Mark Blumenthal

New Wisconsin Poll: Scott Walker Maintains Lead Over Tom Barrett

2012-05-30T15:27:00-04:00

WASHINGTON -- The latest independent poll in Wisconsin shows Republican Gov. Scott Walker maintaining his lead over his Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, in the gubernatorial recall election set for June 5.

The new poll of 600 likely voters, conducted by Marquette University Law School from May 23 to 26, shows Walker leading Barrett by seven percentage points (52 to 45 percent). Two weeks earlier, another Marquette Law School poll had Walker leading by six points (50 to 44 percent).

"Very little has changed," said Marquette pollster Charles Franklin via Twitter. Given the four-point margin of sampling error associated with each poll, the gap between the candidates is statistically unchanged.

Democrats have been encouraged, nonetheless, by three recently released internal polls showing a closer race. Specifically, polls sponsored by the Barrett campaign and the Democratic Governors Association showed narrower Walker leads of four and three percentage points, respectively. A third poll paid for by the pro-labor Greater Wisconsin Committee, conducted over the Memorial Day weekend using an automated, recorded-voice methodology, found the race to be dead even.

Barrett pollster Fred Yang told The Huffington Post that the internal polls differed from earlier surveys because the latter had been conducted before the Barrett campaign started running television advertising on May 14.

But the Marquette Law School poll shows no trend toward Barrett. Although it is just one poll, it also found candidate favorability ratings consistent with its voter preference results: The Marquette poll shows Walker's personal rating essentially unchanged at 51 percent favorable, 46 percent unfavorable (it was 48 percent favorable, 48 percent unfavorable two weeks earlier). Meanwhile, Barrett's name recognition has increased, leading his favorable rating to rise by four points (from 37 to 41 percent) and his unfavorable rating to rise by seven (from 39 to 46 percent).

Via Twitter, Franklin warned against focusing on "only one pollster" and noted that the larger "array" of polls show a "close race, with most giving Walker a lead." Twelve polls were released in May, including the Democrats' internal polls, and all but one found Walker ahead. None showed Barrett leading.

With the Democrats' internal polls included, the HuffPost Pollster chart of all available Wisconsin polls gives Walker a lead of just under one point (49.0 to 48.2 percent) and shows a trend to Barrett. With the internal polls removed, however, the trend is flat and shows roughly the same Walker margin (51.9 to 44.0 percent) as the Marquette Law School poll does.

Full disclosure: Professor Franklin and this reporter co-founded the site Pollster.com, the forerunner to HuffPost Pollster.

Elizabeth Warren-Scott Brown Poll: Still Deadlocked

2012-05-24T00:16:00-04:00

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Scott Brown and his Democratic challenger are nearly tied in the race for a Massachusetts Senate seat, according to a poll released Wednesday night. This new result suggests that relentlessly negative news coverage over allegations that Warren embellished her biography have had little impact on a race that has remained deadlocked for months.

The new poll, conducted by the Suffolk University Political Research Center and sponsored by Boston television station 7News, gave Brown a one percentage point edge over Warren (48 percent to 47 percent), with just 5 percent undecided. The survey of 600 likely voters in Massachusetts was conducted from May 20 to 22.

The new results are a close match to two surveys conducted by other organizations in early May. Warren and Brown were exactly tied in both an automated Rasmussen Reports poll (with 45 percent each) and an internal poll paid for by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (46 percent each). But polls by other organizations have produced slightly different estimates of where the candidates stand for months.

The HuffPost pollster chart, which combines all of the publicly available survey data into trend lines that attempt to smooth out the variation among individual polls, has shown a generally close race since December. Its current estimate shows Warren leading Brown by 1.5 percentage points (45.8 percent to 44.3 percent).

Warren's standing on the latest Suffolk University poll represents an improvement from the previous survey in early February that gave Brown a nine percentage point lead (49 percent to 40 percent).

But comparisons to the previous survey may be misleading, given criticism leveled at the last poll for asking a series of questions just before the vote preference measure that may have inflated Brown's standing. Even Brown's pollster, Republican Neil Newhouse, expressed doubts about the order of questions on the previous Suffolk survey.

The new survey included questions about the Native American controversy. Nearly three quarters of the voters (72 percent) said they were aware of it, but when asked if Warren is "telling the truth about her claims to be part Native American," 49 percent said yes and 28 percent said no. Voters split, but tilted slightly in Warren's direction, on the question of whether she "benefited by listing herself as a minority hire" -- 41 percent said yes, 45 percent said no. But only 27 percent said they considered the issue to be a "significant story."

The controversy appears to have left the Massachusetts Senate race where it has been for months: Very close and far from over.

This article was updated to include a HuffPost pollster chart.

Polls In Tennessee And North Dakota Raise Questions About Sampling

2012-05-21T16:57:26-04:00

WASHINGTON -- Is the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney shaping up as a "virtual tie" in Tennessee? Is the likely Republican nominee leading the U.S. Senate race in North Dakota?

Headlines making both assertions have appeared in the last week, but both depend on reading too much into poll results based on populations being sampled either too broadly or too narrowly.

In Tennessee, a poll of adults sponsored by the Nashville Tennessean and conducted by Vanderbilt University's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions showed President Barack Obama running just a single percentage point behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (41 percent to 42 percent). The result for adults led the Tennessean poll story and the headline chosen matched that tally: "Obama closes gap with Romney." An Obama fundraiser quoted in the story proclaimed Tennessee to be "a toss-up state."

Less prominently, the Tennessean story also included some far more relevant results, however. Among the self-identified registered voters interviewed for the poll, Romney led Obama by a statistically meaningful 7 percentage point margin (or 47 to 40 percent). The article also reported that John Geer, a Vanderbilt political science professor who helped direct the poll, considered Romney's lead among registered voters the "more likely outcome in November."

Geer was right to focus more on the registered voter subgroup, as those results are a far better gauge of the potential electorate six months before an election than a cluster of all adults. As the National Council on Public Polls argued in its "20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results," the people chosen for the base of calculations is critical. The council recommended looking for pre-election results based on registered or "likely" voters rather than all adults.

Otherwise, the Tennessean poll had no obvious methodological issues. It was conducted by a highly respected call center, reached subjects on land line and mobile phone numbers and was overseen by a bipartisan advisory board. And the results among registered voters mirrored those of a poll conducted in February by Middle Tennessee State University that showed Romney leading Obama by 6 percentage points (47 percent to 41 percent).

Of course, both polls suggest a closer race in Tennessee than the 15 percentage point margin by which John McCain defeated Obama there in 2008, but both new polls assign Obama about the same percentage of the vote (40 percent to 41 percent) that he received in Tennessee four years ago.

In North Dakota, a poll by the Fargo-Moorhead Forum on May 17 showed Republican Rep. Rick Berg leading Democrat Heidi Heitkamp by 7 percentage points (51 percent to 44 percent), but Democratic critics charged that this poll had too narrow a sample.

In this case the poll, conducted by Iowa based Essman/Research, screened for "likely voters" but for the wrong election. The poll of 500 likely primary voters had been designed to measure preferences in North Dakota's June 12 primary, not the November general election, but included a question about the likely general election contest between Berg and Heitkamp.

Democrats immediately criticized the survey. The Heitkamp campaign put out a statement, calling out what it described as the poll's "deeply flawed methods." Via Twitter, Heitkamp pollster Mark Mellman attacked the poll and argued that "ethics require retraction."

The Forum's reaction was largely defensive. On May 18, it published an article about Democratic criticism of the poll, quoting several political handicappers about whether the results seemed right (most of them did), but largely ducking the substance of the criticism. Another article the next day reviewed the history of Forum polls, stating that they "have often hit their mark. " Finally, on May 19, Forum editor Matthew Von Pinnon published an editorial bemoaning the partisan attacks, standing behind the poll and asserting with confidence that it "was conducted fairly and independently."

Von Pinnon's editorial also addressed the substantive argument that the poll had sampled only likely voters for a primary election in which "Republicans have two contested federal primary races and Democrats have none." That sampling would skew "the political profile of the poll respondents," he wrote, summarizing the Democrats' argument, since "more Republicans are likely to vote June 12."

But Von Pinnon rejected that theory, claiming that the "nonpartisan measures" on the June 12 ballot will make turnout "similar to a nonpresidential general election." The ballot measures have North Dakota election officials "bracing for a record primary turnout," one that's "similar, in fact, to a general election," Von Pinnon wrote.

There are two problems with that argument. First, Heitkamp and Berg will face the voters later this year, in a presidential general election, not in an off year. Second, it would take quite a record turnout in the primary to match the 321,133 voters who voted in the 2008 general election. Primary elections in North Dakota typically draw about only a third as many voters. According to election statistics published by the North Dakota Secretary of State, the high since 1980 was 146,867 in the 1992 primary election. Over the last 10 years, primary turnouts have ranged from a low of 92,066 to a high of 128,519.

The issue is not whether the poll was conducted fairly or independently or whether handicappers think the results seem right, but about whether the poll sample should be characterized as representative of the general electorate. Von Pinnon argued that it is "reasonable" to think that the answers provided by primary voters "might mirror those of the general electorate." They might.

But without measuring both -- as the Vanderbilt poll did with adults and registered voters in Tennessee -- how would we know for sure?

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Vanderbilt University.

Poll Response Rates Fall 'Dramatically,' Pew Research Finds

2012-05-15T14:08:15-04:00

WASHINGTON -- How low can they go? A new study from the Pew Research Center released on Tuesday finds that poll response rates continue to fall "dramatically," reaching levels once considered unimaginable.

Yet the study also finds evidence that on most of the wide variety of measures tested, the declining response rates alone are not causing surveys to yield inaccurate results.

In just 15 years, according to the report, typical response rates obtained by the Pew Research Center have fallen from 36 percent in 1997 to 15 percent three years ago to just 9 percent so far in 2012. The most recent decline results partly from the inclusion of cellphone numbers in its samples in order to reach the rapidly growing number of American adults who have a mobile phone but lack landline telephone service. But the Pew Research landline response rates have also fallen (from 25 percent in 2007 to 10 percent this year) and are now only slightly higher than the response rates currently achieved with cellphones (7 percent).

The report released today is based on the third iteration of a study, first conducted in 1997, that involves two parallel surveys: One uses the standard, five-day field period and methodology used by the Pew Research Center, and the second makes a much greater effort to obtain the highest possible response rate. The object is to see whether the lower response rates make a difference, or at least whether a far more rigorous survey would obtain different results.

The challenges that face modern polling are perhaps most evident in the effort expended and results achieved by this year's "high effort" survey. Interviewers called households up to 25 times for landline phones and up to 15 times for cellphones over a period of two and half months, if necessary, in an attempt to make contact. They also sent advance letters, where addresses were available, that explained the survey and offered incentives to participate (ranging from $10 to $20). For households where potential respondents initially refused to participate, an interviewer "particularly skilled at persuading reluctant respondents" made follow-up calls.

Despite all that additional effort -- far more than expended on any typical media survey -- the more rigorous survey obtained a response rate of just 22 percent, less than half the rate achieved just nine years ago (50 percent).

The purpose of all this work was to determine whether declining response rates are causing surveys to yield less accurate results. On that score, the news was mostly good: "[T]elephone surveys that include landlines and cell phones and are weighted to match the demographic composition of the population," the report concludes, "continue to provide accurate data on most political, social and economic measures."

Yet while accuracy remains on "most" measures, the report also emphasizes that response rate declines "are not without consequence." When compared to more reliable government surveys, the study found telephone survey respondents to be "significantly more engaged in civic activity than those who do not participate." Specifically, the telephone respondents were more likely to have volunteered for an organization in the past year (55 percent vs. 27 percent), more likely to have contacted a public official in the past year (31 percent vs. 10 percent) and more likely to have talked with their neighbors in the past year (58 percent vs 41 percent).

The report checked the accuracy of results in three ways:

Results from the standard Pew Research survey were compared with identically worded questions on large-scale U.S. government surveys that achieve response rates of 75 percent.

Both respondents and non-respondents were matched to national commercial databases on "a wide range of political, social, economic and lifestyle measures" to identify statistical bias.

Finally results of the standard methodology Pew Research survey were compared with the higher-effort survey, again with an eye toward measurements that differ significantly when response rates are lower.

The good news, again, is that only a handful of these comparisons yielded notable differences, and those involved the greater tendency of telephone respondents to engage in civic activity.

Of particular consequence to political surveys is that households that responded to the survey were more likely to have voted in the 2010 election (54 percent) than those who did not respond (44 percent). This finding is important to efforts by pollsters to screen for the most likely voters. It shows that to some extent, the screening process is baked into the respondents' decision to participate in the survey.

A reassuring finding for those who follow pre-election polling is that registered Republicans and Democrats "have equal propensities to respond to surveys." Similarly, the mix of Democrats and Republicans was roughly the same in both the standard and high-effort surveys. So a lower response rate, in and of itself, should not automatically skew a survey to either party.

The study also found that respondent households were just as likely as non-participating households "to be heavy internet users, newspaper or magazine readers, prime time TV watchers, or radio listeners."

The sharp and truly dramatic decline in survey response rates makes this sort of study essential. In the future, more pollsters will likely incorporate some of its methods -- such as obtaining richer data on both respondents and those who refuse to participate -- as standard procedure to identify and correct skews in their samples as they occur.

At very least, the latest Pew Research report should be required reading for anyone who relies on political polling data.

Gay Marriage Polls: The Trend Is Clear

2012-05-09T18:44:00-04:00

WASHINGTON -- Two years ago, President Barack Obama was not quite ready to say, as he did Wednesday, that he supports same sex marriage, but he conceded at the time that "attitudes evolve, including mine." In a question and answer session with progressive bloggers in October 2010, Obama was quoted by Americablog's Joe Sudbay saying "it's pretty clear where the trendlines are going."

If the president was thinking of the trends in public opinion polls, his read was dead-on. Surveys by various national media pollsters have shown a consistent, ongoing trend toward support of same-sex marriage, with slightly more Americans offering support than opposition in measurements taken over the past year.

For example, a just completed national Gallup poll fielded May 3-6 shows 50 percent in support of same-sex marriage and 48 percent opposed, slightly down from 53 percent support a year ago. As Gallup explained, the latest result marks "only the second time in Gallup's history of tracking this question" that support exceeded opposition.

Similarly, three surveys conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News since May 2011 have shown from 51 percent to 53 percent of Americans saying it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to marry, with 43 percent to 45 percent saying it should be illegal.

Polls conducted by the Pew Research Center show the same trends, with opposition to "allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally" falling from 60 percent to 43 percent since 2004, while support has increased from 31 percent to 43 percent.

A recent Pew Research report also shows that although black Americans are still more likely to oppose same-sex marriage than whites, the gap has narrowed significantly since 2008.

In a recent New York Times column, Pew Research president Andrew Kohut noted that while "much of the growing support for gay marriage is generational," it also reflects changing opinion among older Americans. "Since 2004," Kohut writes, "support for gay marriage has increased from 30 percent to 40 percent among baby boomers, and even among seniors (from 18 percent to 32 percent)."

Kohut also argued that the shifts in attitudes change the "political prospects" for the issue, particularly because of what he described as a narrowing of the "partisan intensity" gap in recent years that has worked to the advantage of opponents of gay marriage. "Today there are almost as many strong supporters of gay marriage among Democrats (34 percent) as there are strong opponents among Republicans (40 percent)," Kohut wrote.

Whether Obama's embrace of same-sex marriage will further shift the intensity of opinion on this issue remains to be seen, but as the president observed nearly two years ago, the direction of the trends is clear.

HuffPost Pollster Charts: Introducing Weekly Averaging For Daily Tracking Polls

2012-05-08T19:06:12-04:00

WASHINGTON -- HuffPost Pollster is pleased to announce a small but significant change to our polling charts that should greatly reduce the tendency of our most closely watched charts to give undue weight to a few prominent daily tracking polls.

Our polling charts, like the one shown below that plots national Obama vs. Romney vote preference, are not based on simple averages of recent polls but instead use a statistical technique known as local regression (or loess) to plot summary trend lines based on all of the available survey data. We typically refer to the numbers represented by the end-points of the trend lines as polling "trend estimates."

The advantage of our approach is that regression-based lines smooth out much of the random "noise" in polling results in order to provide a more accurate graphic picture of the true trend, including the occasional "outlier" result that can skew simple averages.

In practice, however, our approach has come with one troublesome shortcoming: The regression procedure treats all individual polls as equal, even when some pollsters release far more data than others. For the Obama job approval chart, for example, two daily tracking polls conducted by Gallup and Rasmussen Reports typically account for about half of all the data points plotted on the chart. To complicate things further, both polls have demonstrated "house effects," producing results that tend to be more negative of President Obama (either on the job approval rating or when pitted against Mitt Romney) than other surveys.

Our abiding philosophy, both at Pollster.com and now at The Huffington Post, has been to resist cherry-picking polls. "We make every effort to include every poll," Pollster.com co-founder Charles Franklin explained four years ago, "even if it sometimes hurts. So even when we see a poll way out of line with other polls and what we 'know' has to be true, we keep that poll in our data and in our trend estimates."

But by releasing results far more frequently than other pollsters, the daily trackers have greater combined influence on the trend estimates than they do in simpler polling averages. In the most recent RealClearPolitics average of the Obama job approval rating, for example, Gallup and Rasmussen are just two of eight polls. But in our chart, as of this writing, the two daily trackers contribute six of nine data points plotted. Thus, this aspect of our system has the effect of giving the daily tracking polls greater weight than they would have in a simple polling average.

The problem would be worse but for our procedure of using only the non-overlapping samples for daily tracking polls. For Gallup and Rasmussen, who release Obama job approval numbers based on a three-day rolling average, that means we start with the most recently published data and work backwards, using only every third release to calculate the trend lines (selecting the interviews conducted on Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, then the previous Friday-Saturday-Sunday, then the Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday before that, and so on).

The change we make today is simple. It adds just one more step to our current process. For national charts featuring results from a handful of daily tracking polls -- such as the Obama job approval rating and the Obama-Romney horse race question -- we will average the results for daily trackers so that we use just one data point per pollster, per week to calculate the trend lines, starting with the most recent seven-day period and working backwards, one week at a time. This procedure does not throw out or cherry pick data or pollsters, it simply reduces the number of data points used to calculate the trend lines by averaging multiple data releases within a given week.

So consider again the polls plotted in the last seven days. On the Obama job approval chart, as of this writing, the Gallup and Rasmussen daily tracking polls account for six of nine polls included using our standard procedure. With the weekly averaging in place, Gallup and Rasmussen account for just two of five polls included.

The difference on the overall trend will typically be slight: For the national Obama-vs-Romney vote preference question, the current estimate would be a near tie, with Obama a whisker-thin 0.1 percentage points ahead of Romney (46.5 to 46.4 percent). With the weekly averaging in place, Obama's lead increases by a half a percentage point (to 46.7 to 46.1 percent). The chart below shows that the impact is consistent over time, reflecting the house effects in the Gallup and Rasmussen trackers benefiting Romney.

This change comes with a few qualifications. First, the change only affects the data used to calculate the trend lines. It does not affect the number of data points plotted on our interactive charts or listed in the table that appears below each chart. Those will continue to display independent, non-overlapping releases.

Second, the change does not "correct" for pollster house effects, it only reduces the impact of daily trackers showing large house effects on the overall estimates.

Third, as of this writing, we have only applied the weekly averaging procedure to the two national level charts described above. In the coming days, we will be putting the procedure in place in additional national level charts -- such as the "generic" U.S. House ballot or the right direction-wrong track question -- where a handful of pollsters that release data on a weekly basis tend to dominate. For those charts, we will average multiple surveys from individual pollsters within a three- or four-week window.

Fourth, we will likely remove the averaging procedure for the Obama-Romney national chart in the fall, when the number of organizations releasing daily tracking polls will significantly increase. In late October 2008, for example, eight different survey organizations released rolling-average, daily-tracking surveys, effectively eliminating the problem of one or two pollsters having undue influence on the trend lines.

Finally, expect more upgrades to the HuffPost Pollster charts and data in the coming months. We have much more in store, so please stay tuned!

Swing State Polls For Ohio, Florida And Virginia Show Obama Running Stronger Than In 2008

2012-05-03T14:30:54-04:00

WASHINGTON -- New polls released Thursday by Quinnipiac University showed President Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by such narrow margins in Ohio and Florida that the pollsters characterized the two contests as "essentially tied" and "too close to call."

But when combined with other recent polls, the results show Obama running slightly better now than at a comparable points in the 2008 election.

The Quinnipiac poll in Ohio shows Obama edging Romney by 2 percentage points (44 to 42 percent), a slightly closer margin than in three other polls conducted in late April. The surveys by Fox News, Rasmussen Reports and Purple Strategies all give Obama slightly bigger leads, ranging from 4 to 6 points. As of this writing, the HuffPost Pollster chart, based on all of the Ohio polls, gives Obama a 4-point lead (45.7 to 41.7 percent).

The Quinnipiac poll in Florida finds Romney edging Obama by a single percentage point (44 to 43 percent), very close to the margins found by recent Rasmussen and Purple Strategies surveys. The HuffPost Pollster chart for Florida, which also factors in a handful of polls conducted earlier in April that showed Obama doing slightly better, gives the president a 1.3 percentage point advantage (45.7 to 44.4 percent).

While the aggregate of all recent polls shows Florida to be a true toss-up and Ohio leaning slightly to Obama, the president's current standing is slightly better than at this point four years ago. According to the Pollster charts for 2008, summarized in the table below, McCain led by 5.5 points in Florida and just 0.4 percentage points in Ohio at this point four years ago.

Recent polls also have given Obama a narrow lead in Virginia, another critical battleground in 2008. At this point four years ago, the two candidates were nearly tied, though McCain had a slight advantage.

Of course, the Democratic nomination battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton raged on into early May 2008. Obama did not clinch the nomination until early June, and his national poll numbers against John McCain got a significant boost when Clinton exited the race and endorsed his candidacy June 7.

By mid-June, Pollster's national chart showed Obama with a 4.5 percentage point lead over McCain nationally (47.1 to 42.6 percent), which is slightly better than Obama's current advantage over Mitt Romney (47.0 to 45.2 percent, as of this writing).

In Ohio, Florida and Virginia, however, as shown in the table below, Obama's current margin over Romney is still a net 2 to 5 percentage points better than where it stood against McCain in mid-June 2008.

It is still very early in the general election campaign and new surveys are released continually. The polling snapshots in these battleground states may look different in a few weeks than they do today, but for now, a close race nationally is translating into close contests in the critical swing states.

Nonetheless, Obama's current standing in three key swing states looks slightly better now than it did in June 2008, just after he clinched the Democratic nomination.

The HuffPost Election Map: A First Look At The Presidential Race

2012-04-25T16:47:00-04:00

WASHINGTON -- As attention turns from the Republican primaries to the general election for president, The Huffington Post debuts a new, interactive polling map that will anchor our Election Dashboard for the rest of the campaign.

The map shows where each state stands in the contest between President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney, based on the latest polls (where public polling data are available) or on past vote results (where no polls have been conducted). Pro-Obama states are blue and pro-Romney states are red, with the colors darker or lighter to indicate whether a state is solidly for or simply leaning toward the candidate. Toss-up states, where the polling indicates a margin too close to call if the election were held today, are colored yellow.

Clicking on an individual state will take you to a full-size, interactive polling chart for that state -- if at least five public polls of its voters have been released -- or to a listing of the available polls -- where we have collected one to four polls.

The map displays projected electoral vote counts for the two candidate, which will update as more polls are released.

The current electorate vote estimate leans toward Obama partly because our polling charts for Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin give the president leads over Romney of between 4 and 7 percent, the range that we qualify for "lean" status.

For the moment, no states fall into the "lean Romney" category.

We classify states as "strong" for Obama or Romney if either candidate leads by 8 percentage points or better or, where polling is not yet available, if a state has consistently supported the Democratic or Republican candidate in recent presidential elections.

The states of Iowa, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia are classified as toss-ups, because the trend-line charts for those states show 3 percentage points or less separating the candidates.

We're also calling Colorado a toss-up on the basis of the most recent state poll, released on Wednesday by Purple Strategies, which shows a tie between Obama and Romney (47 percent each).

The tally displayed at the top of the map currently gives Obama 298 electoral votes, far more than the 270 needed to win reelection, although about one-third of his total (93) comes from the "lean Obama" states.

While this early Electoral College result will cheer Obama partisans, take it with a huge grain of salt. The polls driving the estimates for the battleground states are sparse, and all but a handful of the most recent surveys were fielded in the midst of the Republican primary contest, when the president enjoyed a bigger lead in national polling.

Some background: The methodologies used for both the charts and the map are the same as those that produced the Pollster.com estimates in 2008. Pollster's final 2008 trend charts had the correct winner ahead in all but two states and missed a perfect projection of the Electoral College count by just a single electoral vote.

However, the polling environment today is very different from that in the final week before a presidential election. First, while pre-election polling in September and October will typically provide an accurate snapshot of the outcome, polling conducted six months before the election is far more prone to error.

Second, and more importantly, the current volume of polling is a tiny fraction of what we will see during the fall campaign. In the last week of the 2008 election alone, Pollster.com logged more than 300 statewide polls, mostly from battleground states. As indicated by the table below, over the past 12 weeks since Feb. 1, 2012, we have entered 63 statewide polls on the Obama-Romney contest in battleground states, including just 12 since Rick Santorum exited the primary race on April 10.

The timing is important, because most of the recent statewide polls were conducted in February and March, when national surveys typically showed Obama leading by larger margins than those measured over the last two to three weeks. If the current national standings persist, the map will likely shift more in Romney's favor.

As the volume of polling increases, HuffPost's new election map offers some features that will become even more useful. First, a state-by-state table below the map shows the current estimate of the Obama-Romney voter preference where polls are available. The table identifies the winner of each state in the 2000, 2004 and 2008 presidential elections (use your mouse to hover over the letter R or D in the appropriate column, and a small box will display the main candidates' vote percentages in that race; see the illustration below). The table can also be sorted by any of the data columns, including the past results (just click on the relevant column heading).

Second, there is an alternative "cartogram" view of the map, which renders each state as a circle sized in proportion to its number of electoral votes. While the cartogram distorts the geography, it provides a more accurate visualization of the current poll standings in the Electoral College contest. You can move between the two views by clicking the "traditional map" and "cartogram" buttons at the top right.

Finally, HuffPost's election map and polling charts remain works in progress that we will continue to refine and improve over the course of the campaign. Please use the comments section to let us know what you think.

Is The Gallup Poll Favoring Mitt Romney By Undersampling Minority Voters?

2012-04-20T17:31:16-04:00

WASHINGTON -- Does the Gallup Daily tracking poll have "some methodological problems," as President Barack Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod claimed via Twitter on Tuesday? Gallup has shown Romney doing better than most other polls, but a review of the data by The Huffington Post calls into question the theory Axelrod cited, that Gallup's polls are under-sampling black and Hispanic voters. Yet a quirk in the way Gallup asks respondents about their race may complicate comparisons of data obtained by Gallup and other polling firms' results.

On Monday, the Gallup organization began publishing daily tracking numbers on the presidential contest between Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Each day, from now through the November election, Gallup will release results based on a rolling average of the last five days of interviewing. On Monday, Gallup gave Romney a slight advantage over Obama (47 to 45 percent). By Friday, Romney's margin had increased to three percentage points (47 to 44 percent).

But in a busy week during which 10 more survey organizations released national polls, Gallup's numbers stood out as the most favorable to Romney. Seven of the 10 show Obama ahead (by margins ranging from 4 to 9 percentage points), including the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Thursday showing Obama leading by six percentage points (49 to 43 percent).

As of this writing, the HuffPost Pollster Obama-Romney chart, based on all of the national public polls measuring the presidential race, gives Obama an edge of just over two percentage points (46.9 to 44.8 percent).

While much of the variation between the polls is owed to the statistical noise inherent in all polling, this week's Gallup results are not the first from Gallup that are more favorable to Romney than most other polls. The HuffPost Pollster snapshot below shows that Gallup's estimate of Romney's support in the surveys it has conducted has typically been 4 to 5 percentage points higher than the overall trend based on the aggregate of all polls.

The apparent skew to Romney in the Gallup results caught the attention of Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist and occasional HuffPost blogger who emailed Gallup to request the demographic breakdown of its Monday release. As reported by the National Journal's Ron Brownstein, the Gallup sample was 22 percent non-white, close to what a national exit poll showed for the midterm election of 2010 (23 percent) but less than the minority composition of the 2008 electorate (26 percent). The racial composition of Gallup's sample is "not realistic," Abramowitz concluded in an email to Gallup that he also forwarded to The Huffington Post.

The portion of a poll sample that is African-American or Hispanic is critical because of the huge differences in the preferences of white voters and of minority and non-white voters. The 2008 national exit poll showed Obama carrying two-thirds of Hispanics and 95 percent of African Americans, but losing white voters to John McCain by a 43 to 55 percent margin. In recent polls, as Brownstein reported, Obama's margins among non-whites have been generally consistent with what he received in 2008.

So if one poll includes significantly more African American or Hispanic voters than another, the poll with the smaller minority composition will be more favorable to Romney.

One limitation of Abramowitz's critique of Gallup's sample is that his basis of comparison was the 2008 exit poll. As Gallup's Frank Newport points out in a response to the Brownstein column, "It's not clear that the percentage of non-whites this Fall will grow larger than 2008." The racial composition of the 2012 electorate, Newport writes, is "still an unknown." RealClearPolitics' Sean Trende considers this argument in more detail and concludes that the racial composition of Gallup's sample "is certainly not unreasonable, and may even prove to be correct."

But predictions of what might happen in November aside, the bigger problem is the apple-to-orange comparison of the current Gallup samples to the 2008 exit poll. A far better way to determine if the racial composition of the sample is behind the Gallup "house effect" is to compare Gallup's racial composition to that of other recent polls of registered voters.

A more apples-to-apples comparison turns up very little difference on racial composition. At the request of The Huffington Post, the pollsters for the Pew Research Center, Quinnipiac University, CBS News/New York Times and Reuters/IPSOS all shared their racial composition results among registered voters. Those results appear in the table below.

These four polls have produced a fairly wide range of results over the last week, from Gallup's 2-point Romney lead on Monday to 4-point Obama advantages on the Pew Research, Quinnipiac University and Ipsos/Reuters surveys. Yet the combined percentage of Hispanic respondents and non-Hispanic black respondents was nearly identical (either 19 or 20 percent) for all but the Reuters/Ipsos poll, in which it was only three points higher (22 percent). As such, the differences in racial composition as reported do not appear to explain why the Gallup numbers have been more favorable to Romney.

It is important for poll watchers to understand that most of the the national pollsters do not weight their samples of likely voters to match demographic estimates of voters from prior elections. However, they do weight their larger samples of all adults to match U.S. Census estimates of characteristics like age, gender and race, as Frank Newport stressed in his response to the Abramowitz critique.

That weighting is critical, since most telephone surveys under-represent black and Hispanic voters in their initial, unweighted samples. They rely on the weighting to correct the bias that results from response rates that are typically lower in urban than in rural areas.

There is one remaining wrinkle for Gallup in this controversy that involves the way in which it asks about race. The U.S. Census Bureau allows for multiple responses when it asks respondents what race they are, and Gallup attempts to replicate the Census in that respect. While most pollsters ask two separate questions about race and Hispanic ancestry, Gallup goes a step further, asking five separate questions about race. They ask respondents to answer whether or not they consider themselves White; Black or African American; Asian; Native American or Alaska Native; and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

This procedure complicates the way in which Gallup weights its data and combines the responses into the single measure of race and ethnicity reported above. It also may call into question whether Gallup's racial composition numbers are fully comparable with those from other pollsters. However, the explanation of its procedures Gallup provided to the Huffington Post does reflect a good faith effort to accurately to weight its samples of adults to match U.S. Census population estimates.

None of the data reviewed in this article resolve the question of why the Gallup polls to date have been slightly more favorable to Romney than have other polls. But the data generally suggest a culprit other than the black and Hispanic composition of Gallup's samples.

More Obama-Romney Polls Reach Dueling Results

2012-04-17T14:34:00-04:00

Another day brings two more dueling national polls on the presidential election. A new survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted April 4 to 15, shows President Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by just four percentage points (49 to 45 percent). Pew Research reports that Obama's lead "has narrowed since last month, when he had a 12-point advantage, though it is comparable to leads he held earlier this year."

In contrast, Tuesday's update of the Gallup Daily tracking poll finds Romney ahead by five points (48 to 43 percent).

The common thread among these two surveys and others released in recent days is a slight upward trend for Romney and a modest decline for Obama since March. Those changes are apparent in the latest update of the HuffPost Pollster Obama-Romney chart, based on all public polls.

The latest Gallup update is Romney's single best result in recent days. But random variation is inherent in most polling, and some divergence beyond the margin of error is typical for this early phase of the presidential race. The surveys from the last week reflect the two polls released Tuesday in finding a range of variation.

The polls have been more consistent, however, in their breakdown of the results by political party. Four recent polls -- by Pew Research, Gallup Daily (Monday's release), CNN/ORC International and Fox News -- all show both Obama and Romney receiving an average of 88 to 90 percent support from members of their own parties.

As George Washington University political scientist John Sides points out, these results demonstrate that the two party bases are now "basically unified." As Sides puts it, the arguments that "Obama was going to lose the support of all those Democrats dissatisfied with his weak-kneed compromises" or that "'Anybody but Romney' was 75% of the GOP" have not panned out.

While tracking polls will continue to produce ups and downs, the underlying structure of the race appears to be in place. The Obama-Romney contest is close and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Obama-Romney Polls Disagree, Point To Unsettled But Close Race

2012-04-16T18:55:00-04:00

WASHINGTON -- The Gallup Poll launched its daily tracking poll on the general election with a result that, it says, "highlights the potential closeness of this year's race" -- a near tie between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

But a new national poll from CNN gives President Obama a nine percentage point lead. The contrast between the two and with other recent surveys highlights something even more important: With just under six months remaining before Election Day, voter preferences are soft and polls are apt to produce divergent results.

The release of Gallup's first wave of daily tracking results shows 47 percent of registered voters support Romney and 45 percent favor Obama. Gallup characterizes the two-point spread as a "statistical tie"; Romney's slight edge is not big enough to be considered statistically significant, even with 2,265 interviews of registered voters conducted from April 11 to 15.

The Gallup results are similar to those from two recent telephone surveys. An automated, recorded-voice Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, conducted April 13 to 15, shows Romney with a three-point edge over Obama (47 to 44 percent), and a Fox News phone survey, conducted from April 9 to 11, gives Romney a two-point advantage (46 to 44 percent).

But the CNN/ORC International poll of 910 registered voters conducted April 13 to 15 tells a different story. It finds Obama leading by nine points (52 to 43 percent), a margin nearly identical to the eight-point Obama lead (51 to 43 percent) found in last week's ABC News/Washington Post poll.

A Ipsos/Reuters telephone poll, also released on Monday and conducted April 12 to 15, gives Obama a four-point advantage (47 to 43 percent).

The HuffPost Pollster chart, based on all the national public polls, shows the president (45.4 percent) nearly tied with Romney (45.2 percent).

Since seven of the last 15 surveys plotted on the chart were conducted by Rasmussen Reports, and since Rasmussen's polls have shown a modest but consistent "house effect" in Romney's favor compared to those of the other organizations, the current trend lines produce a result slightly more favorable to Romney than a simple polling average would. Use the chart's filter tool to remove Rasmussen from the average, and Obama's advantage grows slightly to just over two points (46.1 to 43.8 percent).

Gallup's and Rasmussen's tracking polls will both interview continuously between now and the November election. Gallup's survey uses lives interviewers to call random samples of both landline and mobile telephone numbers, essentially the same methodology now used by CNN/ORC, ABC/Post, Fox News and most of the other national telephone survey organizations. Rasmussen uses an automated, recorded-voice methodology that is blocked by federal regulations from calling the nearly one-third of U.S. adults who have only cellphone service.

With or without Rasmussen included, the trend lines show a slight decline in Obama's standing and a slight increase in Romney's in the week since Rick Santorum exited the primary race and the former Massachusetts governor became the presumptive Republican nominee.

While political junkies will obsess about every twitch in the daily tracking numbers, some caution is in order. The national horse-race polls have greater predictive value now that the Republican nomination is essentially settled, but their historical record is still spotty this far out.

Political scientists Chris Wlezien and Bob Erikson have examined that history for their forthcoming book on election forecasting, "The Timeline of Presidential Election Campaigns." A chart from the book (reproduced below with permission) shows that the predictive power of head-to-head polls increases gradually over the last 300 days of the campaign. (Simply put, the closer the adjusted R squared is to 1, the more perfectly the poll predicted the election.) In late October, polls will be highly predictive of the outcome, but now, with more than 200 days remaining until the election, the predictive accuracy of polling is less than 50/50.

Moreover, the variation in current polls resists easy explanation. The random noise inherent in all surveys accounts for much of it, but some variation also results from differences in pollster methods. While many will search for a singularly "accurate" poll, the dissimilarity is telling us something important. The preferences among registered voters -- about which candidates to support and whether to turn out to vote -- are still unsettled.

"No one poll, indeed no two polls, enjoy a monopoly on truth," Democratic pollster Mark Mellman wrote in early April. Though he was discussing presidential job approval, his conclusion applies here: "When different polls lead to different conclusions, caution is well-warranted."

What Americans Know: Pew Research Finds Most Can Identify Where The Parties Stand

2012-04-11T15:30:00-04:00

WASHINGTON -- While some pollsters and journalists have recently argued that "voters are stupid," a new national survey shows that most Americans can, in fact, identify the relative positions of the Democratic and Republican parties on a series of important issues.

The Pew Research Center has measured knowledge of current affairs by the general public for decades. Past surveys have found an awareness of some very basic facts among American adults -- such as an ability to identify Hillary Clinton as the secretary of state or Muammar Gaddafi as the onetime leader of Libya -- but less knowledge about the details of politics in Washington. Late last year, for example, just 43 percent knew that Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives but not the Senate.

The latest Pew Research News IQ survey, conducted March 29 to April 1, focuses more directly on Americans' knowledge of the views of the major political parties and the partisan affiliations of well-known political leaders. The survey finds that majorities of Americans can identify Democratic and Republican positions on several key issues.

The Pew report does note "considerable variance" in the survey's measures of political knowledge. On the higher side, 71 percent chose the Republicans when asked which party "is considered the more conservative party on most political issues" and 67 percent chose the Democrats as the party that supports "increasing taxes on higher income people to reduce the federal budget deficit." However, only 53 percent identified Republicans as the party generally more supportive of "reducing the size and scope of the federal government."

The survey also finds some significant partisan differences, suggesting that some of these questions may be measuring respondents' judgments about the performance of the parties as much as their knowledge of the parties. For example, just 46 percent of Democrats chose the Republican Party as the one more supportive of reducing the size and scope of government, compared to 76 percent of Republicans. That difference may indicate that some Democrats have come to see little current difference between the parties on cutting government, despite the historic commitment of Republicans to that goal.

While that particular question produced the largest partisan difference, the survey finds that Republicans are generally more apt to answer knowledge questions correctly, something the report notes is "typically the case in surveys about political knowledge." The reason is demographics. "On average," the report explains, "Republicans are older and more affluent than either Democrats or independents, and both of these are associated with knowledge about the parties' positions and leaders."

A second set of questions concerning the partisan affiliation of political leaders may provide a less complex measurement of knowledge. The results show most Americans can correctly name the party of two fairly recent former presidents. Specifically, 85 percent identified Ronald Reagan as a Republican, and 84 percent identified Bill Clinton as a Democrat. Far fewer, however, knew that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is a Democrat (61 percent) or that House Speaker John Boehner is a Republican (55 percent).

Of course, these results are for all adults. The report did not break out data for past or likely voters, but earlier research shows a strong relationship between political participation and these sorts of political knowledge.

In response to a request from The Huffington Post, Pew Research shared tabulations of the results by party registration.

Not surprisingly, knowledge is consistently higher among self-identified registered voters, who were 70 percent of adults in the survey. According to Pew Research, registered voters answered an average of 12 of the 17 questions correctly, compared to an average of just nine correct answers from the unregistered.

White the debate over whether voters are rational or "stupid" is certainly larger than this one limited survey, the results do indicate that most voters are familiar with some of the key differences between the two parties.

The results also highlight the sizable minority of Americans who are disengaged from the day-to-day details of politics and illustrate the obstacles facing political campaigns and others seeking to mobilize potential supporters and increase voter turnout.

Massachusetts Senate Poll Shows Elizabeth Warren, Scott Brown Running 'Neck-And-Neck'

2012-04-10T19:00:26-04:00

WASHINGTON -- A new poll on the Massachusetts Senate race confirms what other recent surveys have shown, at least collectively. The race between Republican Sen. Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren is close and likely to stay that way for the duration of the campaign.

Seen separately, however, the same polls paint an inconsistent picture, yielding everything from a 5 percentage point Warren advantage to a 9 percentage point Brown lead. While that variation's sources are difficult to pinpoint, it is likely to persist since poll methodologies differ widely and because many Massachusetts voters have not fully engaged in the race and are still weighing their choices.

The most recent automated telephone survey, conducted on April 9 by Rasmussen Reports, shows the two candidates "running neck-and-neck," with Warren at 46 percent and Brown at 45 percent.

That very close result is similar to the current estimate produced by the HuffPost Pollster chart, based on all public polls measuring voter preferences in the Massachusetts Senate race, shown below. The chart's trend lines currently give Brown an edge of just under two percentage points (44.6 to 42.7 percent).

The relatively flat trend lines in the chart mask considerable variation among the individual polls. Specifically, in the surveys conducted this year, those results range from a nine-percentage-point lead for Brown on a Suffolk University poll in February to a five-point Warren lead on an automated poll conducted in March by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling (PPP).

The surveys produced even wider disparities in the number of voters in the undecided category, ranging from a low of 5 percent in Rasmussen's February survey to a high of 26 percent in the Boston Globe/University of New Hampshire poll in late March.

Why the variation? Some is due to the unavoidable statistical noise that comes with interviewing a random sample rather than the full population of voters. If, hypothetically, the "true" result had been a Brown lead of 45 to 43 percent with no variation over the past several months, and if every poll had sampled 600 voters, the "margin of error" would mean that 95 percent of the polls would produce results varying from an 10-point Brown lead over Warren to a 6-point deficit. That hypothetical range of variation is roughly what we have seen in recent months in Massachusetts.

However, the methods used by the Massachusetts polls also vary widely and likely account for some of the variation in the results. For example, the Rasmussen and PPP polls use an automated, recorded voice methodology that is legally barred from dialing mobile phone numbers. The other recent surveys all claim to have sampled both landline and mobile phones, although the level of disclosure of the details of those methods also varied widely.

The omission of cell-phone only voters is potentially important, given that nearly a third of adults nationwide now live in "cell phone only" households (although the latest state level estimates by the Centers for Disease Control show a lower than average number of cell-phone-only adults in Massachusetts).

But cell phone coverage is just one aspect of the sampling. The surveys' overall sampling methods also vary. Two of the recent polls -- by PPP and MassINC -- sampled from lists of registered voters, while most of the others used "random digit dial" (RDD) techniques that sample randomly generated telephone numbers. (The Suffolk University poll has sampled from voter lists in previous polls but did not disclose the nature of their sample on their most recent Massachusetts release.) Samples from voter lists allow a more accurate selection of truly registered voters, but miss those without listed telephone numbers.

The surveys also varied in the populations they sampled. The Globe/UNH poll reported on voter preferences among all adults, while the Western New England University and Suffolk University surveys interviewed only registered voters. The Rasmussen, PPP and MassINC polls screened for voters classified as "likely" to vote, although as is typical for state-level polling, they did not disclose the portion of registered voters that they classified as likely to vote.

Differences in question order and context are another potential explanation for some of the variation. For example, the Suffolk University poll came under criticism in February for an unusual ordering of questions that may have skewed results slightly in Brown's favor.

Similarly, the bigger undecided percentage on the Globe/UNH poll may result in part from a probe of voter certainty that immediately preceded the question on vote choice. That initial question gives respondents three options, one of which is that they have "considered some candidates but are still trying to decide."

According to the full UNH report, more than a third of adult respondents (42 percent) said in February that they were still considering their choices. That probe may have encouraged some to volunteer that they are "undecided" on the vote preference question that followed.

Whatever the impact on the undecided percentage, the preliminary Globe/UNH certainty question provides a more important set of findings about the Massachusetts Senate race. While the contest has attracted attention (and campaign donations) nationwide, many Massachusetts voters are still weighing their choices. Moreover, those who have made a decision are closely divided. According to the report, those who have "definitely" decided split 51 percent for Brown to 48 percent for Warren.

Those results add up to a close race with a lot of uncertain voters, a combination likely to produce many more volatile poll results over the next six months.

Mitt Romney Delegate Count Near McCain 2008 Super Tuesday Milestone

2012-04-05T17:47:00-04:00

WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney may be just over halfway to winning the 1,144 delegates necessary to clinch the Republican presidential nomination. He's even closer to an equally important milestone: Romney has built a delegate lead nearly as big as the one held by the ultimate GOP nominee John McCain when Romney decided to end his presidential bid in 2008.

Delegate counts by news organizations vary, but all show Romney with a better than 2-to-1 lead over Rick Santorum. The Associated Press estimate gives Romney 658 delegates to 281 for Santorum, 135 for Newt Gingrich and 51 for Ron Paul.

The inconsistent delegate counts result from uncertainty regarding how many delegates each candidate is likely to win in the caucus states where delegates are technically unbound. In reaching its estimate, AP looks at the unbound delegates who will eventually emerge from a multi-step selection process under way in eight caucus states and attempts to calculate the number of them each candidate will eventually win. AP also factors in any public endorsements made by the officially unbound party and elected officials selected as "automatic delegates."

The official count produced by the Republican National Committee, which includes only formally bound delegates, gives Romney 596 delegates to 205 for Santorum, 134 for Gingrich and 27 for Paul.

But counting mechanics aside, the current AP delegate total of 658 for Romney comes remarkably close to McCain's share of the delegates after he won big in the Feb. 6, 2008, "Super Tuesday" primaries and caucuses. The AP tally published the next day gave McCain 703 of the 1,191 delegates then needed to win the GOP nomination, compared to 293 for Romney and 190 for Mike Huckabee.

As a percentage of the delegates that had been allocated, McCain's delegate lead over Romney the day after Super Tuesday (59 to 24 percent) was only slightly larger than Romney's lead over Santorum today (58 to 25 percent).

The comparison to the post-Super Tuesday totals is important, because shortly after confronting what the Boston Globe described as "an unforgiving mathematical landscape," Romney chose to end his campaign for the 2008 nomination.

Romney has taken longer to reach the same rough delegate share as McCain achieved by early February 2008 largely because the Republican primary and caucus calendar is far more backloaded this year. As I pointed out this past November, simply rearranging the 2008 primary results to match the 2012 calendar would have pushed back the date at which McCain went over 700 delegates until April, following the Wisconsin, Maryland and District of Columbia primaries.

Romney's current delegate wins are in some ways more broad-based because McCain picked up a major chunk of his post-Super Tuesday total in just four states that haven't voted yet this year. McCain won a 326-to-3 delegate wipe-out of the other candidates in the Super Tuesday contests in California, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Looking forward, Rick Santorum's numbers look at least as bleak as Romney's post-Super Tuesday total four years ago. The New York primary has changed from winner-take-all allocation in 2008 to what amounts to winner-takes-most this year, but the rules in those other three states are roughly comparable. All still lie ahead, and polls show Romney with big leads in California, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

More important, statistical modeling of the remaining primaries offers Santorum little hope. Specifically, a model of the remaining contests published by The New Yorker projects that Romney will have amassed 1,122 delegates -- just 22 short of what he needs to win -- by the final primary contest on June 26. And that model makes no projection for the 598 technically unbound delegates, mostly from caucus states.

"If Romney is only slightly short of his magic number," the New Yorker report explains, "it will be easy for him to win the support of unpledged delegates from states that he won, like Illinois, Maine, and Washington."

On Thursday, Sen. McCain urged Santorum to make a "graceful exit" from the Republican presidential campaign. McCain made no mention of Romney's decision to do the same four years ago when he faced similarly daunting math, but Romney no doubt hopes that Santorum will follow his own example and bring the 2012 Republican contest to an end.

Wisconsin Primary 2012: Mitt Romney Ready To Drive Up Delegate Lead Over Rick Santorum

2012-04-03T11:39:00-04:00

WASHINGTON -- As Republicans head out to vote in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia, the final pre-election polls show former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney poised to sweep all three contests and gain at least four out of five of all delegates chosen by Tuesday's vote.

The Republican race enters April having just passed a significant milestone. As of the Louisiana primary on March 27, GOP presidential primaries or first-round caucuses have been held in 29 states and five territories, enough to account for just over half (52 percent) of the 2,286 delegates who will attend the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., in August.

Delegate counting is a tricky business. According to the Associated Press estimate, Romney reaches this milestone having won 572 delegates -- exactly half of the 1,144 needed to win the nomination -- followed by 272 for Rick Santorum, 135 for Newt Gingrich and 51 for Ron Paul. In reaching its estimate, AP looks at the technically unbound delegates who will eventually emerge from a multi-step selection process under way in eight caucus states and attempts to calculate the number of them each candidate will eventually win. AP also factors in any public endorsements made by the officially unbound party and elected officials selected as "automatic delegates."

The official count produced by the Republican National Committee, which includes only formally bound delegates, gives Romney 504 delegates to 195 for Santorum, 135 for Gingrich and 27 for Paul.

Santorum's campaign and the pro-Santorum super PAC have disputed both estimates, claiming that he is on track to win 520 delegates. Their estimates assume that the candidate will gain ground by winning unpledged delegates selected in state conventions, sweep in the delegates pledged to Gingrich, and convince the Republican Party to allocate delegates from Florida and Arizona on a proportional basis.

As The Huffington Post's Jon Ward has reported, those highly optimistic projections are based on a number of shaky assumptions, including continuing momentum for Santorum at the grassroots level.

That momentum will likely take a significant hit on Tuesday as voters go to the polls in three primaries accounting for another 98 delegates -- 42 in Wisconsin, 37 in Maryland and 19 in the District of Columbia. All but three unbound automatic delegates in D.C. will be allocated on the basis of Tuesday's vote.

The 95 up-for-grabs delegates are divided into two categories. At-large delegates will be apportioned on a winner-take-all basis in all three contests (18 in Wisconsin, 13 in Maryland, 16 in D.C.). Another pool of delegates (24 each in Wisconsin and Maryland) will be chosen by congressional district and awarded to the winner of each respective district.

In Wisconsin, five recent polls show Romney with leads of between 7 and 10 percentage points, so he is a strong favorite to win those 18 at-large delegates. The NBC/Marist College poll finds Romney with large leads in Milwaukee and the heavily suburban counties surrounding it. Those areas account for most of the voters in four of Wisconsin's eight congressional districts. If Santorum takes the two more rural districts that went for Mike Huckabee four years ago, that leaves just two potentially up for grabs.

Maryland looks even better for Romney. Two late polls show him leading by margins of 17 and 25 percentage points. In 2008, John McCain defeated Huckabee in Maryland by 55 to 29 percent -- not far from where the most recent polls put Romney and Santorum today -- and won all of its delegates because he carried every county and all eight congressional districts. Nate Silver of The New York Times believes that Romney is likely to win all but one or two of Maryland's districts on Tuesday.

In D.C., where Santorum did not even qualify for the ballot, Romney is heavily favored to win all 16 delegates up for grabs.

Thus, at a minimum, Romney appears likely to win 80 of the 95 delegates up for grabs on Tuesday. Coupled with a symbolically powerful sweep of all three contests, the night should be sweet for the Romney campaign.