Purple Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Red

Pennsylvania is not a red state...yet.

Scott Presler VS. Bucks County Commissioners

Well done.

Flaws of RCP poll aggregation

Currently the RCP average of polls shows Harris +0.1 in Pennsylvania, based on a straight average of 6 of the most recent polls. I'm not focusing on Pennsylvania here, merely using the RCP data for the state to point out some observations. This RCP average of polls is deeply flawed on so many levels. Let me explain.

It is indeed true that if you take these 6 polls, and average the response rate for Harris and for Trump, as a straight average,  Harris gets a rating of 47.83% and Trump gets an average of 47.67%. But take a closer look and some interesting things begin to appear.

Notice firstly, that there are polls from as far back as August 18/19 being averaged against polls as recent as September 3rd through 6th. Those are not like periods. I won't quibble this point too much, but recent polls are more likely to be accurate than older polls. But the debate wasn't until September 10th, so these may be more alike in voter temperament than pre debate vs post debate polls. Additionally in RCP's defense, maybe there are not enough polls that are recent enough to do much more. Both fair points, but this is actually the least of my concerns.

There are 3 polls that are tied, 2 in which Trump leads Harris, and only one where Harris leads Trump. 5 polls with Trump tied or ahead, only one with Harris ahead, and yet she leads the RCP aggregate. Not just odd, Very Odd. The poll that has Harris ahead has her way ahead. Its skew, is overpowering 5 other polls. That means the outlier poll is dominating the RCP average. That's not good math.

Let me take that last point one step further, the Bloomberg poll surveyed Registered Voters, not Likely Voters. It is not as indicative of actual turnout as all the other polls.  So not only is the outlier over emphasized due to it's skewness, it also is not as good a poll as the likely voter polls.

In calculating an average of polls I would exclude the Bloomberg poll because of the people polled. That's without even getting into the crosstabs of the polls to see if Democrats were oversampled. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't, but remember Michael Bloomberg ran for president, as a Democrat.  Again, not suggesting there is a bias in the sample selection, because there is enough reason to exclude it from the poll without even considering that. To be fair, Insider Advantage and Trafalgar Group tend to skew Republican and those are the two polls that have Trump ahead. I would not exclude them however, because I would not exclude CNN or The Hill polls just because they tend to skew Democrat.

The CNN poll has an absurd 4.7% margin of error though.  The rest of the polls margin of error are below 3.5%, which is to me a reasonable number. For that reason I would exclude CNN.

All else being equal, and it's really not, that would leave me with 4 polls. And if everything were equally done, I would take a weighted average of the polls rather than a straight average. The Insider Advantage poll of 800 should count slightly less than the CBS poll of 1085. Weighting the percentages according to poll size makes a bit more sense.  

Doing so, I get the following output, showing Trump +0.8% In Pennsylvania:

The real danger for the Trump 2024 campaign

Donald Trump is an infinitely better candidate for president than Kamala Harris. He'd be a much better debater if she musters the courage to debate Trump (she probably won't and that alone is very telling). Trump would of course make an infinitely better president than Kamala Harris. We know this. But there's reason to worry. The Democrats are not playing to win, they're playing to be able to be in a position to say they won.

If you look at the RealClearPolitics poll averages in the swing states (something I urge you to do with caution as it averages polls that are not alike), as of today, Trump still leads Harris in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia. He's only trailing in Michigan, but thanks mainly to a highly unlikely outlier poll. If the entire current RCP state of affairs holds true, Trump will get 297 electoral college votes and win the presidency.

But here's the catch, the polls, particularly including the outliers, have significantly dampened the lead Trump holds.  In fact they've depressed the margins strongly enough (again as of now), that it would be fairly easy for Democrats to pad the vote totals and steal the election in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.  Those two states alone would swing the election to Harris given enough ballot stuffing. And the Trump leads are a bit tight. You could also add Georgia to the list of possible Harris steals. Maybe even Arizona. 

The real danger therefore, is not Trump being unable to win the right combination of states to win the electoral college, the danger is not winning the right combination of states by enough votes to overcome cheating on an epic scale by Democrats in those states.  If Kamala Harris does indeed choose inexplicably popular Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate, being able to cheat Pennsylvania into her column becomes infinitely easier.  If she holds the suspect polls for Michigan, that means any one Wisconsin, Georgia or Arizona would capture the Whitehouse for the Democrat.

The map with Harris as the Democrat nominee should be at least as easy for Trump as it was with Let's Go Brandon, but the truth is, it got harder. Not through legitimacy, but the bar to provably win each swing state got higher.

Another election projection analysis

Not mine, this is from Election Projection Official:

Democrat law in Pennsylvania might backfire, help Republicans.

If you know the playing field, you can better compete.  Pennsylvania Republicans seem to be benefitting from that.  Democrats passed an automatic voter registration bill into law. It's capturing REpublicans at a 10-1 ratio over Democrats so far. This alone won't deliver them the state the way say a sudden 300,000 appearing votes might, but it's a start.

Evidence the GOP may be catching on

A special election victory for Republicans in Pennsylvania might be an indicator that the GOP is starting to get it on how to fight elections using the same tactics as Democrats.  Either that or Republicans simply won a safe district and they haven't really adjusted.  You decide.

Senate Series: PA - Dr. Oz

 Pennsylvania, you can choose this:

or this (and this meme is very indicative of the candidate):

Here's more:

This guy, Pennsylvania?

 This guy needs medical attention, not a senate office.

Doug Masterino announce runs for PA governor

 He announced yesterday. This is good news.

Wait, this isn't real, right?

 This is way too specific, not to mention creepy.

Is the GOP full of liberal sleeper agents?

We know there are RINOs.   We know there are weak-willed Republicans afraid to do anything that rocks the boat.  We know there are establishment Republicans who are driven by money rather than principle.  All of these combine to make the party vastly less effective than it could, and should, be.  Here's the question though - is the GOP full of liberal/Democrat sleeper agents?  At times it really, really seems to be the case.

How else would you explain this (via Gateway Pundit):

Pennsylvania Republican Senate leader Jake Corman has squashed Doug Mastriano’s quest for an audit of the PA 2020 election results.

Senator Mastriano put up a video on his Facebook page blaming the “powers that be” for keeping his committee from meeting and issuing subpoenas. The video was subsequently taken down.

This despite some pretty convincing evidence that president Trump actually won the state. Why, as a Republican would you stand in the way of exposing this? Is the GOP that obsequious?  Or are Democrats in Republican clothing infiltrating the Republican party at all levels, rising through the ranks, and making decisions contrary to conservative beliefs?

Pennsylvania had more votes than registered voters

This election will probably never be sorted out properly. Pennsylvania voting was a train wreck.  They are not alone in that regard. It's really difficult to see a path where Biden actually won, given all of the fraud that seems to have happened.  It's also hard unfortunately, to see how this works out for president Trump and his supporters.

The legal battle continues

 We are in uncharted territory here:

Pennsylvania crash and burn in progress?

 Election in PA not certifiable as is?

Just a thought on election fraud in Pennsylvania

Remember that time in 2020 when they stopped the electoral vote count in Pennsylvania for the evening, only to resume in the morning?  Do you think it might have been because they underestimated how many votes they would have to manufacture to get Biden ahead of Trump and they needed time to find more ballots?  Remember at that point Trump was still ahead by about 400,000 votes.

Maybe they ran out of fake ballots for Biden.  Just spit-balling ideas.

Joe Biden got fewer votes than Hillary or Obama in every state except MI, PA, GA, WI

The very states that the election is turning on see a Biden surge?  One of which he explicitly stated he wanted to take away their energy industry. That's some amazing coincidence, isn't it?  

This video sort of buries that lead, but it's still a good watch.  What is striking is how little credence has been given to the concerns about transparency by the Left.  It's purposeful, it's hypocritical and it's anti-democratic.

Did Biden end his own chances to win last night?

A lot of commentators have pointed out that Biden's stance on ending oil might cost him Pennsylvania.  Here's one example from Tim Pool:

Here's why THEY are wrong

Previously, I explained why I didn't believe my own filtering of the REalClearPolitics (RCP) average of polls and why I am inclined to think president Trump will win, despite the polling evidence.  It's a stretch for me, I know.  I'm an evidence guy.  I'm a data guy.  Yet I don't agree with the evidence I've collected. So in the spirit of self-checking and to dispel any sort of confirmation bias on my part, I thought I'd run an experiment of sorts.  Or rather just do some checking.  I took a look at the RCP polls for 2016 Trump vs. Clinton and compare it to 2020 Trump vs. Biden.  I specifically drilled down on Pennsylvania as a battleground state.  More specifically, I looked at the polls and compared August vs August.  Here's what I found.

The results are remarkably similar in both election years.  Consider - Trump did not lead in either state in either year, in any poll.  But in 2016 Trump defeated  Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania.  Famously so.  If you compare the 6 polls from 2016 to the 6 from 2018, Clinton was ahead of Trump by a combined +42.  Biden is ahead by +33. If you remove the meaningless Registered Voter (RV) polls, Clinton was ahead by +31, Biden only by +26.  In other words, Biden is under-performing Hillary Clinton at the same time period (August) in the election cycle.

Some might argue that pollsters have gotten smarter and are polling better than in 2016.  Show me proof after the election.  Right now there is no evidence to support that claim.  

In fact, when you look at individual pollsters who polled both 2016 and 2018, CBS News/YouGov has Clinton +8, Biden +6.  He's under-performed. Franklin and Marshall had both Clinton and Biden +7.  They've even got a lower margin of error in 2020, so Biden is doing better right?  No, because in 2020 they polled Registered Voters instead of Likely Voters like they did in 2016. Why is that?  Registered Voters always favor Democrats versus Likely Voter polls, and they are always less accurate.  The only pollster in 2020 that has good news for Biden is Emerson.  Emerson has Biden +9 and it only had Clinton +3.  Interestingly in this case, Emerson showed the lowest spread of Clinton over Trump and shows the largest spread of Biden over Trump.  Is it a perennial outlier or the one pollster we can say is an apples-to-apples comparison?  There's no evidence it's the latter without investigating the cross tabs (which I have not yet done).

Evidence, though only circumstantial, would indicate that the pollsters showing a Clinton lead and a Biden lead could be suffering from the same innate bias.  Trump beat Clinton despite the polls (in August anyway), and the same is quite potentially true in 2020.  And Biden is under-performing Clinton at the same point in the race.  The directional indication thus is Trump beat Clinton in Pennsylvania, despite trailing in August.  He trails Biden by less than he trailed Clinton in August.  Therefore it's possible he will defeat Biden by more than he defeated Clinton in Pennsylvania.  That's not an impossible trail of breadcrumbs to follow. 

Now time for the glass half empty view.  In the polls the gap between Trump and Clinton appear to be due to her own ceiling.  Remember, she was not a likable candidate.  Biden, while oafish, is more likable than Hillary was.  Trump's numbers have come up vs. 2016 but Biden has a higher polling average than Hillary did.  It seems he has a higher top end.  The Emerson poll is an interesting example.  Trump scored a 43% in both 2016 and 2020 but whereas Clinton got 46% in the pol, Biden got 52% support.

I eye that even with suspicion.  It is possible that a pollster could (NOT would) hold an option static and then smooth out the results based on that.  In other words, they could have held Trump at 43% and then took the remainder of voters and got fewer not sure/uncommitted and more Biden support.  I don't think they did that.  It's more plausible that Biden is more likable than Hillary was.  That does not translate to more votes in November though.

I'll leave it with one last thought.  The final RCP average in 2016 had Clinton +2.1%, Trump won by 0.7%.  The only two polls that had Trump competitive in the final days of early November were Trafalgar Group (Trump +1) and Harper (Tie).  Most of the pollsters (excluding the RV polls) had Clinton +2.  Morning Call had Clinton +6.  Monmouth had Clinton +4.  Not included in the RCP average but still final week polls, were CNN (Clinton +5), Quinnipiac (Clinton +6) and Franklin and Marshall (Clinton +11).  Remember: The only poll that matters is election day (plus all the monitored mail in voting but that's a story for another day).