Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are running neck-and-neck in the Sunshine State. Americans call Trump a more extreme candidate than Clinton. And women are optimistic about progress for their gender, but see room for improvement. This is HuffPollster for Monday, September 19, 2016.
FLORIDA POLL SHOWS A CLOSE RACE - Nate Cohn: “Donald J. Trump has almost no plausible path to the White House unless he wins Florida, a rapidly changing state where Hispanic voters could deal a decisive blow to his chances. But a new poll, by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College, suggests that Mr. Trump is keeping his hopes alive in Florida, the largest and most diverse of the crucial battleground states. The reason: White voters favor him by a large margin. Mrs. Clinton leads by a single point, 41 to 40 percent, among likely voters in a four-way race that includes Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. The race is tied in the head-to-head race, 43-43. The poll, the first of its kind by The Upshot, was based on voter records that allow unusually detailed analysis of the electorate. It indicates that Mr. Trump leads Mrs. Clinton by 51 percent to 30 percent among white voters – and that includes all white voters, not just those without a college education who have been so vital to his campaign. She’s winning white voters registered as Democrats by only 63 percent to 17 percent.” [NYTimes]
Clinton’s challenge is getting unlikely voters to turn out - More from Cohn: “Unlike many public polls, the Upshot/Siena survey was conducted using voter registration files, the core of the ‘big data’ that has transformed campaigning over the last decade. The voter file data here — from L2, a nonpartisan voter file vendor — includes information on the race, vote history and partisanship of every voter in the state, a big advantage for polling. We used the responses to our poll to build a statistical model of the vote preferences of every registered voter… Mrs. Clinton may have a narrow edge among likely voters, but the race isn’t quite so close among registered voters, who support her by a four-point margin. Her challenge is straightforward: to get less likely voters to the polls. Mr. Trump has a considerable lead among the likeliest voters, the older, generally whiter voters who regularly turn out in primaries and midterm elections…. The model, similarly, finds that Mr. Trump has a seven-point lead among registered voters with a greater than 90 percent chance of turning out.” [NYTimes]
This is the first known media poll use of list-based modeling - Many pollsters are using voter registration lists for their polls’ samples, but the NYT Upshot/Siena College poll takes that further, using the lists to model likely voter turnout. Cohn explains: “Most public pollsters use the self-reported vote intention of respondents to determine who is likely to vote…. Campaign pollsters instead rely more on the past behavior of voters. Studies have shown that vote history is a more accurate predictor of turnout than self-reported vote intention. The Upshot/Siena survey averages the two approaches, 50-50. Half of the likely voter measure comes from how voters report their vote intention; the other half is based on a model predicting the probability that they vote. The result is that all respondents are still considered to have some chance of voting, as they would in reality…. The Upshot/Siena poll called a younger and more diverse set of voters, knowing that many of them would not respond, to try to get a more representative sample of respondents in the end. It yielded a younger and more diverse sample than in most polls, and it considerably reduced the amount of weighting.” [NYT]
TRUMP VIEWED AS THE MORE EXTREME CANDIDATE - HuffPollster: “A wide majority of Americans view Donald Trump as overly extreme, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds, with few saying he’s become less so since the start of the general election. Fifty-seven percent of Americans say that Trump is ‘too extreme,’ while just 41 percent say the same of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In a direct comparison, Americans say by a 19-point margin, 53 percent to 34 percent, that Trump is the more extreme of the two….Thirty percent of Americans say Trump has gotten more extreme since becoming the nominee, while 27 percent say he’s gotten less extreme and 35 percent that he’s stayed about the same.” [HuffPost]
MOST FEMALE VOTERS SEE NOMINATING A WOMAN AS A POSITIVE STEP - Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto, on a new CBS/NYT poll: “Women feel good about their opportunities to succeed compared to their mothers’ experience. More than 3 in 4 women (77 percent) say their opportunities to succeed in life are better than their mothers’, including majorities of women of all ages, although older women are more likely to feel that way. Looking ahead, most women are optimistic about the future for American girls; 74 percent say girls’ opportunities to succeed will be better than their own. But women still see obstacles, and fewer men do. Forty-eight percent of women think in today’s society there are more advantages in being a man than in being a woman, compared to 35 percent of men who think that...Regardless of how they will vote, most women voters are glad a woman is a major party nominee for president, including 80 percent of Democratic women and 58 percent of independent women. However, most Republican women (54 percent) do not share this sentiment. Most men voters are also glad a woman is a major party presidential nominee. And 55 percent of women voters who are glad there is a woman nominee are satisfied that Hillary Clinton is the first female presidential candidate for a major party, but 42 percent would have preferred someone else.” [CBS]
A NOTE ABOUT POLLS CONDUCTED USING GOOGLE CONSUMER SURVEYS - At this time, HuffPost Pollster will not be including election polls conducted via Google Consumer Surveys in our charts. Google’s method of conducting surveys is substantially different than that employed by most online pollsters. Instead of building a panel of users willing to answer questions, it instead relies largely on intercepting respondents elsewhere on the web, prompting them to click through the surveys before they’re able to read news articles or other content. While this approach allows Google to conduct especially fast surveys, there is far less research to support its accuracy, and several reasons for caution.If users are interrupted by a survey while trying to visit a website, rather than choosing to answer surveys via an email invitation or after completing a different survey, there’s a strong possibility that they might enter random responses to get past the intercept screen to the content they originally sought. The other potential issue is that GCS only collects and weights data by gender and age. We know that other demographics matter ― education and race are particularly important this year ― but GCS doesn’t indicate that these are measured or accounted for in the polls.
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MONDAY’S ‘OUTLIERS’ - Links to the best of news at the intersection of polling, politics and political data:
-Dana Blanton writes that voters are eager for new leadership but uneasy about Donald Trump. [Fox]
-Larry Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley see the electoral map shifting in Trump’s favor, although Hillary Clinton continues to hold the advantage. [Sabato’s Crystal Ball]
-Craig Gilbert notes that nearly a fifth of Wisconsin voters remain undecided. [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]
-Toni Monkovic and David Rothschild discuss Pennsylvania’s importance to the presidential race. [NYT]
-Gary Langer finds that the impact of debates is...debatable. [ABC]