July 17 Poll Report

            Good morning everybody.   Yesterday’s poll went 92% as we expected it to go, based on previous polling.   We expected Julian Castro to win the day with an anticipated 44% of the vote, and he did in fact win the day with 44%.  The only thing that happened in that poll was that Kirsten Gillibrand took 3% away from John Delaney and 1% away from Michael Bennet:

            The discrepancies are so small that they don’t really have any meaningful impact on the standings.   Of more significance was the poll that we removed from the data considered relevant, which was the voting of May 27^th, which was Buttigieg (70%), Gabbard (13%), Hickenlooper (11%) and Michael Bennet (6%).  The removal of that poll has larger effects.  Since yesterday:

            Michael Bennet is up 13 points, despite the 1-point underperformance yesterday, due to the removal of the May 27^th poll from the data.   Bennet has been steadily moving upward in the poll over the last two weeks.  He was at 126 on July 2^nd, got 41% against a weak group on the poll on that date, moved up to 133, moved up to 137 as a secondary adjustment on July 6, moved up to 143 as the result of the removal of an old poll on July 7, and moved up to 145 as a secondary adjustment on July 8.  He did well on the poll that was taken on July 8 (he got 27% in a field that included Bernie Sanders), and moved up to 157 as a result of that (July 9), moved up to 168 on July 11, when we removed Jeff Flake, Stacey Abrams, Eric Swalwell and Wayne Messam from the polling group and distributed their Support Points among the remaining candidates.  He went up to 171 on July 15, as a secondary adjustment, and is up to 183 today as the result of the removal of the May 27^th poll from the data.  The 1% under-performance in yesterday’s poll doesn’t hurt him to any meaningful extent.  Anyway, he has moved up 57 points in 15 days, which puts him on the Green List for the first time.  I like Bennet, based on what little I know about him; he seems like a sensible person, and based on what I know about him, my impression is that I could vote for him.

            John Hickenlooper is up 11 points as a result of the removal of the May 27^th poll.

            Kirsten Gillibrand is up 9 points as a result of doing well in yesterday’s poll.

            John Delaney is down 9 points as a result of under-performing in yesterday’s poll, and

            Pete Buttigieg is down 26 points as a result of the removal of the May 27^th poll from the data.  He got 70% on May 27; that’s hard to sustain.  Buttigieg, now at 975 (9.75%) has fallen under 1,000 (10%) for the first time since May 15^th.   This is consistent with the post-debate trend, discussed here several times in the past, of the leaders declining, giving away a little bit of support to a variety of lesser-known, less-supported candidates.   Warren is down 7% from her peak score on June 27, the date of the first debate. Biden is down 25% from his peak score, also on June 27, and Harris is down 5% from her peak on July 8^th, and is up only 1% since June 27.  Meanwhile, a whopping ten candidates are now marked in green, meaning that each of them is up 33% in the last 30 days:

            I see what I am doing with these polls as being a logical continuation of what I have done all of my career.  There is a passage in the writings of Harvard’s William James in which he says, in essence, that it is the task of the thinking man to unite the questions of the earth with the questions of the sky; that is, to make a meaningful link between the small, every-day facts of life and the great eternal questions.  Although I didn’t discover that passage in his writings until I was past 50 years old and have now lost track of the citation because I am now way past 50, I think that that is exactly what I have always done.   The Runs Created method is in essence a way of uniting the common events of every game—singles, doubles, triples, walks—with the larger question of the game of baseball:  How are runs scored?  The Pythagorean Method is a way of uniting Runs with the yet larger question of how runs are related to wins.  The original Hall of Fame Monitor, from the 1970s or early 1980s, was/is a system of uniting the common events of a career—hitting .300, driving in 100 runs, etc.—with the greater question of who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.  

            My criticism of what I call Old Fogey polling is exactly the same:  that it has so little focus on the small questions that it cannot possibly create an accurate portrayal of the bigger picture.  The Old Fogey polling method completely fails to distinguish the support of Marianne Williamson from that of Tim Ryan or John Hickenlooper.  They poll 800 people, mostly people who, pardon my French, don’t give a shit about the candidates, and 790 of the 800 will recall the name of Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or maybe Amy Klobuchar, with just a trace of the vote left to be divided among Jay Inslee and Bill de Blasio and Steve Bullock.  They don’t have any idea how these candidates stand with regard to one another, who is moving up, who is moving down, who is stronger, who is weaker. 

            My method draws 1,000 votes a day divided among four candidates, so that the distinctions between relatively weak, quite weak, relatively strong, moderately weak but gaining, moderately weak but losing. . .so that these distinctions become clear, and I actually do know how Michael Bennet stands compared to Tulsi Gabbard.   To the best of my knowledge, mine is the only poll that does that, and the people who read my poll reports are the only people who actually know that.  This is what I have done all of my career:  focus on the exact answers to the small questions, in such a manner that they help us to understand the bigger picture.   Thanks for reading.