Paul Maintains Consistent Lead in Three Straight Polls, Trump Re-Builds Lead to Double Digits
U.S. Senator Rand Paul’s lead over Lexington Mayor Jim Gray in the race for U.S. Senate has remained consistent for three straight Babbage Cofounder Pulse Polls as the incumbent now has a 6.6 percentage point advantage in a poll conducted Oct. 26-28 of 1,016 Kentucky residents. Paul’s lead in the previous two polls was 6.5% and 7.3%, respectively.
Donald Trump’s lead over Hillary Clinton in the Presidential Race in Kentucky has rebounded to double digits. Trump’s lead in mid-October, immediately following the Billy Bush tape episode, shrunk to under 4 percentage points for the first time. However, Trump now maintains a 13.4% advantage in the poll of 1,004 Kentucky residents.
“With only one week until Election Day, our surveys in both races are settling into consistent patterns.” said Bob Babbage, Leading Lobbyist for Babbage Cofounder. “Paul and Trump both hold strong leads, which suggest they are in good position to cross the finish line first next Tuesday.”
The Cofounder Pulse Poll utilizes Google Consumer Surveys to determine a representative sample of how the internet population in Kentucky feels about a particular issue or political race. Google Consumer Surveys makes use of inferred demographic and location information to employ stratified sampling method by distributing the surveys based on the targeted audience to Google’s publisher network and/or Android smartphone users. Google infers demographics through respondents’ browsing history (DoubleClick cookies for age & gender and IP address for geography), then they match them against existing government statistical data. Google Consumer Surveys uses post-stratification weighting to compensate for sample deficiencies to remove bias among the survey sample. This gives a more accurate result with lower root mean square error (RMSE) which also makes the results better represent the Current Population Survey (CPS).
In 2012, Nate Silver, then of the New York Times FiveThirtyEight blog fame, concluded that Google Consumer Surveys was the #1 most accurate poll online and the #2 most accurate poll overall.
U.S. Presidential Race:
Overview of Oct. 26 U.S. Presidential Pulse Poll
Inferred gender of Oct. 26 U.S. Presidential Pulse Poll
Inferred age of Oct. 26 U.S. Presidential Pulse Poll
U.S. Senate Race:
Overview of Oct. 26 U.S. Senate Pulse Poll
Inferred gender of Oct. 26 U.S. Senate Pulse Poll
Inferred age of Oct. 26 U.S. Senate Pulse Poll