By Alan Abramowitz
It isn’t just the tracking polls that seem to be fluttering randomly in the wind. An analysis of polls by six major media outlets (Time, Newsweek, CNN/USA Today/Gallup, CBS/New York Times, Pew, and Fox) that released polls during the first half of October and during the second half of October reveals that there is a strong negative correlation (-.84) between the early October results and the late October results.
In other words, the better Bush was doing relative to Kerry in the early October poll, the worse the was doing in the late October poll. Some of this might be explained by the well known phenomenon of regression toward the mean. If a poll’s early October sample had either too many Bush supporters or too few Bush supporters just due to chance, it’s late October sample should be closer to the true population mean. But these results went well beyond regression toward the mean. Every poll that was above the overall mean in early October was below the overall mean in late October and every poll that was below the overall mean in in early October was above the overall mean in late October. What this bizarre pattern suggests is that the movements of the major media polls in October, like the movements of the tracking polls, reflect sampling error and peculiarties of the polls rather than real change in the underlying preferences of the electorate.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 28: RIP Joe Lieberman, a Democrat Who Lost His Way
I was sorry to learn of the sudden death of 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. But his long and stormy career did offer some important lessons about party loyalty, which I wrote about at New York:
Joe Lieberman was active in politics right up to the end. The former senator was the founding co-chair of the nonpartisan group No Labels, which is laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign on behalf of a yet-to-be-identified bipartisan “unity ticket.” Lieberman did not live to see whether No Labels will run a candidate. He died on Wednesday at 82 due to complications from a fall. But this last political venture was entirely in keeping with his long career as a self-styled politician of the pragmatic center, which often took him across party boundaries.
Lieberman’s first years in Connecticut Democratic politics as a state legislator and then state attorney general were reasonably conventional. He was known for a particular interest in civil rights and environmental protection, and his identity as an observant Orthodox Jew also drew attention. But in 1988, the Democrat used unconventional tactics in his challenge to Republican U.S. senator Lowell Weicker. Lieberman positioned himself to the incumbent’s right on selected issues, like Ronald Reagan’s military operations against Libya and Grenada. He also capitalized on longtime conservative resentment of his moderate opponent, winning prized endorsements from William F. and James Buckley, icons of the right. Lieberman won the race narrowly in an upset.
Almost immediately, Senator Lieberman became closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. The group of mostly moderate elected officials focused on restoring the national political viability of a party that had lost five of the six previous presidential elections; it soon produced a president in Bill Clinton. Lieberman became probably the most systematically pro-Clinton (or in the parlance of the time, “New Democrat”) member of Congress. This gave his 1998 Senate speech condemning the then-president’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal as “immoral” and “harmful” a special bite. He probably did Clinton a favor by setting the table for a reprimand that fell short of impeachment and removal, but without question, the narrative was born of Lieberman being disloyal to his party.
Perhaps it was his public scolding of Clinton that convinced Al Gore, who was struggling to separate himself from his boss’s misconduct, to lift Lieberman to the summit of his career. Gore tapped the senator to be his running mate in the 2000 election, making him the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate of a major party. He was by all accounts a disciplined and loyal running mate, at least until that moment during the Florida recount saga when he publicly disclaimed interest in challenging late-arriving overseas military ballots against the advice of the Gore campaign. You could argue plausibly that the ticket would have never been in a position to potentially win the state without Lieberman’s appeal in South Florida to Jewish voters thrilled by his nomination to become vice-president. But many Democrats bitter about the loss blamed Lieberman.
As one of the leaders of the “Clintonian” wing of his party, Lieberman was an early front-runner for the 2004 presidential nomination. A longtime supporter of efforts to topple Saddam Hussein, Lieberman had voted to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq, like his campaign rivals John Kerry and John Edwards and other notable senators including Hillary Clinton. Unlike most other Democrats, though, Lieberman did not back off this position when the Iraq War became a deadly quagmire. Ill-aligned with his party to an extent he did not seem to perceive, his presidential campaign quickly flamed out, but not before he gained enduring mockery for claiming “Joe-mentum” from a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire.
Returning to the Senate, Lieberman continued his increasingly lonely support for the Iraq War (alongside other heresies to liberalism, such as his support for private-school education vouchers in the District of Columbia). In 2006, Lieberman drew a wealthy primary challenger, Ned Lamont, who soon had a large antiwar following in Connecticut and nationally. As the campaign grew heated, President George W. Bush gave his Democratic war ally a deadly gift by embracing him and kissing his cheek after the State of the Union Address. This moment, memorialized as “The Kiss,” became central to the Lamont campaign’s claim that Lieberman had left his party behind, and the challenger narrowly won the primary. However, Lieberman ran against him in the general election as an independent, with significant back-channel encouragement from the Bush White House (which helped prevent any strong Republican candidacy). Lieberman won a fourth and final term in the Senate with mostly GOP and independent votes. He was publicly endorsed by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, among others from what had been the enemy camp.
The 2006 repudiation by his party appeared to break something in Lieberman. This once-happiest of happy political warriors, incapable of holding a grudge, seemed bitter, or at the very least gravely offended, even as he remained in the Senate Democratic Caucus (albeit as formally independent). When his old friend and Iraq War ally John McCain ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Lieberman committed a partisan sin by endorsing him. His positioning between the two parties, however, still cost him dearly: McCain wanted to choose him as his running mate, before the Arizonan’s staff convinced him that Lieberman’s longtime pro-choice views and support for LGBTQ rights would lead to a convention revolt. The GOP nominee instead went with a different “high-risk, high-reward” choice: Sarah Palin.
After Barack Obama’s victory over Lieberman’s candidate, the new Democratic president needed every Democratic senator to enact the centerpiece of his agenda, the Affordable Care Act. He got Lieberman’s vote — but only after the senator, who represented many of the country’s major private-insurance companies, forced the elimination of the “public option” in the new system. It was a bitter pill for many progressives, who favored a more robust government role in health insurance than Obama had proposed.
By the time Lieberman chose to retire from the Senate in 2012, he was very near to being a man without a party, and he reflected that status by refusing to endorse either Obama or Mitt Romney that year. By then, he was already involved in the last great project of his political career, No Labels. He did, with some hesitation, endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. But his long odyssey away from the yoke of the Democratic Party had largely landed him in a nonpartisan limbo. Right up until his death, he was often the public face of No Labels, particularly after the group’s decision to sponsor a presidential ticket alienated many early supporters of its more quotidian efforts to encourage bipartisan “problem-solving” in Congress.
Some will view Lieberman as a victim of partisan polarization, and others as an anachronistic member of a pro-corporate, pro-war bipartisan elite who made polarization necessary. Personally, I will remember him as a politician who followed — sometimes courageously, sometimes foolishly — a path that made him blind to the singular extremism that one party has exhibited throughout the 21st century, a development he tried to ignore to his eventual marginalization. But for all his flaws, I have no doubt Joe Lieberman remained until his last breath committed to the task he often cited via the Hebrew term tikkun olam: repairing a broken world.
A couple of points on this from Wm. Saletan during the 2000 election:
“On its Web site, Gallup makes clear that its poll seeks to maximize daily change: “Our objective is to pick up movements up and down in reaction to the day-to-day events of the campaign.” ”
— also —
“CNN and USA Today are in the news business. They’re paying Gallup for new numbers every day. If Gallup’s numbers don’t change, where’s the news? So Gallup has an incentive to keep its filter loose, allowing the winds of shifting partisan intensity to blow its numbers back and forth.”
Today (Oct 25) Prez Track , Rasmussen’s
site , shows Kerry ahead for the first time
since late August.
Mr. Abramowitz:
I don’t think these results necessarily indicate random fluctuations. Maybe the likely voter screens are working as might be expected: screening out the less intense, less informed late-to-tune-in crowd 3 or more weeks out from the election, and then screening them in as the election nears and their attention sharpens.
I disagree, in part. Some, but not all, of the fluctuations in the tracking polls are simply statistical noise.
Polls that fix the number of Democrats and Republicans in the sample should have less sampling error. Zogby and Rasmussen do so, and they have smaller day-to-day fluctuations. The sampling error MOE with fixed party ID for 3000 respondents (Rasmussen) is around 1.2% and for 1200 respondents (Zogby) it’s around 1.9%. The range of fluctuations for both of these polls since a few days after the last debate has been slightly larger than these numbers. (There is random error due to estimation of weighting coefficients, and there were no doubt oscillations in actual voter preference that were too small to pull out of the statistical noise.)
However, Rasmussen’s result today of 48.4% for Kerry exceeds the average of the preceding 15 days by 2.3%. This is almost 4 standard deviations and seems to represent real movement.
The statistical significance of Zogby’s move in the opposite direction over the last few days is harder to judge, partly because Zogby doesn’t give results in tenth of a percent.
Polls that don’t fix party ID have bigger sampling error. The Wash. Post’s poll oscillations seem to be just slightly larger than the sampling error, although I can’t calculate exactly because they partially adjust for party ID and because they sometimes average over 3 days and sometimes over 4. (Their RV MOE would be about 2.1% if there were no party ID weighting at all.)
When polls move together, of course, it has statistical meaning even if the polls taken one-at-a-time could be random movements. If Zogby jumps more Democratic over the next couple of days (as is likely, because two very pro-Bush days will fall out of the sample), and the Post and Rasmussen stay more or less the same, or if Zogby and Rasmussen stay the same and the Post trends more Kerry (which would bring it out of the sampling error range), we will have a clear trend.
Oct. 25, Rassmussen has Kerry ahead of Bush for the first time since August.
Relax, have faith, we are not alone, ignore all polls if your nerves can’t take it and GOTV!!!
I hate to say this, but if everyone had a hunch their polls were not making sense then fudging (er… fine tuning) the methods in ways that eventually overcompensates would also create the described effect.