Polls of the US 2018 elections

To check on opinion polls about elections in the United States, I find it practical to google Nate Silver, election forecaster and founder of FiveThirtyEight, a website that aggregates opinion polls.  (FiveThirtyEight, aka 538, is named after the number of votes in the American electoral college; a candidate needs 270, the majority of electoral college votes, to win the presidency.)

Silver is a user, not a doer, of polls.  Pollsters are essentially those who design the questionnaires and analyze the results of the interviews. Silver doesn’t rely on some favorite polls, but believes in assembling them all, and using them sharply (even assigning them grades for polling quality).

In the last US presidential election, the polling profession in general got the outcome wrong by predicting that Hillary Clinton would win. But 538, according to its Wikipedia account, gave her only a 71  percent chance, whereas major forecasters gave her an 85+ percent chance to win.

At 11:06 a.m., US eastern time, 11/06/18, the day of the US midterm elections, 538 gave the Democrats an 86 percent chance of winning the majority in the House of Representatives, and the Republicans an 81 percent chance of retaining the majority in the Senate. The election result has enabled the polling profession to redeem itself.

In the last 100 “generic” polls listed by 538 from August to November, on whether voters would go blue (Democrat) or red (Republican) for Congress, 98 found blue ahead, 1 found a tie, and 1 put red ahead by a single point.

The US Senate stayed red mainly due to the geography of the 50 seats (out of the 100-member upper house) up for election. There were only 9 Republican senators up for reelection this year, compared to 26 Democrats, 10 of which ran in states that Trump won in 2016.

The election was about Donald Trump. Opinion polls serve not only to forecast the vote, but also to explain it. In national exit polls done by CNN and ABC News, more voters said that they voted to oppose Trump than those that said they did it to support him. This is no surprise, since Trump has turned out to be the most unpopular American president since Harry Truman’s time.

Trump’s approval ratings went net negative within two months of his inauguration in 2017, and are negative up to now. 538, i.e. all polls together, gave him 42 percent approval and 52 percent disapproval, or net -10, on election day.

The top issue for voters was health care, with immigration second, the economy third, and gun control fourth.  Half of the voters say that Trump’s immigration policies are too tough, a third say they are just right, and only 15 percent think he’s not tough enough.  Thirty percent say the new tax law has helped them, a quarter say it has hurt them, and almost half say it has not affected them.

Luckily for Trump, the US economy has been doing well for Americans. Those whose personal finances are better now than two years ago outnumber those who say they are worse off. The “gainers” versus “losers” indicator tells more about the people than the Gross Domestic Product or the state of the stock market.

Americans are a very divided people. According to ABC News, whites voted red by 54-44; nonwhites voted blue by 75-22. The youth went blue by 67-32; seniors were split 48-50. College-educated white women voted blue by 59-39; noncollege white men went red by 66-32.

Evangelical white Protestants went red by 75-22; all others went blue by 66-32. Urban dwellers went blue by 65-32; rural and small-city people went red by 56-42; the suburbs split into 49-49.

Three-fourths said the United States is becoming more divided. On this, Democrats (86 percent), Republicans (67) and independents (76) all agree.

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