The FiveThirtyEight Team Goes To Iowa

DES MOINES — Well, evening has fallen here in Iowa and some of us have been up since the pre-5 a.m. hours that only elementary school teachers and “Today Show” hosts should have to see. But as I’m looking over my notes for the day there’s one voter comment that struck me as an individual working for a, shall we say, poll-attentive website? David John, 75, of Jefferson, Iowa, who I met at Bernie Sanders’s town hall in Perry was pretty emphatic about how he doesn’t answer the phone these days, unless it’s a number he knows, for fear of encountering a pollster. And sure enough, when I asked his wife, Carol, for their number, she wanted to be sure she knew the area code on my cell phone so she could look out for it. The people of Iowa are ruthless call screeners! When I asked John if he felt the polls he was hearing about were accurate and reflective of the sentiments he was seeing on the ground, he said this:

I don’t think they’re totally accurate because a lot of people like us don’t answer the phone, and we get a lot of calls and unless we know someone, we don’t answer. And there aren’t as many landlines anymore. I don’t know how people do polls anymore, but if they’re doing them over cellphones that’s probably a little more precarious than if they’re doing them over landlines.

The big polling problem illustrated here is one that has come with the rise of cellphone use and the decline of the good ol’ landline — thanks to regulations stemming from the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act, you can’t call cellphones via automatic dial. In other words, David and Carol John are outsmarting pollsters.

As a Des Moines native and longtime patron of its finest establishments, it’s my solemn duty to perform a public service for the carpetbagging East Coast media (including my colleagues). Here’s my guide to Des Moines’s good bars.

BOONE — We’re waiting for a Rick Santorum meet-and-greet to start at Kings Christian Bookstore. Santorum, who won the Republican Iowa caucus in 2012, has criss-crossed the state more than any other candidate this cycle, but it hasn’t paid off — at all. He’s polling at just 0.7 percent in the RealClearPolitics average. You might think that’s because Santorum’s “lane” — religious conservatives — is crowded with other candidates this year, such as Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. But a fractured religious vote isn’t the only thing hurting Santorum; Iowa Republicans simply don’t like him. His net favorability in last month’s Des Moines Register poll was -1 percentage points. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, on the other hand, had net favorability ratings of +54 points and +50 points, respectively. So what’s plaguing Santorum? It could be that he’s suffering from the same problem facing the much more establishment-friendly Jeb Bush: Voters of all ideological stripes appear to want something new. This would also help to explain why Mike Huckabee, who won the GOP caucus in 2008, is at only 2.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics Iowa polling average and had a net favorability of only +15 percentage points in that Des Moines Register poll.

Ben Carson is holding a Pastor’s Roundtable tonight with John Maxwell in Sioux City. The GOP candidate and retired neurosurgeon is shown here in the spin room after the debate at The Venetian in Las Vegas in December.

URBANDALE — At Ted Cruz’s headquarters outside Des Moines (one of only two Cruz field offices in the whole state, the campaign tells me) volunteers are making phone calls that sound a lot like you’d expect: “Hi, my name is so-and-so, I’m calling from the Ted Cruz campaign. Is this-and-that home?” (Those names have been changed, fyi.)

These phone interactions feed the campaign’s data set in pretty interesting ways. As phone-bankers go through the script, an on-screen display prompts them with what questions to ask next and how to log the answers. “Was the person at home?” A volunteer presses: Yes/LeaveVoicemail/WrongNumber. “Have you made up your mind who you’re going to vote for?” Press: Yes/No. “Would you like to learn more about Ted Cruz?” Yes/No.

That campaigns use data to target voters is no new story. I’m more interested in the way that campaigns update their data sets, to get better and better information as they get closer and closer to Election Day. This kind of data hygiene is something I’ll keep my eye on all week. The Cruz campaign isn’t the only one trying to learn the data lessons of 2012, of course. I’ll have more on that later this week and on my What’s The Point podcast over the next few weeks.

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PLEASANTVILLE — I’m sitting in the gym at Pleasantville High School, watching Sen. Bernie Sanders speak. There isn’t much press here, but there are about 400 people in the crowd (I multiplied the number of seats in a row by the number of rows, then added a couple dozen for the people standing around the edges). A lot are students who were just let out of school, but there are also a good number of Sanders supporters. While Sanders is known for his support among younger voters, most of the non-students in the room are older. That may have something to do with the fact that it’s a Monday afternoon; most people can’t get to these events because they are working. Indeed, even when turnout is high, most registered Democrats don’t caucus. And the students? Many won’t be old enough to vote in the caucuses, so their support may not end up helping Sanders that much. But he’s still laying down a lesson in democracy, asking questions about politics and U.S. history (for example, Who didn’t have the right to vote when America was founded?). As an obvious fan of politics, I wish my high school had been located in Iowa or New Hampshire. This kind of event would have been fun.

DES MOINES — You don’t get more anecdotal than this, but in an hour of driving around and continuously scanning the radio, I’ve heard two ads for Ted Cruz, two for Bernie Sanders and the end of what sounded like an ad for Hillary Clinton. Democracy In Action, by the way, has a nice resource of early-state TV and radio spots. If you want to feel like you’re with us this week, just stand by your freezer and play these on a loop.

PERRY — Bernie Sanders spoke this afternoon at the McCreary Community Center about health care, income inequality, terrorism and campaign finance reform, among other things. “Nothing I’m talking about this afternoon is particularly radical,” he said. “Virtually everything I’m talking about is supported by the vast majority of the American people.” https://instagram.com/p/BAaU4rwNeKV/

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We’ve landed in Iowa, but New Hampshire is calling our name — the car we’re driving even has New Hampshire plates! And of the polls out today, the more interesting ones are in New Hampshire. Not only is Donald Trump maintaining his lead in the Granite State, his percentage of the vote is rising. Monmouth University gives him 32 percent (up from 26 percent in November), while the American Research Group puts Trump at 25 percent (up from 21 percent last month). This month he’s averaged 29.8 percent in all polls compared to 25.7 percent in December. Trump’s uptick may seem minor (and it may be fleeting), but it makes it that much more difficult for an “establishment” candidate to catch him. Right now, the next two candidates combined are averaging just 26 percent in New Hampshire. Part of the reason is that the establishment is divided. While I continue to think that an opposition vote to Trump will coalesce, it’s impossible to say around whom. John Kasich is coming in second place in New Hampshire in today’s polls at 14 percent, but in an average of polls this month the second spot goes to Marco Rubio with 14 percent, followed by Ted Cruz at nearly 12 percent and Kasich at 11 percent. Chris Christie, who supposedly had momentum in New Hampshire, is averaging just 9 percent this month. The question is whether we’ll see the polls move away from Trump in the next few weeks. There’s still time for that to happen based upon the predictive ability of polling at this point in past campaigns.

DETROIT METRO AIRPORT — Here I am recording the outro to this week’s What’s The Point podcast while waiting to board the final leg of our flight to Des Moines (And that’s Allison McCann giving me a C’mon Dude look). I’m doing a two-part show the next two weeks on the history of political data, which has surprisingly deep roots. As early as the 1890s, William Jennings Bryan kept a massive card catalog of his supporters’ names, addresses and voting history. I’ll look at the rise of television and computing and geotargeting, all the way through to the Obama campaign’s individual-level information in 2008 and 2012. I’ll be interested to learn how this cycle’s candidates are gathering data and putting it to work on the ground in Iowa. Stay tuned.

A supporter waits to shake hands with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at a town hall meeting in Muscatine, Iowa, on Dec. 29.

DES MOINES — As a data journalism site, FiveThirtyEight sometimes gets pegged as anti-reporting — we’re supposedly uninterested in looking away from our spreadsheets long enough to talk to real people. That’s never been true, but it’s even less applicable now: Shoe-leather reporting has become an increasingly integral part of what we do. We do think some questions are best answered with data — who’s going to win a presidential election, for example. Or whether a candidate has improved his or her image with voters. But other questions are best answered by seeing for yourself: Is a campaign well run? Is a candidate connecting with voters? The trouble comes when you use data to answer the latter or “vibrations” to answer the former. In 2012, when FiveThirtyEight was still publishing at The New York Times, Nate Silver and I went to New Hampshire. The state’s Republican primary was a few days away, and we saw the candidates speak, and watched how they interacted with voters. And then we visited each candidate’s New Hampshire headquarters. What we found summed up the campaigns perfectly: Mitt Romney’s office was bustling and organized. Ron Paul’s was smaller but run with military precision. Newt Gingrich’s was lightly attended and lightly managed. And Rick Perry’s was sprawling and empty. Throughout this presidential campaign, our reporters have been making calls and interviewing sources (in addition to fiddling with spreadsheets), but this week we’re again turning up the dial: A team of FiveThirtyEight-ers – Nate Silver, Clare Malone, Harry Enten, Allison McCann, Jody Avirgan, Hayley Munguia and myself — has descended on Iowa, which will hold the first contest of the presidential primaries on Feb. 1. We’ll be here all week, checking out the candidates in person, visiting campaign field offices and talking to potential voters. We’ll be posting videos, photos, thoughts and impressions to this blog. Think of it as our travelogue: We’ll show you what’s happening on the ground in the Hawkeye State with a data-driven twist. We’ll be posting regularly, so check back when you can. And let us know what you think, or ask us a question @FiveThirtyEight.

What’s it like to be in Iowa with a presidential campaign in full swing? FiveThirtyEight’s politics team is on the ground and will be sharing updates all week, with a data-driven twist, of course.