August 18 Poll Report

Good afternoon.   My poll staggers on, wounded but not yet down.   In the poll of Friday, August 16, Kirsten Gillibrand (a) significantly exceeded expectations and (b) won the poll, for the second straight time:

Second straight Gillibrand poll in which she significantly exceeded expectations and won; she also did this on August 9.   In the poll of Saturday, August 17, Julian Castro had a great result, beating expectations by 14 points:

Since my last report two days ago, Elizabeth Warren is up 100 points and Donald Trump is down 52 points, mostly as a result of the removal of the July 4^th poll from the relevant data.  In the poll on Independence Day, Warren got 58%, Trump 27%.   But Warren’s current score is more than four times Trump’s score, which suggests that Warren should beat Trump something like 81-19.  (It suggests this wrongly, I agree, but this is the mathematical implication.)   Anyway, when you take the Warren/Trump poll out of the system, the remaining data tries to push Warren and Trump into an 81-19 relationship or ratio.  Since their numbers are so large, Warren being now at 2,000 or 20%, the removal of that poll has large effects on the Support Scores. 

Since my last report two days ago, in addition to the changes for Warren and Trump:

Kirsten Gillibrand is up 29 points as a result of Friday’s poll,

Pete Buttigieg is up 12 points as a secondary adjustment,

Michael Bennet is down 10 points,

Bill de Blasio is down 12 points as a result of Friday’s poll,

Steve Bullock is down 29 points as a result of yesterday’s poll,

These are the current, and, it may be, the final Support Scores from my audience:

I’m not 100% on this yet, so I am going to sit on it for 24 hours before I make a final decision, but I have tentatively decided to end the series of polls at this point.   The reasons for this were explained in the August 16^th poll report, which I will re-publish at the end of this article.   Basically, the twitter polling series has to end when the point is reached at which the campaigns or persons supporting the campaigns begin driving their supporters to the poll in numbers sufficient to seriously undermine our ability to draw conclusions from the poll.   This happened in spades on Thursday, with Andrew Yang supporters, but it happened again on Friday, with Gillibrand supporters, and again on Saturday, with Castro supporters. 

There are several signs that this is happening in a given poll:

1)     The poll results for one candidate deviating strongly from expectations.  

2)     Mid-day "surges" in the poll; that is, a period of time in which a candidate suddenly goes from 20% to 75% in the poll, and then retreats slowly but ends up at 45%,

3)     A larger number of responses to the poll than are expected,

4)     Twitter notifications about the poll being re-tweeted, which, when checked out, can be traced to supporters of a campaign. 

It’s not really difficult to tell when someone is trying to swamp the poll.  The fact that it is not difficult to tell is a primary reason that I didn’t worry about it happening before, when some of the citizens of BJOL thought that I should be worrying about it.  But I don’t see any reason to believe that this will stop happening if I continue doing the polls.  It seems clear that it will just get worse and worse.  It was always clear that this would happen; I never had any doubt that it would happen.  I just didn’t know when. 

If I continue the polls now, I will just be measuring the competitive ability of the different campaigns to drive their supporters toward my poll, or how much interest they have in doing so.   While I can envision a scenario in which that might become very interesting, (a) this was not my intention in starting the series, and (b) the interim period before we reach the point of everyone making an equal effort to do that would yield ugly, essentially uninteresting results.  I’m just not going there.   So the polling series is probably done at this point.  I thank you all for participating, and I thank you for your comments about and insights into the process. 

August 16 Poll Report

Good afternoon, everybody.  I have not done a poll report for the past two days, have not done one since Tuesday, because I have had obligations I couldn’t dodge.  Tuesday’s poll went more or less as expected; Elizabeth Warren over-achieved by a couple of points, but the poll went 95% as expected:

That doesn’t stir the numbers much.   The poll of Wednesday also went pretty much as anticipated, although Howard Schultz got a shot of adrenaline somewhere:

As you may remember, I have also begun deleting two old polls a day from the data considered relevant; until this week I was eliminating one a day, but now two a day, shortening the list of relevant polls from 50 to 40.  We’re now at 46. 

And now I have some bad news that I have to share.  This polling exercise appears to be near an end.  I don’t think I can sustain it much longer. 

In yesterday’s poll the four contestants were Beto O’Rourke, Donald Trump, Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang.  The predictions for that poll, based on previous polling, would be that Andrew Yang would win the group with 38% of the vote.

  Early in the voting, however—four or five hundred votes in—Beto O’Rourke was out-performing expectations by a huge margin.  I didn’t take notes, but he was at something like 58%. 

Well, you know what that means; it means that somebody has re-tweeted the poll to a group of Beto O’Rourke supporters.   That’s fine; the polls can survive that up to a point.  Dave Pinto and Pat Porter re-tweet the polls regularly, which is great, and there’s a guy who re-tweets the polls to a more conservative audience, which I appreciate his doing, because the Twitter audience leans so far to the left that it is in danger of falling off the mound and landing on first base in the middle of its delivery. 

Sometime about mid-day, however, an Andrew Yang supporter noticed this, and responded by re-tweeting the poll to an Andrew Yang support group of some kind.  This kind of got out of hand.   My polls usually get about 1,150 responses, but this one got 3,569 responses.  Yang, whose track record would suggest that he would get about 38% of the vote, a little bit better than that, honestly, since he was running against Donald Trump, but he got 62% of the vote. 

Nothing against Andrew Yang or his supporters or his enthusiastic supporters, but this is how the poll ends.   I gather that this is called "brigading". . .. don’t know what the derivation of that expression is. 

Anyway, I’ve always known that this would happen at some point, and this is how the poll ends.  We’ve had a good run; we had 120-some polls before we got here.  But polls which have an open doorway—that is, polls which allow anyone who chooses to participate to participate—have an inherent problem which will at some point sink them.  Maybe we’re not at that point yet, but it has to happen sooner or later.  Once people learn that they CAN end the poll by doing this, somebody will.

I did not enter the Andrew Yang/Beto O’Rourke poll into the data.   It’s like this:  suppose that your exercise plan is that you swim 30 minutes in your pool every morning, but you wake up one morning and discover that your neighbor’s sewer system has backed up and the overflow ran into your pool. Do you do your swimming that morning, or do you skip it?   You skip it, right?  I am just skipping that pool, not entering the results into the system.   Again, nothing against the people who did this; it was inevitable. 

For now, I’ll continue to post the daily polls, see how it goes.   It’s really easy to see when this brigading becomes a problem; there are many different signals that let you know that’s what’s happening.  I posted a poll today; I’ll post one tomorrow, see what I get.   At some point, the political partisans will flood the system, and I’ll have to stop.   It’s OK; everything comes to an end.  If it isn’t a life or a marriage, it isn’t a big deal.  I’ve gotten a lot out of it, and actually, I think I can continue the process in a different venue.  We’ll see. 

These are the current Support Scores for the 24 candidates that I am tracking:

John Hickenlooper-Scooper has dropped out of the race since my last post.  Hickenlooper had 275 points, or 2.75% of the support, so when he drops out, those 275 points have to go somewhere.  Because of that, there are 13 candidates who are up ten points or more since the last post.  Basically, they’re splitting up Hickenlooper’s 275 points, and everybody winds up a little bit ahead.  Since my last post:

Pete Buttigieg is up 91 points, almost entirely as result of the removal or an old poll, which was taken just after the South Bend police shooting.   What we learn from this is that that incident has NOT seriously wounded Buttigieg, at least with this audience. 

Also, Kamala Harris is up 22 points, Jay Inslee is up 20, Elizabeth Warren up 19, Howard Schultz up 16, Bernie Sanders up 15, Julian Castro up 14, Amy Klobuchar up 14, Michael Bennet up 13, Tim Ryan up 13, Andrew Yang up 11, Bill Weld up 10, and Tulsi Gabbard up 10.   

Joe Biden is down 16 points because. . .well, he’s Joe Biden; his campaign is slowly dying, he just hasn’t figured it out yet.  He’s down 168 points in the last month, and 436 points in the last two months. 

Thank you all for reading.  We’ll hope that we can continue for a little while longer, anyway.