Gingrich Surging in South Carolina

Nate Silver unequivocally answers a question he posed yesterday--does Newt Gingrich have momentum in South Carolina?--in his FiveThirtyEight blog post today: "Yes, Mr. Gingrich does have momentum — and a lot of it." He writes, "Six different South Carolina polls have been released so far today, and they show a split in their results." Three of them, automated polls by Rasmussen Reports, Public Policy Polling and InsiderAdvantage, "have Mr. Gingrich in the lead...by margins ranging from 2 points to 6 points."

The polls strongly indicate that Mr. Gingrich's performance at the Monday debate has contributed to his rise in the polls. Marist for NBC News, one of the more traditional polls conducted by live interviewers, "showed Mitt Romney leading by 10 percentage points." But when Marist "split its results," it appeared that the debate did indeed give Mr. Gingrich some momentum with South Carolina voters. Mr. Silver writes, "Mr. Romney’s lead was smaller — 5 points — in the post-debate sample." Further, the aforementioned automated polls that show Mr. Gingrich in the lead "were conducted on Wednesday, after the debate and the qualified endorsement Mr. Gingrich received from Sarah Palin."

The FiveThirtyEight forecast model suggests that Mr. Gingrich is, in fact, gaining significant momentum. According to Mr. Silver, "The model now shows a virtual tie in the race, with Mr. Gingrich projected to get 34 percent of the vote and Mr. Romney 33.6 percent and each candidate having about a 50 percent chance of winning."

Most of Mr. Gingrich's gain, however, does not appear to be connected to a drop in the polls for Mr. Romney. Mr. Silver notes, "Mr. Gingrich has gained ground in the polls more than Mr. Romney has lost it. Two days ago, our forecast had Mr. Gingrich with 22.6 percent of the vote, so he has gained about 11 points since then. Meanwhile, Mr. Romney’s projection has declined less than 3 points — to 33.6 percent from 36.1 percent — over the same interval."

So where is Mr. Gingrich getting his new projected votes? According to Mr. Silver, "Mr. Gingrich’s gains have come from Rick Santorum and Rick Perry (who dropped out of the race today and endorsed Mr. Gingrich), as well as from undecided voters." Mr. Silver does go on to acknowledge that automated polls, because they usually do not call cell phones and "also generally have lower response rates than traditional polls," may not be the best source.

For now, Mr. Silver anticipates that the Saturday primary could yield a number of different results. He writes: "Our research shows that high levels of volatility and disagreement in the polls make polling aggregation methods less reliable. In other words, the margin of error on the forecast is especially high, enough so that either Mr. Romney or Mr. Gingrich could emerge with a clear victory by the time that the vote takes place on Saturday."

Early Polls Show Romney's Lead in South Carolina Shrinking

Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog writes that the first South Carolina GOP primary poll contradicts his earlier prediction that Mitt Romney would increase "his modest lead in the South Carolina polls once his victory in New Hampshire was reflected in the surveys there." Instead, the poll, an automated survey from InsiderAdvantage, "shows Mr. Romney’s lead contracting in South Carolina," though Silver "urge[s] a lot of caution in interpreting it."

The poll "was conducted on Wednesday and shows Mr. Romney with 23 percent of the vote, just 2 points ahead of Newt Gingrich at 21 percent. The poll has Rick Santorum and Ron Paul tied for third place at 13 percent, with Jon M. Huntsman Jr. having moved ahead of Rick Perry for fifth place."

But Silver is not completely sold on InsiderAdvantage. He writes, "InsiderAdvantage has a mixed track record and rates fairly poorly in the FiveThrityEight pollster ratings, which is one reason to interpret these numbers with some care. In addition, Matt Towery, the head of InsiderAdvantage, formerly served as the head of Mr. Gingrich’s political organization from 1992 until Mr. Gingrich left Congress."

Silver does note, however, that "another polling firm that rates more highly, Public Policy Polling, said in a series of Twitter messages that it has also detected a tight race between Mr. Romney and Mr. Gingrich in South Carolina, with little evidence of favorable momentum for Mr. Romney following his New Hampshire victory."

Negative early news for Romney in South Carolina is partially offset by early polling in Florida, however. Silver writes: "Confusing matters further is that a poll of Florida, from Rasmussen Reports, did show some gains for Mr. Romney. The poll, conducted on Wednesday, showed Mr. Romney with 41 percent of the vote there, better than he has done in any prior survey of the state. The poll also showed Mr. Gingrich’s numbers on the decline." Silver predicts that "if the initial results from South Carolina and Florida are confirmed by other pollsters, they would suggest that Florida could play a backstop role for Mr. Romney, in somewhat the same way that New Hampshire did for him relative to Iowa."

However, at this stage Silver suggests that we wait before attaching much weight to the early poll results from either South Carolina or Florida. 

FiveThirtyEight: Gingrich Leads Five Plausible GOP Candidates in Iowa

In a recent FiveThirtyEight blog post, Nate Silver shared a preview of his polling-based forecasts for the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, the official versions of which he plans to release in a few days. The statistical analysis is based on state-by-state polling; Silver writes that although more objective and subjective factors could be taken into account, "building a well-calibrated forecast from the polls is challenging enough given the uncertainties inherent in primary polling, and so that’s what we’ve decided to focus on rather than anything fancier."

The polling-based analysis for Iowa has Newt Gingrich projected to win 25.1% of the vote, followed by Ron Paul, with 20.7%; Mitt Romney (15.6%); Rick Perry (12.3%); and Michele Bachmann (11.4%); and both Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman Jr., who are projected to garner under 10 percent of the vote. In his blog post, Silver explains the three factors used to calculate the projections: a weighted polling average, which emphasizes more recent polling as being a better predictor of probable primary results; the reallocated average, "which takes undecided voters and allocates them among the viable candidates;" and a process Silver calls momentum, which "looks at the near-term trend in a candidate’s polling and assigns a small bonus or penalty based upon it."

Silver warns, however, that these projections "are not very precise, because primary polling is not very precise." He tries to quantify this uncertainty, providing both confidence intervals for each candidate's projections and their win probability, "which combines the vote projections and the uncertainty together to estimate how likely each candidate is to win the caucuses." Gingrich leads with an estimated 49.6% probability, followed by Paul, with 28.2%; Romney (10.6%); Perry (5.2%); and Bachmann (4.1%).

According to Silver's analysis, "Although Mr. Gingrich still has the lead, Iowa looks to be fairly wide open with as many as five plausible winners.

In Polls Regarding Policy, Words Can Be Deciding Factor

In his blog post detailing the likely public response to President Obama's new jobs proposal, Nate Silver pointed out an important variable in the polling data we often take as fact: the wording of questions. He asks, "Are Americans going to be tolerant of proposals for new spending after having spent six months hearing about deficit reduction?" His answer? "Well, it depends on how you ask them."

According to Silver,"when the issue is framed as one of jobs against deficits, jobs win." He writes: "On average, those polls that ask Americans to prioritize 'creating jobs' or 'reducing unemployment' against 'cutting spending' or 'reducing the deficit' have had 57 percent of respondents coming out on the jobs side, against 36 percent who prioritize the deficit."

But wording can make all the difference. "The answer changes, however, when the conflict is instead framed as stimulus or recovery spending against deficits. In polls that employ the term 'spend' or 'spending' in describing the additional stimulus, its support drops to an average of 44 percent, with 50 percent saying that deficit reduction is the higher priority."

It appears President Obama has taken notice. Silver found "that in his speech on Thursday night, Mr. Obama used the term 'job' or 'jobs' 39 times, often preceded by 'create' — but never uttered the word 'stimulus.'" And when he used to word 'spend' or 'spending', he was typically referring to his efforts to reduce spending--not plans to spend more. Nor did "Obama specify the cost of his program."

Silver anticipates more "semantic scrum" to follow in the coming weeks of partisan policy debate. And he has a suggestion for pollsters and readers: "I would advise [pollsters] to use multiple question variants where possible, taking a larger sample and splitting it into halves or thirds, and I would advise readers to be suspicious of articles that cherry-pick one or two polls without discussing the broader context."


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Are Moderate Republican Governors Going Extinct?

In a recent FiveThirtyEight blog post, Nate Silver rated each governor's political ideology and the ideology of voters in the governor's state on a scale from liberal to conservative. He found that Republican governors--unlike their Democratic counterparts--are abandoning the middle, and are often taking conservative stances that outpace the more moderate views of the voters who elected them to office.

Writes Silver: "Unlike for the Democrats, there is almost no ideological diversity within the group: essentially all of the current Republican governors are quite conservative, taking moderate positions on at most one or two issues. Also unlike the Democrats, there is no correlation between the ideology of the governors and the ideology of the states."

This may be a dangerous development for the Republican party, as "Politics 101 would suggest that you need to be at least somewhat responsive to voters in your state." According to Silver, it is also a fairly recent development. He plots the ideological stances of governors in office a year ago--before the 2010 elections--to show that "there were plenty of moderate Republican governors," many of whom have retired since.

 
 Silver argues that Republican governors' distance from their state's ideology has made them unpopular--and may hurt the G.O.P. in the next election. He writes: "Retribution from the electorate is a strong possibility unless there is a change of course."

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