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    NYT/Siena Poll Is Latest to Show Republican Gains

    Is four points the real margin nationally? That’s a good question.The path to keeping the House and the Senate appears to be getting tougher for Democrats, according to the most recent polling. Campaign signs for the Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Tim Ryan in Columbus on Friday.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesWe have the result of our third New York Times/Siena College national survey of the midterm cycle to go with your coffee this morning: 49 percent of voters say they back the Republican congressional candidate in their district, compared with 45 percent backing the Democratic one.It’s a modest but notable swing from last month, when Democrats led by one percentage point among likely voters. Since then, the warning signs for Democrats have begun to add up, including Republican polling gains in key Senate races like those in Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and surprising Republican strength in districts in Rhode Island and Oregon where Democrats would normally be safe.Up to this point, Democrats have maintained a narrow lead in polls asking whether voters prefer Democrats or Republicans for Congress, but there have been warning signs for the party here as well. Republicans have led in several high-quality polls, like ABC/Washington Post, CBS/YouGov and Monmouth University. Today, the Times/Siena survey adds a fourth such poll to the pile.The evidence for a shift toward Republicans appears to be underpinned by a change in the national political environment. Gas prices went up again. The stock market is down. A variety of data suggests that the electorate’s attention is shifting back to issues where Republicans are on stronger ground in public opinion, like the economy, inflation, crime and immigration, and away from the summer’s focus on democracy, gun violence and abortion, where Democrats have an edge.In other words, the conditions that helped Democrats gain over the summer no longer seem to be in place.Is four points the real margin? (Wonkiness 4/10)Our poll may show Republicans ahead, 49-45, and yet it may not be accurate to say they lead by four points. In fact, they actually lead by three points.How is this possible? Rounding. By convention, pollsters round the results to the nearest whole number. In this poll, the exact unrounded figures are 48.51 (rounding to 49) to 45.47 (rounding to 45). That’s a three-point lead.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Arizona’s Governor’s Race: Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor in the state, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but members of his party have learned to tolerate his behavior.This is not at all uncommon. In 2020 polling, about one-third of our reported margins, based on the difference between two rounded vote shares of the candidates, were different from what our reported margin would have been if we had rounded once on the difference between exact figures.It’s not even the only example in today’s poll. Our result among registered voters is reported as a 46-46 percent tie, but Republicans lead, 46.2 to 45.6. If we reported it as a rounded margin, this might count as a one-point Republican lead.The two rounding errors add up to an even larger disparity between the reported and actual result when it comes to the difference between likely and registered voters. The rounded result makes it seem to be a four-point gap. In reality, the difference is a 2.5-point gap.This is a polling custom that has always left me a little cold. The case for rounding is straightforward: Reporting results to the decimal point conveys a false sense of precision. After a decade of high-profile polling misfires, “precision” is most certainly not the sense pollsters want to try to convey right now. And in this case, reporting to the one-thousandth of a point would obviously be ridiculous. We didn’t even contact a thousand people; how could we offer a result to the one-thousandth?But there’s a trade-off. Characterizing this poll as a four-point Republican lead doesn’t merely offer a false sense of precision — it’s just false. That’s not something I can gloss over.Sometimes, the difference is enough to affect the way people interpret the poll. We’ve reported one party in the “lead” by one percentage point when, in fact, the figures are essentially even. These differences don’t actually mean much, of course, but no one — not even those of us well versed in statistics and survey methodology — can escape perceiving a difference between R+1 and Even.Hopefully, the differences between the rounded and exact results can be another reminder that polling is inexact. The results are fuzzy, and the margin of error understates the actual degree of uncertainty anyway. If we had called another 100 people, or did another round of callbacks, the results would almost certainly have been at least somewhat different, and the same if we had called another 100 more. There isn’t a great way out of this problem. We can refrain from characterizing a 49-45 lead as a four-point lead, as the main Times article on this poll does today. But even this requires us to notice when the rounded and actual margins differ, which is not easy when our crosstabs and other products use rounded numbers. When we do notice a difference worth your attention, we’ll try to flag it here and elsewhere.What’s different about our polls this year?A few weeks ago, I noted that most pollsters this cycle weren’t making big methodological changes. Instead, they’re doing something more like tightening the screws on an old boat after a rough storm in 2020, rather than going out and buying a new boat.But I didn’t actually mention what screws we’ve tightened this cycle. Here’s a quick summary:We’re weighting on method of voting in 2020 — whether people voted by mail, early or absentee. It’s an important predictor of vote choice, even after considering the partisanship of a registrant. Registered Republicans who voted on Election Day, for instance, were more likely to back Donald J. Trump than those who voted by mail. Weighting on this in 2020 wouldn’t have made a major difference, but it would have brought some of our polls about half a point or so closer to the final result.We now use additional information about the attitudes of respondents in determining whether they’re likely to vote, including whether respondents are undecided; whether their views about the president align with their party; whether they like the candidate they intend to vote for; whether they back the party out of power in a midterm; and so on, all based on previous Times/Siena polls. At the same time, we now give even more weight to a respondent’s track record of voting than we did in the past.We’re changing how we characterize people who attended trade or vocational school but did not receive a college degree (Wonkiness rating: 6.5/10). The effect is a slight increase in the weight given to Republican-leaning voters without any post-high-school training, and a decrease in the weight given to the somewhat fewer Republican voters who attended some college or received an associate degree.This is a little complicated. Basically, pollsters need to decide whether people who went to technical or vocational school count as “high school graduates” or “some college” when they’re adjusting their surveys to make sure they have the right number of voters by educational group. They have to choose, because the Census Bureau doesn’t count a trade or vocational school as a level of educational attainment. In the view of the Census Bureau, that puts them in the category of high school graduates. The Times/Siena poll (and many other pollsters) previously counted them the same way.But this choice isn’t necessarily straightforward. Whether it’s the right choice in practice depends on whether census interviewers and respondents handle this question the way the census would like. If you completed a professional technical program at, say, Renton Technical College, there’s a chance you selected one of the various “some college” options on the census American Community Survey or the Current Population Survey.I’d like to run an experiment on this at some point, but for the moment we’re moving respondents like these into the “some college” category. By doing so, we modestly increase the weight we give to those categorized as high school graduates (who are pretty Republican), and decrease the weight on the other group (who still lean Republican but somewhat less so). Unfortunately, had we done this, it would have improved our result by only about a quarter of a point in 2020 — despite the number of words I just dedicated to the topic.On a totally different topic, we now consider the source of cellphones in determining whom we’ll call (Wonkiness rating: 8/10). This is the last point in this newsletter, so you can go on with the rest of your day if your eyes are glazing over, but I think it might be the most interesting to a subset of you, especially those who conduct polls.As I’ve mentioned before, we get the telephone numbers for our poll off a list of registered voters called a voter file. The telephone numbers on the voter file can have two different sources: those provided by the registrant on their voter registration form (which then wind up on the file), and those matched by L2 (our voter file vendor) from an outside source.The voter-provided cellphone numbers are the likeliest to yield a completed interview. They almost always lead to the person we’re looking for (we complete interviews only with the people named on the file). And the people contacted are a little more likely to cooperate, too. But the voter-provided cellphone numbers are almost exclusively from people who registered over the last 10 years (after all, if you registered 20 years ago, you probably didn’t have a cellphone number). As a result, they’re relatively, young, liberal, less likely to be married, less likely to own a home, and so on.The externally matched cellphone numbers are less likely to yield a completed interview. They’re less likely to belong to the people we try to reach; these people may also be less likely to take the survey, even when we’re reaching the right ones. They’re somewhat more representative of the population as a whole because anyone, regardless of when they registered, could plausibly have one of these numbers.Why does this matter? When we treated all cellphone numbers the same, we were systematically reaching fewer people who were older or married or homeowners — people more likely to have registered long ago. We called these groups in the right proportion, but we would wind up with fewer completed interviews from groups like this with more externally matched numbers.Now, we’re accounting for whether different demographic groups — like new or previously registered voters — have more self-reported phone numbers or externally matched phone numbers. As a result, we’ll dial more people from the groups with relatively high numbers of externally matched numbers.It’s hard to know how our 2020 polls would have been different if we had used this year’s approach. After all, we would have reached a different set of respondents. Most of the analyses I’ve conducted suggest that the respondents with self-reported or externally matched numbers aren’t very different politically, controlling for the characteristics we’re using in weighting. I’d note, though, that this would have been a real problem if we hadn’t been weighting on homeownership or marital status. Most pollsters using voter file data aren’t doing so; it might be worth looking at. More

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    How a Christian Cellphone Company Became a Rising Force in Texas Politics

    GRAPEVINE, Texas — Ahead of what would usually be a sleepy spring school board election, a mass of fliers appeared on doorsteps in the Fort Worth suburbs, warning of rampant “wokeness” and “sexually explicit books” in schools, and urging changes in leadership.The fliers were part of a broad effort to shift the ideological direction of school boards in a politically crucial corner of Texas, made possible by a campaign infusion of more than $420,000 from an unlikely source: a local cellphone provider whose mission, it says, is communicating conservative Christian values.All 11 candidates backed by the company, Patriot Mobile, won their races across four school districts, including the one in Grapevine, Texas, a conservative town where the company is based and where highly rated schools are the main draw for families. In August, the board approved new policies limiting support for transgender students, clamping down on books deemed inappropriate and putting in place new rules that made it possible to be elected to the school board even without a majority of votes.The entry of a Texas cellphone company into the national tug of war over schools is part of a far more sweeping battle over the future of Texas being waged in the suburbs north of Dallas and Fort Worth.The company’s efforts have been seen as a model by Republican candidates and conservative activists, who have sought to harness parental anger over public schools as a means of holding onto suburban areas, a fight that could determine the future of the country’s largest red state.“If we lose Tarrant County, we lose Texas,” Jenny Story, Patriot Mobile’s chief operating officer, said. “If we lose Texas, we lose the country.”Glen Whitley, the top executive in Tarrant County, Texas, recognizes the rising political clout of Patriot Mobile in his part of the state. Emil Lippe for The New York TimesGlen Whitley, the top executive in Tarrant County, said the company has become an important player in politics in this part of the state. “They’ve been successful in taking over the school board in Grapevine-Colleyville, in Keller and Southlake,” Mr. Whitley, a Republican, said. He said the company appeared to be setting its sights next on city council races next year.“They’re coming after Fort Worth,” Mr. Whitley said.Patriot Mobile representatives are a frequent presence on the conservative political circuit across the country, taking praise from Steve Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference, buying tables at nonprofit fund-raisers and meeting with candidates from inside and outside of Texas.Modeled after a progressive, California-based cellphone provider founded in the 1980s, the company unabashedly embraces its partisan agenda, donating money to anti-abortion and other conservative causes. Lately, it has begun spending money on behalf of Republican political candidates.Peter Barnes, who helped start Credo Mobile, the California cellphone company that funded progressive causes, said he long expected that other firms would follow a similar path.“The business model is pretty simple and we expected that something similar would emerge on the right,” he said of the plan for channeling profits into politics. “But it didn’t — until now.”In North Texas, Patriot Mobile’s political spending has supported digital advertising, door hangers and campaign mailers as well as get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of its chosen candidates.Patriot Mobile openly embraces its partisan agenda, donating money to anti-abortion and other conservative causes. Emil Lippe for The New York TimesIts political activism has already changed things on the ground in Grapevine, where the nine-year-old company is based. The new policies on books and transgender issues passed 4-to-3, with the two Patriot Mobile-backed candidates making the difference.More on U.S. Schools and EducationDrop-Off Outfits: As children return to the classroom, parents with a passion for style are looking for ways to feel some sense of chic along the way to school.Turning to the Sun: Public schools are increasingly using savings from solar energy to upgrade facilities, help their communities and give teachers raises — often with no cost to taxpayers.High School Football: Supply chain problems have slowed helmet manufacturing, leaving coaches around the country scrambling to find protective gear for their teams.Teacher Shortage: While the pandemic has created an urgent search for teachers in some areas, not every district is suffering from shortages. Here are the factors in play.An array of high school students in this increasingly diverse area responded with a walkout from class, led by transgender and nonbinary students. Parents opposed to the changes have begun meeting to figure out their own response.In Grapevine’s harvest-and-wine-themed downtown, where upscale coffee shops and restaurants can be found near displays of “Ultra MAGA” sweatshirts, Patriot Mobile is headquartered in a cluster of offices unmarked from the outside.The company’s logo adorns a conference room where Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, leads a packed Bible study every Tuesday. Along one cubicle hangs a Texas flag with silhouettes of assault rifles and the words “Come and Take It,” in a nod to a well-known slogan from the Texas revolution.“We just said, ‘Look, we’re going to put God first,’” said Glenn Story, the founder and chief executive, sitting in his office on a recent afternoon, a guitar signed by Donald Trump Jr. hanging on the wall. “Which is why I haven’t erased that from the board,” he said, pointing to a list of core values written on a whiteboard, beginning with “Missionaries vs. Mercenaries.”Under Glenn Story, the chief executive, Patriot Mobile has become a growing influence in communicating conservative Christian values in Texas. Emil Lippe for The New York Times“Our mission is to support our God-given Constitutional rights,” said Ms. Story, the chief operating officer and Mr. Story’s wife.“And to honor God, always,” said Leigh Wambsganss, a vice president at the company who also heads the political action committee, Patriot Mobile Action, founded by the company’s executives.Corporations donate regularly to state and local political campaigns, but a regional company, founded with a partisan mission and willing to spend money in backyard races, is unusual. School boards across the country are increasingly becoming political battlegrounds, attracting larger sums of money and national groups into what had once been largely invisible local contests.Patriot Mobile’s political activities are focused on suburban Tarrant County, north of Fort Worth, in large part because the county has been trending blue, narrowly carried by President Biden in 2020 and by the former Democratic congressman and current candidate for governor, Beto O’Rourke, during his 2018 Senate run.Long a bastion of well-regarded schools, conservative churches and largely well-off, white neighborhoods, the area nurtured strong Tea Party groups during the Obama administration and, more recently, those that supported a Republican primary challenger to the right of Gov. Greg Abbott. It has a reputation, among some in the party, as a hotbed for hard-right politics.Downtown Grapevine, Texas, is where Patriot Mobile has its headquarters. Emil Lippe for The New York TimesThe new policies voted on in the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District have divided parents and raised concern among some teachers, some of whom said they feared becoming targets of the new school board.One of the new board members suggested as much during a Republican forum over the summer, saying the board had a “list” of teachers who she believed were activists promoting progressive ideas about race and equity.“They are just poison and they are taking our schools down,” the board member, Tammy Nakamura, said.Some teachers have begun removing books from their classrooms rather than abide by new rules that require titles to be posted online so that they can be publicly reviewed. The district canceled its annual Scholastic book fair after previous concerns about books that were “mis-merchandised” and were not age-appropriate, a district spokeswoman said.“You now have the school board approving library books, and I feel that is completely micromanaging the administration,” said Jorge Rodríguez, a school board member who voted against the new policies, adding that more than a quarter of the district’s 14,000 students were economically disadvantaged. “We’re here to educate kids and this is not helping.”The top spokesman for the district resigned a few months after being hired, citing the “divisive” atmosphere. The district’s superintendent said recently that he planned to retire at the end of the school year.A neighborhood in Grapevine. New policies in the school district there have divided parents. Emil Lippe for The New York Times“I’ve always been a staunch conservative,” said Christy Horne, a parent whose two children go to elementary school in the district. But the attacks on teachers were too much for her, Ms. Horne said. “It got personal.”But for Mario Cordova, another parent in the district, the new school board leadership has rightly given more control over curriculum and reading material to parents, many of whom were dismayed by what they saw their children learning in remote schooling during the pandemic.“Parents across the district voted for a change on the board last May and are happy to see them follow through,” Mr. Cordova wrote in an email. Opponents of the changes are “crying wolf,” he added. “This crowd has convinced themselves they cannot teach children without incessant conversations about sex and gender.”For many parents and teachers, an early sign that their schools had become a political battleground came last year with complaints over the first Black high school principal at Colleyville Heritage High School.Some parents contended that the principal, Dr. James Whitfield, had been promoting “critical race theory” and were rankled by an email he sent, days after the death of George Floyd, expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters and a desire to create greater equity.“He’s going to start a diversity advisory committee? At our school? He’s going to say that Black Lives Matter?” said Dr. Whitfield, describing the reaction he encountered. The fight made national headlines and the district eventually reached a settlement with Dr. Whitfield that included his departure as principal.The district superintendent has said the decision was not about race.The fight over comments that Dr. James Whitfield made supporting Black Lives Matter protesters when he was principal of Colleyville Heritage High School made national headlines. Emil Lippe for The New York TimesA few months after Dr. Whitfield’s departure, opponents of a diversity plan in neighboring Southlake won control of the local school board, with help from a political action committee, Southlake Families. One of the founders was Ms. Wambsganss, a parent in Southlake schools and a former television news anchor. Another was Tim O’Hare, who is the Republican nominee in November’s election to lead Tarrant County.Parents both in Southlake and in Grapevine-Colleyville have been offended by the sexual content, including explicit descriptions of sexual activity, in some books offered to students, as well as certain discussions of gender and race, said Ms. Wambsganss, now at Patriot Mobile.“Parents do not believe that gender issues should be discussed in K through 12,” she said. “Especially Christian parents do not want multiple genders discussed with their children by someone who is not their parents.”She added: “I always say, it’s not about homosexuality. It’s not about heterosexuality. Stop sexualizing kids in either of those arenas.”The victories by Patriot Mobile-backed candidates surprised some parents who did not agree with the new direction in the district.On a recent morning, a dozen of those parents and community members gathered at the local botanical garden. For many, it was the first time they had met after finding one another through one of the many proliferating Facebook pages dedicated to the school district conflicts.“I ask myself every day, what did I bring my children into,” said Katherine Parks, who moved to the area from France.Marceline, a student at Grapevine High School, helped organize a walkout.Emil Lippe for The New York Times“We were Swift Boated by these people,” said Tom Hart, a Republican former city councilman in Colleyville, referring to the political attacks that helped sink John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004. “We cannot combat $400,000 in funding from the outside.”As parents met to strategize, some students at Grapevine High School, where the Gay-Straight Alliance club was shuttered for lack of a faculty sponsor, have already begun to find ways to protest. A student started a book club for reading banned books. A group of friends organized a walkout.“We can find solidarity, and we can find safety in each other,” said Marceline, who asked that only their first name be used out of concern for possible reprisals. “Because we cannot trust the adults.”About 100 students joined in the walkout. No similar protest has taken place at nearby Colleyville Heritage High School, and for many students, the beginning of the school year has proceeded, more or less, as it always has.In Grapevine, books and the discussion of gender and race continue to be hotly debated topics.Emil Lippe for The New York Times More