• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Fairvote Ranked-Choice Polls of the Presidential Primaries

lpetrich

lpetrich

Contributor
Joined
Jul 27, 2000
Messages
26,334
Location
Eugene, OR
Gender
Male
Basic Beliefs
Atheist
Presidential Primary Polling Project -- polls using ranked-choice or preference voting, ranking the candidates by their preferences.

Back in 2016, FairVote polled Republican voters about the candidates in their party's Presidential primaries.

Ranked Choice Poll of GOP Voters Yields Insights - FairVote
National Poll Highlights What Republican Voters Really Think - FairVote

Trump won in both first place and last place - 37% and 22% - meaning that he is loved by some, hated by some, with not many in between.

Of the four other candidates compared, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were the biggest in second place: 20% and 17%. Ben Carson was the best in third place: 16%. John Kasich was the best in 8th to 10th place at around 14%.

Doing a top-two election with the first and second preferences, Trump and Cruz got 37% and 17% in the first round, and 61% and 39% in the second round.

Doing instant-runoff vote counting gives us these dropped candidates:

Rick Santorum 0.93%, Mike Huckabee 2.39%, Carly Fiorina 3.22%, Chris Christie 3.53%, John Kasich 4.05%, Rand Paul 7.50%, Jeb Bush 8.66%, Ben Carson 12.46%, Marco Rubio 25.45%, Donald Trump 49.35%

Ted Cruz won with 50.68% in the final round of counting.

Now for next-place votes with each dropped-out candidate. That can reveal which candidates are like which other candidates, and unlike which other candidates.
  • Rick Santorum: Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson the most, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush none.
  • Mike Huckabee: Ben Carson and Rand Paul the most, John Kasich the least.
  • Carly Fiorina: Marco Rubio and Ben Carson the most, then Jeb Bush, and John Kasich and Chris Christie the least.
  • Chris Christie: Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio the most, then Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz and Ben Carson the least.
  • John Kasich: Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush the most, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz the least.
  • Rand Paul: the others about equally
  • Jeb Bush: Marco Rubio the most.
  • Ben Carson: Ted Cruz a little more than the others.
  • Marco Rubio: Ted Cruz
Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson were Religious Right sorts of candidates, and Ted Cruz was some of that also.

Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio were also much alike.
 
I now turn to the 2020 election. FairVote has delivered in abundance, and we also had four ranked-choice state primaries.
There is a lot to unpack here, and I will do that in my next posts.
 
Whew. It's all done. I've gotten all the numbers into the Mathematica notebook that I've been using to analyze my data.

For the September 2019 poll:

First and second preferences as top-two:

Joe Biden - Elizabeth Warren:
33% - 29%
49% - 51%

The IRV poll's last percentage for each candidate was

Joe Biden 50.1%, Elizabeth Warren 49.9%, Bernie Sanders 23.19%, Kamala Harris 12.36%, Pete Buttigieg 8.63%, Michael Bennet 5.43%, Cory Booker 3.23%, Beto O'Rourke 3.21%, Tulsi Gabbard 2.75%, Andrew Yang 2.21%, Julian Castro 2.05%, Tim Ryan 1.66%, Amy Klobuchar 1.57%, Tom Steyer 1.28%, Marianne Williamson 0.95%, Bill de Blasio 0.72%, John Delaney 0.71%, Steve Bullock 0.41%, Joe Sestak 0.38%, Wayne Messam 0.19%

Its Smith winner-set sequence was

Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Beto O'Rourke, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang & Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Steyer, Tim Ryan, Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, Marianne Williamson, John Delaney, Steve Bullock, Joe Sestak, Wayne Messam

(Andrew Yang and Amy Klobuchar were tied)

So JB and EW are neck-and-neck in that poll, with one or the other winning, depending on how one counts the votes.
 
For the December 2019 South Carolina poll:

The IRV poll's last percentage for each candidate was

Joe Biden 68.06%, Bernie Sanders 31.94%, Pete Buttigieg 17.7%, Elizabeth Warren 12.28%, Tom Steyer 8.23%, Tulsi Gabbard 6.6%, Kamala Harris 4.15%, Cory Booker 3.66%, Andrew Yang 3.07%, Michael Bennet 2.79%, Amy Klobuchar 1.57%, John Delaney 1.38%, Deval Patrick 1.27%, Michael Bloomberg 0.92%, Marianne Williamson 0.26%, Julian Castro 0.11%, Joe Sestak 0.02%, Steve Bullock 0.%

Its Smith winner-set sequence was

Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer


For the February 2020 poll:

First and second preferences as top-two:

Bernie Sanders - Joe Biden:
28% - 21%
53% - 47%

The IRV poll's last percentage for each candidate was

Bernie Sanders 51.31%, Joe Biden 48.69%, Michael Bloomberg 27.12%, Pete Buttigieg 12.52%, Elizabeth Warren 10.14%, Amy Klobuchar 4.72%, Tom Steyer 2.17%, Tulsi Gabbard 1.55%

Its Smith winner-set sequence was

Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard

Bernie Sanders is the clear winner.
 
I collected the vote-transfer fractions for the candidates, and I looked for patterns. My summary:
  • Elizabeth Warren -> Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden (almost even)
  • Andrew Yang -> Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden
  • Tulsi Gabbard -> Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden
  • Michael Bloomberg -> Joe Biden
  • Tom Steyer -> Joe Biden
  • Pete Buttigieg -> Joe Biden
  • Amy Klobuchar -> Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg
I can recognize some "lanes":
  • (centrists) Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer
  • (intermediate) Elizabeth Warren
  • (eccentrics) Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang
It's not surprising that PB and AK quit a few days before Super Tuesday, because they didn't want to split the votes for their lane, and also because they weren't doing as well as JB.
 
FairVote also did a poll about possible Vice Presidents for Joe Biden.

Democratic Vice Presidential Poll - FairVote
Ranked choice Vice Presidential poll shows value of polling voters’ ranked preferences - FairVote

It used only the top three preferences, unlike some of the other polls.

Using the first and second preferences in a top-two vote, I find:

Kamala Harris - Elizabeth Warren
32% - 55%
27% - 45%

Using IRV, each candidate's last percentage was:

Kamala Harris 54.79%, Elizabeth Warren 45.21%, Susan Rice 22.89%, Stacey Abrams 11.90%, Tammy Duckworth 9.3%, Val Demings 4.15%, Karen Bass 3.28%

Its Smith winner-set sequence was

Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Susan Rice, Stacey Abrams, Tammy Duckworth, Val Demings, Karen Bass

Like the others, each set had only one member, making the sequence a Condorcet sequence.


Looking at who got whose votes, I find:
  • Karen Bass -> KH, SR
  • Val Demings -> most of the others, with a slight peak at EW, except for TD
  • Tammy Duckworth -> mainly EW
  • Stacey Abrams -> mainly KH and EW
  • Susan Rice -> KH about twice EW
The vote included some voting on racial lines, but not much.
 
Would a different style of voting have changed the 2016 election? We tested 5 alternatives. - Vox - in the Presidential general election of that year

The candidates polled about:
  • Hillary Clinton - Democratic Party
  • Donald Trump - Republican Party
  • Gary Johnson - Libertarian Party
  • Evan McMullin - Independent
  • Jill Stein - Green Party
  • Darrell Castle - Constitution Party
IRV:
  • Round 1: Clinton 43.8% Trump 43.8% Johnson 5.8% McMullin 2.9% Stein 2.8% Castle 0.9%
  • Castle eliminated, Clinton +0%, Trump +0.3% Johnson +0%, McMullin +0.5%, Stein +0%
  • Round 2: Clinton 43.8% Trump 44.1% Johnson 5.8% McMullin 3.4% Stein 2.8%
  • Stein eliminated, Clinton +1.3% Trump +0.1% Johnson +0.9% McMullin +0.7%
  • Round 3: Clinton 45.1% Trump 44.2% Johnson 6.7% McMullin 4.0%
  • McMullin eliminated, Clinton +0.8%, Trump +1.6%, Johnson +1.9%
  • Round 4: Clinton 45.9% Trump 45.8% Johnson 8.6%
  • Johnson eliminated, Clinton +4.8% Trump +3.5%
  • Round 5: Clinton 50.7% Trump 49.3%
This is the only data that I could find on how a voter for a Libertarian candidate might vote if that candidate was absent. Here, it's Clinton 58% Trump 42%.

Stein voters voted Clinton 43% Trump 3% Johnson 30% McMullin 23%
So her voters were a bit more for alternatives than for Clinton - and hardly any for Trump.

I recall from somewhere that voters for the Green Party candidate would have voted 2/3 Gore 1/3 Bush in the absence of that candidate (Ralph Nader).
 
Hillary Clinton was the Condorcet winner in that poll, beating all the others individually:
Trump 50.7% Johnson 55.0% Stein 57.9% McMullin 60.9% Castle 62.5%

The Borda count: "In the 2016 election, it would’ve resulted in Gary Johnson winning the presidency: Trump would get the second-highest number of points, then Clinton very closely after, then Stein."

The people polled were polled on how they rated the candidates: “strongly approved,” “somewhat approved,” “somewhat disapproved,” or “strongly disapproved”.

Approval voting (sum of strongly and somewhat approved):
Clinton 48.4% Trump 46.7% Johnson 32.4% Stein 29.0% McMullin 25.9% Castle 17.6%

Rated voting: strongly disapproved = 1 to strongly approved = 4
Trump wins, with Clinton a bit behind him

Shows that Trump has more zealous followers than Clinton did.


The polling firm: Home - Civis Analytics -- I couldn't find anything further.
 
Alternate voting methods that show Clinton winning the national vote narrowly don't tell us much: Clinton narrowly won the national popular vote as it was.
lpetrich said:
The Borda count: "In the 2016 election, it would’ve resulted in Gary Johnson winning the presidency: Trump would get the second-highest number of points, then Clinton very closely after, then Stein."
Click to expand...
Wow. This tells us something bad about the Borda Count. (In defense of Borda, people in the Age of Enlightenment may not have anticipated that most candidates would be so obviously bad. Anyway, in a true Borda system, Kasich and/or Bush would still have been on the ballot and, one might hope, have beaten Johnson.)

(For brevity, the sequel assumes there are exactly four candidates.)

Suppose there are four candidates: Clinton, Trump, Shit, Poison. 74% of the voters rank the candidates Clinton, Shit, Poison, Trump. The remaining 26% rank them Trump, Shit, Poison, Clinton. If the Borda count awards rankees with 4,3,2,1 points, then Shit wins the election no matter how shitty he is. Clinton would need 75+% to win in this scenario. With a 2nd Poison in the race, and 5,4,3,2,1 for the Borda counting, Clinton would need 80+% to win. In a 3-way race she'd need 67%.

There are many variations of the Borda count; in the "Dowdall" variation for example, 1,½,⅓,¼ (or equivalently 4,2,1.33,1) is substituted for 4,3,2,1. Now Clinton needs only 51% to prevail against Shit in our scenario. (Apologies to the hyperlibertarian fringe for identifying Johnson with "Shit." In Johnson's defense he could hardly have been as shitty a President as Trump.)

Historical Note: The Borda Count method was NOT first discovered by Jean-Charles de Borda: it was invented by the 15th-century Nikolaus Cusanus, the famous thinker who postulated heliocentrism before Copernicus and much more. About Cusanus, Giordano Bruno wrote: "If Nicholas had not been hindered by his priest's vestment, he would have even been greater than Pythagoras!"

I think Cusanus proposed a simple 4,3,2,1 or 3,2,1,0 scheme as Borda did, but I cannot confirm this. Googling for details just takes me to pay-walls.
 
Over at r/EndFPTP on reddit.com I found Comparing voting methods: 2016 U.S. presidential election : EndFPTP

It referred to

Comparing voting methods: 2016 US presidential election - ScienceDirect - it's open access, not paywalled

The paper did the 2016 Presidential election with various voting algorithms, polling groups of people with a short list and a long list. The short list was the major parties' candidates, and the long list included candidates that did well in other respects, like in the primaries.
  • Short list (4 candidates): Hillary Clinton (D), Donald Trump (R), Gary Johnson (L), and Jill Stein (G)
  • Long list (9 candidates): the short list with Bernie Sanders (I as D), Ted Cruz (R), Evan McMullin (R as I), Mike Bloomberg (I), and Darrell Castle (C)
Parties: D = Democratic, R = Republican, L = Libertarian, G = Green, I = Independent, C = Constitution

Three voting algorithms were used: approval voting, rated voting, and instant runoff voting. Also in the poll was honest assessment - what each participant thinks of each candidate, done much like rated voting.
  • Approval voting: yes or no, but one can vote yes on more than one candidate.
  • Rated / range / score voting: like approval voting, but one gives every candidate a score from 0 to 5 in integer steps.
  • Instant runoff voting: vote for top three.
The paper linked to a Supplementary Data document, and I consulted it.
 
Turning to the votes themselves, for approval voting, about 8% (short) and 7% (long) did not vote, and 74% (short) and 49% (long) voted for only one. There were more multiple voters for the long ballots than for the short ones, and that is from having more major-party candidates for available. Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters had not just Hillary Clinton but also Bernie Sanders, and Republican and Republican-leaning voters had not just Donald Trump but also Ted Cruz.

Checking on rated votes, the rating 0 was the most common, with 40 - 55% of the ratings for each candidate. Honest assessments had more of that rating than rated votes.

Now for who won.

Looking at the short ballots, in FPTP, HC and DT did much better than GJ or JS - 48 41 8 4, but with approval voting, GJ and JS move up - 50 42 21 12, and with rated voting, GJ and JS move up even further - 2.3, 1.9, 1.6, 1.3.

The long ballots are a somewhat different story. GJ and JS do better in FPTP alternatives, but TC and especially BS do better.

FPTP: HC 31, DT 28, BS 20, TC 10, GJ 5 MB 4 EMM 2, JS 0, DC 0
Approval: HC 40, BS 39, DT 34, GJ 12, MB 12, EMM 8, JS 5, DC 2
Rated: BS 2.7, HC 2.3, DT 2.0, TC 1.9, MB 1.7, GJ 1.5, EMM 1.4, JS 1.2, DC 1.0

In approval, HC and BS are nearly tied, while in rated, BS wins. Also in approval, TC is less behind DT, while in rated, DT and TC are nearly tied.
 
Turning to the IRV results, I find it interesting to see who receives votes as candidates drop out.

In the short ballot, JS drops out first, with GJ and HC receiving about equal numbers of votes. When GJ drops out, HC and DT receive about equal numbers of votes, though DT receives a few more.

Turning to the long ballot, the first candidates to drop out make changes of only a few percent, and the data were reported as rounded to integer percents, making roundoff error a problem for these candidates. DC, JS, and EMM have too small transfers compared to roundoff error, and MB is a borderline case, with every remaining candidate getting 1% or more precisely 1 +- 0.5%.

The transfer from GJ is the first one with a clear pattern, and it's BS 3, DT 2, HC and TC 1. A libertarian's voters wanting a social democrat next?

The transfer from TC is DT 8, BS 3, HC 1. Not surprising for voters who like TC.

Then BS drops out, with HC getting 21 and DT 7. HC is a logical choice, but DT?

One can recognize some lanes: BS - HC and DT - TC, agreeing with which parties they ran in.


Turning to virtual head-to-head contests, I find Condorcet sequences for IRV and also for rated votes.

IRV:
HC, BS, DT, TC, MB, GJ, EMM, JS, DC

Rated:
BS, HC, DT, TC, MB, GJ, EMM, JS, DC

So depending on how one votes and how the votes are counted, the winner is Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or both as a tie.

Among the Republicans, Ted Cruz is behind Donald Trump, though by varying amounts.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom