July 11 Poll Report

            Good morning everybody.   I screwed up yesterday morning and posted the wrong poll candidates.  Yesterday’s poll candidates were supposed to be Williamson, Bullock, Delaney and Gravel, but I messed up and carried over the names of three candidates from the previous day, thus polling three names on two consecutive days.   It doesn’t invalidate the poll or anything; it just means that three minor candidates are going to be polled one time less than the more major candidates, which is not really an issue.  What happened was, I worked until 4:45 AM the previous morning trying to finish a project, then I had to get somewhere by 10 AM that morning, so I rushed through the (very simple) process of posting the poll, and I made that mistake.  Sorry.

            Anyway, this was yesterday’s poll result; the  much-maligned Bill de Blasio won the group:

            That has not a lot of impact on the standings, although it does help de Blasio a little and hurt Schultz a little more.  (If you’re dead, can you still be hurt?)  Anyway, yesterday’s rescission was the poll of May 21, which was Cory Booker (43%), Amy Klobuchar (42%), Steve Bullock (9%), and Eric Swalwell (6%).  At that time Booker and Klobuchar were almost tied in the Support Scores.  Klobuchar has long since passed Booker and pulled about 150 points ahead of him, so the removal of that old poll should hurt Booker and help Klobuchar although, because of the other changes in the data since yesterday, it doesn’t really show up.

            Since yesterday’s Update, I have deleted from the polling data Stacey Abrams, Jeff Flake, Eric Swalwell and Wayne Messam; I wasn’t displaying reference to Messam anyway, but he was still lurking in the background, claiming 19 Support Points out of the 10,000 being distributed.  Now he is actually gone.  I also added a space for Tom (Dire) Steyer, setting aside a few imaginary points for him because the mathematical network that creates these scores doesn’t like zeroes.   Steyer will move into the space once he is actually polled, which will be on Saturday, July 13, although I won’t display a Support Score for him until he has been polled at least three times, probably four times.   Position points based on just one poll are not reliable. 

            When a candidate is removed from the system, their points have to go somewhere else.  The system is, in essence, a way of determining how many supporters each candidate has per 10,000 voters ("voters" in this case meaning respondents to the poll, rather than election-day voters.)   When somebody drops out of the race, the people who were supporting them have to support somebody else.  The network re-distributes the points on a percentage basis. 

            So we have lots of things happening here—a new poll, a new candidate, the removal of an old poll, the removal from the data of four candidates, and the removal from the network of comparative Support Scores of all of the data derived from comparison to the four candidates who Shall Not Be Named.   The result of this is that the scores of the remaining candidates have changed by 577 points (gross) since yesterday, the highest total since the debates a couple of weeks ago.  Most of these points are being added to candidates, not as many taken away, because that’s what really happens.  Nobody LOSES support because somebody else dropped out.  Everybody adds a little support because people drop out.   Anyway, since yesterday:

            Julian Castro is up 86 points.  Castro has been surging in the Support Score standings since the debate.  The more old data we take out of the system, the faster he moves up.

            Donald Trump is up 75 points.  A reader has been re-tweeting the polls to a more conservative audience, giving us more realistic readings on Trump’s support.  As with Castro, when we take more old data out of the system, this happens more rapidly.

            Jay Inslee is up 44 points as a result of the re-evaluation of the old data.  Also, John Hickenlooper is up 28 points, Tulsi Gabbard is up 25, Steve Bullock up 21,  Bill Weld up 17, Beto O’Rourke up 15, Bernie Sanders up 13, Michael Bennet up 11, Bill de Blasio up 11, Kirsten Gillibrand up 11, Andrew Yang up 10, Seth Moulton up 8, Tim Ryan up 8, Mike Gravel up 7, and Howard Schultz up 6.

            Kamala Harris is down 30 points as a result of the re-evaluation of the old data, and

            Elizabeth Warren is down 44 points as a result of the re-evaluation of the old data.  In the last week Warren’s Support Score has dropped from 2000 to 1836.  I am still uncertain as to whether this represents an actual loss of support for her or merely a wrinkle in the data which is being smoothed out.  Since I am uncertain as to whether or not it is a "real" effect, I am regarding it as an artifact of the math. 

            If a candidate is up 25% in the last 30 days I highlight his/her support score in green and refer to him/her as on the "Green List"; if he or she is down 25%, I mark it in gray and refer to that as the Gray List.   One might guess that all of these little up-ticks would add people to the green list, but actually that doesn’t happen.   There are eight people on the Green List, but all of them were there yesterday except John Delaney, but Delaney was at 24% yesterday and would have moved onto the Green List today even without the little help from people dropping out.  Beto O’Rourke has finally gotten off the Gray List, but that, again, would have happened without the removals from the list.  Beto is still dropping, but his period of rapid decline was 30 days ago; he is no longer declining fast enough to make the Gray List. 

            There are eight people on the Green List now and only one on the Gray List, but that’s not actually related to the removals of Abrams, Flake, Swalwell and Messam from the data.  What’s actually happening is that, since the debates two weeks ago, there is more interest in the minor candidates and a little more support for them, whereas three of the four major candidates—Warren, Buttigieg, Biden—are losing a few points, nothing major, but elements of support that are trivial to them are significant to lesser candidates.  (The fourth major candidate, Kamala Harris, has not lost support but has not gained much, either.)

            In  my view, this is a significant outcome from the debate.   One might think that what would happen from the debates is that somebody would catch fire and some of the weaker candidates would disappear, but that really has not happened.   In my view, the four major candidates have missed a significant opportunity to put some space between themselves and the field.

            These are today’s standings:

            Thanks for reading.