Wednesday, September 14, 2016

As Goes Ohio, So Goes The Nation

Despite Donald Trump having no ground game in the state, Bloomberg's latest poll of the Buckeye State finds the GOP candidate with a significant 5-point lead in both head-to-head and third-party inclusive matchups against Hillary Clinton, but there's a catch: the likely voter model they are using matches the state's 2004 electoral makeup.

Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points in a Bloomberg Politics poll of Ohio, a gap that underscores the Democrat’s challenges in critical Rust Belt states after one of the roughest stretches of her campaign.

The Republican nominee leads Clinton 48 percent to 43 percent among likely voters in a two-way contest and 44 percent to 39 percent when third-party candidates are included.

The poll was taken Friday through Monday, as Clinton faced backlash for saying half of Trump supporters were a “basket of deplorables” and amid renewed concerns about her health after a video showed her stumbling as she left a Sept. 11 ceremony with what her campaign later said was a bout of pneumonia.

Trump’s performance in the poll—including strength among men, independents, and union households—is better than inother recent surveys of the state. It deals a blow to Clinton after she enjoyed polling advantages nationally and in most battleground states in August before the race tightened in September as more Republican voters unified around Trump.

The poll also finds Sen. Rob Portman with a massive 17-point lead over former GOP Gov. Ted Strickland, 53-36%, as fully 20% of Clinton voters support Portman's re-election, and a whopping 51-38 generic congressional ballot lead for the GOP in the state.  Bloomberg admits their model is unlike anyone else's.

“Our party breakdown differs from other polls, but resembles what happened in Ohio in 2004,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, whose Iowa-based firm Selzer & Co. oversaw the survey. “It is very difficult to say today who will and who will not show up to vote on Election Day. Our poll suggests more Republicans than Democrats would do that in an Ohio election held today, as they did in 2004 when George W. Bush carried the state by a narrow margin. In 2012, more Democrats showed up.”

A higher proportion of men and older voters—groups that tilt Republican—passed the survey's likely-voter screen than typical in past election cycles, Selzer said, boosting Trump's numbers.

Party breakdown for the poll was 33 percent Republican, 29 percent Democrats, and 34 percent independents. Exit polling shows that Ohio's electorate in the 2012 presidential election was 38 percent Democratic, 31 percent Republican, and 31 percent independent, while in 2004 it was 40 percent Republican, 35 percent Democratic, and 25 percent independent
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That's...a gigantic swing in just four years.  If it's true, it's no longer right to call Ohio a swing state, but a red one.  The poll also finds that nearly a quarter of voters under 35 are supporting Gary Johnson, and the rest split evenly among Clinton and Trump, which I find interesting to say the least.

But among the likely voters Bloomberg is basing this poll off of, 46% approve of President Obama and 45% approve of Donald Trump.  Considering President Obama's numbers nationally are pushing 60%, I find this likely voter model to be less reflective of the truth than most.

In other words, Bloomberg's likely voter model is crap. They get points for showing exactly why their likely voter model is crap, but it's still greatly inaccurate as far as I'm concerned.

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