PPC polls during the past month

Apr 11, 2025

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Tue Aug 07, 2012 at 17:53:34 PM EDT

PPC has run dozens of cheap robo-polls for various clients, looking toward today’s primary election.

Just for the fun of it, I thought I’d post all our polls which were conducted in the past 30 days and reported in the media. I may have missed a few, but these were gathered by searching Google/News and a few other sites.

I’ll post the actual results when they become available, and compare them to our numbers. In general, it would be good not to miss any candidate’s percentage by more than 1/sqrt(sample size).

The “MOE” column in the continuation refers to the margin of error for the difference between the two candidates, as calculated by the method I described a few years ago.

District/party	owner	leader	percent	second	percent	sample	lead	date
CD13 (D)	Ballenger/IMP	Conyers	48	Anderson	26	182	22	7/11/2012
US Senate (R)	Ballenger/IMP	Hoekstra	75	Durant*	8	204	67	7/11/2012
CD14 (D)	Ballenger/IMP	Peters	41	Clarke	34	232	7	7/11/2012
US Senate (R)	MIRS	Hoekstra	59	Durant	23	316	36	7/31/2012
Ingham Drain (D)	Lindemann	Lindemann	65	Grebner	35	222	30	7/26/2012
HD71 (D)	Ballenger/IMP	Abed	43	Cascarilla	37	377	6	7/23/2012
HD84 (R)	Ballenger/IMP	Grimshaw	47	Damrow	27	209	20	7/23/2012
HD108 (D)	Ballenger/IMP	Nerat	57	Gray	43	357	14	7/23/2012

*Durant finished in second place on election day, but was actually in third place when we conducted our poll.

District/party	leader in poll	second	sample	lead in poll	date	act marg	miss	MOE
CD13 (D)	Conyers	Anderson	164	22	7/11	42	18	14%
US Senate (R)	Hoekstra	Durant*	204	67	7/11	20	-47	12%
CD14 (D)	Peters	Clarke	232	7	7/11	12	5	12%
HD71 (D)	Abed	Cascarilla	377	6	7/23	0	-6	9%
HD84 (R)	Grimshaw	Damrow	209	20	7/23	8	-12	12%
HD108 (D)	Nerat	Gray	357	14	7/23	-2	-16	11%
Ingham Drain (D)	Lindemann	Grebner	222	30	7/26	32	2	13%
US Senate (R)	Hoekstra	Durant	316	36	7/31	20	-16	10%

Overall, it was a mediocre showing for PPC. We got some races exactly right, and in all but one case, we picked the winner correctly. In a number of cases (especially the two US Senate polls) it was obvious that the lead was shifting at the time we conducted our survey, so it wasn’t a surprise that things were different on election day. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the polls we conducted four weeks before the election didn’t track the final results very closely – the candidates hadn’t really done much campaigning yet.

But we really don’t have an excuse for getting Nerat/Gray wrong. We had Nerat leading 57-43 just a week before the election, and she ended up losing by 2%. Maybe there was some sort of event up there (I don’t follow UP news) or maybe Gray’s campaign was surging in a way that would be obvious to a local observer. Unless somebody provides such an excuse, I’m going to chalk it up to “error”.

Polls are sometimes wrong, and inexpensive robo-polls are wrong more often than their expensive brethren. In the right situation, and treated with proper skepticism, they can be extremely valuable. But they aren’t perfect, at least when I run them.

Comments

6 responses to “PPC polls during the past month”

Violet

April 11, 2025

Absentees?
I don’t about some of the districts you polled, but I was doing AV chase for one candidate and at least 34% of the vote in my district was absentee.
If a large amount of the vote is starting to trickle in on June 26th through July 7th or so, how does that affect polling?

I know Durant was surging with the later vote, but AV’s killed him and took him out of the running.

“He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security” – Benjamin Franklin

by: Republican Michigander @ Thu Aug 09, 2012 at 14:24:45 PM UTC

Reply
1. Violet
  
  April 11, 2025
  
  Early AVs should make polling easier.
  AVs aren’t the problem. The biggest problem is a campaign that only starts rolling a few days or week before the election, leaving the polling data behind.
  In last week’s election, 1.5 million votes were cast, of which 425000 (28%) were absentee. Because the return rate was slightly less than 3% per day, only about 80000 ballots were received by local Clerks through July 15 – 5% of the total vote.
  
  In this election, the absentee ballots seemed to come in later than usual, and roughly 15% were never returned at all.
  
  by: Grebner @ Thu Aug 09, 2012 at 22:23:21 PM UTC
  
  Reply
Violet

April 11, 2025

What’s the difference?
How was it that you could call the Democratic gubernatorial nomination race in 2010 with such precision, but have to disclaim this polling?

Among the Trees
by: Eric B. @ Sat Aug 11, 2012 at 13:58:35 PM UTC

Reply
1. Violet
  
  April 11, 2025
  
  Why the difference?
  I’m not sure, but I have some ideas.
  For the statewide gubernatorial primary, I could follow the story line of the campaign, just by reading the papers and talking to political friends. So I knew how the polling data fit into the narrative. That is, I knew when Dillon had peaked, and when Bernero was starting to make his move. I knew that Snyder’s lead was large but fragile because I knew that his four opponents were all far to his right, so if their votes ever coalesced, it could overwhelm Snyder’s smaller number of moderate votes. In short, I knew the story.
  
  But for many of these races, all I know is the poll result. Nerat and Gray are just names to me; I have no idea how their politics differ, or what kind of a campaign they ran. In other words, I didn’t have context.
  
  I don’t think any of the results was terrible. If we knew the inside story, I bet each one of them would be illuminating.
  
  In Ingham, the Drain race was static, and so the polling didn’t suffer from trying to track a dynamic race. So were the three state representative primaries, whose data was never published so I don’t include it in the chart, and which we also pegged within a few percentage points. In other words, PPC did a lot of good work this summer, but not everything worked out.
  
  The Republican Senate race was obviously a story of Hoekstra holding an almost unchallenged dominance until the last two weeks of the campaign, when Durant finally started unloading his money into media. Knowing that, PPC’s results were probably right on target in tracking the race, although they appear “inaccurate” if you simply compare them to the final vote totals.
  
  Maybe I’d put it this way: knowing the local story, but not having any polling data, leaves you open to misjudging the situation because of subjectivity or depending on friends who may all share a blind spot. Let’s say that relying on insider gossip is worth one point in some measure of knowledge.
  
  Collecting data in a poll gives you objective information, but unless you are part of the political scene, there is the danger you won’t really understand what the data MEANS. Let’s say that’s also worth one point.
  
  If you have the good fortune to both know the polling data and also the local story, each kind of knowledge increases the value of the other, and reduces the dangers inherent. If you add one point for local knowledge to one point for a poll, you get four points worth of predictive accuracy.
  
  by: Grebner @ Sat Aug 11, 2012 at 17:15:16 PM UTC
  
  Reply
Clifton4265

April 25, 2025

Awesome https://lc.cx/xjXBQT

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Alexa3616

April 28, 2025

Very good https://rb.gy/4gq2o4

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PPC polls during the past month

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6 responses to “PPC polls during the past month”

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