An interesting 50 state poll came out of WaPo today. Sampling over 74,000 registered voters, it's one of the largest polls to date.
New poll shows how Trump-Clinton matchup is redrawing the electoral map
Here's some analysis on it, also courtesy of WaPo:
A new 50-state poll shows exactly why Clinton holds the advantage over Trump
The solid blue and solid red states remain the same, as do the lean-blue or red states. But the poll revealed some interesting tidbits about the tossup states. For example Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are all very close, whereas Hillary had previously enjoyed 3-5 point leads following the conventions. Trump's support in the midwest is stronger than originally estimated. Additionally, key swing states such as Florida and North Carolina are virtually in a dead heat, with the advantage being within the margin of error.
What was perhaps most surprising was Texas. Texas hasn't given its electoral votes since 1976, but according to this poll Clinton is currently ahead in the Lone Star State by about 1 point. Again, that's still within the margin of error, but when you consider the fact that Romney won Texas by 16 points, McCain by 12 points, and GWB by over 20 points both times, it's a pretty significant development. To me that's pretty nuts!
I do have one concern with this poll, however. As you can see
in their methodology report, the poll was conducted online from a sampling of the nearly 3 million SurveyMonkey users. This means that while respondents were registered voters, they essentially needed to opt-in twice; first to the SurveyMonkey platform, and then to this specific SurveyMonkey/WaPo poll. I have a feeling that this could have skewed the results somewhat, though I trust the Post's statisticians more than my own undergraduate-level knowledge of statistics.
The Post-SurveyMonkey poll used an online-based sampling methodology that differs from previous polls by The Washington Post. Those are telephone surveys based on random samples of cellular and landline phones.
The new poll was conducted online as part of SurveyMonkey’s 2016 Election Tracking project, which recruits respondents from the large number people who take polls on the company’s do-it-yourself survey platform, roughly three million each day. A subsample of respondents to this range of surveys — which includes formal and informal polls of community groups, companies, churches and other organizations — were invited to participate in a second survey with the prompt, “Where do you stand on current events? Share your opinion.” The survey was not advertised on any website, so individuals could not “click-in” in an effort to influence results. A survey invitation could be used only once.
From Aug. 9 to Sept. 1, the survey asked the sample of 74,886 registered voters about their presidential support, including between 546 and 5,147 respondents in each state. The final sample was weighted to the latest Census Bureau benchmarks for the population of registered voters in each state.
To their credit, the Post acknowledges the difficulty of achieving a truly representative sample from an online poll.
The Post has generally avoided citing results from non-probability Internet-based surveys such as SurveyMonkey, as it is impossible to draw a random sample of Internet users, and random selection is a widely accepted standard in drawing representative samples of any population.
As Internet-based surveys have proliferated, research has grown on the ability to make accurate population estimates from these non-probability samples. Several benchmarking studies have found that probability sample surveys produce smaller errors than samples from opt-in, non-probability surveys. But research has also found that some non-probability methods have been more accurate than others. The Post has continuously reviewed this evidence with an aim of developing a standard to determine which non-probability techniques are useful and appropriate.
Here's the
full survey results, including methodology report, if you're interested.
(Special thanks for
@lindy for guilting me into subscribing to the Post!)
