The Horserace – October 6, 2016

National Polls

LA Times – Trump +4
People’s Pundit Daily – Trump +1.8
Rasmussen – Trump +2
Gravis – Tie
Google Consumer Surveys – Hillary +5

State Polls

New Hampshire – Boston Globe/Suffolk – Hillary +2 (4-way)

Maryland – Washington Post – Hillary +36 (4-way)

Tennessee – MTSU – Trump +12 (4-way)

Texas – KTVT – Trump +7 (4-way)

Florida – Emerson – Trump +1 (4-way)

Arizona – Emerson – Hillary +2 (4-way)

Rhode Island – Emerson – Hillary +20 (4-way)

Nevada – Emerson – Tie (4-way)

Florida – UNF – Hillary +7 (2-way), Hillary +3 (4-way)

Michigan – Detroit Free Press – Hillary +11 (3-way)

Ohio – Anzalone Liszt Grove Research – Hillary +2 (3-way)

Update: Still no sign of a dramatic post-debate swing in the LA Times poll. In 2012, this poll showed the debates having little impact while the media polls swung wildly after Romney won the first debate.

Commentary

The last Gravis poll which came out while I was on the way to Arkansas had Hillary +4. This was three days before the first presidential debate and shortly before some good Gravis state polls came out in Minnesota and Colorado. Now, it has returned to a Tie.

The Horserace has noticed these national polls tend to move in sync. The PPD tracking poll showed a post-debate bounce for Hillary, but it quickly faded. The UPI tracking poll also showed a slight bounce for Hillary, but it also faded. Yesterday, the Rasmussen daily tracking poll showed a similar fade after a big post-debate surge for Hillary.

For some reason, The Horserace has noticed that the LA Times poll moves like the other tracking polls, but is off by about 5-7 days. Just by observing the tracking polls, you can predict the trend in the media polls. The FOX poll and CNN poll are very similar and tend to move in sync with and slightly behind the Rasmussen poll.

In August and September, we noticed this pattern and it suggests the race is already settling down again. It will be shaken up again on Sunday and again after the last debate on October 19th.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

31 Comments

    • 538 has zero credibility. It concocts “performative” assertions — i.e., making things out to be the way that they actually want them to be, in order to fabricate a sense of inevitability.

        • Hilarious. This is the same 538 that kept claiming that Trump would lose the GOP nomination, and was proven so utterly wrong that he subsequently had to pen rationalization pieces explaining why he was so off base.

          • The only thing that’s hilarious is your inability to distinguish between Nate Silver’s off-target punditry re Trump and the accuracy rate of FiveThirtyEight’s election forecasts. If you will review this past year’s primary elections, Democrat and Republican, you will find, I’m pretty sure, that FiveThirtyEight miscalled only one. That was a Democrat primary–Michigan, I think–in which Sanders upset Hillary.

        • Yep, he’a jew…but Jews aren’t wrong all the time. Just dismissing someone’s arguments because he’s a jew is unfortunately the intellectual laziness that the alt-right is becoming increasingly known for and is one of the reasons why it remains an internet only movement.

          • What I mean is this, the Jews attempt to shade the narrative true or not. I just put their identity out there so people know

    • 538 is reacting to the slew of bouncy post-debate polls. This is exactly what happened in August and September.

      The tracking polls – LA Times, PPD, and UPI – swung toward Hillary and quickly receded. Then, one by one the national polls – starting with Rasmussen, FOX and CNN – came in and the bounce faded. Then came some good state polls for Trump. Then the other media polls showed a Hillary drop.

      • Yes–a bounce is called a bounce for a reason. That doesn’t mean that any gain Hillary might have enjoyed from the debate is a bounce.

        If you think you’re going to persuade me that FiveThirtyEight’s forecast is to be ignored because FiveThirtyEight is being misled by “bouncy” polls that you yourself are too clever to be fooled by, you’re going to have to do better than fling out a paragraph or so of your observations about a few polls. Whatever are the details of FiveThirtyEight’s method, that website seems to have a pretty-good record of prediction.

        If you’d like to get even a slight sense of the rigor of the FiveThirtyEight approach, go to http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/
        and take a quick look at that website’s pollster ratings, which, as far as I can tell, are based on some sort of mathematical analysis of the past performance of literally thousands of polls.

        • Hillary Clinton will win the election even if Trump actually won, BECAUSE Hillary and her friends have the Diebold Machines hacked. ON TO PLAN B

  1. Rasmussen has Johnson at 9% which means if true that Hillary the Corrupt has real soft support because 99% 0f that 9% must be coming from holier than thou cucks of cuckservatives who can’t even think of voting for the God Emperor.

  2. God help us Maryland is an absolute nightmare. The League of the South if there was a New Confederacy would have to resort to absolute ethnic cleansing to reconquer Maryland

  3. J_Bonaccorsi_Philadelphia
    ‘Whatever are the details of FiveThirtyEight’s method, that website seems to have a pretty-good record of prediction.’

    Not when it comes to Trump. He can make all the excuses he wants. It’s obvious they have an intense dislike for Trump. This line from #5 shows how clueless and biased the little twerp is against Trump.

    “Our emphatic prediction is simply that Trump will not win the nomination,” Silver said. “It’s not even clear that he’s trying to do so.”

    Wrong! My EMPHATIC assessment of Nostradumbass. What a putz!

    7 Times Nate Silver Was Hilariously Wrong About Donald Trump

    1. June 16, 2015: Why Donald Trump Isn’t A Real Candidate, In One Chart

    The first anti-Trump volley at FiveThirtyEight was fired by Harry Enten, the website’s election specialist. Enten’s “one chart” that showed Trump wasn’t a real candidate was one showing the net favorability of 106 presidential candidates since 1980. Trump’s high name recognition combined with a staggering -32 favorability made him the least-liked presidential candidate of all time, Enten said.

    “For this reason alone, Trump has a better chance of cameoing in another “Home Alone” movie with Macaulay Culkin — or playing in the NBA Finals — than winning the Republican nomination.,” Enten said.

    . July 16, 2015: Two Good Reasons Not To Take The Donald Trump ‘Surge’ Seriously

    2. Another Enten article, this piece assures readers that while Trump is rising in the polls (he was second behind Jeb Bush at the time), that’s no reason to regard him as a new Republican frontrunner.

    “In reality, the broad, shallow nature of Trump’s support suggests it’s due mostly to near-universal name recognition, thanks in part to being in the news more often than the news anchors,” he said.

    3. July 20, 2015: Donald Trump Is The World’s Greatest Troll

    Silver finally weighed in with this article, where he described Trump as a “troll” candidate, who was thriving simply by virtue of the tremendous attention he could receive by insulting everybody and not playing by the rules. Trolling, he suggested, had its political limits and would almost certainly deny Trump the nomination.

    “Trump has taken trolling to the next level by being willing to offend members of his own party. Ordinarily, this would be a counterproductive strategy. In a 16-candidate field, however, you can be in first place with 15 or 20 percent of the vote — even if the other 80 or 85 percent of voters hate your guts.

    “In the long run — as our experience with past trolls shows — Trump’s support will probably fade. Or at least, given his high unfavorable ratings, it will plateau, and other candidates will surpass him as the rest of the field consolidates.”

    4. Aug. 6, 2015: Donald Trump’s Six Stages of Doom

    This article likened Trump’s candidacy to a variety of other insurgent Republican campaigns in the past 20 years, from Pat Buchanan in 1996 to Herman Cain in 2012.

    “The lesson … is that Trump’s campaign will fail by one means or another. Like Cain, Bachmann and Gingrich, Buchanan, Huckabee and Forbes came nowhere close to winning the Republican nomination,” Silver wrote. He pegged Trump’s odds of winning the nomination at 2 percent, and laid out the so-called “six stages of doom” for his campaign.

    Trump would eventually be undone, Silver said, by the many roadblocks in his way. He could disappoint in Iowa or New Hampshire, hit a ceiling as the field shrank, botch delegate accumulation in caucus states, or encounter a concerted GOP effort to sabotage him at the convention. Ultimately, all of these factors influenced the race… and none of them were enough to halt the Trump train.

    5. Aug. 11, 2015: Donald Trump Is Winning The Polls, And Losing The Nomination

    With Trump’s poll support apparently only increasing with time, Silver sought to explain how Trump’s surge in the polls was actually coming at the expense of any chance he had of actually winning the nomination.

    In Silver’s telling, Trump’s abrasive, attention-getting rhetoric was serving to make the primary a “referendum” on Trump, a referendum where 75 percent of Republicans were voting against him. Other GOP candidates had less support, but were at least viewed positively by the party. Once the field shrank, Silver said, one of them would almost certainly be able to crush Trump head to head.

    “Our emphatic prediction is simply that Trump will not win the nomination,” Silver said. “It’s not even clear that he’s trying to do so.”

    6. Nov. 23, 2015: Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls

    Three months later, Trump was still stubbornly refusing to fade away. So, Silver waded back into the fray to tell the news media to stop panicking, and to declare that betting market odds placing Trump’s chances of victory at 20 percent were “substantially too high.”

    The key problems with believing in Trump, Silver said, were his persistently-high unfavorability even among Republicans, along with the fact that the vast majority of voters would only decide whom to support at the last minute. Those last-minute deciders, Silver suggested, could break against Trump in a big way.

    “[C]ould Trump win?,” he asked. “We confront two stubborn facts: first, that nobody remotely like Trump has won a major-party nomination in the modern era. And second, as is always a problem in analysis of presidential campaigns, we don’t have all that many data points, so unprecedented events can occur with some regularity. For my money, that adds up to Trump’s chances being higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent. Your mileage may vary.”

    7. Donald Trump Comes Out Of Iowa Looking Like Pat Buchanan

    Silver was quick to pounce after Trump finished second to Ted Cruz in the Iowa caucuses.

    “Trump underperformed his polls, which had him winning Iowa with 29 percent of the vote, while Cruz and Rubio outperformed theirs,” he wrote. “It’s not uncommon for the polls to be off in Iowa and other early-voting states, but the manner in which Trump underachieved is revealing. It turns out that few late-deciding voters went for him … Iowa voters made Trump appear to be much more of a factional candidate along the lines of [Pat] Buchanan, who received 23 percent of Iowa’s vote in 1996, than the juggernaut he’s been billed as.”
    Still, Trump’s sustained polling success was finally cracking even Silver’s resolve. Instead of being openly dismissive of Trump, he simply noted that Trump’s real strength would be revealed by how New Hampshire voted. We all know how that went. On Feb. 10, Silver finally anointed Trump as the GOP frontrunner.

    http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/04/7-times-nate-silver-was-hilariously-wrong-about-donald-trump/

    • When you get a chance, Sam, let me know how many Republican primary elections FiveThirtyEight called wrong.

      • I don’t know nor do I care about his successes or failures regarding other candidates not named Trump.

        How could he be so wrong so often about Trump if his methods, models and data are superior to other pollsters?

        Simple. He’s an anti-Trump zealot masquerading as an objective analyst with the intent of destroying Trump.

        He can’t be trusted.

        I remember when Trump’s chances looked very bleak after Iowa. The Orange faced blowhard is all but dead proclaimed the learned pundits.

        Then, Paul Manafort confidently announced to the world that Iowa was Cruz’s high point and not only would Trump secure the 1237 delegates but he would do it quickly.

        OMG! He is crazy!

        He went on to say that Trump would win something like 8-9 of the next primaries If memory serves me well.

        Nailed it. Wow!

        Why was he so bold? He could have hemmed and hawed and given a typical political response.

        No, he was more than bold, he was brazen, defiant.

        He would have been mocked and ridiculed if the opposite occurred.

        Why did he throw caution to the wind?

        He had knowledge and data the punditry did not possess coupled with decades of experience in his craft. Prognostication is more than numbers crunching it’s an art.

        • I wasn’t talking about candidates other than Trump, Sam. I was suggesting you review FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts for the Republican primary elections. The Daily Caller article whose contents you provided had much to say about Nate Silver’s inaccurate assessment of Trump’s political prospects–but that has nothing to do with FiveThirtyEight’s election forecasts, which is what we’re talking about. With the exception of one Democrat primary–Michigan, I think, in which Sanders upset Clinton–FiveThirtyEight called every primary election, Republican or Democrat, correctly, I’m pretty sure.

Comments are closed.