Let’s all chill out about the Colorado poll: No one is electing Ben Carson president

[brooklynite]

Salon:

A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Hillary Clinton trailing Republican rivals in Colorado, which, being a swing state, gets lots of love and attention from pollsters. “Florida Sen. Marco Rubio bests Clinton 52% to 38%, the biggest gap,” CNN explains. “Ben Carson wins a potential head-to-head matchup as well, with a 52% to 38% advantage. And Donald Trump leads 48% to 37%.”

This seems like bad news for Clinton, the Democrats and frankly the nation itself, if all these clowns can best an experienced and competent politician like Clinton. But don’t write off Clinton—or the concept of democracy itself—quite yet. The blunt fact of the matter is that, while primary polling is useful at this stage in the campaign, general election polling this far out from the election is useless.

In 2011, political science professor John Sides, in a q-and-a with the Columbia Journalism Review, explained why we should distrust these kinds of polls that are a full year away from the actual election. “The simplest fact about polling a presidential general election is this: early polls are much worse at forecasting the outcome than later polls,” he explained, since the people being polled don’t really have the same level of information that they’re going to have closer to the election, when they start actually paying attention to the election coverage. (Most voters aren’t breathless political junkies like professional pundits are. Shocking, I know.)

Sides followed up this interview with a post at his blog the Monkey Cage, which now lives at the Washington Post, with a chart from a book by political scientists Robert Erikson and Chris Wlezian. They compared poll data on presidential elections from 1956 to 2008, starting 300 days from the election up until Election Day, to see how accurate the polling was. Polling right before the election is, it turns out, pretty good at predicting outcomes. Three hundred days before, you might as well be reading tea leaves.

[ibegurpard]

1. Yeah let's not

Her negatives are high, she has no room to move because everyone already knows who she is, and people are pissed off at establishment politicians. Sticking your fingers in your ears like you have been doing is the worst thing you could do.

[DanTex]

3. Only in the Bernie bubble are examinations of statistical trends done by political

science professors described as "sticking your fingers in your ears".

[Juicy_Bellows]

4. I have a feeling that her negatives are going to get higher - I don't see any ebbing possible.

I've been wrong before, but once the market is fully saturated with something it usually tends to sour.

[DanTex]

2. Good article.

Another important point that it makes is that people who aren't running and people who aren't known partisan figures poll better than actual candidates. Carson and them are basically polling like "generic Republicans" or even simply as "others." Hillary, on the other hand, is the presumptive nominee, so she's polling like a candidate.