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November 03, 2010 07:34 PM UTC

Q&A Today With Kevin Ingham, Pollster for RBI Strategies

  • 60 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

One thing we’re quite proud of this morning is the evident accuracy of polling we released last week from RBI Strategies & Research. RBI appears to have correctly forecast every race polled last week–a narrow win for Michael Bennet, a wide margin of victory for John Hickenlooper, and the failure of the major statewide ballot initiatives.

Pollster Kevin Ingham of RBI Strategies will join us TODAY in this thread from 1-3PM to discuss their polling, and answer your related questions about yesterday’s elections.  

As always, please be respectful in your comments and questions for Mr. Ingham. We appreciate the time that he is making for this Q&A session, and whether you agree or disagree with anything he says, there is NO reason you need to voice your opinion in a rude or disrespectful manner.

In order to keep things as orderly as possible, we’re asking readers to please post their questions for Mr. Ingham as a new comment, not as a reply to other comments that may accumulate between now and the Q&A.

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60 thoughts on “Q&A Today With Kevin Ingham, Pollster for RBI Strategies”

    2. He was clearly the most obvious Buck campaign staffer that was shilling here. His job is done and we’ll never see him again.

      Beej, OTOH, is a wannabe who was just sooooo sure that these polls were biased. Since he had no shame about his Facebook sockpuppeting, he will be back. Probably not here, though, or any other thread where he’ll have to eat his words. But who knows with that guy.

        1. will do anything to avoid coughing up what he owes you. Beej is constitutionally incapable of admitting he’s wrong, and paying a lost bet is a huge admission of exactly that.

          1. if he could gloat non-stop about Buck taking over the world, with beej’s invaluable assistance, of course.  Now, he will have to admit that he was just MSU about every responsible poll on governor and Senate.

            When i said turnout numbers were cause for cautious optimism for Dems, he puked all over his screen.

        1. but he’ll have a lot less to say with a GOP controlled House.

          The shoe is going to be on the other foot for all the critics. I predict that they’ll just blame everything on Obama and the Dem-controlled Senate, but that won’t fly when the House is trying to impeach the president instead of fixing the economy.

    1. Looking at the results at the top of the ticket compared to the bottom, it looks like there was a lot of ticket splitting for Hick, a little for Bennet, and not much below that.

      Or maybe Unaffiliateds voted more like Dems at the top of the ticket and more like Rs at the bottom.

      Or a little of both.

      Please give us your analysis.

      1. It appears that people voted FOR Hickenlooper and Tipton, FOR J Paul Brown and a school bond issue.  What are those people thinking?  I mean it, that’s not snark, I would really like to grasp how those votes are compatible.

      2. the super decisive defeat of all the far right amendments along with the all the victories by the far right, including the statewide offices of treasurer and SOS and the almost choice of Buck.

        It’s as if there is no relation between how people feel about issues and which candidates they choose to support (this was glaringly true of those who voted for Reagan way back when) even though not many of the righties wanted to say a word about how they stood on those amendments.  Even so, there should be some level of assumption that these amendments fit the agenda of the right and therefore of the candidates on the right.

        It seems that, in the absence of a candidate absolutely notorious for extreme nuttiness, such as Tancredo, the only thing that matters is money and sound bites. Grown up Rs and Ds alike were sufficiently scared by the amendments to spend the tons needed to defeat them here.  Other states haven’t been so lucky. All in all, Colorado does seem to do a better job hanging on to a shred of sanity and practicality. We aren’t an easy state to figure out, are we? Kudos again to RBI.

        1. on total votes for the issues/amendments against total votes for candidates.

          Did putting extremo amendments (like eggmendment) bring out the conservatives and their votes carried through to Buck & others?  Were more candidates undervoted than issues/amendments?  

          Montana & Ark had Hunter’s Rights inititatives on ballot that were tools to GOTV of righty conversative pistol packers.  Did CO’s do the same thing?  

      3. For starters, I have to do the full disclosure thing.  Buescher and Kennedy are clients of our firm.

        That said, down ballot races are inherently difficult to analyze.  Most voters are unfamiliar with the candidates and often times, the actual responsibilities of the office they are voting on are not well defined.  Therefore, low information voters will either 1) vote the party, not the candidate or 2) skip the race.

        For the sake of analysis, we like to look at the CU Regents race as that is at the bottom of the ballot, is one of the least defined offices, and candidates often do not raise enough for broadcast communication. The Republican won in that race by about 8% (there was an ACP candidate so that sort of complicates things).

        There was about an 8% drop off in the number of voters who voted in the most voted race (Gov) to the least voted (CU Regent).  My guess (and I have no hard data other than my polling experiences) is that the ones most likely to vote in these down ballot races are partisans and the ones most likely to drop off are unaffiliateds.  

        Because Republicans had a significant edge in turnout, and given that unaffiliated voters were favoring Democrats in top of ticket races, the drop off most likely came at the expense of Democratic votes in a situation when there weren’t many votes to spare if a Dem wanted to win statewide (see Bennet, Michael).

        Another possibility is that, as you said, voters wanted to vote R on some races but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the top of ticket Rs.  So the down ballots suffered in that situation.

        We’ll do more analysis on this moving forward but these races are very hard to analyze.

    2. With the Dems winning Gov and Senator, the “ugly three” going down in flames, yet Republican pickups in Congress and both the State House and State Senate, it looks like local politics is still local, and that many races were more about the candidates than the dogma.

      Do you concur?

      2. In terms of pulling out some nugget of wisdom about what just happened, you can’t just do an analysis of the results.  You have to look at all the dynamics.

        The Govs race cannot really be used to judge anything.  That was just a ridiculous race that it makes any sort of “narrative” analysis sort of superficial.  You had a Republican candidate nearly get 10% in a state where Republicans out number all other parties.  You can’t pull anything from that.

        In the Senate race, people knew both of the candidates and saw their ads (more was spent on Colorado than any other Senate race in the country) and while they may not have been thrilled with either choice, they really were put off by Buck’s more extreme positions.  Bennet benefit from a Tea Party candidate.

        The Bad 3 had no real “Yes” campaign and the “No” campaign put MILLIONS into defeating them.  Plus, as a pollster, I can tell you that the ballot language they used was awful.  If you want to pass something in Colorado, make it short and sweet or prepare for defeat.  The results could have been much different with better ballot language and a real yes campaign.

        As for the legislative races, those candidates are often unknown to most voters and “the wave” is more likely to be effective.

    3. is pretty simple. Overall people believed the GOP propaganda about the economy and voted R, but still evaluated the top ticket candidates on their merits. I know that I never cared about downticket races until I started frequenting this site – just voted Dem.

      1. Even undervotes in uncontested races.  Sets a baseline for how many people refuse to vote D or R even if there’s no other choice.  Very important when you’re targeting how many votes you REALLY need to sway to win.

    4. I think that Independents in this particular year would have felt guilty voting for a straight dem ticket.  The couldn’t vote for Tancred or Maes, Buck was questionable, so the voted for Gardiner and Tipton and the constitutional Rs because they did believe the hype.  My two cents.

  3. 1. what happened on the western slope (how did Salazar lose?

    2. How did Rice lose when Arapaho seems to have broken D at the top?

    The results are pretty much what I expected 4 months ago except for Bennet winning, but I have Buck, and his views on women, to thank for that.

    1. Just my opinion, but we’ve hardly heard from him the last two years.  He never made a public trip through the area last summer, at least that I recall, and only started campaigning the last two weeks.  Complacency?  Arrogance?  I don’t know, it’s just that he seemed … removed.  And unresponsive.  That’s a bad start and he didn’t work for it.  Of course, he was doing his job in DC, and I’m good with many of his votes, but he didn’t light any fires.  An enviro I saw last night wasn’t fired up about Salazar even though he’s done a good bit on public lands.  Maybe, it always felt like triangulation and not commitment.

      1. It was hard for D’s to get excited about Salazar’s D-lite, at best, stances.  (It’s almost as if Salazar wasn’t all that excited about Salazar.)  And this wasn’t a year that R’s felt any need or compunction towards pulling the lever for an alternative to their party’s slate or line.

        That district has had R representation all along, the voters just made it official for this cycle.

        1. Kogovsek (D) wins 78, 80, 82

          Strang (R) wins 84

          Campbell (D) 86, 88, 90

          McInnis (R) wins 92, 94, 96, 98, 00, 02

          Salazar (D) wins 04, 06, 08

          Democrats have won that seat nine times, Republicans seven times, in the last 16 terms.

          There were three redistrictings in that period.

          CD3 is a swing District.

          1. Kogovsek: Conservative Democrat

            Campbell: Conservative Democrat cum Republican as a US SEnator

            Salazar: Conservative Democrat.

            Few would call the third “progressive” by any measure. Pueblo is a stronghold, but even it can tip more conservatively than most would think.

              1. But I wouldn’t call it a swing district, either. Voters of the third vote the same way election after election. It’s more about personality and the national electoral climate than it is about party affiliation. In that way, it’s the furthest thing from a swing district.  

                2. “It’s more about personality and national electoral climate” says to me that it is a swing district since it responds to and reflects the national climate.

            2. then the most important thing for progressives to learn is that Democrat =/= Progressive.

              The GOP is still heading for the cliff IMO. They are still purging and purifying, and are about to do nationally what they did in California in the 90s – radicalize themselves into oblivion. If they even dream of doing the crazy things they have promised (anti-Obama investigations and witch hunts), we’ll have a Dem controlled House in two more years.

              BUT… progressives are going to have to find a way to get along with real moderates and a few fiscal conservatives – the ones who don’t find the GOP to be a welcome place anymore. If progressives are going to go all pure too, it will spell disaster.

              The Dems have to play it smart. Appeasing the GOP doesn’t work, but being the left wing mirror image of the right won’t work either.

            4. If you want liberal representation move to Boulder or Denver.

              Plenty of so-called ‘progressives’ do live in the 3rd (look at Bennet’s 53% in Gunnison County last night). But they’re vastly outnumbered by conservatives and mods.

              Even the San Luis Valley, while reliably Dem – Conejos County gave Michael Bennet a higher vote % yesterday than did Boulder County – is hardly ‘progressive’.

              Ari’s right: if you want an ideologically pure Dem, don’t expect him/him to get elected in the 3rd. It is by definition Blue Dog country, when it’s not GOP-ville.  

              1. I think the district is conservative, in various meanings of the word, but not necessarily Blue Dog.  John Salazar exemplified the problem with the Blue Dogs.  He swung between voting with leadership or obstructing leadership which just comes across as overly political posturing.  The Republican charge that he didn’t vote for some bills because leadership gave him a pass stuck to him.  Whether or not it was fair.  I think he (and the Blue Dogs) really blew it by not backing a vote on tax cuts.  They could have raised the ceiling on reinstating taxes to 300k maybe, but what was needed was a vote for reducing the deficit.  Instead they obstructed and killed the vote.  Bad politics, bad policy.

                1. I think John Salazar backed into his seat originally, and never really liked the job enough to battle hard for it. My bet is that he feels a weird kind of relief today to be out of DC and headed back to the ranch in Colorado.

                  His brother, however, is a scrapper with aspirations. Any dreams of Supreme Court or Colo governor probably got killed forever by the BP spill.

    2. I’m still looking into CD3 to get a really nitty gritty sense of what happened there.  But I think you can just look at the Generic Ballot (which was about +7R) and see what happened.  

      This was a bad year to have a D next to your name.  We pollsters like to say that politicians who are well liked and are outperforming their party in popularity receive what is called a “personal vote.”  So if you don’t like Obama but you know Salazar and like him you say “I hate Democrats but that Salazar guy isn’t like the rest of that lot.  I can vote for him.”  I think this helped Salazar win in 2004.

      This year, we saw time and time again that even a personal vote couldn’t stop you from getting caught in the wave.  I think Salazar got hit by the same thing.

  5. But first a compliment: THANK YOU for taking time to “talk” with us, and for ignoring some of the ignorant insults you were getting on this site (especially the claims that you were slanting your polls to try to suppress GOP turnout).

    1. I second the other question: Any indication as to why John Salazar did so poorly against a rather flawed opponent?

    2. Any indication as to why Bennet won at the same time that so many other federal Democratic candidates were going down to defeat?

    3. Did Hickenlooper appear to have any coattails? Or put another way, did the lack of a credible Republican gubernatorial candidate appear to harm other Republican candidates?

    I think the results in the downticket races were fairly predictable. In all cases there were Democratic, full-term (not recently appointed, a la Bennet) incumbents, and this was a Republican year.  

    1. 1) I wrote something about this above you should look at.  Basically, that area is not very fertile ground for Democrats to withstand a national wave larger than 1994.

      2) Yes.  First, I think Michael Bennet and Harry Reid woke up this morning and probably considered sending flowers and a thank you note to the Tea Party.  These candidates have a difficult time building mainstream coalitions in swing states.  So Bennet did a great job of defining his opponent on his more extreme views.  It wasn’t just a referendum on Bennet – it was a choice between mainstream and extreme.  You can see that in the exit polls.  People voting for their candidate were voting Buck.  People voting against the opponent voted for Bennet.  Second, third party candidates received a pretty high share of the vote.  Bennet really benefited from not having to win 51%.  The strategy all along was to get 47-48%.

      3) I don’t think Hick had coattails (he barely broke 50%).  But I think the damaged Republican brand (56% had a negative opinion of the GOP according to exit polls) might have hurt their chances in some State Senate and House seats.

      1. … b/c your take on all this is really helpful.

        One quibble: don’t know that I agree with your statement that because “third party candidates received a pretty high share of the vote[,]  Bennet really benefited from not having to win 51%.” The top 3d pty candidate was the Green who won about 2.3%. The Libertarian got barely half that (about 1.3%). Then you had a couple looney-tunes unaffiliated candidates of mixed ideologies (Miller seemed more conservative but Napolitano seemed more liberal), but really, those last few candidates’ support seems too random and mixed to infer where those votes would’ve gotten. So I’m doubting that Bennet would’ve done worse if you took out the Green who won 2.3%, the Libertarian who won 1.3%, and three nobodies of odd/mixed ideologies who won 0.3-1%. Am I wrong?

  6. Do you think groups like Rasmussen will come away from this with re-worked models that take into account the cellphone phenomenon?

    And a related question: In two years’ time, do you foresee other technological/social trends that will affect polling accuracy?

    1. Ras uses “Dynamic weighting” that can differ from poll to poll–that makes it impossible to use Ras for tracking.

      Your weighting methodology seems to be grounded in previous elections, not week-to-week swings.

      What are your thoughts on changing the weighting every poll?

    2. And reassess their methodology and methods.  Cell phones are nearly impossible to deal with by just making a simple decision to call them.  It is illegal to call cell phones with an automatic dialer and that is what IVR pollsters use.

      Rasmussen weights their polls by party self identification.  As I said when we first released the COPols/RBI poll, party self identification and party registration are not the same thing.  We (almost) never weight by party self affiliation because it is an attitude which can change and frequently does.  We do weight by party registration because it is relatively simply to calculate partisan turnout by looking at past elections and registration trends and we can verify your party registration by looking at your voter registration record.  Rasmussen cannot do this because they do not call a voter registration sample.  They use a random digit sample which is not matched to a voter registration record.

      So I’m not sure how they will deal with whatever error they had in their polls but they are simply unable to do the party weighting we do because of their methodology.  I think dynamic weighting was supposed to be their idea of how to deal with the problem of party self affiliation.

      And finally, in two years, the big problem is going to be the increasing number of cell phone only adults.  Not calling cell phones without doubt affects accuracy but most clients are simply unable to afford calling cell phones.  Its a huge challenge and I’m not sure how the industry will deal with it.

  9. 1) Did RBI do any exit polling that you can share here? (And what do you goys do now?)

    2) Is good polling necessarily local, like “all politics”?

    I continually got the feeling that pollsters not from Colorado didn’t poll here very accurately.

    And thanks- nice to meet some of your guys last night. I hop CoPols acn get you again in the future.

    1. We rely on the media exits for that sort of stuff.  I actually think they were pretty darn accurate this year.

      Now that the election is over, we will still do polling but it will probably be less politically focused for the next few months.  Also, we will be doing a post election analysis.

      I wouldn’t say that good polling is local.  We were able to correctly forecast the margins in every race we polled within 3 points (except for A62 where the margin was larger than we anticipated).  I’m very proud of that.  However, any pollster that was within the margin of error was technically accurate.  Non-Colorado pollsters were very close but had Buck ahead by a point or two.  Further, YouGov (as far as I know) was the only other firm to release a poll publicly that correctly predicted Bennet to be the winner and they are not from here.  It’s not local, just decisions you make about your sample, weighting and methodology and every pollster had access to the same information we had.

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