While I’m not particularly invested in the tit-for-tat of the horse race, there are moments when you take a step back and say: Huh!
Suddenly, it’s not one poll, it’s not two polls, it’s three live polls published this week that show a tied national race.
Now, when I look at the consensus of polling, I like to discard all the experimental, unproven online polling, along with the dubious robopollsters that ignore cellphones, and go straight for the live interviewer polls. Look at averages, and look to the live phone polls. This is what Ann Selzer says to do. And this is what 538 recommends as well.
Now here’s a little chart you can scroll around on yourself, using DK5’s spiffy chart widget, and here’s a link to show I did nothing special but remove the robocallers and the web-based stuff.
x Embedded ContentWow, right?
In fact, if we go back three full weeks, and look at the last six live interviewer national polls, the trend is rather remarkable:
3/30-4/3 | 46 | 47 |
3/28-4/2 | 45 | 44 |
3/29-3/31 | 47 | 49 |
3/17-3/27 | 49 | 43 |
3/20-3/22 | 55 | 42 |
3/19-3/22 | 48 | 49 |
Among those six polls, it’s the Fox poll begun three weeks ago that looks like the outlier, and the trend is toward a marked tightening in the national race. (The Huffpost composite even has Sanders by a nose.) Selzer, the A+ pollster on the list seemed to catch the movement first, but all of those pollsters are reputable sorts, grade B or better, and they are using solid methodologies (at least to this particular audience measurement professional).
Now, while everyone was looking at the recent Wisconsin result, perhaps we missed something else that’s afoot. One only needs to look at the rec list the past 48 hours to notice that Team Clinton and Team Sanders are at each others’ throats more than usual, and if you are like me, you can see some patterning and coordination in the tussling as well.
Suddenly, Team Clinton went scorched earth on Team Sanders (telegraphed broadly in the mainstream media), Team Sanders responded rather clumsily, with a surfeit of passion and conditional statements, and then Team Clinton went in for a kill. Etc etc etc. Meanwhile, news organs that have previously endorsed Team Clinton (like WashPost and NYT), and which participated in telegraphing the scorched earth pivot, suddenly have thrown leaves all over their bear traps, er, previous reportage, and declared: journalmalism is hard, caveat emptor!
Hmm.
Well, not being overly invested in either combatant this cycle, it all seems a bit much – but certainly an overreaction to Sanders’ Wisconsin victory, at least, no? But maybe it wasn’t that particular primary at all that kicked off the backyard wrestling. Maybe the Clinton campaign’s data teams were seeing precisely what the consensus of good public pollsters – lagging indicators that they are – are demonstrating now.
Adjust your mirrors, everyone. Are things closer than they’ve appeared to be up to this point?