**crossposted from Stochastic Democracy**
I'm very happy and proud to announce the launch of Stochastic Democracy, a new polling institute founded by David Shor, a young statistics wunderkind from Florida, and myself.
We're aspiring to be a pollster that offers high-quality statistical analysis for our IVR polls, priced at a cost that allows local campaigns that have so far not been able to afford opinion polling to buy our polls.
Below the fold you'll find a bit of a taste of what we're doing, as well as the release of our first public polls.
MRP, IRT, and Polling
For the past three years, we have mainly focused on election forecasting and poll aggregation. Honestly speaking, we seem to be pretty good at that. But after having predicted US House district results with an average error of 2.5 points in 2010, there honestly isn't much room for improvement for finding out who is going to win the election.
Our final 2010 race forecasts graphed against election results.
That's why I'm really excited about newer statistical techniques that will allow us to answer more subtle and interesting questions about the electorate.
Estimated Obama Approval in the first half of 2011, derived from weekly PPP polling over six months(n~20,000). Blue is more Democratic, Red is Republican, Green indicates groups for which there wasn't enough data to reliably estimate opinion. This map was created with a technique called MRP, which uses multi-level logistic regression in order to produce sub-group estimates that are much more accurate than traditional naive disaggregation of the data into various crosstabs.
Probability of supporting Jack Davis (I), Jane Corwin (R), or Kathy Hochul(D) as a function of IRT-derived ideology for the NY-26th Special Election. To produce this graph, we used a Bayesian IRT model to estimate inherent respondent ideology based off of their survey answers, much like political scientists estimate legislators' ideological beliefs from their votes in congress.
Understandably, it's pretty hard to get pollsters to provide the raw individual level polling data that is needed for this kind of analysis. So we decided to build our own data by building our own pollster. We're aiming to bring the kind of sophisticated statistical techniques that previously were only seen in academic journals into the realm of timely analysis.
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Polling: NC1, NC2, NC3, and Precinct-level Post-Strat
Estimated Obama Approval by precinct in the North Carolina 3rd Congressional District
One thing we've been trying to do is push the limits of what can be done with a traditional poll of a district. This is a map of estimated Obama Approval by precinct, based on a multi-level Bayesian spatial model that took into account past election results, the 2008 Presidential Exit Poll, and the poll of 750 Registered Voters we did of the district. The precinct estimates should be accurate to about six points, which is pretty incredible considering that there are only a couple respondents per precinct.
Here's our first round of public polls:North Carolina's 1st Congressional District: [Obama approval, Congressperson Approval]. Click here for a detailed poll report with cross-tabs.
President Obama depended on strong support from the heavily African-American 1st Congressional District of North Carolina to eek out a win in the state in 2008. Since he retains the support of the black voters in the district, the President is still on a good track to repeat that showing in this district.
He leads Mitt Romney by 28 points, by a 60-32 margin, thanks to his pretty strong 56-41 approval rating. He also leads Rick Perry by a 60-33 margin, but remember all of these polls were taken in mid-October as test subjects for our new polling outfit, so considering Gov. Perry has since taken a nose-dive in his favorability numbers, he would probably do even worse today.
It is striking that even in this heavily Democratic district Governor Beverly Perdue has a negative approval rating at 37-44, but she still leads former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory by a 47-36 margin. The discrepancy stems from the fact that African-American voters approve of her by just 44% to 29% disapproval, but still vote for her over McCrory by a 66-16 margin.
Senator Kay Hagan does better than Governor Perdue, but worse than President Obama-- mostly because she's less-well known than the President and thus many supporters of President Obama are hesitant to back her-- she gets only of 70% of voters who approve of President Obama. But she still leads Congresswoman Renee Ellmers by a margin of 49-30.
Congressman G.K. Butterfield is moderately well-liked in the district, with an approval rating of 37% to 33% disapproval.
North Carolina's 2nd District:[Obama approval, Congressperson Approval]. Click here for a detailed poll report with cross-tabs.
North Carolina's old 2nd Congressional District is the classic example of a swing district with a slight Republican tilt: It was carried by former President George W. Bush by convincing margins twice, but bolted for President Obama by a narrow margin in the Presidential Election 2008, allowing him to win the state of North Carolina. Its incumbent Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge was ousted by an even narrower margin by Republican Renee Ellmers after a personal scandal in which he attacked two teenagers tracking him with a video camera.
The probably most interesting finding in this poll: Fmr. Congressman Etheridge has regained some of his further popularity, leading Congresswoman Ellmers 46-40 in a hypothetical rematch. However, considering the district was made more strongly Republican in redistricting, this lead probably wouldn't exist under the new boundaries.
President Obama sports a negative 47-50 job approval rating, but leads Governor Romney by a 7-point margin-- 48-41. It is notable that here, as well, almost none of the undecided voters approve of President Obama's job performance, so once these voters come home, Romney should be in a narrow lead here.
Governor Perdue sports an atrocious 29-53 approval rating and trails likely Republican nominee Pat McCrory by an 11-point margin-- 36-47. With these numbers, reelection seems close to out of reach for her.
Senator Hagan leads Congresswoman Ellmers by one point in Ellmers' own district-- 42 to 41. Still, Ellmers is not terribly disliked by her district-- she has a 37 percent to 31 percent approval rating-- which is better than a lot of politicians these days.
47% of voters in this district want President Obama to become more conservative, while 18% want him to become more liberal, and 35% are comfortable with his current posturing.
North Carolina's 3rd District: [Obama approval, Congressperson Approval]. Click here for a detailed poll report with cross-tabs.
The third Congressional District of North Carolina is a classic Southern district: It is made up of some African-American voters, but mostly of ancestrally Democratic, conservative Whites. This is perfectly illustrated by the fact that Democrats have a 12-point Party-ID gap over Republicans here (38% of respondents identify themselves as Democrats, 37% as Independents, and just 26% as Republicans)-- but at the same time 50% of respondents say they're Conservatives, with just 16% identifying themselves as liberals.
President Obama is very unpopular in this district. He has an approval rating of 36 to 59 percent, trails Governor Romney by 12 points (37-49), and that's only going to get worse as people who still haven't formed an opinion on Romney, but disapprove of the President's job performance come home.
Governor Perdue has an approval rating of 28-54 here-- which is notable, since her home base of New Bern is located in this seat. She trails Pat McCrory by 11 points, 33-44. Winning this district in 2008 even while President Obama lost it heavily against Senator McCain was a cornerstone for Gov. Perdue's victory in 2008. She doesn't seem likely to be able to repeat that.
Senator Hagan trails Congresswoman Ellmers by three points here-- 37-40, but with 23% of voters undecided this race is very much in flux. Congressman Walter Jones is decently popular at a 39-28 approval rating, but primary polling we'll be releasing over the next days shows that he has at least something to worry about in the Republican primary, if a strong challenger emerges.
Our polls are of registered voters who've voted at least once in the last four years, and have been weighted by Age, Race, and Gender.