Polls in Swing States

[roger_thornhill]

Given the EC system, the polls of voting intentions of voters in swing states are the real,ly important polls. So, citizens of Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Arizona etc., what are the polls saying in your states? And how much can be read into them in this tight race?

[Atticus_Finch]

Two useful sites here:

Democrat biased editorially, but better information and more frequently updated:
The Electoral Vote Predictor

Republican biased editorially, provided for the sake of balance:
The Election Projection

[BrainGlutton]

At http://www.electoral-vote.com/, you can get the data from every poll that has been done this year in every state. Just click on the state of interest on the map, and it will take you to a page showing a chart over time of support for Bush (red line) and Kerry (blue line). In some of the states few polls have been done because it’s an obvious lock for one or the other. In the swing states, lots of polls have been done and the lines look crazy – they touch, they cross, they zigzag up and down. A lot seems to depend on what agency is doing the polling.

Click on a state at http://www.race2004.net/, and it will take you to a page with a table of all polling data to date for that state. It gives more details than the other site but does not represent the data in graphic form.

[Spoke]

As I mentioned in the other thread on polling, a number of the state polls on electoral-vote.com were conducted by Strategic Vision, a Republican polling group which has become notorious for skewing its samples. More on Strategic Vision as relates to polling in Georgia here. From that article:

But Strategic Vision’s methodology was and remains questionable, according to political experts.

The poll results were calculated on the assumption that just 18 percent of statewide votes would be cast by African-Americans. Yet African-American turnout for the last three statewide general elections was 23 percent, according to Bullock and the Georgia secretary of state’s office. Historically, most African-Americans vote Democrat.

This calls into question the value of Strategic Vision’s polls (reflected on electoral-vote.com) in such critical states as Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

[Captain_Lance_Murdoch]

True dat. Strategic Visions puts Bush ahead almost everywhere. If you throw them out, you get several states that are dead toss-ups now. Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, etc…

Minnesota has been hailed as a toss-up throughout the election, but it looks good for Kerry here. Even Strategic Visions gives Kerry a slight edge. Every poll shows Kerry leading by a bit and it has been that way since the start. I think it’s getting to be time to take Minnesota off the toss-up list.

[Spoke]

I’ve been trying to figure out what Strategic Vision’s motive would be for skewing its polls. Any thoughts on this? (Maybe to get Kerry to waste resources in places like Minnesota and New Jersey? Make 'em look like swing states, and force the Democrats to come and “defend” them?)

[elfkin477]

Much like in 2000, the polls in New Hampshire show an exact tie. Bush won last time though, and we didn’t need to recount ballots, so I’m not sure that the polls are a good predictor.

[rjung]

@spoke-

I’ve been trying to figure out what Strategic Vision’s motive would be for skewing its polls. Any thoughts on this?

The “bandwagon effect” – if you’re an undecided voter in a swing state and you hear slanted polls and surveys saying Candidate X is in the lead, you might be inclined to “follow the herd” and vote the same way.

[DMark]

Well, the polls in Nevada are confusing.

You read the national polls and we are supposedly tied, or barely Kerry.

But on every local television station, they are showing Kerry leading by a far wider margin when they do their independant polls.

I think this is the first election that I am starting to really believe that most of the polls are bullshit. Regardless if they are for Kerry or Bush. Something seems oddly wrong.

New voter registration has been decidedly Democrats, and for the first time in Nevada, there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in this state…yet the national polls seem to think these newly registered voters are not “likely voters”. So, uh, why are they registering? So they can be called for jury duty?

[BrainGlutton]

According to http://www.electoral-vote.com/, the latest two polls, done 10/14, show Florida and exactly tied. One of those polls was by Strategic Visions. When Strategic Visions calls the race tied, I think we can read that as meaning Kerry is ahead!

[Apos]

The fact is, polls aside, we have all the votes we need lined up to win this thing. All we have to do is make it past the voter suppression efforts and roadblocks being thrown up by Republican secs of state.

Get this: Everyone points to Ken Blackwell’s ruling that Nader isn’t an official candidate in Ohio as proof that he’s being “evenhanded.”

But Nader was NEVER at any point, an official candidate in Ohio. Yet, thanks to a series of confusing rulings and stonewalling by the same Ken Blackwell (his strategy has basically been not that he’s going to win legally on any of his crazy anti-voting positions, but just that he can create mass confusion), he’s going to be printed on the ballot in most counties. That’s insane. You might as well put Jesus on the ballot: he’s not an official candidate, but what the hell, right? Even though votes for Nader won’t be counted, the upshot is that Nader will get his name posted INSIDE the polling locations (since most counties wont reprint the ballots, and thanks to the crazy (if you do anything even slightly weird, your vote doesn’t count!) voting machines cannot remove or block out his name). He’ll probably get more votes than if he WAS an official candidate.

The Republicans also have a strategy this year to basically gum up every crowded polling location in Ohio by having a person INSIDE the polls litterally randomly singling individual people out, saying “I don’t think this person can really vote here” at which point that person gets pulled aside, has to wait while the challenger fills out paperwork (I’m sure they’ll just rush through it!), and then the voter fills out some more paperwork, one of the poll workers has to deal with the claim, etc. It’s an archaic law that’s almost never been before used, but it’s on the books and legal. These challengers can do it whether or not someone is actually on the rolls. They can do it for no reason at all, nonstop, all day. The end result is longer lines, more frustrated people just giving up and getting out of line, voters feeling like they’ve done something wrong by coming to vote, etc. Of course, they Republicans seem to have a strange problem finding such challengers for anything other than high Democratic performing areas with historically low turnout. They are also already lobbying to have heavily armed police stationed outside polling locations in light of the expected high terror alerts: you know, because of Al Qaeda’s repeatedly stated intention to attack inner city black churches. Luckily, Al Qaeda doesn’t seem to have any plans for the polling locations in county clubs or rural farmhouses.

We overcome things like that, however, and Bush is toast.

[mks57]

@DMark

New voter registration has been decidedly Democrats, and for the first time in Nevada, there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in this state…yet the national polls seem to think these newly registered voters are not “likely voters”. So, uh, why are they registering? So they can be called for jury duty?

How many newly registered voters actually show up on election day?

Someone should have some statistics on that.

[BrainGlutton]

@Apos

The Republicans also have a strategy this year to basically gum up every crowded polling location in Ohio by having a person INSIDE the polls litterally randomly singling individual people out, saying “I don’t think this person can really vote here” at which point that person gets pulled aside, has to wait while the challenger fills out paperwork (I’m sure they’ll just rush through it!), and then the voter fills out some more paperwork, one of the poll workers has to deal with the claim, etc.

They’re doing that in Florida, too. From the St. Petersburg Times, 10/16/04, http://www.sptimes.com/2004/10/16/State/Voters_will_be_under_.shtml:

Florida Republicans and Democrats say they are heavily recruiting volunteers to serve as poll watchers. They will not say what instructions they are giving them, but they are expected to draw on poll watchers’ experiences in any post-election litigation.

The approaches are somewhat different.

Democrats say their goal is to have poll watchers ensure every eligible voter gets to vote. Republicans say they want their poll watchers to ensure election laws are enforced.

The poll watchers also are expected to be more aggressive in challenging the qualifications of voters. Longtime elections officials could not recall the last time they saw such a challenge.

State law allows each political party and candidate to post one observer at each precinct. The poll watchers must be registered voters from the same county and cannot be candidates or law enforcement officers.

But the law also includes an arcane 109-year-old provision that gives poll watchers the right to challenge on the spot an individual’s qualification to vote. The challenge must be in writing and is similar to a sample affidavit included in state law.

Dawn Roberts, director of the state division of elections, sent a reminder last month to county elections supervisors about the poll watcher law.

The Sept. 29 memo suggested elections supervisors designate an area in each precinct for poll watchers to sit or stand to watch the check-in process. It said local officials also need to determine how to handle written challenges while other voters wait.

Democratic lawyers contend the memo was meant to encourage elections officials to go out of their way to accommodate poll watchers’ challenges of would-be voters.

State law says poll watcher challenges must be addressed on-site by election workers before a citizen is given or denied a ballot. In many cases it will require calls to election headquarters to double-check voter registration or asking the citizen to sign another affidavit. If the challenge can’t be resolved, the would-be voter may cast a provisional ballot and the county canvassing board would decide later if the citizen is qualified.

Multiple challenges could quickly clog voting precincts.

“The secretary of state’s memo acts as a road map to challenge voters on Election Day,” said Mitchell Berger, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer who was a key member of Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 legal team and is general counsel for John Kerry’s legal team. “It’s not a road map that ensures that a citizen interested in coming to the polls and voting will have the opportunity to exercise that franchise.”

Among Berger’s concerns: Polling places will come to a virtual standstill if Republican poll watchers challenge voters by comparing would-be voters’ names to the state’s controversial and since-discarded list of suspected felon voters. Or they might aggressively challenge any voter who shows up without a photo identification.