05 pm



[guest post by JVW]

Two sides of the same coin: the Monmouth University poll of 2020 Democrat candidates was updated today. As you may recall from my weekend post, candidates need to reach a level of 2% support in at least four “qualifying” polls (the list of polls is on my earlier post) by the end of day Wednesday in order to qualify for the September 12 debate in Houston. There are currently ten candidates who have qualified for that debate, and if any additional candidates make the cut then the field will yet again be split into two debates, one on September 12 and the other on the following evening.

Bad News: My Little Aloha Sweetie did not reach the magical 2% bar in the Monmouth poll, so she is still in search of two more polls to qualify.

Good News: Crazy Cute Hippie Crystals Chick reached 2%! I believe this is the first poll in which she has hit the mark, so she is still hoping to score big in three more.

Complaint: This Monmouth poll — again, one that is being used to determine who gets to participate in the next round of debates, which is a pretty damn big deal — was conducted with phone surveys of 800 people, of whom 298 were either registered Democrats or self-identified as Democrat-leaning. The percentages were only based upon that smaller subset, so for this poll n = 298, which yields a maximum margin of error of 5.7%. Look at it this way: My Little Aloha Sweetie received somewhere between two and four votes of the 298 surveyed to record her 1% (I am assuming that the pollsters round up). The difference, therefore, between her reaching the threshold or not in this poll was somewhere between one and three votes.

If the other polls are updated in the next couple of days and Congresswoman Gabbard and Ms. Williamson do not make it into the debate, then I’ll glumly accept the results. It’s not as if I wanted to have to pay attention to those televised spectacles anyway. But given the shenanigans that went on with regards to the debates the last election cycle, and given that the Democrats are right now sitting on the magical ten candidate maximum to get everyone on the stage together in one night, I can’t help but start to smell a rat.

– JVW

24 Responses to “Bad News/Good News and a Complaint”

  1. Here’s a run-down on current polls. I’m looking at it now to see if I can figure out who might be updating soon.

    JVW (54fd0b)

  2. You can’t spell Democrat without rat.

    nk (dbc370)

  3. Here are “qualifying” polls, with the last date updated and the showing of My Little Aloha Sweetie (TG) and Crazy Cute Hippie Crystal Chick (MW):

    Monmouth – Aug 16-20, 1% TG, 3% MW
    CNN – Aug 15-18, 2% TG, 0% MW
    Fox News – Aug 11-13, 1% TG, 1% MW
    Quinnipac U – Aug 1, 1% TG, 1% MW
    U of New Hampshire – July 8-15, 1% TG, 1% MW
    NBC/WSJ – July 7-9, 0% TG, 1% MW
    ABC/WaPo – Jun 28-Jul 1, 1% TG, 1% MW

    That’s all I see of the list of qualifying polls on the FiveThirtyEight site. I am surprised to see that in two case, outlets that are counted as separate qualifying polls appear to double up their efforts, meaning there are fewer possible polls than the Dems would have you believe.

    JVW (54fd0b)

  4. @3. Rather surprising they didn’t ‘grade on a curve’ in her case given she had to stop campaigning for time due to some military obligations.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  5. again, one that is being used to determine who gets to participate in the next round of debates, which is a pretty damn big deal

    Dude.

    Apart from (ahem) sentimental considerations, it is completely irrelevant whether a couple more or less candidates polling 1-2% make it into the next debate.

    🙂

    Dave (1bb933)

  6. Apart from (ahem) sentimental considerations, it is completely irrelevant whether a couple more or less candidates polling 1-2% make it into the next debate.

    Oh yeah? What was Abraham Lincoln polling back in August 1859, I ask you? Back when everyone figured the nomination was Seward’s for the taking.

    JVW (54fd0b)

  7. I want to see Tulsi take out another top contender.

    mg (8cbc69)

  8. Has any Congressman gone directly from the House to the Presidency? Without a stint in the Senate or as Vice-President or as state governor or by forming his own Party?

    For that matter has any 38-year old Samoa Catholic-Indiana Hindu woman from Hawaii ever been elected President? Tulsi, Marianne, Pete, Andrew, Julian, Beto are all for entertainment purposes only.

    nk (dbc370)

  9. Her brown hue, unlike her faith, is not from the subcontinent, so no Jindal ethnic solidarity bump (that’s what happened in Louisiana, what didnt happen for the R governor candidate in CA in 2014, and why a lot of otherwise stalwart Greek Americans gloss over the 1988 presidential election).

    urbanleftbehind (ec9038)

  10. Mommy was a convert I guess. Mainstream Hinduism is not a proselytizing religion — they believe that if God wants you to be a Hindu He will reincarnate you as one. If you merit it. Tulsi must have been at least passably good in her previous life.

    nk (dbc370)

  11. My whole family voted for Dukakis. Because he was Greek. But I know a lot of Greeks did not and I do my best to avoid them. It’s not all their fault, or the fault of Archbishop CIAkovos who gave the convocation at the Republican convention. What was Dukakis thinking converting to Unitarianism, on top of marrying a drunken, hippie, Californian, Jewish divorcee instead of a nice Greek girl?

    nk (dbc370)

  12. Tom Steyer is also probably not going to make it into the debate, leaving the field at 10, and one debate..

    Joe Biden actually came in third in this poll, at 19% with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren at 20%, and they’re calling it a 3-way tie. (The New York Times story reports Biden’s percentage as both 19% and 20%) He’s dropped in other polls too but not lost the lead.

    In a statement, the Biden campaig said the poll was an outlier, and the RealClear Politics average of polls puts Biden at 27.2% and Sanders at 16.7% and Warren at 16.2 (but that includes older polls)

    The favorability rating for Biden in the Monmouth poll was 70%, with Elizabeth Warren at 72% and Bernie Sanders at 65%

    Kamala Harris is at 8% (same as the last Monmouth poll in June) and Pete Butttigieg at 4% (down from 55) Cory Booker has jumped from 2% to 4%.

    Sammy Finkelman (dec35d)

  13. Have any of the ‘important polls’ gone public about changes in methodology since 2016? Because, absent that, I fail to understand why anybody takes them seriously.

    C. S. P. Schofield (9eb8bc)

  14. 8. nk (dbc370) — 8/27/2019 @ 4:46 am

    Has any Congressman gone directly from the House to the Presidency? Without a stint in the Senate or as Vice-President or as state governor or by forming his own Party?

    James A Garfield in 1880, but he was the Speaker of the House. He had also been chosen for the Senate for the next term by the Ohio state legislature in 1880, but never took his seat because he won the Republican nomination for president after a deadlocked convention, and then was elected president.

    We nevr hasd a president born west of the Mississippi until Herbert Hoover, and then we had Truman, Eosenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Clinton, (but not the second Bush because he was born in Yale–New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut,) and then Obama.

    The only ones born east of the Mississippi since Hoover are Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan (born in Illinois) George Bush the elder, George Bush the Younger aka as W or 43, and I almost forgot, Donald Trump.

    Sammy Finkelman (dec35d)

  15. All the polls have a tremendous amount of refusals. I think telephone polls now get less than 10% responding. They fiddle with numbers, and try to stay somewhat consistent with each other.

    It’s telling you something that they took 800 answers when they were mostly interested in Democrats. All they could get was 298.

    Sammy Finkelman (dec35d)

  16. JVW (54fd0b) — 8/26/2019 @ 9:30 pm

    outlets that are counted as separate qualifying polls appear to double up their efforts,

    Some polls are joint efforts by two organizations, often aprint publication and a broadcast outlet.

    Nationwide polls and polls in 3 or 4 states count. (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada)

    Sammy Finkelman (dec35d)

  17. I want to see Tulsi take out another top contender.

    That is indeed what this is all about. That, and letting Crazy Cute Hippie Crystal Chick let loose with some stream-of-consciousness trippy stuff to flummox Dinosaur Joe and Comrade Bernie.

    JVW (54fd0b)

  18. Monmouth poll with crosstabs and their explanation of methodology. (the most important question, of course, is how they tweak the numbers)

    https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/documents/monmouthpoll_us_082619.pdf/

    They say they weighted it for region, age, education, gender and race based on US Census information. They also probably screened out some people.

    They report it was all live intervuews, and 314 were contacted on a landline telephone and 486 contacted on a cell phone. That used to be recorded to weight it – some people could be gotten at 2 phone numbers. They would ask if that was their only phone or not.

    They read off to them 23 names identified also by most important political rank, i.e. Former cabinet secretary Julián Castro or Entrepreneur Andrew Yang. 18 of them got at least 1 vote out of the 298. In he various Monmouth polls since January, Undecided ranged from 8% to 11% and that was after counting leaners.

    Everyone had some description prefixed to their name. It was Author Marianne Williamson, Former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer. Names were rotated (but were they in the same order?)

    Bernie Sanders got a lot more of the younger voters than of the older ones, and the same thing went for Kamala Harris (at lower numbers) Biden and Sanders got more males than females, an Elizabeth W
    Warren and Kamala Harris got more females than males (but remember, people are being oushed to make a choice and this can be the first inclination) Marianne Williamson got almost exclusively female (3% to rounding down to 0%) and she got mostly younger voters (3% versus 1%)

    Don’t know was higher among the 50+ group (14% versus 8% for those aged 18-49) So older voters take this poll more seriously.

    Bernie Sanders is higher in the later voting states, and Kamala Harris in the early states (March 3 or earlier, which I think includes California this time)

    Only 48% of non college graduates will admit to having never heard of Joe Sestak and 46% of college graduates, so they’re bluffing. With other names college grasduates are more aware, although sometimes by on;yy 5%. The fewer people say they haven’t heard of someone, the greater is the difference between college graduates with 4 degrees and those who do not have that. (Of course, people are unsure if they heard of someone or not)

    I suspect it just doesn’t go above 50% to say they never heard of someone.. But no opinion of so and so goes into the high 30s.

    Sammy Finkelman (dec35d)

  19. * college graduates with 4 year degrees

    Sammy Finkelman (dec35d)

  20. Get ready for the Warren Media Express, it’s coming ‘round the bend!

    Billions for Native Americans!

    Calling her Fauxcahontas is racist!

    Joe is crazy, Bernie is a white man and Kamala is a cop!

    harkin (d17996)

  21. of whom 298 were either registered Democrats or self-identified as Democrat-leaning

    Probably only in those states that don’t have party registration or at least those which have open primaries.

    http://crystalball.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/registering-by-party-where-the-democrats-and-republicans-are-ahead

    Altogether, there are 31 states (plus the District of Columbia) with party registration; in the others, such as Virginia, voters register without reference to party. Among the party registration states are some of the nation’s most populous: California, New York, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Arizona, and Massachusetts.

    Highly populated non-party registration states are Texas, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconson Georgia and Tennessee. California registers voters by party but it means almost nothing now – it’s not clear to me what the Monmouth poll did there.

    The reason the Tulsi Gabbard campaign told people to register as Demorats is that they didn’t want to tell them to lie to the polltakers about that, because if they did, she might be disqualified.

    Sammy Finkelman (dec35d)

  22. the soothsayer is in, but tulsi is out, this is why what she’s doing in Sumatra is more productive,

    narciso (d1f714)

  23. Tulsi should think about being the Govna of Hawaii.

    mg (8cbc69)

  24. I agree with your complaint, JVW. A poll with a sample size smaller than 300 shouldn’t count.
    Speaking of polls, this one is not good for Trump.

    President Trump’s net approval rating has plunged in every key battleground state since taking office in January 2017, according to Morning Consult’s tracking poll.

    Paul Montagu (a2342d)


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