Polling Results 5-7-2019

Elizabeth Warren Moves Into First Place

            Good morning, everybody.  I was away from my computer all day yesterday, first of all spending the day at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and then travelling back home to Kansas, so I have not yet had the opportunity to read your comments from yesterday.

            Elizabeth Warren slightly over-performed expectations in yesterday’s poll, which, since the top three were very close anyway, was enough to push Warren ahead of Buttigieg and Harris and into first place in my polling.   Based on previous results we would have expected Warren to get 57% in yesterday’s poll.  She actually got 59%--not a huge difference, obviously, but enough to improve her score from 1052 to 1069.   The 17-point improvement is actually a 28-point improvement, because of. . . .see next paragraph, below the current results.  These are the current results:

            I had not previously polled Michael Bennet, who just entered the race.   Bennet got 6% in yesterday’s poll, which gives him a score of 113, which means that about 113 of each 10,000 respondents would choose Bennet, or 1%.   This 1% has to come out of the "scores" of the 26 candidates previously included in the polls, which means that they each lose 1%.   So Elizabeth Warren moves up from 1052 to 1069 despite the 1% downward technical adjustment, which means that her 17-point gain is actually a 28-point gain.  That’s not 28%; that’s 28 hundredths of one percent.  It is not a big deal, but it does move her into first place in my polling. 

            For the third straight poll, Cory Booker performed markedly below the expectations created by the first three times that he was polled.   Booker had a predicted performance based on the previous polls of 23%, but came in at 17%.   Most of that ground was not actually surrendered to Elizabeth Warren; most of it was actually lost to Bill Weld, who out-performed expectations by a margin of 18 to 14.   This causes Booker to fall in the scores and Weld to move up, obviously, but in neither case it is enough to effect their positions in the rankings.   Booker remains in 10^th place and Weld in 12^th place, although the space between them shrinks from 170 points to 120 points. 

            The rankings are the same as yesterday except that:

1)      Warren passed Buttigieg and Harris,

2)     Bennet moved from "not polled" to 22^nd, which pushes the bottom five candidates down a notch,

3)     Tulsi Gabbard moved ahead of Jeff Flake, which is a technical adjustment based on a re-evaluation of older polls based on the information from the new poll, and

4)     Seth Moulton edged ahead of Mike Gravel (69-68), again based on a re-evaluation of the older polls based on the information from the new poll.

To help you get a little bit better understanding of the process, we have now polled Elizabeth Warren five times.  Each poll gives us 3 data points by which to evaluate her, which is her performance versus each of the other three candidates in each poll.  Her worst "score", among those 15, is 1007, which is based on poll #24 (May 3), in which Warren got 47%, and John Kasich got 32%.    Based on the sum total of the other polling, we would have expected Warren to beat Kasich by a slightly wider margin than that (I think 48-31), so that leads to a slightly lower score for Warren.   Her best "score" is 1141, based on her performance compared to Beto O’Rourke in the same poll, May 3; in that one Warren beat O’Rourke 47-18, which is a wider margin than she would have been expected to beat O’Rourke, based on the other polls, so that leads to a higher score.

Triangulating Warren’s positions based on the poll results and the standing of the other candidates, we thus have scores for Warren in the range of 1007 to 1141.   These are the 15 "polling positions" that we have for Elizabeth Warren:

            1048, based on beating John Hickenlooper 45-21 in Poll #6

            1078, based on beating Bernie Sanders 45-22 in Poll #6

            1011, based on beating Tim Ryan 45-12 in Poll #6

1015, based on beating Tulsi Gabbard 67-16 in Poll #7

1059, based on beating Jay Inslee 67-9 in Poll #7

1068, based on beating Eric Swallwell 67-8 in Poll #7

1090, based on beating Howard Schultz 68-13 in Poll #22

1089, based on beating Bill Weld 68-16 in Poll #22

1073, based on beating Wayne Messam 68-2 in Poll #22

1091, based on beating Mike Gravel 47-2 in Poll #24

1007, based on beating John Kasich 47-32 in Poll #24

1141, based on beating Beto O’Rourke 47-18 in Poll #24

1073, based on beating Michael Bennett 59-6 in Poll #26 (yesterday)

1137, based on beating Cory Booker 59-17 in Poll #26

1031, based on beating Bill Weld 59-18 in Poll #26

So she is undefeated, having finished first in all five polls in which she has appeared, which I did not know until I prepared that summary for you, since the calculation process does not record poll results as wins or losses.   No one has beaten Buttigieg or Harris in a poll yet, either.  Sooner or later they will bump up against one another in a trial heat.  

Thank you all for reading.  I appreciate your interest in my interests.  Tomorrow’s poll candidates will be Julian Castro, Beto O’Rourke, Jeff Flake and Tulsi Gabbard.  In today’s poll, with 589 votes cast so far, Joe Biden is over-performing a little bit, while one of the four candidates is dramatically underperforming based on previous results.