Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Poll: Patrick Maintains lead but Baker and Cahill Gain

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New Rasmussen poll was released today.

Deval Patrick  41%

Charlie Baker  34%

Tim Cahill     16%

Patrick is down from 45% in the last poll, both Baker up from 31% and Cahill up from 14% gained from the last poll.  Charlie can’t seem to get out of the 30s and maybe Tim is not going away after all.

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  1. That’s the boolean logic to a Patric re-election.

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    p>If the MA economy is improving in Aug, Sep, Oct, and
    If the MA economy is improving faster than tUSA economy

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    p>then

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    p>Patrick wins reelection.

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    p>

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    p>If not… dunno.

    • if that continues, and it has been foretasted to do just that, then Patrick gets another 4 years.  Good point on improving faster than the country, it pretty much takes away Baker’s argument; that he can do better.  He has already watered down his attack that we are mot improving to I can do better.  That hurts his campaign, but if Patrick maintains what he has accomplished so far then I don’t see how an independent can take Baker’s rhetoric seriously.  

    • Cahill is holding level. 14% from one poll to 16% in another is within the noise and tells us nothing about whether he’s gaining – or continuing to drop.

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      p>For Patrick the drop from 45% to 41% starts to look significant. And I think Baker’s rise is probably true as well – as it’s a continuation of a rising trend.

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      p>The key number in this poll – like all the other polls is how many people are undecided about Baker. Patrick and Cahill now have almost no people undecided about them. Their movement is going to be more limited.

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      p>Baker still has 20% undecideds to mine so it’s likely that his rising trend will continue over the coming weeks. By end of July I think Baker will be well known to voters and then the competitive landscape will even out with all candidates having to convert people who are already decided on another candidate.

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      p>If there is no significant positive or negative news on Patrick and Baker, I expect that by late July they will be about even, just from the trend of people getting to know Baker better.

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      p>Biggest risk for Patrick: economic news reverses itself.

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      p>Biggest risk for Cahill: continuing bad news about his insider ties keep him down, lack of money hurts his ability to get his message out.

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      p>Biggest risk for Baker: that he fails to convert a significant portion of the 20% undecided block to his column. he needs to end July about even with Patrick or its an uphill battle for him.

      • sampling error is +/- 4.5, using your logic everyone is within the margin of error from the last poll, but only Patrick’s numbers are significant?

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        p>Then you say “spin all you want but…”

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        p>Please, at least make an attempt to cover your spin before pretending to be objective.

        • The confidence values are +- 4.5% for a 90% confidence value.

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          p>It’s up to you if you want to only draw conclusions at 90% confidence.

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          p>If you are seeing a three polls numbers in a row, one high, next lower, then higher again all within what is probably under 30% confidence – then it’s reasonable to conclude that its probably noise.

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          p>If you see a trend running at 70% confidence in the same direction for three polls in a row, it would be reasonable to conclude that there is a real rising trend there.

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          p>A 4% drop for Patrick – it not at 90% confidence – but its easily above 80%.

          • I’m sorry if you are full of it, my apologies.  Thanks for your analysis, I had thought that a poll to poll change calculations would be more significant, but apparently it can be done in a minute and described in a sentence by some right wing yahoo that seemed to have figured out that it only matters for Patrick.   Got it.

            • I thought the top of this blog said “reality based commentary”. I think that’s a reference to certain bush white house people who started with conclusions and worked backwards. You have a lot in common with them.

              • I’m sure that you are checking.  Why don’t you go to Pollster or somewhere like that for trending instead of playing make believe.

                • that would be the affirmative.

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                  p>Please, play nice David Whelan and stop hiding behind your non-anonymity.

                • Certainly a ligit campaign issue all over the Commonwealth. The forgotten 58! Coming to a Rep or Senate race near you. Promise!

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                  p>After all the children in Swampscott, Saugus, Wakefield, and Woburn should have the same chance at a good education as the kids in Marblehead, Natick, Lynnfield, and Somerset.

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                  p>  

                • It’s unfair that some people are just so much smarter than the rest of us regular folk.  

                • I haven’t been writing many front page posts recently as I’m upgrading the back end to better cover elections.

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                  p>But actually yes my little blog is getting 300 uniques per day and it was getting over 1000 per day during the special election. With over 1000 people following on facebook, twitter and email its building a nice little audience.

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                  p>I think people like rational numbers and facts based reporting on politics.

                • Sounds like a medium size web page. And I think your analysis is pretty reasoned.  

                • why don’t you move the BS over to RMG where you usually play.  Funny with all those “good points” no comments about a real polling website when linked.  Odd.

              • When you get attacked here, it just confirms you are on to something. You may be right about the trends and the assumptions. Remember the audience though and don’t expect objectivity.

                • It’s just someone pretending to be something that they are not really gets under my skin.  

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                  p>So how many Democratic candidates has he liked anyway?

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                  p>Do you think there is anything wrong with someone that wants to argue why a Republican candidate could win?  I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.  The problem is you got a guy who somehow thinks a Republican is always going to win based on his “analysis”, then posting some foolishness about trying to write an expose post about Cahill’s donations at RMG, now this person wants to say that it’s not spin?  Come on, no one here is an idiot.  If this guy wants to debate then he’s better off coming clean and be truthful of what he is.

                • I supported Smulowitz. I like Josh Cutler. I like Susanne Bump. I don’t like Glodis. I like Sal DiDomenico. I’ll go with either Walsh or Williams against Mike Rush. I’m not pretending to be party partisan either. I like a lot of Republicans too. If you must know I voted Obama, I hated Bush, I voted Patrick last time but not likely this time.

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                  p>I’m just against insider crony pols. I’m sick of having my taxes raised in the name of things I support like local aid – and then having local aid cut again and again.

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                  p>It’s pretty simple for me – my kids aren’t getting what they used to in school and I want the legislators responsible to go home.

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                  p>I don’t have a strong favorite between Patrick and Baker. I’ll cop to leaning Baker. But Patrick has been a standup guy on local aid. Just weak on actually protecting it.

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                  p>But you know – I do hate Cahill. He is the very definition of insider bough and paid for crony politics as usual garbage.

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                  p>But at the end of the day on polls I’ll call it like I see it. You can argue all you want about my motives – but numbers are numbers. Either the terms “bell curve” and “z value” mean something to you or they don’t.

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                  p>It takes all of 15 minutes to educate yourself on statistics enough to interpret a poll. I suggest you do that. Be warned it does take high school level math to understand it.

                • that you were the first to say stop the spin, then when it was noted that you were spinning.  You started the insults.  Save the 3s and 0s and it’s clear on the timestamps when the insults occurred.  My response is what you deserve based on your insults.  Why would anyone listen to what you have to say.  You have marginalized yourself.

                • I’ve been busy and took some advice from BMGers to concentrate on my job. Plus my other activities (non-profits, town committees…) have sucked up many cycles.

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                  p>I don’t know “Massachusetts Election 2010” but he/she appeared to be presenting some recent poll results and assigning some theory to why they trending down for Deval. They then made some “guesses” at where it could go further. I didn’t see any claims from MA-EL-2010 of absolute confidence, just guesses. There will be plenty of Republicans who lose races in November and I think we all know that.

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                  p>Nice to chat again John.

            1. it’s probably a 95% confidence interval. In fact,

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            p>

            The survey of 500 Likely Voters in Massachusetts was conducted on June 21, 2010 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

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            p>That’s from the Rasmussen folks themselves, by the way.  Right there on the linked web site.

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            p>2. Theory of Runs says you usually need 6-7 data points going in the same direction for a significant trend. Or above/below the median.

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            p>Where are these 30% and 70% “confidence” numbers coming from? Confidence intervals aren’t additive, or subtractive. Or subjective; sorry “reasonable”.

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            p>You are right, though, a few more polls and we’ll know more.

            • But I decided that it wasn’t necessary to actually plot the curve to calculate where the actual confidence interval are in the poll.

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              p>If you know the sample size you can plot the confidence curve. I didn’t do that I just made some reasonable estimates to answer the commenter. I think they are close to the right values. But I’ll defer to anyone who actually wants to compute it for us.

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              p>As for 6-7 data point – its a luxury not usually available in looking at polls. By the time we have that many points the election will be over. But with three points in the same direction you can predict that a trend is likely there.

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              p>Polls are sparse low sample size data and you’re always making reasonable guesses. I wouldn’t want to drive the motors on a rocket with data this poor – but I think the analysis I made is pretty good with the quality of data we have to work with.

              • But with three points in the same direction you can predict that a trend is likely there.

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                p>Erm, you can do whatever you want, but it’s crap statistics to do what you’re suggesting.

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                p>Two points make a line.  Unless those two points have substantially different values (in this case, say 20 and 46) then it’s hard to suggest a trend.  After all, MoE is 4.5% — on each point.  Which means if one point is moved up 4.49% and the other down 4.49%, you may well have a slope in the opposite direction.

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                p>The third point?  As long as it happens to land in between the other two, it’s easy to suggest a linear trend.  That doesn’t make it so though, not by a long shot.

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                p>

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                p>Again, if the difference between each sample is above twice the MoE (one for each point), you’ve got a legit claim.  If it’s less than that, you’re not using science, you’re using scientology.

      • a 2% change for Cahill is no change at all, but a 4% change on a poll with a margin of error larger than that “starts to look significant?”

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        p>I really think you could use a crash course on the science aspect of political science, before commentating on the significance of polls as an election source.

        • 4.5% is a 90% confidence value – so a 4% change is that not close to 4.5%? Doesn’t that mean its approaching a 90% confidence value?

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          p>And 2% – that’s much closer to the center of the bell curve. That means within 2% is very far from the 90% confidence value.

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          p>You do know that a 2 point change is much less statistically significant than a 4 point change is right? I mean its not just 50% less significant… its like 10x less significant.

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          p>Have I entered the innumeracy zone?  

          • which is pretty much the minimum confidence value acceptable in polling. It’s been a while since I’ve taken my statistical analysis course in political science, so I don’t want to take this too far with you, but suffice it to say the number isn’t a huge deal. Of course, that isn’t to say the Governor should be taking this race lightly. If he does at any point in time, for any length of time, there’s a good chance Baker could steal the thing. But so long as the Governor’s on his game, I don’t see how Baker makes up the difference, especially with the way his campaign loves to continually screw up.

  2. The most interesting result from today’s Rasmussen poll: despite over $2 Million in combined TV advertising between the Republican Governor’s Association, the MA Republican Party, and the Charlie Baker campaign, the Rasmussen poll shows the race remains basically unchanged.

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    p>A close look at the Rasmussen poll over time:

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    p>

  3. 11/23/09: DP 33%, CB 28%, TC 25%

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    p>

  4. 3/8/10: DP 35%, CB 32%, TC 19%

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    p>

  5. 4/5/10: DP 35%, CB 27%, TC 23%

    6. <

    p>

  6. 5/10/10: DP 45%, CB 31%, TC 14%

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    p>

  7. 6/21/10: DP 41%, CB 34%, TC 16%

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    p>As you can see, Governor Patrick’s lead has been as low as 3% and as high as 14% in the poll, and I assume it will continue to move around due to the methodology of the poll, but it has remained roughly the same as it was in November 2009.

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    p>The Rasmussen data also shows a significant increase in Governor Patrick’s favorability ratings since last year, spurred in part by the positive economic news of the past few months.  April showed the largest monthly job gain in 17 years, and MA has created over 44,000 new jobs in the last four months.  In addition, business confidence has grown 13 out of the last 15 months, and numerous independent studies have shown that MA is recovering faster and stronger than the rest of the country.

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    p>Overall, this latest Rasmussen poll is good news for the Patrick campaign.  We have weathered a significant negative TV blitz, forced the Baker campaign to spend hundreds of thousands on TV ads early, and maintained a solid lead in the polls.  We still have a lot of work to do, but our grassroots organization is growing exponentially, and Governor Patrick and Lieutenant Governor Murray are delivering every day for the people of Massachusetts.

    • First Patrick has clearly gained from good economic news. He’s up significantly from the low 30’s to the low 40s.

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      p>The other big change is that Baker’s ‘unknown’ has been shrinking. If you posit that Baker has not been gaining – then his staying in place while his unknowns shrink is definitely good for Patrick.

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      p>That’s why I say that risks for Patrick are a reversal in economic news – because his gains i think mainly come from that.

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      p>And for Baker – he has to convert that last 20% predominantly to his side.

    • Rubin the joker!!

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      p>What does Rubin know that Jon Keller doesn’t?

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      p>

      The Race Tightens
      Posted by Jon_Keller

      Uh-ohSo much for the notion of Gov. Deval Patrick pulling away from the pack.

      The latest Rasmussen poll shows Patrick’s 14-point spread of six weeks ago has been cut in half. Half the electorate continues to disapprove of his performance in office; 24% have a “very unfavorable” impression of him, twice Charlie Baker’s number.

      But Patrick cannot be pleased at continuing to struggle to get into the low 40s, especially after several months of positive free-media exposure, marginally improved economic news, and underwhelming performances by his opponents.

      I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – elections featuring incumbents are usually a referendum on those incumbents, and Deval Patrick is one of the least-popular incumbents I’ve seen in more than three decades of covering Massachusetts politics.

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      p>Keller appropriately wonders why Rasmussen is excluding Jill Stien.

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      p>http://pod08.prospero.com/n/bl…

      • You and Powerman 2000 (for some reason that keeps on popping in my head every time I see the user name) have it all but won for Baker, so turn that frown upside down.

        • Life is good, the family is healthy, and what’s there to be angry over. Opps, just read about the “compromise” budget in the Globe. This health ins issue is a budget buster and the Legislature just blinked. Now I’m angry!

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          p>Here’s the deal johnk. You have been busting a guy that is probably on your side politically. He makes good points and you carve him up like he’s some sort of right wind ass. All because he dares be more objective (ha!) than Dougie Rubin. Bad form!

          • Surely, Charlie Baker’s never had an opportunity to help this state reign it’s health care costs in control…

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            p>David… I’m sorry to say this… but your team has backed the wrong horse, and our Swampscott enthusiasm for the guy isn’t going to matter a lick beyond our 3.5 square miles.  

            • As of July 2009 I was an Independent and I never got Mitt Romney. Thus, I had no team!

            • Anyone that follows Deval on FaceBook sees your name over and over, always spewing nastiness.  Same with any Deval related thread here. For example:

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              p>

              David Whelan: How come Deval Patrick didn’t step in to help Worcester ROTC instructor Major Stephen Godin? Could there be some reluctance to cross the teacher’s union? Thanks to Charlie Baker and Richard Tisei for caring enough to take on this inequity. Common sense for regular people.

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              p>I do have to say that deleting any diary where you’re proved wrong (e.g. your latest rant on Chapter 70) is a new low for BMG’s differently winged denizens.

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              p>As KBusch says: Please, play nice David Whelan and stop hiding behind your non-anonymity.

  8. I liked last month’s double-digit cushion much better. However, the wild card in my estimation is still Cahill. Is he really gonna blow $3M with no realistic chance at victory? I thought he may head to the sidelines, grab a nice job, and wait to pounce with his warchest (a la Marty Meehan.) But it looks like it’s all systems go for now, which is nice…I think.  

      • This is a tracking poll. Stein is doing well enough that she should be included in the poll, but if he adds her then it stops being a controlled tracking poll.

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        p>I think there is a case to be made that if Stein were included that Patrick’s numbers would shrink a little. We will have to wait for the WNEC poll.

    • Warchest or no, he just gave up a big statewide gig, left the party that helped get him that gig, and is sitting on that 3M which he either spends now in going for it, or doesn’t spend, but becomes a statewide flop of epic proportions.

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      p>Of course, Cahill isn’t a smart man, but if he were and still wanted to be Governor now, he would have challenged Patrick in the primary. I’m glad he’s not the brightest bulb on the block — and I’ll be glad when he’s out of office. He damn near ran the treasury office into the ground.

  9. I think she is a complete and utter non-factor (I will concede she could become relevant in a Patrick/Baker nailbiter.) I’m sure Deval wishes she wasn’t on the ballot, but I think the 8% number recently attributed to her is pure folly.

    • But not much less. She may be a non-factor in most parts of the state, but in ultra-progressive districts I think she is a serious threat.

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      p>I live near Cambridge. I’m constantly surprised by the number of Stein bumper stickers I see in Cambridge, Arlington, Somerville ( progressive bastions I know ).

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      p>I bet she’s a factor in some western progressive districts too like Amherst and Northampton.

      • Those liberal bastions don’t want to see a health care CEO and the guy who brought us the Big Dig funding schemes that almost brought this state under recently. If Stein gets 10% of the Cambridge vote — and I think that is a high estimation — there’s no way she gets 2% of the state’s vote. Given that just getting your name on the ballot is likely to get 1% of the vote strictly from people who accidental filled the bubble in, I don’t think Stein is going to be a factor at all. You can’t look at that small slice of a population and say, “Spoiler.” Whoever votes for Stein wasn’t going to vote for anyone else, anyway.

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        p>This all, of course, assumes the election is close. If it’s not close, then you’re right, she could get a few extra votes from people sympathetic with causes they believe the greens support.

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