July 13 Poll Report

            Good morning everybody.  

            My audience really does not like Bernie Sanders; previous polling had told us that, and yesterday’s poll emphasizes the point.  In National Polls Bernie Sanders is the number two Democrat, behind only the esteemed, prestigious, distinguished, unapproachable Former Vice President, Joe (Me’N Barack) Biden.  In my polling he is the #7 Democratic candidate, and yesterday’s polling was screaming "No, no; that’s too high."  In yesterday’s poll he was much closer to Tim Ryan than to Me’N Barack.   

            This is the summary of yesterday’s poll:

            The predictions for the poll were 82% accurate, which is a pretty typical figure.  What does it mean to say that the predictions were 82% accurate?  Suppose that the results of the poll had precisely matched what we would have predicted based on previous polling, every number being the same.  If the prediction is 1 number off on one candidate, I count that as a 1% error.  In yesterday’s poll, the predictions were off by 6% for Harris (62-56), 1% for Moulton, 4% for Ryan, and 8% for Sanders—a total of 19%.  That would make the poll 81% accurate, but if you save more decimals in the calculation of the predictions, then it is only 18.3%, so I count the poll as 81.7% accurate—100, minus 18.3.  

            The polls average 79% accuracy, so this one was fairly representative.  We’ve had them as high as 98% accurate, and as low as 46%. 

            I’ve got two changes to my project to announce today:  one, that I’ve invented a way to measure the degree to which the previous polling matches the day’s new polling—explained above—and two, that I’ve changed the rules for the Green and Gray Lists.  Before, I was marking a candidate in Gray if his Support Score was down 25% in the last month, and in Green if it was UP 25% of more.  But I’ve changed that so that now I’m marking them Gray if they are down 25%, but Green if they are up 33%, not 25%.   Down 25% mathematically is the same as up 33%; I suspect that most of you know why that is true.  If you go from 100 to 75, that’s a 25% decline.  If you go from 75 to 100, that’s a 33% increase. 

            Without that change, I would now have 10 candidates on the Green List as opposed to 2 candidates on the Gray List.  Even with that change, I still have 8 candidates on the Green List as opposed to 2 on the Gray List, but. . . .it’s a little more even.   Over time it will be more even. 

            Anyway, Kamala Harris was expected to Beat the Bern 56-30 and actually beat him 62-22, so she had a good day.  Not a great day.  She outperformed expectations in the poll by 10%, basically, whereas Tim Ryan outperformed expectations by 57%.   Since yesterday:

            Donald Trump is up 53 points as a result of the removal of the Poll of May 23^rd  (see comments below about Beto O’Rourke), and also as a result of the poll in recent weeks being re-tweeted by a supporter to an audience more sympathetic to Trump.   (See comments below about Beto O’Rourke.)  Due to the help of the gentleman who is tweeting it to a more conservative audience, Trump’s Support Score has more than doubled since June 20.   (I don’t mean that he is a Trump Supporter; I don’t know that.  I meant that he was supporting the polling effort.)

            Tim Ryan. . . by the way, if you abbreviate Tim Ryan as T Ryan it reads "tryan", which I like. . .anyway, Tim Ryan is up 9 points as a result of yesterday’s poll.

            Julian Castro is up 8 points as a result of secondary effects from yesterday’s polling; see comments below on Kamala Harris.

            Jay Inslee is up 8 points as a result of the removal of the May 23^rd poll from the data, and of the fact that he has done in polls taken since May 23. 

            Kamala Harris is up 6 points as a result of yesterday’s poll; six points, but over time it will be more than six points.  Over time, the removal of old "stale" polls will shift more credibility to the more recent polls.  Harris doing better in the more recent polls will shift Support Points in her direction as the older polls are eliminated, and also secondary effects.   The Support Points are calculated based on how each candidate has done in polls against specific other candidates.  When a candidate has momentum, the secondary effects are more likely to work for the candidate than against them. 

            Amy Klobuchar is down 6 points due to secondary adjustments.

            Bernie Sanders is down 23 points as  a result of his poor performance in yesterday’s poll.

            Beto O’Rourke is down 33 points, and has re-appeared on the Gray List (which he had just escaped yesterday) as a result of the removal of the May 23^rd poll from the relevant data.   The May 23 poll result was Beto O’Rourke (36%), John Kasich (30%), Donald Trump (19%) and Jay Inslee (15%).   Kasich has long since been deleted from the study, which means there are only six positioning points resulting from that poll, rather than twelve as their usually are, and this would usually limit the impact of the polls removal.  But since May 23 Trump, Inslee and O’Rourke have all moved quite significantly in our polling, Trump and Inslee up, O’Rourke down, so the impact of the removal of that poll is much greater than the impact of the addition of yesterday’s poll, the Harris-Sanders-Ryan-Moulton poll. 

            These are the updated standings:

Thanks for your interest in the project.