Biden's lead is up to 12.7 on the USC tracker, his all time high. election.usc.edu
It's a particularly interesting day to take note of the USC tracker, since it's a two week field-period and it's been two long weeks since the first presidential debate. So today will be the last day, I believe, with any pre-debate data.
Biden's lead has grown 3.2 pts since 9/29
Biden's gains ought to begin to slow once all of the pre-debate interviews are cycled out. It could even begin to decline, if more recent interviews are better for Trump than immediately post-debate. So it'll be a relatively interesting few days for following the USC trends
Looking at the 7 day tracker though, it sure seems like Biden's could keep gaining, even after the debate. Biden's running 6 pts ahead of his standing in the 7 day tracker from 9/29, which ought to be the most comparable date given the 7-day tracker periodicity bias
In general, I'm pretty open-minded about the range of possibilities in this election. I'm also very slow to judge pollsters based on crosstabs, since I think so much of what goes on down there is just noise that cancels out. But...
Quinnipiac has had *a lot* of polls showing Biden doing really, really well among white southerners, including white southerners without a degree in the Deep South. And hey, maybe it'll happen. But that's a far-fetched possibility IMO, and pollster bias is the easier explanation
And no, I don't know why or how. I mean, even our sample of white no degree voters in ATL+inner burbs was just 30% Biden--I assume they call outside of those four counties. Biden was at 13% in the rest of the state
I honestly don't understand why people want to push undecided voters to make up a mind in a race when they barely know the candidates. Knowing that they're undecided is a lot more valuable
There are some structural reasons why we do get higher undecided voters than other polls:
--probablistic LV screen keeps some number of people who say they won't vote, who are far likelier to be undecided
--we have far more low turnout voters, who are far likelier to be undecided
--we're naming the third party candidates, and in any given survey a decent number are backing a minor party candidate, even if I don't tweet about them
Joe Biden leads in Wisconsin and Michigan by a significant margin, according to new Times/Siena polls.
Biden leads Trump by 10 in Wisconsin, 51 to 41 percent.
Biden leads by 8 in Michigan, 48 to 40 nytimes.com/2020/10/12/ups…
Perhaps the most interesting result: Gary Peters (D) holds just a 1 point lead over John James (R), 43-42, in the race for US Senate in Michigan, down from a 10 point lead in June
The polls offered little reason to think that the last week's events had worked in the president's favor, at a time when every week counts.
Voters overwhelmingly thought he should have participated in the virtual debate, and thought Harris won the VP debate
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
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