Politics

Alaska: Future Swing State?

By NATE SILVER

The state where Barack Obama most improved his performance from 2008 was Alaska. He lost it by “only” 14 percentage points this year, considerably less than his 22-point margin of defeat in 2008.

Part of the reason is that the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, was on the Republican ticket in 2008 but was not this year. That probably doesn’t explain all of the shift, however.

Consider that in 2000 — also without Ms. Palin on the ballot — the Democratic nominee, Al Gore, lost Alaska by 31 points.

There are reasons to think that Alaska could continue to become more competitive in the coming years.

One factor is that Alaska’s vote is quite elastic, meaning that it can shift quite a bit from year to year. In 2008, 43 percent of voters in Alaska identified themselves as independents on the exit poll, among the highest percentages in the country. (There was no exit polling in Alaska in 2012.)

Of the remaining voters in the state, far more were Republicans (37 percent) than Democrats (20 percent), meaning that a Republican candidate will ordinarily have a clear advantage if the independent vote is split about evenly. But the right sort of Democrat, who wins the majority of independents, can be competitive there, and indeed some Democrats (like Alaska’s Democratic senator, Mark Begich) can win statewide office there under the right conditions.

Read more…

When Internal Polls Mislead, a Whole Campaign May Be to Blame

By NATE SILVER

Pollsters can expect to take their share of blame when their campaigns lose, and this year has been no exception. Not long after Barack Obama and Democrats had a strong night on Nov. 6, Republicans began to complain publicly that the polls conducted by their campaigns and by affiliated groups implied considerably more optimistic outcomes for them than actually occurred.

Perhaps these Republicans shouldn’t have been so surprised. When public polls conducted by independent organizations clash with the internal polls released by campaigns, the public polls usually prove more reliable.

Take, for example, the gubernatorial recall election in Wisconsin earlier this year. Independent polls had the Republican incumbent, Scott Walker, favored to retain his office by about six percentage points. A series of polls conducted for Democratic groups showed a roughly tied race instead.

Mr. Walker in fact won by seven points: the independent polls called the outcome almost exactly, while the internal polls were far from the mark.

Cases like these are fairly typical. My database of campaign polls released to the public in United States House races found that they were about six points more favorable to their candidate than independent surveys on average — and that they were typically less accurate in the end.

The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that the subset of campaign polls that are released to the public is subject to a type of selection bias. Campaigns conduct polls all the time, but only occasionally disclose these results to the public and will be much more inclined to do so when the numbers are favorable for their candidates (especially in comparison to independent polls). In essence, the internal polls that filter their way into the public domain may be the outliers.

This is certainly an important part of the story, but my view is that it lets the campaigns off a little too easily. Read more…

Polls Show Below-Average Post-Election Approval Bounce for Obama

By MICAH COHEN

Public opinion surveys conducted since President Obama won re-election show an improvement in his job approval ratings.

Compared to previous presidents, however, Mr. Obama’s post-election approval bounce has been relatively meager. Most recent presidents — whether they were running for re-election or retiring and whether they won or lost — received a larger boost to their approval ratings after Election Day than Mr. Obama, according to an examination of polling by Gallup, which has been testing presidential job approval much longer than any other polling firm.

A comparison of the last Gallup poll conducted before each presidential election since 1952 to the first Gallup poll in the field entirely after the election shows that incumbent presidents have seen their net job approval (the percentage of people who approve minus the percentage that disapprove) jump by an average of six percentage points.

Mr. Obama’s net job approval improved by only two percentage points right after the election, according to Gallup. Fifty-two percent of adults approved of Mr. Obama’s performance in Gallup’s surveys both immediately before and after the election, but the share of adults who disapproved dropped from 44 percent before to 42 percent after (those numbers largely match an average of all polls since Election Day).

A quick methodological note: Gallup conducted polls much less frequently before 1984. Often, its final pre-election poll was conducted weeks or sometimes months before the election. In addition, there are only 16 elections in the sample. Accordingly, treat the data over all and particularly before 1984 with caution.

In 13 of the past 16 presidential elections, the incumbent has seen his job approval ratings improve. Only three presidents, all Democrats, have seen their numbers deteriorate: Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter.

The outcome of the election has made little difference. It seems that while everyone loves a winner, everyone loves a loser a bit more. The two largest post-election approval bounces belong to losing candidates: Gerald Ford in 1976 and George H. W. Bush in 1992. Mr. Bush, after failing to win a second term, saw his net job approval jump by 19 percentage points just after Election Day.

Losing candidates, including presidents who did not run but whose party lost, received a seven percentage point bounce, on average. In the eight instances where a president was re-elected or where his party kept the White House, the average post-election approval bounce was roughly five percentage points.

Mr. Obama, of course, has no more elections to worry about. But a president’s approval rating is one indication of his political clout and can affect his ability to dictate the agenda in Washington.

As negotiations heat up between the Obama administration and Congress over how to resolve the looming fiscal crisis, for instance, Mr. Obama has decided to make his case outside the Beltway for raising tax rates on high-income earners, hoping to pressure Congress indirectly.

Mr. Obama has more political capital having won re-election, rather than negotiating a fiscal cliff resolution as a lame duck president. But his hand might have been even stronger had he received a more average post-election approval bounce.

Had his net job approval — now in the low 50s — improved on the order of Bill Clinton’s in 2000 or George W. Bush’s in 2004, it would be in the high 50s or approaching 60 percent, a level he has not reached since the summer of 2009, a few months after his inauguration.

But the era of large post-election approval bounces may be receding. In the four most recent elections, the bounce narrowed in each successive cycle. It is too soon to know if this is a real trend, but in an age with more hardened partisan lines and fewer true swing voters, there may be less potential for a post-election honeymoon.

The shift in Mr. Obama’s net job approval is the second smallest — positive or negative — in 60 years, behind only Truman’s one point decline in 1952.

In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns

By NATE SILVER

SAN FRANCISCO – I live in Brooklyn, where President Obama won 81 percent of the vote this month. It’s hard to find anywhere in the country that is more Democratic-leaning.

But San Francisco qualifies. Here, Mr. Obama won 84 percent of the vote, while Mitt Romney took just 13 percent. Even John McCain, who won 14 percent of the vote four years ago, performed slightly better than Mr. Romney did.

And unlike the New York metropolitan area, where Long Island, the borough of Staten Island and many suburbs in New York and New Jersey remain competitive in presidential elections, it is hard to find any significant pockets of support for Republican candidates in the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area.

Instead, Mr. Obama won the nine counties of the Bay Area by margins ranging from 25 percentage points (in Napa County) to 71 percentage points (in the city and county of San Francisco). In Santa Clara County, home to much of the Silicon Valley, the margin was 42 percentage points.

Over all, Mr. Obama won the election by 49 percentage points in the Bay Area, more than double his 22-point margin throughout California.

Although San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley have long been liberal havens, the rest of the region has not always been so. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the Bay Area vote over all, along with seven of its nine counties. George H.W. Bush won Napa County in 1988.

Republicans have lost every county in the region by a double-digit margin since then. But Democratic margins have become more and more emphatic. Read more…

Congressional Proposal Could Create ‘Bubble’ in Tax Code

By NATE SILVER

The coming Congressional debate over fiscal policy is sure to feature a wide array of proposals, some of which would hit certain taxpayers harder than others.

But one idea being floated by Congressional negotiators, as described in an article by The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman on Thursday, is hard to defend from the standpoint of rational public policy making.

Its arithmetic could require that the 300,000th dollar of income was taxed at a rate of about 50 percent – even while the three millionth dollar of income, or the three billionth, was taxed at a lower 35 percent rate instead.

The math behind these calculations is not all that complicated. It’s just a matter of understanding how marginal tax rates work.

Take an American who earns $400,000 a year in taxable income. (This is roughly the threshold at which a taxpayer reaches the top 1 percent of households.)

The top marginal federal income tax rate is now 35 percent, and kicks in at earnings above $388,350.

Someone making $400,000 is above the $388,350 threshold. Does this mean that she’d be taxed at a 35 percent rate on all $400,000 of income, meaning that she’d owe the government $140,000?

Not under current law. Read more…

Pennsylvania Could Be a Path Forward for G.O.P.

By NATE SILVER

The last ballots in the presidential election were cast more than two weeks ago. But votes in 37 states, and the District of Columbia, are still being counted, with the results yet to be officially certified.

President Obama’s national margin over Mitt Romney has increased as additional ballots have been added to the tally. According to the terrific spreadsheet maintained by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, Mr. Obama now leads Mr. Romney by 3.3 percentage points nationally, up from 2.5 percentage points in the count just after the election.

Turnout has grown to about 127 million voters, down from roughly 131 million in 2008. The gap could close further as additional ballots are counted. The newly counted ballots have also shifted the relative order of the states.

Immediately after the election, it appeared that Colorado was what we called the “tipping-point state”: the one that gave Mr. Obama his decisive 270th electoral vote once you sort the states in order of most Democratic to least Democratic.

Mr. Obama’s margin in Colorado has expanded to 5.5 percentage points from 4.7 percentage points as more ballots have been counted, however. He now leads there by a wider margin than in Pennsylvania, where his margin is 5.0 percentage points. Neither state has certified its results, so the order could flip again, but if the results hold, then Pennsylvania, not Colorado, will have been the tipping-point state in the election.

Does this suggest that Mr. Romney’s campaign was smart to invest resources in Pennsylvania in the closing days of the campaign? Read more…

Where Obama and Romney Beat Their Polls

By NATE SILVER

I’m traveling for Thanksgiving, so we’ll keep this relatively brief. But I thought this map was worth sharing. It shows how President Obama and Mitt Romney performed on Election Day relative to the FiveThirtyEight forecasts in each state, based on the ballots counted so far.

States colored in blue represent those where Mr. Obama beat his forecast — the deeper the blue color, the larger the margin by which he did so — while those in red are the states where Mr. Romney bested his.

A few things jump out here.

First, there are some pretty clear regional patterns in which each candidate beat his forecast (and, by extension, beat the polls). States where Mr. Obama beat the polls (Oregon, for example) tended to border others where he also did so. The same was true for Mr. Romney.

This suggests that it is a mistake to assume that the potential error in the polls is distributed randomly. Instead, if a candidate beats the polls in one state, he is very likely to also do so in other states that are demographically or geographically similar. (The FiveThirtyEight model assumes that error in the polls may in fact be correlated in just this fashion.) Read more…

Expansion by Big Ten May Bring Small Payoff

By NATE SILVER
Maryland plays in a state with low avidity for college football.Nick Wass/Associated Press Maryland plays in a state with low avidity for college football.

Maryland accepted an invitation to join the Big Ten Conference on Monday. Rutgers did the same on Tuesday, expanding the conference’s roster to 14 teams and its footprint to the East Coast.

The new additions would bolster the Big Ten’s reputation for strong academics. Both universities are members of the Association of American Universities, as are all current Big Ten institutions, with the exception of Nebraska.

Their athletic heritages are mixed, however. The Rutgers football team has finished the season ranked in the Associated Press top 25 once in the last 35 years, although it is currently ranked No. 21.

Maryland’s football team has finished the season as a ranked team eight times in the same period. Its basketball team has had more consistent success, winning a national championship in 2002.

But the main rationale for adding the schools seems to be economic: the prospect that they would give the Big Ten, and its cable network, access to the New York and Washington media markets.

On that account, the decision may be questionable. Read more…

The 2012 Election, in a Relative Sense

By MICAH COHEN

For President Obama, re-election proved to be a more nerve-racking ride than his election. Four years ago, aided by an unpopular Republican incumbent, a financial crisis and a wave of enthusiasm, Mr. Obama defeated John McCain by seven percentage points in the national popular vote.

His fight for a second term was more of a slog. The economic recovery was steady but tepid, and while some states are still tallying votes, Mr. Obama leads former Mitt Romney by just under three percentage points nationally.

In 46 states and the District of Columbia, President Obama did worse in 2012 than he did in 2008, winning by less or losing by more. The vote in most counties, too, shifted to the political right.

But separating out the national political environment from more fundamental and potentially longer-lasting political shifts at the state level is harder. Relative to the national popular vote, the picture is muddled: 29 states and the District of Columbia shifted toward Mr. Obama, and 21 states shifted toward the Republican Party. But the partisan lean in most states moved only slightly, and only one state flipped from leaning toward one party to the other. Read more…

Democrats Unlikely to Regain House in 2014

By NATE SILVER

Democrats did not have as strong a performance in races for the United States House of Representatives last week as they did in the contests for the Senate and the presidency. Instead, Republicans retained control of the chamber.

But Democrats did regain some ground in the House. Although several races remain uncalled, Democrats would wind up with 201 seats in the House if all races are assigned to the current leader in the vote count – an improvement from the 193 seats Democrats held after the 2010 midterm elections. That would leave Democrats needing to pick up 17 seats to win control of the chamber in 2014.

Although 17 seats is not an extraordinary number, both historical precedent in midterm election years and a deeper examination of this year’s results would argue strongly against Democrats being able to gain that many seats.

There is also reason to suspect that Democrats are unlikely to sustain the sort of losses in the House that they did in 2010. But odds are that the electoral climate in 2014 will be somewhere between neutral and Republican-leaning, rather than favoring Democrats.

Read more…