2022 election cycle among the most accurate in history for pollsters

Trump's support erodes in Iowa, Asian-Americans shift right

No. 257 | March 10th, 2023

🗳️ Elections

Nathaniel Rakich: The Polls Nailed The 2022 Election (FiveThirtyEight)

“Let’s give a big round of applause to the pollsters. Measuring public opinion is, in many ways, harder than ever — and yet, the polling industry just had one of its most successful election cycles in U.S. history. Despite a loud chorus of naysayers claiming that the polls were either underestimating Democratic support or biased yet again against Republicans, the polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.

Of course, some pollsters were more accurate than others. And today, we’ve updated the FiveThirtyEight pollster ratings to account for each pollster’s performance in the 2022 cycle. Our ratings are letter grades that we assign to each pollster based on historical accuracy and transparency. They’re one of many tools you should use when deciding how much stock to place in a poll.”

FiveThirtyEight’s Pollster Ratings (FiveThirtyEight)

“FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings are calculated by analyzing the historical accuracy of each polling organization’s polls along with its methodology. Accuracy scores are adjusted for the type of election polled, the poll’s sample size, the performance of other polls surveying the same race and other factors. We also calculate measures of statistical bias in the polls. When a pollster publishes multiple versions of the same survey (for example, versions with and without third-party candidates included), FiveThirtyEight uses an average of the different versions to calculate the pollster’s rating. However, all versions of these polls are listed here.”

How Our Pollster Ratings Work (FiveThirtyEight)

“Longtime readers of FiveThirtyEight are probably familiar with our pollster ratings: letter grades that we assign to pollsters based on their historical accuracy and transparency. Since 2008, we have been evaluating pollsters and using these ratings to inform both the public and our models about the quality of individual polls. Over the years, the methodology for these ratings has evolved, but the fundamental principle has remained the same: look at all the polls we have that were conducted within three weeks of an election, and try to determine how accurate each pollster has been and might be in the future.

[Our pollster ratings dashboard is where ] you’ll see a graph with every pollster we have evaluated, organized by their most recent rating, as well as a searchable and sortable table of all the pollsters. Each pollster also has an individual rating page that shows details about its rating, including all the polls we’ve analyzed by that pollster and their accuracy.

Our pollster ratings are based on a metric called Predictive Plus-Minus. This metric is based on several key factors, including:

• Simple error for polls (i.e., how far away the poll results are from the actual election margin).

• How well other pollsters performed in the same races (i.e., whether this pollster is as good as, better than or worse than others).

• Methodological quality (i.e., whether this pollster is conducting polls in accordance with professional standards).

• Herding (i.e., whether this pollster appears to just be copying others’ results)."

Seth Masket: Trump Is Losing His Grip on the Grassroots (Politico)

Republican grassroots leaders are increasingly losing interest in former President Donald Trump — and eyeing Ron DeSantis for the 2024 presidential campaign.

That’s according to a new survey I conducted with GOP county chairs across the country, the first survey in an ongoing project that will be featured in POLITICO Magazine over the next year. It’s designed to track the shifting state of what’s often called the “invisible primary,” that lengthy, and critical, period between now and when actual voting in the 2024 presidential primaries begins. Future surveys will focus on the views of Democratic Party chairs, and some will survey both parties at once.

It’s still early in the campaign, and many respondents are not yet committed to a presidential candidate. But the survey results are a potentially ominous sign for Trump as he seeks to claw his way back to the White House in the face of resistance from key party actors.”

Brianne Pfannenstiel, Francesca Block: Iowa Poll: Donald Trump’s Republican support erodes in Iowa, even as many remain committed (Des Moines Register)

“Many Iowa Republicans remain committed to Donald Trump, but the former president is seeing his support erode as campaigning begins to heat up ahead of Iowa’s 2024 presidential caucuses, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows.  

Trump, who launched a third White House bid late last year, has seen his favorability numbers in the first-in-the-nation caucus state steadily decline among Republicans since they peaked in September 2021. 

And the percentage of Iowa Republicans who say they would “definitely” vote for him if he were the nominee in 2024 has plummeted by more than 20 percentage points since June 2021.”

Jason Kao: Where New York’s Asian Neighborhoods Shifted to the Right (New York Times)

“In last year’s governor’s election, voters in Asian neighborhoods across New York City sharply increased their support for Republicans. Though these areas remained blue overall, they shifted to the right by 23 percentage points, compared with 2018, after more than a decade of reliably backing Democrats.

It was the largest electoral shift in Asian neighborhoods in the period from 2006 to 2022, the longest available span of election results by precinct, according to a New York Times analysis. The Times interviewed more than 20 community organization leaders, scholars and local politicians who serve or study Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in New York. In recent years, they said, Republican candidates have increased their presence in Asian neighborhoods. They added that Republicans have also benefited from residents’ sense of being overlooked by Democratic leaders and that Republicans’ tough-on-crime stance attracted voters after increased anti-Asian violence.”

📊  Polling & Public Attitudes

How Young Adults Want Their Country to Engage with the World (Pew Research)

“Decades of cross-national surveys have found that younger people tend to be more internationally oriented than older adults. They usually have more positive views of international organizations and foreign countries and are more likely to prioritize international cooperation.

But young people differ from one another over how they want their country to engage with the world. Some feel their country has an obligation to people beyond their borders. Others doubt their country has the resources to pursue international actions. To better understand these perspectives, we conducted 16 focus groups with young adults in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.”

👫 Demographics

Derek Thompson: The Surprising Effects of Remote Work (The Atlantic)

“In the past half century, Americans have had fewer and fewer babies with almost every passing decade; in 2020, the U.S. reported the lowest official fertility rate on record. But last year, statisticians observed a surprising baby bump. Researchers weren’t entirely sure what had happened. Maybe this was random noise. Maybe, like so many pandemic effects, it was a weird one-off phenomenon.

A new paper puts forth a fascinating theory: Maybe remote work is making it easier for couples to become parents—and for parents to have more children. The economist Adam Ozimek and the demographer Lyman Stone looked at survey data of 3,000 American women from the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey. They concluded that female remote workers were more likely to intend to have a baby than all-office workers, especially if they were richer, older, and more educated. What’s more, remote workers in the survey were more likely to marry in the next year than their nonremote counterparts.”

The Programs You’d Have to Cut to Balance the Budget (New York Times)

“Several conservative lawmakers say House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised a House vote on a balanced federal budget. That’s a harder task than it sounds, given the size of the federal deficit.

More recently, Mr. McCarthy has said he doesn’t want to cut spending on defense, Medicare or Social Security — or raise taxes. Those constraints mean cuts to the rest of the budget would have to be brutal.

The Republican Study Committee, a group that includes 173 of the 222 Republican House members, has offered a fairly detailed plan. Its budget includes deep cuts to Medicaid and to discretionary spending on things other than defense, the part of the budget that funds functions like environmental protection, public transportation, medical research and homeland security. But those changes alone don’t get the budget to balance. The committee also relies on significant reductions in Social Security and Medicare to erase the deficit.”

🖥  Digital Data

Jeff Asher: How TikTok Helped Cause A Surge In Auto Thefts (Substack)

“Changes in national crime trends are usually gradually seen and difficult to explain. Property crime has generally been falling slowly for the better part of two decades. Murder fell in the 1990s at a relatively steady single-digit percent clip with numerous potential causes that bely easy explanation even today.

One exception to gradually changing crime trends is the rise in gun violence that began in mid-2020. This spike was sudden and clearly tied chronologically to the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The sudden increase in gun violence in 2020 is still not easy to explain nor is it simple to say why gun violence has remained persistently high in the 2.5 years since.

The rise in auto thefts in 2022, therefore, is something of an outlier: a sudden change in crime that is easily explained by a single event. In this case, a video posted on TikTok has led to a massive increase in car thefts across many — though not all — US cities with available data.”