This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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Polling in the last couple months has been a bit slow. Prior to the 2014 elections, there had been a lot of polling piggy backing on Senate polls. Not so much since the election. But finally, with the batch of polls I processed today, for the first time since I launched the Election 2016 site in November, there has been a change worth a blog post!*
Namely, looking at the Clinton vs Christie combination, with the addition of a PPP poll released on Thursday, Pennsylvania has slipped from “Weak Clinton” to “Strong Clinton”:
(Click through on the image for more details on the specific polls, etc.)
Now, you’ll notice there haven’t been all that many polls here. The five poll average at the moment covers 1.1 years. That is a long time. But even with this small number, you can see that in late 2013, Christie appears to have had a bit of a spike, making Pennsylvania look like a close state, with one poll even showing Christie ahead. But the more recent polls show Clinton with a healthy lead, and the 5 poll average now has Clinton with a 6.0% lead.
Now, this still leaves Christie looking better in Pennsylvania than the other 4 combinations that are “best polled” nationally:
(Again, click through on the image for more detail.)
Paul, Bush, Ryan and Huckabee all trail Clinton by more than 10% in Pennsylvania. So I guess Christie still has that.
Looking at what this means nationally, with Pennsylvania taken out of the “possible” category for Christie… at least for now… the summary for Clinton vs Christie looks like this:
After Christie’s best case peaked at winning by 116 electoral votes back in February 2014, the trend has been downward, and the new change just continues that:
(Once again, click through on the image for… oh, never mind… you get how that works now, right?)
A lot of the “movement” here is still polling catching up with reality, but it does seem like Christie continues to fade, and so far he has not been able to reverse his fortunes. There is of course still a long time until we even get to the Iowa caucuses, let alone the 2016 election, but Christie isn’t doing all that great at the moment.
Since it is Christie’s “best case” that changed with the latest update, lets also take a quick look at the Republican best cases for all of the best polled combinations:
Wow, that looks messy. You’ll note that at the moment none of the five Republicans win against Clinton, even if you give them all of the close states. It looks like Huckabee actually has the best best case, but Huckabee is also the least well polled of the five, so take that one with a grain of salt. Otherwise, in terms of their best cases, in the last six to nine months while Christie’s situation has deteriorated vs Clinton, Bush and Ryan have improved theirs, and Paul has been basically flat.
Of course, Ryan has taken himself out of the race at this point. And Romney seems to have jumped in. As I described last week, as new polls are released Clinton vs Ryan should drop off the “Top 5 Best Polled” list and Clinton vs Romney will probably rise onto it. But not yet. Clinton vs Ryan is still #4 at the moment. The two additional polls for Clinton vs Romney since last week (one in NJ and one in PA) have moved Clinton vs Romney from the 21st best polled combination all the way up to… the 20th best polled combination. Still quite a ways to go. And still very sparse data. But if Romney is serious, the polls will come soon enough.
Stay tuned…
* For the moment, I consider a change to be “worth posting” if it involves one of the five best polled candidate pairs and it either changes one of the “summary” stats (the expected margin, the Republican best case margin, the Democratic best case margin), or there is a change to the tipping point margin of at least 0.1%. Of course, ALL changes in the summary, the tipping point margins, state categorizations, and even individual polls, for all candidate combinations, are posted at @ElecCollPolls for those interested in all those details.
There has been polling going on about the 2016 election since the 2012 election. (Actually, earlier, the first state level 2016 matchup poll in my database is from May 2012.) For most of that timeframe, the pollsters have been polling people who they deemed likely to run. Candidates were not for the most part outright declaring their intentions one way or another, and even when they seemed to, sometimes they were not believed.
That is now changing rapidly. While “formal” announcements that candidates are running 100% for sure for realsies may yet be a little further out, we now have candidates being pretty explicit that they are “exploring the possibility” or “considering” or whatnot, and we have a few that are being more and more definitive that they will not be running. Now, many of the people who are looking like they are running may decide not to after all before we get to the Iowa caucuses. And some of the ones saying they won’t run may change their minds. But we are starting to get a much better sense of who is in and who is out.
So, for instance, in the last couple weeks, we’ve had Romney making strong moves indicating he is in, while Ryan has stated that he has decided not to run. So why does the top of my 2016 Electoral College Analysis look like this?
Clinton vs Ryan is listed right there, but Clinton vs Romney is not. Why is this? Ryan is not running, shouldn’t he be dropped? Romney looks like he is running, and a number of polls on the Republican nomination show him in the lead at the moment, shouldn’t he be here?
The short answer is that I show the five “best polled” candidate combinations at the top of the page, and there is a lot of polling on Clinton vs Ryan (52 state level polls in my database) while there have been very few so far on Clinton vs Romney (only 4 state level polls in my database).
As pollsters start deciding to poll Clinton vs Romney more, and Clinton vs Ryan less (or not at all), this list of the five best polled combinations will update automatically and Clinton vs Ryan will drop off and Clinton vs Romney will very likely move onto this list. I choose not to hand edit this list by who seems to up or down in the primary polls at the moment, instead, I’ll let the fact that pollsters will show more interest in candidates that seem more likely to win take care of that. But it will take a little time for that to catch up, since actual polls have to be done first.
Of course, I also provide the drop downs, so anybody who wants to see any combination at all can go look. But the top five really are the ones that have decent polling, and beyond that there really isn’t a lot to see.
(Note: Once we actually get to the primaries and caucuses and have actual delegate counts, I will probably keep the five “best polled” list, but instead of defaulting to the best polled combination in terms of what I show on the rest of the page, I’d default to the delegate leaders in both parties… probably. Of course, there is a good chance these will match.)
Now, even for most of you who have already read the above, this is probably enough information. You can consider yourselves done now…
OK… for those few of you (if any) that want more detail and are still here…
I am trying to show the “best polled” combinations, which isn’t necessarily the same as the “most polled”. There are a number of ways one could calculate this, and none are perfect. I chose one way in particular, and it isn’t perfect either, and it certainly has its flaws, but it does the job well enough for these purposes.
Namely, my whole site is based on looking at a “5 poll average” for each candidate pair in each state. In certain cases this can actually include more than 5 polls to break various sorts of ties I care about. But these polls cover a certain amount of time.
For instance, right now if you look at Clinton vs Paul in North Carolina you’ll see that the average currently include five polls, which span the last 5.0 months. (The oldest poll in the average is from August 16th, just about 5 months ago as I’m making this post.)
As a contrast, if you look at Cuomo vs Perry in Vermont you’ll see that it has NEVER been polled, which means I pull in the last five general elections in Vermont as an approximation. That means the oldest data included in the average here is from November 6th 1996, so the average goes back 18.2 years.
States where this timespan is low are better polled than those where it is high. By the time we get to the election in 2016, I expect to see many close states with timespans measured in days.
But, if 2008 and 2012 are guides, some of the less contentious states may not get polled at all, or maybe just have one poll in the whole cycle. After all, everyone knows the Democrat is going to win DC by a huge margin, and the Republican is going to win Nebraska’s 3rd congressional district by a huge margin, and there aren’t that many electoral votes there either, so why bother?
Given that polling is concentrated in close states (and to some degree in big states even if they aren’t particularly close) and close states matter a lot more if you are trying to determine the electoral college outcome, I didn’t want to just average the timeframes of the 50 states (plus DC and 5 congressional districts).
So I decided to do a weighted average of the timeframes, weighted by the inverse of the absolute value of the margin. Since my method doesn’t allow exact ties in the averages, I don’t have to worry about division by zero, although really close states will have a very strong influence on the average.
So, for example, a really close state with a margin of 0.1% would get a weight of 1000, while something like DC (average margin of 80.3% over the last five presidential elections) would only get a weight of about 1.2. Using these weights, I construct an average of the 56 jurisdictions with electoral votes.
There is also the possibility of further weighting this by electoral college strength, I didn’t do that though. Isn’t this already complicated enough to explain?
In any case, from this you get a number from which you can compare how well various candidate pairs have been polled so far. Lets look at this for the top 25 candidate pairs:
 Click through on the image for a bigger version if desired.
The lower this number is, the better polled the combination has been. Candidate combinations that have not been polled at all will show up at 18.2 years at the moment.
You can see that Clinton vs Paul is best polled (5.4 years), with Clinton vs Bush right behind (6.2 years). Then we have a gap until Clinton vs Christie (9.0 years). Then another gap before Clinton vs Ryan (11.8 years), Huckabee (12.4 years) and Cruz (12.8 years). At this point we’re past the top five and you can tell we’re relying quite a lot on old elections and less and less on actual polling of these candidates.
The first non-Clinton combination comes in at #8: Biden vs Christie (15.0 years).
Where is Clinton vs Romney in this? #21. 18.1 years. Just BARELY better than no polling at all.
Hickenlooper vs Rubio has better polling by this metric than Clinton vs Romney. (#11, 17.5 years).
Looking at specific polls, there is only ONE poll for Hickenlooper vs Rubio, but it is in Colorado where the margin is 0.7%. Clinton vs Romney has been polled once each in New Jersey (margin 14.6%), New Hampshire (margin 3.3%), Iowa (margin 2.8%) and Florida (margin 1.1%). While some of those are close, they are less close, so lower weight is given to those.
There are NO states where Clinton vs Romney has a full five poll average (that would of course be impossible with only four polls).
By contrast, Clinton vs Paul has full five poll averages not including any old general election results in New Jersey (Clinton+22.4%), Pennsylvania (Clinton+12.6%), Florida (Clinton+11.3%), Virginia (Clinton+10.6%), Ohio (Clinton+8.8%), Michigan (Clinton+8.6%), New Hampshire (Clinton+6.1%), Iowa (Clinton+5.7%), North Carolina (Clinton+0.2%), Colorado (Paul+2.0%), Kentucky (Paul+4.2%), Kansas (Paul+6.8%) and Alaska (Paul+7.4%).
Bottom line, we can’t say much about a Clinton vs Romney matchup on a state by state level yet, there just hasn’t been enough polling yet. That will probably change rapidly over the next few months if Romney goes all in. And Ryan will fall off. And the “top five” list will otherwise adjust appropriately to changes in the field.
If you do look at Clinton vs Romney you will of course see something. The little polling there is has improved Romney’s “best case” from winning by 24 electoral votes to winning by 44 electoral votes. In this, he does better than any of the Republicans currently in the Top 5 best polled… but it is based on so little data, it is too early to make anything of it at all. You are still basically looking at the last five presidential elections, not any real Clinton vs Romney trend.
This is why I show only the Top 5 as highlighted combinations. Polling quality drops off very quickly, once you get much beyond that, you’re not looking at real data yet. This is also why while all changes will show up in the @ElecCollPolls twitter feed, I’ll only be posting analysis here when something significant changes in the status of one of the top five candidate combinations.
Well, not counting this post. :-) But I wanted to explain why Ryan is showing up, while Romney is not, and why even if we start getting some status changes in states for Clinton vs Romney, I most likely won’t start talking about them much until that combination has enough polls to show up on the top five best polled. Until then, we don’t really have a decent picture of what is going on in this sort of state poll based analysis.
Edit 22:15 to add more links and to change the “Clinton vs Romney has lower quality polling than” example from Hickenlooper vs Paul to Hickenlooper vs Rubio, so I would have an example that didn’t include any candidate showing up in the top five pairings.
Edit 2015-01-17 22:30 to correct Clinton vs Paul results in Colorado. It is Paul+2.0%, not Clinton+2.0% as previously stated.
I was asked by a reader for my thoughts on a blog post that was recently republished on the Houston Chronicle website. Read the whole thing and come back, but the key conclusion is here:
Reality-check on the 2014 results (Chris Ladd, GOPLifer)
This means that the next Presidential election, and all subsequent ones until a future party realignment, will be decided in the Democratic primary. Only by sweeping all nine of the states that remain in contention AND also flipping one very solidly Democratic state can a Republican candidate win the White House.
I responded to the reader by email, but I decided to post a slightly cleaned up version here.
Yes, at the moment every single one of the most commonly polled Republican candidates loses to Hillary even if you gift the Republican all of the states they are behind in by less than 5%. Yes, if you add up all the states where the Democrats have averaged a greater than 5% lead over the last five presidential elections, they are only a handful of electoral votes away from winning and only need to win one or two of the historically close states to win, where the Republicans have to almost sweep those states to win. See my “The Race Begins” post for more thoughts on this.
If this was Fall 2016 and things still looked like this, then yes, it would be pretty close to inevitable that the Democrats were cruising to an easy victory.
HOWEVER, it is only 2014, and once we get into full fledged campaign mode, Hillary has lots of weakness that can and will be exploited by the Republicans. A lot depends on who the Republicans nominate, but if they manage to nominate someone that is capable of sounding reasonable to the “median voter” like a Jeb Bush, or they nominate someone like Paul who would scramble things up a bit by having a mixture of positions that slice across issues in a very different way than other Republicans, then we will perhaps see some interesting dynamics.
If you look at my “Tipping Point” comparison, you see that the worst off of the five best polled Republican candidates (Paul) is currently behind by 8.8% in the tipping point state.
(Click through on the image for more detail.)
An 8.8% margin sounds like a pretty big lead for the Democrats, but actually, it means if the Republicans are able to flip 4.4% of voters through the campaign process (assuming uniform movement in all the close states) then they can win. 4.4% doesn’t seem quite as insurmountable, does it?
Now, things are pretty highly polarized right now, so changing the minds of almost 5% of voters may still be a tall order.
BUT, in the next two years a lot can happen:
- If you have Hillary being slimed to within an inch of her life by every smear you can probably think of…
- If you have the Republican nominate someone that doesn’t immediately just “ooze” crazy or slimeball… not to the left leaning folks who would think that of any Republican, but to those rare birds in the middle that really could go either way…
- If the Republicans nominate someone who really comes across as a likable person… and who doesn’t end up having to destroy their appeal to general election voters in order to win the nomination…
- If Hillary makes some silly mistakes that make her seem cold, distant or unlikable…
- If the economy ends its growth streak and goes back into recession…
- If there are more things going on with the Obama administration either in foreign policy or domestically that make the Democrats look incompetent…
- If the public just plain has a strong “give the other side a chance now” feeling, which is common after eight years, regardless of who has been there and what the current issues of the day are, or even who the specific candidates are.
If you get a confluence of a few of these things, it is pretty easy to see 5% of voters deciding to switch from their preference from Democrat to Republican, making a Republican win quite possible.
(And if it isn’t Hillary for whatever reason, of course everything changes, but despite her potential negatives, Hillary is probably stronger here than any of the other “if it isn’t Hillary” people who are occasionally mentioned.)
Don’t get me wrong, the Democrats have a clear advantage in 2016. (In the Senate too, although I haven’t done any analysis of that myself.) The Republicans are starting from a very real disadvantage. If I had to put odds on it, I’d give the Democrat maybe a 70% or 75% chance of winning in 2016. But Ladd made it sound almost completely inevitable in that article.
It isn’t inevitable. The Republicans have to get somewhat lucky. Or the Democrats have to screw up. But the Democrats have a tendency to screw up. So I wouldn’t count the Republicans out by any means. There are still lots of ways for them to make up the deficit and win, despite their disadvantages going in.
Bottom line, I agree with the article that the Democrats are heavily favored in 2016 and have a lot of structural advantages… but I think Ladd overstates it by quite a bit.
In the original email to my reader, I then went on to speculate about 2020 and beyond, specifically that assuming a Clinton victory in 2016, I feel there are high odds that she ends up as a one term president, despite current Republican structural disadvantages. But it is only 2014, so maybe I’ll just wait a little while for that prediction. :-)
Edit 18:36 UTC to add “If it was Fall 2016” comment.
Edit 19:19 UTC for minor spacing and wording fixes.
Edit 2015-01-10 07:28 UTC to add the “Electoral College:” prefix to the title
OK, now that all of that “launching the analysis site” stuff is over, time for the first actual look at the 2016 Presidential race. Let me start with this map:
This has NO 2016 data. This represents the average margin in each state over the past 5 presidential elections. Thats 1996 to 2012. That is a long time. A lot has changed since 1996. In those 5 elections, the Democrat won 3 times, and the Republican won 2 times. When you crunch the numbers, you end up with only SIX states where the average margin in these five elections has been less than 5%. That would be Nevada (Dem+2.8%), Ohio (Dem+1.7%), Florida (Dem+0.9%), Colorado (Rep+0.0%), Virginia (Rep+1.6%) and Missouri (Rep+2.8%). Every other state is basically solidly on one side or another when you average these five elections. Those six states add up to 85 electoral votes. If you let these six states swing from one side to another, your range is from the Democrats winning by 146 electoral votes, to the Republicans winning by 24. If all the states just went the way of their averages, the Democrats would win by 82 electoral votes.
That essentially was the state of play immediately after the 2012 election. But we’ve had a lot of polling since then. There have been 745 polls added to my database so far. That covers eight potential Democratic candidates, and 24 potential Republican candidates. There have only been a few combinations with a significant amount of polling though. On the Democratic side, only Clinton has substantial polling. (Biden is next, but he is way behind.) When looking at how much polling there has been in close states, the “best polled” combinations at the moment are Clinton vs Paul, Bush, Christie, Ryan and Huckabee. Next would be Cruz and Rubio, but lets concentrate on the Top 5. These are not necessarily “front runners”. We’re measuring how interested the pollsters are in these candidates, not their chances of winning the nomination. But presumably the pollsters are polling about the folks who are looking like possibilities, so it is a good enough place to start.
Although I generally prefer looking directly at Electoral College margins, for now the best visual of the difference between the generic “last five elections” position versus where we are now is actually looking at the “Tipping Point Margin”. The tipping point margin is the margin in the state that would push the winner “over the edge” if you ordered the states by candidate support. It can also be thought of as how much you would have to shift the popular vote nationally to flip the result of the election (assuming that shift was distributed uniformly across all states). In other words, it is a pretty good indicator of who is ahead and by how much.
Here is what that looks like for the top five candidate combinations from the 2012 election through to today:
Click the image to go to the full comparison page with all sorts of other detail.
The key here though is that as we get more and more polls, we’ve seen a significant shift toward Clinton over the “starting point” defined by the last five presidential elections. This seems to be true whichever of the five opponents you look at.
Now, at this stage you have to interpret these graphs carefully. Most of what you see in this chart is NOT movement or changes in support. Rather, it is just the process of getting enough polls in enough states to get an actual picture of how these two specific candidates fare against each other, rather than just a generic Republican vs a generic Democrat based on 18 years of history. We are only now at the point where we might be starting to see things representing actual movement in charts like this. But what we can see is that at a starting point, Clinton has a big advantage here.
If you look at the actual electoral college expectations, you see this:
Between these five candidates, the expected case (where everybody wins all the states they are ahead in) ranges from Clinton winning by 156 electoral votes (against Bush or Huckabee) to Clinton winning by 126 electoral votes (against Ryan). Those are not insubstantial margins.
Even if you give the Republicans all the close states, you end up with results ranging from Clinton winning by 96 electoral votes (against Paul) to Clinton winning by 14 electoral votes (against Huckabee). In no cases are ANY of these five Republicans registering a lead against Clinton at the moment. Even if you give them ALL the close states.
This is somewhat to be expected of course. Clinton has the name recognition. She had high recognition and approval ratings coming out of being Secretary of State. Meanwhile, while those of us who follow these things closely know a lot about each of the five Republicans here, your average guy on the street probably goes “Who?” when hearing many of these names, or even if they have heard of them don’t know much beyond that. Like her or not, everybody knows who Clinton is.
So it is not surprising to see Clinton with a big lead at this stage. That does not mean it will stay that way.
Are the 2014 election results (major Republican wins nationwide) an indication of things to come in these Presidential numbers? Maybe. Maybe not. The Presidential landscape is very different than the landscape for Congress. The structure and fundamentals are just very different. If 2014 is an indication of a wider trend to the Republicans, that will surely show up on these sorts of charts soon. But even without that, there are tons of reasons that things may move toward the Republicans.
Everything is still very theoretical at this point. The real campaign against Clinton hasn’t ramped up yet. Lots of mud will be thrown. And the Republican candidates will get more and more visibility. Although anything is possible in either direction, it is quite possible that what we are seeing right now will be Clinton’s high water mark. The race is likely to get closer as we move through 2015 and people get more engaged.
I mentioned that on the two charts above we may still be seeing “settling in” to the real positions between these candidates vs the generic positions we started with and that therefore it might be hard to distinguish actual movement yet. But is there anything else we can look at?
Yes. We can look specifically at how the polls are going in some of the more heavily polled states, where we have frequent enough polls that we long ago washed out the previous election results and can see trends based on the candidates themselves. There are only a handful of these highly polled states, but one of them may be indicative. North Carolina:
As before, click through on the graph for more details.
There is a clear pattern here. All of the Republicans except Christie (who is still sinking) and Ryan (who has not been polled at all in North Carolina) seem to have bottomed out earlier in 2014, and since then have been improving their positions against Clinton. For the last six months we haven’t seen any category changes here. This movement is within the “Weak Clinton” category. So no changes yet to the electoral vote summaries. And North Carolina is pretty far from the tipping point at the moment, so no changes there either. But we CAN see definite movement toward the Republicans here.
North Carolina is the only state with such a clear pattern at the moment. But it is also one of the most highly polled close states. So is it an indicator of things to come?
We’ll find out over the next few months.
The race is on!
This is a FAQ for the Electoral College portion of electiongraphs.com. The FAQ for the Delegate Race portion can be found here.
Why are you doing this?
Well, mainly because I have fun doing it. I don’t have any illusions about being the next Nate Silver or anything. But I think my little version of this adds yet another perspective to look at the presidential race, and more is better, right? But mainly, I’m a news junkie, and presidential elections are an every four year frenzy for that sort of thing. And I enjoy crunching numbers, doing analysis, and making graphs. So this is a natural fit. Mainly though, I enjoy it.
Seriously, we already have 538, PEC, The NYT, The Washington Post, and all kinds of other folks doing this. What do you add?
Well, all those places are great. I eagerly consume everything they do and respect all of those efforts quite a bit. I’ve added to and enhanced what I do here based on things I’ve learned from them. (Specifically, the “tipping point” stuff is inspired by PEC’s meta-margin.) All those models can get quite complex though. They factor in many things, and they do much more robust mathematics than I do. One of my “points” in doing this the way I have since 2008 is that even with a very simple model, just a plain old average, nothing fancy, you can do very well.
Also, while a few of the other do this too, I concentrate a bit more on monitoring the ebb and flow of the race and looking at the trends over time rather than just what the prediction was today for November.
And of course, my views and analysis are always purely electoral college based. When I started in 2008, it was because I had been frustrated in 2004 that it was hard to get views of the race based exclusively on the electoral college, instead everybody kept talking about the national polls. But that isn’t how we elect presidents!
Is this a prediction?
No. Not at all. At least not yet. Everything here is essentially an “if the election was held today” snapshot. But the election is not today as I’m launching the site in 2014. It is a long way away. Things will change. Events will happen. The two parties will actually select their candidates. Maybe as we get into the Fall of 2016 the data here can start to be reasonably interpreted as a prediction. Before then, it is not. It is simply a description of what things look like today, which can still tell you quite a lot.
Why a five poll average? Why not six? Or ten?
This is actually fairly arbitrary. It was chosen to be high enough that you could get a reasonable average out of it, but low enough so that the time frames covered by the average are short enough to be responsive to changes in the campaign… at least closer to the election in the close states… when we are far from the election… or for uncompetitive states right up through the election… the average can cover so much time it won’t respond much to change. But what happens is that as the election approaches, close states are polled more and more often, so by the time of the election, the five poll averages in the close states generally only cover a few days.
But why a number of polls? Why not an amount of time?
Well, once you include the backfill from old elections, you can always fill out the average. With any timeframe, you will often hit the situation where you have no polls at all in your chosen timeframe. Then what do you do? There are obviously answers to that question, but you have to start having special cases. Having an “X poll average” is just simpler and more straightforward.
How about some fancy curve fitting or smoothing instead of an average?
Oooh! That is fancy! Initially I didn’t consider this because I was calculating everything with a simple Excel spreadsheet and it was a little daunting to think about. Now that I’ve automated all sorts of things, it wouldn’t be that hard to plug in whatever logic I wanted for computing the “average”. It has occasionally tempted me, but then I remember that one of my points in doing this is to show how very simple logic can do just as well as the complicated models, so I decide not to add complexity if I don’t need to.
OK, but how about a median instead of a mean? Wouldn’t that be better?
Maybe. Sam Wang at PEC uses medians. They are more resiliant to outliers. They definitely have some advantages. I have thought about it, although there are probably downsides too. In the end though, I’ve used means for the last two election cycles and it has worked pretty well, and I’d like to be able to compare results between election results to some degree, so I’ll stick with the mean.
Fine. So what about these categories? Aren’t they completely arbitrary?
Yes. Yes they are. I consider any state where the margin is less than 5% to be “weak” and thus subject to the possibility of going either way. This could be some other number. 5% just seemed like a reasonable amount that you could imagine either polls being wrong, or for a last minute movement in the race that could happen too fast for polls to catch. After the last couple of elections, I considered narrowing this a bit, but ended up sticking with 5%.
Do you do any sort of simulation that gives odds of winning?
No. At the moment I just provide the “possible” band and the tipping point margin. The band between the best cases roughly means that anything inside that band is within the realm of the possible, and anything outside of it is not. It of course isn’t that simple. It is far less likely that every single close state goes to one candidate than the states are roughly split in the way indicated by who is ahead in each state.
I have considered modeling this and doing a Monte Carlo simulation and generating “Win Percentages” and such. But to do so, I have to basically toss out the core methodology of just categorizing the states into broad bands, and instead have to start looking at modeling uncertainty based on the available polls and other factors.
This is of course a valid thing to do, but it is a fundamentally different way of structuring things than the basic premise of my breakdown. If I did this, I’d probably want to reassess almost everything else about how the site’s analysis is done. So for the moment I have decided not to pursue this direction. If you want that, there are plenty of other sites doing exactly that. (Or there will be by election time anyway.)
How do you decide what polls to include?
I basically am not picky. I include just about everything I find. I’d have to have a really good reason to exclude something. I don’t try to evaluate pollsters by their methodology, previous accuracy, or anything like that. I just throw everything into the mix and see what comes out.
Doesn’t this take a lot of work?
Yes. Hopefully it will not be quite as much of a slog in the run up to the election now that I’ve automated a large part of the grunt work. But just scanning the web for polls, entering them, and writing commentary when things change will still suck a significant number of hours. But referring back to the first question, it is fun for me, so that isn’t that bad.
Aren’t you starting this a bit early?
Well, again, it isn’t a prediction. Predictions this far out probably are fairly useless. But the first 2016 polls actually appeared BEFORE the 2012 election. And there have been new polls dribbling out pretty much constantly since then. They may still be pretty sparse, and it is still a very long time from the election as I officially launch this site in November 2014, but in terms of trying to understand how things are shaping up, it is NOT too soon to be paying attention. The folks that do groundwork and manage and fund campaigns have been paying attention and making decisions based on what they see in the wind… including polls… for more than two years already. No reason why the rest of us shouldn’t be looking too.
Who are you anyway? Are you even qualified to be looking at any of this?
A long time ago I was a Physics major. Then somehow I got into the world of the web, and eventually ended up doing product management at a tech company in Seattle. This election stuff is purely a hobby. I do it for fun. I do not have professional credentials in this area. I can’t claim to be an expert. I’m just an amateur putting this together in his spare time. I think the results have been pretty good so far, and I’m looking forward to the 2016 version. If you ARE an expert and have constructive criticism for me, I’d love to hear it and learn from you. Just don’t be mean. :-)
Shouldn’t you maybe get a life? Maybe go outside or something?
Nah, I’m good.
What do I do if I have questions or comments on all this?
Well, just add a comment to one of the blog posts about the election on Abulsme.com. Or email me at abulsme@abulsme.com. Or tweet at me via @abulsme or the dedicated twitter account for these election updates, @ElecCollPolls.
How do I follow along with what is changing with this analysis?
For up to the minute updates when polls are added, when states change categories, when tipping points change, or information of that sort, follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter. When changes worth noting more widely occur, I will be making blog posts on Abulsme.com. To see just Election 2016 related posts, look for the tag. My cohost Ivan and I will undoubtedly also be speaking more and more frequently about the election on our podcast as we get closer to November 2016.
Edit 2014-11-06 05:43 UTC – Fixed typo
Edit 2014-11-07 21:50 UTC – Fixed incorrect word
Edit 2016-05-14 19:55 UTC – Changed first sentence to refer to election graphs.com instead of the older election2016.abulsme.com, added link to Delegate Race FAQ.
This post gives an overview of my 2016 Electoral College website, highlighting the major features of the site and explaining how to interpret the data on the site. Or you can just go to the site to explore and skip this entirely. This is more for those who want a written reference to how the site works and what is on it.
Basic Premise
All of the information on the site is generated based on these fundamentals:
- Simple Poll Averages: How each candidate is doing in each state is determined by a simple average of recent polls in that state. Generally the most recent five polls are used, but more will be used if there is a tie for the 5th most recent, or if more are needed to place the average definitively into one of the “categories” described below. If there are not five actual polls between the two candidates, previous general election results are used to fill out the average.
- Classifying States: All states are classified based on how much of a margin the leading candidate has in a state. Between 0% and 5% is “Weak”, between 5% and 10% is “Strong”, and more than 10% is “Solid”. Older polls are pulled in as needed to avoid any state ever being exactly on a boundary. The range of possibilities the site describes are based on the assumption that only “Weak” states are really in play and could go either way.
- The Tipping Point is interesting too: The tipping point represents the state that would put a candidate “over the top” if the states were sorted by candidate support. The margin in the tipping point state represents how much of a uniform shift in national polls would be needed to change the overall election result, so is a measure of how close the race is that gives greater granularity than the electoral college totals.
Common Navigational Elements
Each of the four pages has a header that lets you navigate through the site, and which lets you know what you are currently looking at and the recency of the data:
[Screenshot above updated 2015-06-23 03:12 UTC]
[Screenshot above updated again 2016-01-24 23:24 UTC]
The items here are:
- Best Polled Candidate Combinations: The five candidate pairs with the most polling (weighted to count close states more) are shown here for quick access. These links will take you to a national level page if you are on a national level page, or will keep you on a state level page if you you were on a state level page. Note that being the best polled does not necessarily mean these are the frontrunners! Once there are delegate leaders in both parties, a separate “Leaders” button will appear for that combination.
- Comparison: This takes you to a page where you can see the top five pairings compared to each other, once again remaining on a state or national level as appropriate.
- Selection Bar: This line lets you choose which candidate pair you are interested in looking at, the amount of history you want to show on the graphs, and if you are at the state level, which state/jurisdiction you want to look at. As of the launch of the site, there had been polls involving 8 Democrats and 24 Republicans. Any combinations beyond the top five combinations are however generally very sparsely polled, so results should be viewed with appropriate skepticism.
- Page Identification: Which candidate combination you are currently looking at, and what information about that combination you are currently viewing.
- Most Recent Poll: The date and time of the most recent poll (by middate of the days the poll was in the field) used in the page you are currently viewing.
- Last Poll Update: The date and time data on the page you are looking at was most recently updated.
- Time until polls start to close: How much time is left until actual election results start coming in making poll based analyses like this moot.
- Link to national summary: If you are viewing a state level page, a link will be available to navigate to the corresponding national page.
Also of note, all maps and graphs have a hamburger menu in the upper right which allows you to save off a copy of the image if desired.
This page gives a national overview of the state of the race for a particular pair of candidates. The page defaults to whatever candidate pair is currently the “best polled”, but of course any other candidate pair can be chosen.
The following elements are shown on this page:
[Screenshot above updated 2015-02-17 13:14 UTC]
The summary block gives a round up of the overall situation between the two chosen candidates.
The expected line gives results if all states are won by the candidate currently ahead in the poll average in the state. The two best lines show the range of possibilities if all of the close states end up going with one candidate or the other. The current tipping point is also described.
The bottom half of the block contains links to recent Election 2016 related posts on Abulsme.com. These may be summaries of poll updates digested from twitter, blog posts with analysis or commentary, or podcast episodes that include discussion of the election.
[Screenshot above updated 2015-06-23 03:02 UTC]
The Electoral College Trend Chart shows the ranges described in the summary as they have evolved over time. Mousing over the chart allows you to see the margin ranges as they were on various dates in the past.
The Electoral College Map is just the traditional red/blue map of the states. Blue for Democrats, Red for Republicans. Any margin over 10% is solid red or blue. The closer a state is, the closer the color gets to white. On the site, if you mouse over the map you can get details on particular states. Clicking on a state takes you to the full detail page for the state.
[Screenshot above updated 2015-06-22 04:08 UTC]
The Tipping Point Chart shows the Tipping point margin over time. Mousing over the graph will show the numerical margins along with the state which was the tipping point state at particular dates in the past. Shading is used to represent the “Weak”, “Strong”, and “Solid” categories.
The State Breakdown gives an ordered list of the states as they fit into the six categories. The yellow dot indicates the tipping point state. If it is in a blue state, the Democrats are winning. If it is in a red state, the Republicans are winning.
If the poll average in a state needed to use previous general election results to fill out the average because not enough actual polls of the candidate pair were available yet, parentheses are added around the average, one per general election result used. A state with five sets of parentheses indicates that there have not yet been any polls of that candidate pair in the state and the average is based only on the five previous general elections. A state with no parentheses on the other hand indicates that there is enough polling that the average is based fully on actual polls for the candidate pair.
Clicking on any state’s name will take you to the detail page for that state and these candidates.
The Category Breakdown can be toggled from Spectrum View (the default) which shows all the states in one continuum with vertical text to Column View, which keeps the text horizontal with separate columns for each category. The information presented is identical, only the way it is presented changes.
Finally, for anyone wishing to remix or reuse the poll data on this site, links are available at the bottom of this page to access the underlying poll results.
The left of the page is simply a compilation of the national summary blocks for each of the top five best polled candidate pairs.
[Screenshot above updated 2015-06-23 02:54 UTC]
The Margin Comparison chart simply shows the “Expected” case from each of the top five best polled candidate pairs. Unlike the candidate specific national summaries, this only shows the expected lines, not the full range of possibilities between the two best cases. With five mostly overlapping area ranges, the chart would simply have been unreadable. As with other charts, if you mouse over the lines, you will see the specific numbers for the candidates on the days you are mousing over.
[Added 2015-01-23 10:28 UTC – As of today, the Republican and Democratic “Best Case” charts are also shown on at the bottom of the National Comparison page in a manner parallel to the “Expected” chart.]
[Screenshot above updated 2015-06-23 02:54 UTC]
The Tipping Point Comparison chart shows the same type of comparison, but for the tipping point margin. Shading is used to represent the “Weak”, “Strong”, and “Solid” categories.
[Added 2015-02-17 13:20 UTC]
[Screenshot above updated 2015-06-23 02:54 UTC]
At the very bottom of the comparison page is a chart comparing the “polling quality” of various candidate combinations. For purposes of this site, polling quality for each candidate combination is measured by an average of the time since the oldest poll included in the polling average in each of the 56 jurisdictions. In order to account for the fact that closer states “matter more” than ones where the result is essentially a foregone conclusion, rather than being a flat mean, we weight the average by the inverse of the margin in each jurisdiction, thus giving a much higher weight to closer states. Rather than just showing the top five candidate pairs like the other charts, this chart shows the top ten in order to illustrate the position of the “next closest” candidate combinations relative to the five generally shown throughout this site.
[Screenshot above updated 2015-06-23 03:02 UTC]
The chart on this page shows both the poll average (the red line) as it changes over time, and the actual individual polls. Mousing over the red line will give you the value of the average at each time in the past. Mousing over the blue dots will give you details of each individual poll.
The right side of the page shows the actual averages for each candidate, as well as the margin and classification of the state. The color swatch represents the color of the state on the national summary.
Below this is a listing of each of the specific polls used in the average, along with a variety of details on each one. Clicking on the name of the pollster will link to the source for the poll information. Most often, this is the pollster’s website directly, but in some cases it may be a news article about the poll.
A separate table of all available older polls not used in the average, including general election results back to 1980, is also shown.
[Screenshot above updated 2015-06-23 03:05 UTC]
The chart here compares the poll averages in this state for each of the top five best polled candidates nationally. As usual, you can mouse over the lines to see the margins for each of the candidate pairs on specific dates in the past.
The right side of the page is simply a compilation of the summaries from the state detail pages for each of the five candidate combinations.
Edit 2015-02-06 19:10 UTC to fix minor formatting issues.
Edit 2015-06-23 04:17 UTC to update screenshots affected by updates to the color schemes on certain charts.
Edit 2016-01-24 23:27 UTC to update a screenshot and note the appearance of a button for delegate leaders in the navigation.
The blood is barely dry from the 2014 midterm elections, but that means everybody’s eyes will be turning rapidly toward 2016, and therefore as I did in 2008 and 2012 I am spinning up my own election analysis site:
What you will see there is NOT a prediction. Everything represents “if the election was held today”. Until we get to Fall 2016, things will probably be very different by the time we get to the election. We don’t even know who the candidates will be yet! But it doesn’t have to be a prediction to be useful or interesting. Where things stand NOW still gives insight into how much work each candidate has to do, and where that effort needs to be spent. You will be able to see the ups and downs of the race as it develops. It isn’t only the end that matters, watching how we get there is fascinating too.
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been working on this since early 2013. Why? The 2012 elections left me physically and mentally exhausted. At the time everything was done via lots of manual effort in Excel, image editing programs, and on my wiki pages. It became close to a full time job in the last month. I decided that while I had a blast, if I was going to do it again, I needed to automate most of the more tedious tasks.
So, for the last couple years, with a few hours here and there as time allowed, plus some vacation days burned recently to concentrate on it, I’ve put together a site that does all of what I did manually in 2012, and more. I just update a single data file with the raw poll data, and everything else is generated automatically… even automated tweets at @ElecCollPolls when new polls are added, or for notable status changes. I’ll still have to write blog posts by hand though. :-)
In addition, since I’m jumping in early, and it didn’t exist anywhere else yet, this site seems to be the single most authoritative source on the Internet for state level 2016 presidential polls. For the moment. I’m sure that won’t last as the “big boys” jump in over the next two years, but right now, if you want this info, my site is the best source.
And don’t worry, once we get to 2016, I will be adding analysis of the delegate races. But there won’t be data for that until the Iowa caucuses, so that will wait another year or so. Believe it or not though, there are already TONS of 2016 polls. As of today, I have 745 separate poll results in my database… and we hadn’t even gotten to the midterms yet!
This is the first of four introductory posts I have scheduled for today. The others will be a “tour” of the features on the site, FAQs for those interested in details, and a post looking at where things stand today, at the “starting line” for 2016.
So… here we go!
[Edit 2015-08-23 10:45 UTC to reflect new domain.]
[Edit 2016-01-24 23:02 UTC to point to electoral college stuff specifically since delegate tracker now launched as well.]
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