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Lakshya Jain Profile picture
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5 Aug, 8 tweets, 2 min read
It's well known that SurveyUSA can't poll California -- they've had several ridiculous polls over the last several years that border on polling malpractice.

But this result is fairly shocking. Let's dive in further to see what's going on. 🧵
To begin with, their sample of *registered voters* is kind of off in partisanship and race.

The D/R/Ind. splits in February 2021, per the CA SOS: 46/24/24

The SurveyUSA poll: 46/29/22
The racial splits are kind of strange too. We know, from AP voter analysis, that the CA electorate was ~54% White, 7% Black, 24% Latino, 15% Asian/other.

SurveyUSA has the *registered voter* sample at 61% White, 4% Black, and 15% Latino. That's quite off.
Okay, let's move to the likely voter screen. The electorate is 70% white, which would be an absolutely phenomenal spike in the white share, even for an off-year. But their partisanship splits are even more crazy
Okay, if you have a ~70% turnout rate among registered voters, as SurveyUSA has, that's not especially low-turnout. 36% of the electorate is Republican, 41% Democratic. With some hasty, back of the envelope math, the GOP would need...105% turnout among their registered voters.
SurveyUSA has shown an extreme inability to poll California several times in the past. It's why I'm not inclined to take this poll very seriously either.
If you want to argue that this race should be moved to lean D because of the polling, then that's because you take this poll seriously. I don't. If I did, I would move it too. But I don't. I'm sticking to likely D and this poll does not occupy an ounce of credibility in my mind.
Oh, and if the recall succeeds, Kevin Paffrath is probably not going to become Governor. That's just the result you get when you poll *one* Democrat out of the nine running against a field of six Republicans. This is stupid.

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Lakshya Jain Profile picture
4 Aug
On that @StPetePolls result mentioned in this column, I'm a bit skeptical for a few reasons:

-Biden having a 21% GOP approval rating and only a 77% Dem approval rating
-Biden returning to Clinton levels of support in Miami

That's a huge change in just 8 months.
Something like that would be extraordinary, but that'd require a fair bit of extra evidence to make me think that the change is by that much. And although I expect Crist to outperform Biden with whites by a fair amount, a 10% overperformance is a *lot*.
I mean, I could actually plausibly believe Crist is at 40% with whites; I just don't think he gains on it by too much, and I'd think undecideds break for DeSantis.

On another note, the difference in candidate quality between Crist and Fried is now being shown in several polls
Read 4 tweets
Lakshya Jain Profile picture
3 Aug
I still don’t think this happens — I don’t think Democrats vote to recall by this margin, and a governor with a +5 approval likely doesn’t lose. But the poll has a Biden +30 electorate. It’s the first real poll I’ve seen with some genuinely concerning signs.
Previous polls were all varying degrees of ridiculous with LV screens. This one seems to rely heavily on persuasion, particularly with Hispanics and independents. If Newsom is actually underwater with those groups by double digits, he probably only survives by like 5.
Anyways, each cycle has ebbs and flows in polling, so I still stick to my notion that it *should* revert more to state partisanship and hold to my likely D rating. But in the absence of any other evidence, that’s the type of poll that would set off some actual concern.
Read 4 tweets
Lakshya Jain Profile picture
1 Aug
Based on the evidence available, this race is no longer safe D, at least for now.

That said, Newsom has just begun campaigning and the undecideds break strongly Democratic. I expect that we’ll see things revert towards the state’s base partisanship as the recall approaches.
I’d be very surprised if this works for the GOP and if it doesn’t revert — we’ve seen that the undecideds don’t split evenly in heavily R/D states and CA’s universal vote by mail system helps solve a turnout problem for Ds. But he can’t sleep on it, and I don’t expect he will.
On evidence available to us for this race, it’s *currently* likely D. That’s not safe, and Newsom can’t sleep on it

But I don’t expect he will, and he’s starting to crank up campaigning. As voters begin to pay more attention, I’d expect Dems begin to get fired up and vote too.
Read 4 tweets
Lakshya Jain Profile picture
27 Jul
A hot-button issue has been “should CA Dems have picked a backup on the recall ballot?”

No. Newsom’s goal is to turn out Dem voters. Adding another D candidate splinters the vote and means some might vote Yes on recall and Yes to the replacement to get them into the office.
“Why not just have everyone coalesce around No and then have a backup just in case?”

Because that’s not how it works. Voters are messy, campaigns are messy, and there will be some defections from folks who are anti-Newsom and love the Dem alternative. You don’t want infighting.
The absolute last thing you want is a war on two fronts — you don’t need to fight your base and the opponents at the same time. “No on Recall, Yes on Bustamante” failed spectacularly in 2003 and led to the end of the careers of basically everyone involved.
Read 6 tweets
Lakshya Jain Profile picture
23 Jul
Okay, a more detailed thread of thoughts on "is it possible to out-organize voter suppression"...the answer is that "it depends" on a lot of things, not least of which is "what do you mean by voter suppression?".
Does voter suppression include gerrymandering? You can argue for one way or another, but a goal in voter suppression is to explicitly and intentionally deny a group of people adequate representation, and gerrymandering does that pretty well.
Can you out-organize maps that give the GOP a built-in R+10 advantage during a neutral year? No. End of story. If I remember the literature correctly, organizing probably makes, at best, a difference of one or two points -- maybe less. Which is important! But not enough.
Read 8 tweets
Lakshya Jain Profile picture
17 Jul
Ignoring baseline partisanship and going solely by race and education-based splits, Democrats performed about 8% below expected in Florida in 2020.

The struggles with the Cuban community are well-documented, but they also perform *way* worse than expected among college whites. Image
I see the white retiree issue, but here's the thing: it's not just Democrats struggling with them; that's not the underperformance area that stands out to me. There's a persistent underperformance among college-educated whites that cuts against the state's demographic profile.
I don't think there's honestly much to instill confidence in me that we reverse this, but if they wanted to do it, there's a path, even if it's very hard. 60% of Floridans are pro-choice, 73% are pro-climate action. 67% are majorly pro-criminal justice reform.
Read 5 tweets

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