This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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On this week’s Curmudgeon’s Corner, Sam and Ivan catch up with the developments of the last few weeks for the Presidential race. They cover all the dynamics on the Republican side, and discuss if Sanders really is a threat to Clinton on the Democratic side. In the lightning round, a round up of some other recent news… Chinese markets, Iran and Saudi Arabia, CES, Y’all Qaeda in Oregon, book and TV show reviews, and more!
Click below to listen or subscribe… then let us know your own thoughts!
Recorded 2016-01-14
Length this week – 1:36:59
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Show Details:
- (0:00:10-0:14:19) Intro
- (0:15:07-0:42:25) Election 2016 – Republicans
- Internet Slowdowns
- Iowa Polls
- Trump’s Cruz Birtherism
- Likely Voter Models
- Rapid Poll Movements
- Kasich surge?
- Debates
- Candidates Dropping Out
- Contested Convention scenarios
- State by State Delegate Rules
- (0:43:02-0:59:45) Election 2016 – Democrats
- More on Republican delegate allocation in Iowa and New Hampshire
- Clinton lead slipping
- Why the late Sanders surge?
- What if Clinton loses both Iowa and New Hampshire?
- Clinton superdelegate advantage
- Media bias toward a close race
- Possible Clinton meltdowns
- Trump’s position vs Clinton’s position
- (1:00:48-1:36:39) Lightning Round
- Book: Conversations with Myself
- TV Series: Star Trek (TOS) [1966-1969]
- If you disagree, you just aren’t listening
- Iran / Saudi Arabia
- Iran and the Navy boats
- CES
- Y’all Qaeda
- Secretary Carter’s Email
- Twitter Character Limit
- Other things we missed
Another day with more Iowa and New Hampshire polls. This time no status changes in the five best polled candidate combinations in New Hampshire, but there were a couple of changes to talk about in Iowa. One of these favors Clinton, the other favors her Republican opponent. Lets take a look.
Clinton vs Trump
At the end of September after a series of good polls vs Clinton in Iowa, Trump had taken the lead in the Iowa poll average. Since then Trump hasn’t done quite as well, and with today’s addition of a Marist poll showing Clinton with up by 8%, the poll average once again shows a Clinton lead in Iowa.
Clinton’s is only ahead by 0.8%, which means Iowa is still close and could easily go either way. The five polls included in the average range from Clinton up by 8% to Trump up by 7%. That is a pretty big range!
The average puts Iowa in the “Weak Clinton” category though, so we give it to Clinton in the “expected case” for the moment. The updated national electoral college bubble looks like this:
The last tick downward in the green center line is Iowa flipping to Clinton, which puts the “expected” Clinton vs Trump case at a 50 electoral vote Clinton win. But there are many close states still, so anything from a 156 electoral vote Clinton win to a 102 electoral vote Trump win would be within the realm of possibility given current state level polling.
This just goes to reiterate the point I made last month: “Do Not Underestimate Trump“. Conventional wisdom is that if the election comes down to Clinton vs Trump, it would be a Clinton runaway win, but poll data just does not show that right now.
(Insert usual comments here about how far we have until the election and how none of this is predictive yet. It only shows us a bit about how things look NOW, and even then only imperfectly due to the relative sparseness of state level polling.)
Clinton vs Cruz
Unlike Trump, who rose for awhile and then has been falling, Cruz has been consistently improving in Iowa for the last year. With today’s update, he takes the lead in the poll average. It is just a 0.6% lead, but it is a lead, and we give him the state for now.
This brings Cruz up to… losing by 96 electoral votes to Clinton. Unlike Trump though, if you give him all the close states as well, it is still a loss to Clinton, just by only 84 electoral votes, which is still a pretty substantial Clinton win. Right now, Cruz is not “within range” of Clinton, while Trump is.
This is based on state level polls though, which at this point in the cycle lag national polls. The RCP average for Clinton vs Cruz shows Cruz ahead at the moment. If there indeed is a big enough move toward Cruz that he starts to be competitive, it will show up in the state level polls soon enough. That isn’t evident from the state data yet, but I can say that Cruz is competitive in Iowa, and currently has a very slight lead there.
Others
I don’t talk much about candidate combinations beyond the top five best polled, as their polling data is generally sparser, but just to note them in passing… Today’s batch of polls also flips New Hampshire from Clinton to Rubio, strengthens the Sanders lead over Cruz in New Hampshire, and moves the national tipping point in Sanders vs Trump further toward Sanders.
We’re going to see the pace of polling increasing dramatically as the primary season gets underway. As soon as we have clear front runners in both parties, we’ll stop seeing any polling at all for the other candidates and it will all be about the final general election match ups. Over the next couple months we’ll get to see just how quick that transition is.
301.7 days until the general election polls start to close.
Note: This post is an update based on the data on ElectionGraphs.com. All of the charts and graphs seen here are from that site. Graphs, charts and raw data can be found there for the race nationally and in each state for every candidate combination that has been polled at the state level. In addition, comparisons of the best polled candidate combinations both nationally and each in each state are available. All charts above are clickable to go to the current version of the detail page the chart is from, which may contain more up to date information than the snapshots on this page, which were current as of the time of this post. Follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for specific poll details as I add them. And like Election Graphs on Facebook!
Election Graphs will be rolling out our primary delegate race coverage before the Iowa caucuses, but in the mean time, we’ve just had the first state level general election polls of the New Year. It is a PPP poll in New Hampshire. There was only one candidate pair where the new polls changed my classification of New Hampshire though.
Clinton vs Bush
For all but a few days in November, Bush had held a lead against Clinton in my poll averages since the end of July. Just barely. But he had hung onto that lead. With the latest poll though, Clinton leads in four of the last five polls, and by enough to take a lead in the average. New Hampshire moves from “Weak Bush” to “Weak Clinton”. The lead is still slim at 2.2%, so the state is still very much in the “could easily go either way” category, but it is enough to put New Hampshire back in Clinton’s column in the case where we give each state to the current leader.
That little notch downward on the center line at the right hand side of the bubble is New Hampshire flipping to Clinton. We go from Clinton winning by 48 electoral votes, to Clinton winning by 56 electoral votes. Either way, Clinton is ahead, but the election is within the “bubble of uncertainty” since if you give Bush all the states where Clinton is ahead, but by less than 5%, Bush wins by 104 electoral votes.
A Clinton vs Bush matchup could go either way.
But, if the primary polls are to be believed, at this point Clinton vs Bush is a relatively unlikely scenario, so even though there were no other category changes, lets take a quick look at how the latest polls affected some of the other matchups.
New Hampshire Matchup Comparison
Looking at the five best polled candidate combinations nationally, the latest New Hampshire poll included three of the five (Bush, Trump and Cruz). In all three cases, the Republican weakened vs Clinton.
For Trump and Cruz though, this just meant Clinton’s already strong lead in New Hampshire got stronger. It makes no difference what so ever to their possible races against Clinton if they were to win the nomination.
Aside from Bush, the only one of these five that makes New Hampshire close is Paul, but that should be taken with a big grain of salt because he hasn’t been included in a general election match up poll in New Hampshire since August. So that data is a bit stale.
Looking beyond the top five though, to what is currently the sixth best polled combination by my metric, you actually see another candidate that makes New Hampshire close with Clinton, and in fact in that case the latest polls actually improved the Republican’s average. That would be Clinton vs Rubio:
Of the 10 candidate pairs included in the latest polls… Clinton and Sanders vs Bush, Carson, Cruz, Rubio and Trump… Clinton vs Rubio is the only combination where the Republican’s poll average improved.
Does this imply larger things for the country at large? No, not really. New Hampshire is a special case in many ways. It is getting a huge amount of attention right now due to the upcoming primary. What is going on there right now in terms of public opinion may or may not be reflected in trends elsewhere.
So, as usual, we need to just wait for more polls. Which states get polled in the next few months is probably going to be highly influenced by the primary calendar as well, so the picture we see in the state polls will be warped a bit by that.
And of course once we have actual delegate numbers in both parties showing which candidates are actually leading in the nomination races, it starts changing perceptions of the general election, which may in turn cause more movement in the state polls.
Keep checking in with Election Graphs. We’ll be launching our delegate tracking soon, and it looks like the kind of election cycle where watching the delegate situation carefully may actually be needed.
In other words, we’re almost at Iowa, and things are going to get crazy. Hold on and have fun!
304.0 days until the general election polls start to close.
Note: This post is an update based on the data on ElectionGraphs.com. All of the charts and graphs seen here are from that site. Graphs, charts and raw data can be found there for the race nationally and in each state for every candidate combination that has been polled at the state level. In addition, comparisons of the best polled candidate combinations both nationally and each in each state are available. All charts above are clickable to go to the current version of the detail page the chart is from, which may contain more up to date information than the snapshots on this page, which were current as of the time of this post. Follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for specific poll details as I add them. And like Election Graphs on Facebook!
At long last, there has been enough state level polling in enough states over a long enough period of time that Trump makes it onto my “top five best polled candidate pairs” list. Until now, there simply was still more and better polling data around various other candidates, simply because they had been considered “contenders” for longer, and so therefore had amassed a wider variety of polls in more states. But no longer. It is time to look at Clinton vs Trump.
The various ups and downs over the last few months should not be considered real changes in Trump’s support. Instead, it is simply the the “average of the last five general elections” starting point that I use for each state gradually being replaced with real polling data on Clinton vs Trump. So we’ll only start looking at trends and changes starting now.
But where are we right now? With the usual caveats about how long it is until the election, lets do the rundown:
So… Clinton wins based on the current state level polling. But it is close. The tipping point state only has a Clinton lead of 2.4%. So 1.2% of people nationwide changing their minds, or the undecideds leaning Republican, or a systematic polling bias… all could easily wipe out that lead.
There is a lot of talk about how if Trump ends up as the nominee, we would see a Democratic win with margins unheard of since Reagan’s landslide over Mondale. This is by no means clear.
People point to how uncomfortable people are with Trump. For instance this CBS/NYT Poll from today shows 64% of the voting public “concerned or scared” about Trump becoming president. Sounds huge right? How can anybody win with numbers like that? But then you notice that, wait, in the same poll, 57% of the voting public are “concerned or scared” about Clinton becoming president. When you put those two together, it isn’t at all clear how things would work when you put the two head to head.
People talk about how Trump just couldn’t possibly win. How he alienates certain key voting blocs. How he will surely implode at some point. All sorts of reasons are mentioned. But a lot of them just boil down to “there is just no way, I don’t believe it.”
And they may be right that he won’t win. The analysis above shows Clinton winning over Trump. Most head to head polling nationally that I have seen shows Clinton winning. RCP’s Clinton vs Trump average has Clinton up by 3.3% today. But all indications with polling today show Clinton vs Trump as close. Not a Clinton blowout.
Now, to make explicit the caveat I noted at the top, there is a long time until the election. We don’t even have nominees yet. Trump winning the nomination is still one possibility among many. And even Clinton hasn’t wrapped things up yet. And a lot can happen in a campaign. General election polls this far out are NOT PREDICTIVE of the final result. They show us how things are RIGHT NOW at best. Things will move between now and next November.
But is there any reason to believe that all of the movement will be toward Clinton? That people will see the Clinton vs Trump comparison as the campaign rolls on and all gravitate to Clinton? It COULD work out that way.
But it is also quite possible that Clinton has bumps along the road that don’t look too great for her either. That the economy hits a rough spot. That Trump does what he has done so well against several primary opponents and finds just the right things to say at just the right moments to put Clinton in a negative light and turn people who were on the fence against her.
Clinton may well win a Clinton/Trump matchup. In fact if I had to wager on it right now, I’d bet on Clinton winning. And there is a chance Clinton could indeed pull off a landslide after a Trump melt down. But this is not a clear and obvious result at this point. Trump could in fact pull off a win. From the current position in the polls, he only has to move things ever so slightly to get there. Clinton winning, but not in a blowout, but in a close competitive race, is actually a very likely outcome.
Folks predicting that a Trump nomination automatically means a Democratic landslide… underestimate Trump at your own peril.
He has shown time and time again over the last few months that the “conventional wisdom” can be dead wrong. He may yet implode. But this should not be taken for granted. Right now he tops the polls nationally and in all the early states for the Republican nomination. And the general election polls show him doing better than Romney did in both the electoral college and the popular vote. To be clear… not winning… but doing better than Romney did… and within reach of a win if just a few things slid his way.
Looking for a second at other Clinton vs Republican pairings, and going past the “Top 5 best polled” combinations I usually talk about to pick up Rubio and Carson, lets see which of the Republicans are currently most competitive against Clinton based on my analysis. Here are the Top 5 Republicans in terms of how they fare in the Electoral College against Clinton:
- Clinton vs Rubio: Rubio wins by 2 electoral votes
- Clinton vs Carson: Clinton wins by 2 electoral votes
- Clinton vs Trump: Clinton wins by 38 electoral votes
- Clinton vs Bush: Clinton wins by 48 electoral votes
- Clinton vs Cruz: Clinton wins by 108 electoral votes
All the other Republicans are even further behind. For comparison, Romney lost by 126 electoral votes.
Rubio actually is slightly ahead right now, but barely. He is the only Republican who can say they are leading Clinton right now.
But really Clinton vs Rubio, Carson, Trump and Bush are all in the “too close to call” category. For each of these four Republicans, the “best case”, where the Republicans pick up the states where Clinton is ahead, but by less than 5%, result in a Republican win. These races are all competitive.
Cruz? Huckabee? Paul? Christie? None of these guys are even close in head to head matches with Clinton.
Trump is not in that category. Although meltdowns are always possible, and indeed, he hasn’t even gotten the nomination yet… Clinton vs Trump certainly has a strong possibility of being a close competitive race.
Do not underestimate Trump.
334.0 days until polls start to close on Election Day 2016. Buckle your seatbelt.
Note: This post is an update based on the data on ElectionGraphs.com. All of the charts and graphs seen here are from that site. Graphs, charts and raw data can be found there for the race nationally and in each state for every candidate combination that has been polled at the state level. In addition, comparisons of the best polled candidate combinations both nationally and each in each state are available. All charts above are clickable to go to the current version of the detail page the chart is from, which may contain more up to date information than the snapshots on this page, which were current as of the time of this post. Follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for specific poll details as I add them. And like Election Graphs on Facebook!
After a busy week including several days without power at Election Graphs HQ, I caught up on the 62 poll results that had been released in the last week. There were polls in eight different states (NV, IA, NH, SC, FL, CO, VA and WI) and for many different candidate combinations. With all of that though, there were only a few significant changes to the “best polled” candidate combinations that I comment on here.
Clinton vs Bush (best polled)
There were two polls for Clinton vs Bush in New Hampshire. Taken one by one, they show New Hampshire slipping back to the Clinton side of the fence for a few days, then back to a narrow Bush lead. Both taken together though, New Hampshire is in the same state as before this set of polls was included. This leaves the “expected case” at Clinton winning by 48 EV.
There was also a poll in Virginia though, and while the state was “Weak Clinton” before, and “Weak Clinton” after, Clinton’s margin increased, and improved Clinton’s “tipping point” against Bush. As a reminder, the tipping point is the margin in the state that would push the winning candidate over the edge. This can also be thought of as the amount the national polls would have to shift (assuming all states shifted uniformly) to change the winner. So it is essentially how close the race is taking into account the structure of the electoral college.
This is the first move toward Clinton in the tipping point against Bush since March. Is this a possible indication that Clinton has reached her floor and has started a rebound? Or is this just a blip, or something specific to Bush? Only more polls will tell.
Clinton vs Cruz (2nd best polled)
Since Clinton vs Cruz is just coming on to the five best polled list today, I won’t spend time looking at recent trends or changes. Instead, lets just look at where this combination sits right now:
In other words, Cruz does pretty badly against Clinton at the moment. Rubio and Bush at least are making it close. Cruz is not.
Clinton vs Rubio (7th best polled)
Speaking of Rubio, with today’s update, Clinton vs Rubio actually falls off the “five best polled combinations” list, replaced by Clinton vs Cruz. I suspect Rubio may get back on this list soon, but in the meantime, here are the changes in this last update.
After a couple weeks with Rubio’s lead in Florida over 5%, with the latest update, the average falls to Rubio +4.1%, again making Florida a “Weak Rubio” classification, meaning that while Rubio is ahead, the state is within reach for Clinton, and could easily flip.
Florida is a big state, so this has a big impact on Clinton’s best case (where she wins all the Weak Rubio states in addition to the states she is actually ahead in).
You can see the ragged lower edge of the “bubble” in the chart above. That is primarily Florida going in and out of the group of states considered possible for Clinton. For the moment, it is back in. The “expected case” is still Rubio winning by a razor thin 2 EV, but her best case is now back up to winning by 126 EV. So, Clinton strengthening?
Well, maybe, but at the same time, another poll increases Rubio’s average in Colorado, in turn improving Rubio’s tipping point against Clinton:
So, Clinton’s best case improves from winning by 68 EV to winning by 126 EV. But at the same time the tipping point moves from Rubio up by 0.1% in Colorado, to Rubio up by 2.6% in Pennsylvania. All in all this is a mixed bag of news, but on balance I’d say Rubio is better off here. So maybe don’t stock up quite yet on that Clinton recovery narrative.
Others
As usual, there are others getting lots of media attention currently that never-the-less have not yet had the sustained polling volume across a lot of close states to get on the “five best polled” according to my metric. This means looking at the results for those candidate pairs is a bit less reliable, but since there is continued interest, here are links to a few of those along with the current “expected” result for each:
351.9 days until the first general election polls start to close. A lot will change before then. Stay tuned.
Note: This post is an update based on the data on ElectionGraphs.com. All of the charts and graphs seen here are from that site. Graphs, charts and raw data can be found there for the race nationally and in each state for every candidate combination that has been polled at the state level. In addition, comparisons of the best polled candidate combinations both nationally and each in each state are available. All charts above are clickable to go to the current version of the detail page the chart is from, which may contain more up to date information than the snapshots on this page, which were current as of the time of this post. Follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for specific poll details as I add them. And like Election Graphs on Facebook!
On this week’s Curmudgeon’s Corner podcast, Sam and Ivan do it again, laying down a commentary track for the second Republican debate. Yes, the whole thing. All three hours of it. We kibitz as Trump and Carson and Bush and Cruz and Rubio and all the rest argue about the issues of the day. Oh, and of course, Fiorina. Ivan’s nemesis Fiorina. Ivan always has nice things to say about her. You’ve probably seen the debate, now listen to our take!
Click to listen or subscribe… then let us know your own thoughts!
Recorded 2015-09-18
Length this week – 3:13:32
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Show Details:
- (0:00:10-1:01:04) Debate Segment I
- Intro from Sam and Ivan
- Candidate Self-Introductions
- Trust Trump with Red Button?
- Outsiders vs Insiders
- Russia / Iran / China / Syria
- Should Kim Davis follow the law?
- Planned Parenthood and Government Shutdowns
- Fiorina’s Face
- (1:02:20-1:42:06) Debate Segment II
- Immigration
- Fiorina/Trump Business Records
- Tax Plans and Budgets
- Minimum Wage
- Political Styles
- (1:43:13-2:16:07) Debate Segment III
- Trump knowing Foreign Policy
- Would Jeb be a repeat of 41 and 43 on Foreign Policy?
- Iraq / Syria / Afghanistan
- Supreme Court / Abortion
- (2:16:46-2:42:24) Debate Segment IV
- Marijuana
- Guns
- Social Security
- Climate Change
- Vaccines and Autism
- (2:43:02-3:03:32) Debate Segment V
- Woman on the $10 bill
- Secret Service Codenames
- How will the world be different after your presidency?
- (3:04:33-3:13:12) Wrap Up
- Sam and Ivan predict the impact of the debate
On this week’s Curmudgeon’s Corner podcast Sam and Ivan throw the usual format out the window and instead give the MST3K treatment to the Republican Debate. If you don’t know what that means, what happened is we played the debate, and recorded our thoughts and reactions to it in real time. So if you didn’t watch the straight up debate already, or even if you did, listen to our commentary now! Oh yeah, and at the beginning we talked a bit about a couple of recent robberies too.
Recorded 2015-08-07
Length this week – 2:24:50
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Show Details:
- Break-ins and Robberies
- Republican Debate Segment 1
- Intros
- Support Nominee?
- Electibility
- Immigration
- Republican Debate Segment 2
- Immigration
- Terror and National Security
- Obamacare and role of Federal Government
- Republican Debate Segment 3
- Hillary Clinton
- Economy, Jobs and Money
- Iran Deal
- Republican Debate Segment 4
- Republican Debate Segment 5
- Republican Debate Segment 6
- Wrap Up Analysis
In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam and IvГЎn talk about:
* [0:00:10-0:05:03] Show Tech
* [0:05:52-0:19:45] Germanwings Crash
* [0:20:55-0:40:05] Ted Cruz Presidential Launch
* [0:40:44-1:04:16] Middle East Going Nuts
* [1:04:33-1:21:39] Lightning Round
Recorded 2015-03-27
Length this week – 1:22:03
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