Monday, November 7, 2016

Final Polling Update #22 and an apology

This is, of course, the final polling update of the 2016 cycle as tomorrow is election day.We have a small confession to make. We have used RCP averages throughout this entire cycle because frankly the site is easy to use, but that ease has come at a price. As we have watched more carefully we have noticed a minor skewing of their averages.  RCP’s clear inclusion of narrative skewing polls at the state level means that if we continue through another cycle, we will be doing our own average.  With that caveat, here are the numbers. 

                The races looks ever so marginally tighter this week, but that is somewhat deceptive.  Clinton leads by 47.2 to  44.3 down from 48.0 to 44.9 last week. This was basically because pre-Comey 1 and pre-tightening polls were included last week and dropped from average this week. To give you an idea of the stability here are the current polling numbers with + for Clinton and a Minus for Trump,  (+3, +4, +1,+3,+4 +6,+ 4,-5 ,+5,+7,+2,+4, tie).  Obviously, one of these thing is not like the others. If you drop best for polls for each side,  you end up with Clinton by  3.3. The Four-Way Data does almost nothing to change this math.  We should also note that almost all of the differences in these margins come from differences in Non-White, performance or margin.)  Except for the LA- Times outlier, the White margins moved between 12-18 points in polls for which we could find cross-tabs. Clinton did not do much better in the aggregate even when she got within 12 of Trump with Whites. So we stand by our point from yesterday.   This is a close race, but not one where there is much disagreement about the outcome. For a different outcome the polls have to be wrong en masse. 


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The Scorecard is a political strategy and analysis blog. Our hope is to provide information and insight that can be found nowhere else into how and why things are happening in American politics. Unlike many political pundits, we will tell you who we think is going to win as an election approaches; we will tell you why; and we will give you a sense of our level of confidence. Ours is a holistic approach, one that takes in as many numbers as possible but is also willing to look past the numbers if need be. When we turn out to have been wrong, we will let you know. When we are right, we’ll let you know that too.

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Author Jason Paul is a longtime political operative who got his start as an intern in 2002. He has been a political forecaster for almost as long. He won the 2006 Swing State Project election prediction contest and has won two other local contests. He had the pulse of Obama-Clinton race in 2008 and has been as good as anyone at delegate math in the 2016 race. He looks forwards to providing quality coverage for the remainder of the 2016 race.