I do think there are real reasons why Alaska is hard. The Alaska Native issue is real, though I do wonder if it's a bit overstated given their share of the electorate. There are *a lot* of people with missing age or party registration.
On the other hand, there was a whole lot of talk about how hard Alaska was in 2014 and the final poll averages in the Senate were better than a lot of places? The polls so far this year seem pretty in line with reasonable, fundamentals based expectations, as well
That said, some states definitely pose novel challenges, and it's hard to build a solution until you've tried the state and seen what it's really like. We've certainly ran into unexpectedly tough states/CDs, struggled on take one, and figured it out with benefit of experience.
So that's pretty tough in this case. We're getting in toward three weeks until an election. We could try it and be stuck with a real mess, and we probably couldn't go back for a second round, even if a first try yielded the kind of insights that might let us do it well
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Here's something I didn't realize: Alyse Galvin (IND, but Dem nominee) has led Don Young (R) in all three polls of AK-AL this cycle. Mainly Dem/progressive sponsored surveys, but still interesting projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/house/al…
OTOH, it's interesting that the one pure nonpartisan poll here also showed Gavin up in the days ahead of the 2018 election, and Young did quite well among the state's Alaska Native population--which is generally believed to be a particularly tough group to reach in surveys
If the group is so hard to reach that you can't even weight them up, and you end up clumping it in with the more reliably Democratic 'other nonwhite' category, then you can wind up in a spot where you're pretty good in, say, the presidential race but maybe underestimate Young
One fascinating thing is that most people look at these maps and think there are too many people in the cities.
In both states, the raw sample is slightly too rural (and weighted appropriately)
There are lots of things in polling that are hard to get right. The *number* of voters in rural areas is not hard to get right. The number of rural RVs, for instance, is just a cold hard fact. We can make our polls match it.
As you can see, we have the... latitude and longitude on our respondents. That's an extremely powerful tool for getting urban-rural splits right.
Over all, I do think the NYT/Siena results in OH/NV and the Marquette Law results for WI are *relatively* good for the president. They're more like the polls we saw before the debate than the Biden>10 type numbers we've seen a lot of lately
Now, I think these are two pretty good pollsters. But we're at the point where the 'good' news for the president is basically the old average, and that's generally a sign things have shifted.
FWIW, I don't see much evidence of nonresponse bias in our polling, or, frankly, even in the polls that do show Biden doing super well. That Biden+12 in PA was D+1 among RVs, after all, and maybe even R+1 among LVs, like our PA poll, @PollsterPatrick ?
Joe Biden leads Donald Trump in Ohio and Nevada, according to new Times/Siena polls.
Biden leads in Ohio by 1 point, 45 to 44 percent.
Biden leads in Nevada by 6 points, 48 to 42 percent. nytimes.com/2020/10/07/us/…
The polls began on Sat., after the president's diagnosis. FWIW, the president's best interviews were yesterday, after he was released from the hospital, controlling for demog. That said, it's always tough to judge one night--let alone the last night, when we're finishing quotas
Unlike in our FL/PA release, when we had AZ already started heading into the last night of PA/FL interviews, we didn't have another poll under way on Monday to help make this kind of analysis more robust
I mean, by now you should probably know that you all have very little ability to predict our results based on this information, but:
OH: R+3 party ID, Trump+8 in recalled '16 vote
NV: D+4 party ID, Clinton+2 in recalled '16 vote