Tag: poll

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION ANALOGIES – THIRD PARTIES AND FORMER PRESIDENTS

By Ken Grossberger, PhD

There is much discussion about how the 2024 US Presidential elections will play out, and media types have pushed several comparisons to prior elections, seemingly in an attempt to predict the future from the elections of the past.  Analogies are usually not perfect, but there are a few that might be instructive. Three-way presidential races, where there are viable third party candidates or independents, and races between current and former presidents, upset the balance between the two major parties and lessen the predictability of the outcomes. The “third” candidate becomes a mediating variable that is hard to analyze.  A brief review of the history of such elections sheds light on such unpredictable contests.

  • The election of 1860 was a 4-way contest between Abraham Lincoln and 3 Democrats at a time that the country was seriously polarized due to sectional differences arising from the slavery issue and the states’ rights argument. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois (against whom Lincoln ran in 1858 for the Illinois Senate seat) represented the northern Democrats, John C. Breckenridge (incumbent Vice President of the United States) drew support from the southern states, and John Bell of the newly formed Constitutional Union party gained electoral votes from the border state region. Lincoln won almost all the electoral votes in the north, the three Democrats split the rest, and Lincoln won the presidency.
  • In 1892 former President Grover Cleveland, Democrat, came back to challenge incumbent Republican President Benjamin Harrison (who beat Cleveland in 1888).  In this return contest Cleveland won back the presidency, the only person in US history to have 2 unconnected terms in the White House. The third party candidate in the race, James B. Weaver, representing the Populist Party, won almost 9% of the vote and carried a few western states, which may have hurt Harrison.
  • The 1912 election was the race of the 3 presidents, one past, one current and one future. Former President Theodore Roosevelt ran against his old protégé William Howard Taft and won 27% of the vote. President Taft, the incumbent Republican, ran third with only 23% of the vote and only 8 electoral votes. Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs won about 6% of the vote. Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote, and New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, won the election with only 41% of the popular vote but an electoral landslide.
  • The presidential election of 1948 was famous for the biggest media faux pas in American history when the Chicago Tribune prematurely published a headline that stated: “Dewey Defeats Truman”. Incumbent President Harry S. Truman beat New York Governor and former prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey by a fairly comfortable margin in the electoral college. Truman was not that popular and the third party candidate, Dixiecrat South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond denied Truman a sizable portion of the southern Democrat vote. After attempts to get him to drop out of the race the Democratic Convention nominated Truman, who went on to win by waging a strong campaign.
  • There was a similar outcome in the 1968 presidential race but this time the Democrat split gave the election to the Republican former Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Democrat Gov. George Wallace of Alabama ran on the American Independent ticket and won 5 southern states, denying Democrat and incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey the electoral votes of those states and a significant portion of the popular vote.
  • In 1992 independent Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, won 19% of the vote, most of it from incumbent Vice President Republican George H.W. Bush, giving the election to Democrat Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. Perot scored one of the highest third party totals in US history. Ironically Bush had a national approval rate of 81% following the 1991 Gulf War, only to see his popularity dwindle to only 37 percent of the vote in the election.

The election of 2024 may be a mix of these scenarios. There is a viable third party candidate I Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who is drawing about 10% in many polls, but not enough to be in contention for any electoral votes in the swing states. He appears to be taking more votes from Biden than Trump as we see a shift of a few points in the 5-way polling (including 2 other third party candidates), as opposed to the head-to-head data showing Trump with about a 2 point lead over Biden.

The post June 27 debate polls show a slippage in Biden’s support, most notably in the swing states, where Trump now leads outside the margin of error in 8 of 14 critical states.  Worse for Biden is that New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia, which have voted Democrat in recent elections, are now within the margin of error. There will be more to come with the polls following the assassination attempt on Trump.

Predicting the future from the past is always a lesson in objectivity and thought, and this election is no different.

TIPPING POINT

by Ken Grossberger, PhD

“The critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place” (Miriam-Webster Dictionary).

Donald Trump has been the focal point of the American political discussion since he first walked down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 when he announced his candidacy for president. Since then much has happened. A good economy, a lousy economy, a pandemic, 2 wars, 3 new Supreme Court justices, elections, court cases, and more political fights than anyone can count. Trump has been at the center of it all.

Thus the political world has divided into 3 camps: those who love Trump, those who hate Trump, and a lot of people in the middle. The current presidential polls show Trump and Biden within the margin of error nationally but Trump with a lead in most swing states. Biden’s approval ratings have been negative for quite some time, and Trump’s aren’t much better. Most polls show that much of the voting public, in general, would prefer 2 other candidates.

Trump has been living on the political edge since he first ran for president. That’s because he put himself there, and the not-so-mainstream media, hardly his fan club, has attached him to almost every story. They just can’t stop talking about him, and they hurl the most bitter, vindictive accusations at him at every chance they get, proving once again there is a dark lining in the silver cloud of public service.

Trump gets forgiven his ranting and personal attacks by his supporters, as his administration had a good record in many ways. Certainly, his time in office compares well against the seriously challenged Biden record of high inflation, the border crisis, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the mismanagement of 2 wars and the deal with Iran that almost guarantees this terrorist state a path to deliverable nuclear weapons.

But even with all that, there remains the issue of Trump fatigue – have too many people heard Trump stories too many times. This has been analyzed and discussed, but his lead in the polls show no evidence of that. There is also the New York hush money trial, with a biased judge who precluded defense witnesses and manipulated the jury instructions so that any 4 jurors could find Trump guilty of any of 3 underlying crimes and did not have to be unanimous in doing so. Any objective reading of the presiding judge’s obvious attempt to manufacture a guilty verdict would lead a reasonable person to conclude that the trial was skewed in favor of conviction.

But is this one issue too many, in a political career jammed with issues? Even if one concedes that Trump had a good record in office, and that this latest trial was a sham, have we just reached the point where some likely voters have reached the Trumpian saturation point and will begin to finally peel away from the Trump-is-better-than Biden logic? Trump is setting fundraising records off his guilty verdict, but will millions of dollars be enough to hold the soft Trump voters, and to persuade the undecideds? Does Robert Kennedy Jr. edge more into the weaker part of the Trump base?

Polls give us trends, not necessarily predictions, and we will see in the coming weeks which direction the political needles point, but let’s not be surprised if there begins a new attrition in Trump support, and perhaps correspondingly in Biden’s as well.

POLLS, POLLS, POLLS – What Do They Really Tell Us?

by Ken Grossberger, PhD

It’s the silly season (again) and all the punsters and pollsters are making predictions as to who is leading and who will win. How do they know? The answers they use are in the almighty polls, but what do those polls really tell us?

The consensus is that voters begin to seriously focus on the election after Labor Day, so the early polls may provide an indication, but we need to look deeper to understand what the polls may mean. Polls are not necessarily predictive but are designed to provide qualitative data on popular sentiment. Gauging a number of polls over time yields trends, which are retrospective, not prospective. In other words, political polls look at the present and the past, not the future. Yet many play the prediction game because we think that what is probable today might tell us what’s going to happen tomorrow. Not necessarily.

Political polls are public opinion surveys, and thus we have to be concerned with the data collection methods as well as the data parameters. For example, in order to collect data many polls use a technique known as Random Digit Dialing (RDD) to ensure all voters in a population have an equal chance of being called. The survey staff must be properly trained and supervised, and samples should be large enough to be statistically meaningful or they may suffer from small sample size validity issues (which may lead to results that are true, when they are false, called Type II error in statistics).

For instance, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll (04/15/24) showed that 833 registered voters preferred Biden to Trump by 41% to 37%. The margin of error (MOE, the statistic that indicates how far off a survey may be) was 4% with 22% of those polled having no preference/might not vote/favoring a third party candidate. So what does this really tell us? The media would report that Biden has 4 point lead, but is that accurate? Does this poll have any realistic predictive value?

My observations are as follows: any sample of less than 1,000 respondents is too small to have much statistical power, and the results are within the margin of error as well.  Also, 22% undecided is too large a group to give us confidence in the determination as to which candidate may be leading. This is just the tip of the statistical iceberg. Many polls suffer from considerable statistical issues:

  • Registered voters vs. likely voters: polls that measure registered voters only are weak as they measure people who may not vote; likely voter responses are more meaningful
  • Timing: polls from last month may be out of date in an age of fast paced news cycles
  • Sample size: it’s doubtful that a sample of less than 1,000 voters could be representative of the voting population of the United States
  • Undecided responses: the Reuters/Ipsos poll mentioned above had 22% choosing something other than Biden and Trump, with only a 4% difference between the two with seven months to go to the election – this makes it very difficult to draw any meaningful  inferences
  • Margin of error: rates over 4% are usually too large to provide confidence in the result, and leads within the MOE means no one has a lead
  • Outlier polls: a result that is far from the average of the other polls – the media on either side loves to quote polls that show their guy in the lead, even if it is way outside the average

So to revisit the Reuters/Ipsos poll, a result that seems to favor Biden: it’s a small sample of registered voters only, a result within the MOE, with a large amount of undecided. If you’re looking for a prediction, don’t bet any real money using this poll.

Another issue is using the average of polls, a method which is supposed to give us a solid basis as to who is leading whom. Perhaps the most popular is the RealClear Politics (04/15/24) average of polls (widely quoted by the media) which is an unweighted average, meaning it’s a simple average of polls with different sample sizes. Here is a recent report:

POLLSTERDATESAMPLEMOETRUMP (R)BIDEN (D)SPREAD
RCP Average3/21 – 4/7——45.545.3Trump+0.2
Morning Consult4/5 – 4/76236 RV1.04443Trump+1
Reuters/Ipsos4/3 – 4/7833 RV4.03741Biden+4
I&I/TIPP4/3 – 4/51265 RV2.84043Biden+3
Emerson4/2 – 4/31438 RV2.54645Trump+1
Rasmussen Reports3/31 – 4/21099 LV3.04941Trump+8
Data for Progress (D)**3/27 – 3/291200 LV3.04647Biden+1
NPR/PBS/Marist3/25 – 3/281199 RV3.74850Biden+2
Forbes/HarrisX3/25 – 3/251010 RV3.15050Tie
FOX News3/22 – 3/251094 RV3.05045Trump+5
Quinnipiac3/21 – 3/251407 RV2.64548Biden+3

But when the samples are weighted by the number of voters (a sample of 1,438 is given more “weight” than a sample of 833), Trump’s lead doubles. Also, note how many of the polls are “RV” or registered voters, and that some of the polls are older, meaning from prior news cycles. The age of a poll is an issue as in just one month Biden may have any number of mumbled gaffes, Trump may insult another dozen people, and another war or two may break out. All of these sway public opinion and affect the polls.

Anyone who draws firm conclusions from these polls is engaging in a neurotic level of wishful thinking. But there is hope, many surveys over a period of time (longitudinal, in statistical language) generate more confidence than one-off polls (cross-sectional). There are no simple answers, we have to do the work. For example, most recent polls show Trump with a lead outside the MOE in the swing states over a period of time, and we therefore can have some confidence in that result. In recent history polls tend to tighten as we get closer to election day, and much can happen. We will see what events move the arc of the current trajectory.

References:

RealClear Politics. 04/15/24. RCP Poll Average. RealClearPolitics – Live Opinion, News, Analysis, Video and Polls. RealClearPolitics – Live Opinion, News, Analysis, Video and Polls

Palmer, Ewan. 04/15/24. Donald Trump’s Polling Numbers Are Dropping. Newsweek. Donald Trump’s Polling Numbers Are Dropping (newsweek.com)