BREAKING: Cuomo up by 94 points

by: Adam Bink

Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 16:30


Special comment/rant here, does anyone else find it incredibly annoying that CBS/NYTimes, Marist, SUSA, Quinnipiac, Siena, CNN/Opinion Research, PPP and even Rasmussen will insist on polling the NY-Gov race when I can't get polls on at least 8 different competitive House races in the last week or two, including some within the vicinity of NYS/Connecticut research/polling institutions, like NY-25? This is not just annoying because I like to know the latest news, it's annoying because it's useful to know where to channel resources in the last two weeks of an election.

In the case of races like Mayor Steve Pougnet's race in CA-45, there's no public polling at all (I've only seen private). Yet an average of 4.25 polls per week came out since the week of Sept. 27th on the NY-Gov race, every single one of them showing leads for Cuomo as small as 14 and as large as 37. I just saw one out today showing him up by 20. And this is still important? Even New York State political junkies like me find it overload. It's like some kind of perverse statement on the media's interest in characters like Paladino and conflict.

I mean, I think it's pretty cool to demonstrate that Paladino saying crazy stuff about gays, Sheldon Silver, Andrew Cuomo's prowess, and other sundry topics can transform his deficit of 10 points to into 14 or 37, but here Cuomo is close to breaking the statewide record for percentage of the vote in a gubernatorial race. For crying out loud, let's move on.

Adam Bink :: BREAKING: Cuomo up by 94 points

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BREAKING: Cuomo up by 94 points | 25 comments
Four (0.00 / 0)


--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I don't (0.00 / 0)
I am glad when anyone spends thousands of dollars polling whatever race they think is interesting. It's amazing really that news organizations do it.

But I can be fat and happy because the New Jersey public universities have done a good job with polling our districts -- admittedly we have no distraction of a statewide race -- and Monmouth U. even polled NY-19.  

I looked up the 1977 New Jersey polls, a famous huge comeback for the Democratic governor, and the entire dataset over the entire year consists of 6 public polls plus vague descriptions of two leaked internals.  So to have a number of polls in a given congressional district is just amazing compared to a generation ago.

New Jersey politics at Blue Jersey.

He is asking for more polls, more informative polls, more that (0.00 / 0)
don't tell us what we already know.

Cuomo is going to win in a landslide. No doubt, no worry.

There are a lot of other races we have information on. Races that may matter a lot.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

[ Parent ]
sure (0.00 / 0)
But let's face it, we're complaining that we know the Democrats are being hammered nationwide in the House, in many individual battleground House districts, Senate races, and governorships, but there's no poll of Palm Springs,CA and Rochester/Syracuse, NY's poll is two weeks old! I feel happy already with the number and quality of polls, I just hate the predicted result. But I don't suggest you should feel the way I do, I just answered Adam's question, and of course I am not trying to help organize a nationwide progressive movement like Adam is.  

(Also, it's harder to poll House races since the boundaries don't match area codes so well, and the party registration numbers are more obscure, etc.  So it might not be as easy as polling statewide races.)

But I agree it's nice to have them. Last week I thought Adler (NJ3) would pull it out narrowly. This week I think he's going to lose narrowly. Better to have realistic expectations, I guess.



New Jersey politics at Blue Jersey.

[ Parent ]
But we don't know, thats why we need better polls. (0.00 / 0)
Huff post is saying this right now:
UNCHARTED TERRITORY
EARLY VOTING NUMBERS SUGGEST A SHIFT IN WHO'S HEADED TO THE POLLS...
STATE-BY-STATE ANALYSIS OF WHAT THE NEW FIGURES MEAN

This election will be won and lost on the ground.  

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

[ Parent ]
Fear (0.00 / 0)
I think assuming what you know the result will be is a not very good reason to not want more polls. More polls can actually help one direct resources.


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[ Parent ]
For example (4.00 / 3)
A Franklin and Marshall poll about 3 weeks ago that had Patrick Murphy, who is an incumbent I very much want to be re-elected down by 14. Immediately I watched a lot of money and enthusiasm dry up, even though I thought the poll was an outlier from a firm with a history of having a lot of undecideds. Succeeding polls but it much, much closer- within the margin of error and one reason were able to generate interest in his race, quickly raise another $7K from 145 people who watched the live chat and video from folks here and elsewhere, a couple smart LGBT organizers are placed on the ground with the campaign, and several bus trips to Bucks County have been organized.

Thus, the value of succeeding polls in a race that would have been written off otherwise. I would like this in races where I know a candidate isn't going to win or lose by 20 points.


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[ Parent ]
That's part of what I feel is happening in MO (4.00 / 1)
About two weeks ago, CNN/Time released a poll showing Robin Carnahan down 13 to Roy Blunt.

Nearly every other non-Democratic poll was a Rasmussen poll.

The CNN/Time poll also had some highly dubious crosstabs. Notably, there were too few minorities, liberals, or voters 34 or under to even show up at all in the crosstabs.

Never the less, particularly after the CNN/Time poll came down, money started leaving and I'm starting to worry about other races down ballot.

[ Parent ]
re: cuomo (4.00 / 4)
Cuomo is going to win in a landslide. No doubt, no worry.

I'm worried.

- The state of New York

[ Parent ]
hello!? (4.00 / 1)
That's not the only relevant thing in this election if you're a New Yorker and a progressive.

In New York's fusion voting system, if you're a third party and you get 50,000 votes on your line, then you get to stay on the ballot until the next gubernatorial election.  Further, the number of votes that you get determines how high up you are on the ballot.  

So, knowing that the Democratic/WFP candidate is definitely going to win means that you can go all out to try to push the smaller party of your choice - whether the WFP, or the Green Party, or another, without having to consider whether the Republican is going to win.  And thereby actually make a difference, which New York voters are rarely allowed to do.

It also is the best way to ensure that the fusion voting system as a whole stays in place, by trying to increase support for whichever of the smaller parties.

The only reason this wouldn't be true is if you're not interested in New York politics (in which case what difference does a Governor's race in New York make) or you are a kneejerk supporter of Democrats over and above any consideration of the impact on the progressive movement.

[ Parent ]
Which makes me wonder how much polling of minor party candidates is actually happening (0.00 / 0)
If TPM PollTracker is to be believed, the answer is none at all.  PollTracker doesn't list any polling that includes minor party candidates.  I'm interested in polling of the NY-Gov race for the reasons of seeing how well the leftist minor party candidates are doing, but it's not happening here.  The pollsters blew their last shred of justification for spamming this race.
[ Parent ]
polling is irritating in general (0.00 / 0)
It takes all the fun out of everything for me :D

Maybe it reinforces hegemonic practices in that it may help determine voting because it establishes early narratives as 'facts'.  Not a lot of people have the time like I do to sit around and think about tactical voting in a  new york governor's race and how they might want to approach it even if they did publish the data.  

I don't know if that's the case though.  There are obvious benefits to publicly accessible polling, such as being able to target money and resources well, which is more important for people who are not well off, or being able to refute media narratives like 'incumbents are all losing.'  

Anyway, constant and regurgitative polling is a really new thing and it must have some effects that need to be taken account of to update the history-based 'lessons' that people like me tend to absorb.

[ Parent ]
On a not-entirely related note (0.00 / 0)
apparently Cuomo ran for the Democratic nomination unopposed.  Wtf??!!!  Not even a whackjob perennial candidate?  Geez.
[ Parent ]
yeah that is strange to me (0.00 / 0)
it might be because of fusion voting so that what would be organized within the democratic party (and through primaries) happens instead through third parties (and as a result in the general election).  

would be interesting to see a compare and contrast to an anologous situation without fusion voting to see what the actual effects are.  it would help figure out if it's useful to have, say, something like the WFP or the Freedom Party working formally or substantively outside the Democratic Party rather than within it.

[ Parent ]
other parties (4.00 / 2)
It would be nice, if they are going to bother to do polls for NY Gov, if they would include some of the so-called minor party candidates, especially since Cuomo and Paladino came in about 5th & 6th in the debate.
Yeah, if anything I'm interested in the NY-Gov race (0.00 / 0)
not cuz I care about Cuomo, who is turning out to be quite a ConservaDem, but because I'm rooting for the Green Party candidate and I want to see how well he does.
[ Parent ]
I agree wholeheartedly (0.00 / 0)
There are three major problems with the diversity of races being polled:

1. There isn't enough polling on House races, for sure.  Btw, I looked up CA-45 on FiveThirtyEight and yeah, there's no polling, though there is a Nov. 2 projection and it isn't pretty.

This makes all the talk about the impending Republican takeover of the House somewhat suspect (either exaggerated or understated) given the lack of consistency in polling.

2. Pollsters, for whatever reason, are often slow to poll important races.  I remember going nuts in the 2006 cycle because for the longest time no one was polling in the MN Senate race, which Republicans were all crowing about how they would win (they went on to lose by 20 points, of course).

3. Like you say, there's often too much attention being focused on races that don't deserve it.  NY-Gov is a good example; so is DE-Sen.  I understand that Christine O'Donnell caught the polling off-guard in the primary but really, it's overkill, and I think the media is just idiotically drawn to crazy candidates like dumb bugs to an electric light zapper.

Well, you can project the national house ballot to (0.00 / 0)
numbers of house seats.  It's inconsistent and not completely accurate, but I would assuem that predictions of a Republican house takeover are based upon models generated from the national House ballot and maybe underlying economic factors.  

And yes, agreed that the media is drawn to idiotically crazy candidates.  There are just so many of them this season that I'm surprised that they're not exploding.  

[ Parent ]
Yeah, I think using the generic House ballot is dumb (0.00 / 0)
or at least, uncomprehensive... if that's a word.
[ Parent ]
It's correlated in the past (0.00 / 0)
not perfectly, but there certainly is a correlation.  And polling individual house seats is scientifically complicated and expensive.  Though I agree that its stupid to spend money polling NY-Gov when you could be polling competitive House seats with the same resources.  
[ Parent ]
Right (0.00 / 0)
On #1, I cannot fathom how anyone can come up with a projection of 94.2% chance of Bono Mack winning without a single poll. Numbers out of the air.

Well said on everything else.


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[ Parent ]
Well Nate Silver has his own model (0.00 / 0)
which I don't know a whole lot about but I'm sure includes factors like the district, performance in past races, the generic House ballot, etc.

In case you don't know, Electoral-vote.com posts new polling on House races in their daily reports (just scroll to the very bottom) but they don't composite their House polling like they do their Senate polling.  I don't remember ever seeing any CA-45 polls, though I haven't exactly followed their House polls every day of this cycle.

[ Parent ]
I have a feeling that Nate Silver's overblowing his (0.00 / 0)
%win chances.  To me, it looks like he's underestimating his standard error somehow.  
[ Parent ]
Hm, I thought the standard criticism was that he was OVERestimating his standard error (0.00 / 0)
which is why his House predictions in particular span a very broad range.
[ Parent ]
I don't know (0.00 / 0)
saying that a 5 point race has a 90% win probability seems a little skewed to me.  
[ Parent ]
BREAKING: Cuomo up by 94 points | 25 comments
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