"There are five leaders � or no leaders � as Republican voters look at likely GOP candidates in the 2016 White House race..."

"... with no candidate above 10 percent and 20 percent undecided, according to a Quinnipiac University National poll released today."

"The one other Wisconsin politician with numbers like Feingold�s in recent years was former GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson at the outset of his own 2012 Senate race."

"Like Feingold, Thompson had been out of partisan politics for several years, making him a less polarizing figure. Like Feingold, he scored well with independents and did unusually well with voters in the opposing party."

But in Thompson�s case, his popularity and crossover appeal didn�t survive the polarizing brawl of the 2012 election, which he lost to Baldwin.

�Thompson started at plus 18,� says [Marquette pollster Charles] Franklin, referring to the difference between his positive and negative rating. �But he finished at minus 14. It�s a powerful example of how a campaign can change a politician�s image with the voters in the state.�

In 2007, 78.4% of Americans were Christian, in 2014, only 70.6%.

According to the Pew's new U.S. Religious Landscape Study.

The decline appears largely in the mainline Protestant and Catholic segment of Christians, evangelicals having lost only one percentage point.

Those who name no religious affiliation have grown from 16.1% to 22.8% in this 7 year period. That segment is broken down into 3 groups: atheist, agnostic, and "nothing in particular." The "nothing in particular" people dominate. 15.8% of Americans affiliate with nothing religious, up from 12.1%. Atheists have broken through to 3.1%, up from 1.6%, but they're still trailing the agnostics, who've made it to 4.0%, up from 2.4%.

It's interesting to separate "nothing in particular" from agnostic. Is "nothing in particular" even more agnostic than agnostic? They don't even want to go out on a limb and say they don't know? Or (more likely) these are the people who feel they are spiritual or they believe in God in a way that doesn't lead them to join any organizations or they used to be something � such as mainline Protestant � but they lost the sense that membership in that group meant anything. So you can't add the nothings and the agnostics.

These "nothing in particular" people, at 15.8%, now outnumber the mainline Protestants, who are down to 14.7%, from 18.1%.

It's also interesting that Mormons � who might seem like a large and growing group � are only 1.6%, down from 1.7%. And how about Muslims? You hear so much about them, but they're only 0.9% (up from 0.4%). Buddhists hold steady at 0.7%. Hindus are up to 0.7%, from 0.3%. The biggest non-Christian religion is Judaism, and it's not declining. It's up to 1.9%, from 1.7%.

Much more at the link, including issues of age, race, region, and switching religions.

"Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election... The fault, Silver claimed, was with the polling."

Don't blame Silver, says Silver. He only processes the data he gets from polls done by other people.

"The World May Have A Polling Problem," Silver asserted. "In fact, it�s become harder to find an election in which the polls did all that well."... "[T]here are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry," Silver concluded, citing a range of factors. "There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry."

Well, that's awfully bland... from Dylan Byers at Politico, who was only processing the raw material Silver gave him. Can I blame Silver? For anything, ever? He cited "a range of factors." Were they too dull and meaningless to be worth more than the repetition of the conclusion that polls just aren't that good?

ADDED: The NYT surveys some analysis of what went wrong with the polls:

�It could be simply that people lied to the pollsters, that they were shy or that they genuinely had a change of heart on polling day,� [said Alberto Nardelli, writing in The Guardian], �Or there could be more complicated underlying challenges within the polling industry, due, for example, to the fact that a diminishing number of people use landlines or that Internet polls are ultimately based on a self-selected sample.�...

�What seems to have gone wrong is that people have said one thing and they did something else in the ballot box,� [said Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov, a leading survey firm]. �We are not as far out as we were in 1992, not that that is a great commendation.�...

Rem Korteweg, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London, said... �People say who they are voting for with their heart and then vote with their wallets,�...

To tweak Korteweg's point: People say what they think will make other people like them, but they do what they think is in their interest. Re-tweak: People do what is in their interest, which is to say what they believe is socially desirable, and that won't square up with what they do when no one's looking. If this is the problem, it's a problem that will get worse as it becomes more widely believed that liberalism makes you look good. Korteweg is contributing to the contagion of this belief by saying that in their hearts people are liberal, nudging us all to say I'm a liberal, so I'll seem to be a person with a heart.



(Detail about that video here.)

"New York Republican voters are all over the lot with four � count 'em, four � candidates in double digits and no one in command."

A new Quinnipiac poll.

"Hillary may have a higher IQ than Bill and objectively be smarter, but man when it comes to optics and basic politics, she's pretty dumb."

A tweet from Liz Mair � quoted in the earlier post about Scott Walker's hiring her as a strategist � prompted me to write this poll:
Click for more �

NYT: "Scott Walker�s Electoral Record Is Less Impressive Than It Looks."

The headline for this Nate Cohn column at the NYT intriguingly assumes we're already seeing something about Scott Walker, but I think the basis for the debunking is that Walker himself keeps pointing out that a blue state, Wisconsin, has elected him governor 3 times in 4 years.

Cohn has a chart comparing Walker to other candidates for governor in 2010 and 2014, the years of Walker's regular elections. (Walker also had to win in June 2012, midway through his first term, because there was a recall election.)

In neighboring and politically similar Iowa, the Republican Terry Branstad won election and re-election by a far wider margin than Mr. Walker.

To the east, in neighboring Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder won by a similar margin in a more Democratic state, even though he also picked a fight with labor.

To the south, a Republican candidate for governor won the dark-blue state of Illinois.

Farther away, Republicans won Ohio by a huge margin and carried states more Democratic than Wisconsin, like New Mexico, Maryland, Maine and Massachusetts.

That is, it might not be anything so special about Walker. People in blue states might just have been hankering for Republican governance in 2010 and 2014.

Cohn branches out to senatorial preferences:

There�s even a case that Mr. Walker didn�t have the best Republican performance in Wisconsin. Ron Johnson, a self-funded political novice, managed to defeat an incumbent, Russ Feingold, by a five-point margin in 2010. Despite that showing, some analysts believe Mr. Johnson is the single most vulnerable senator of the 2016 cycle.

That is, people were really leaning Republican in 2010, and you can't predict that 2016 will be another election year like that. What was going on with that 2010 senatorial election in Wisconsin? Why did Ron Johnson have "the best Republican performance in Wisconsin"? I think that was "a vote against what the Democrats have done with Congress," which is what I said on Election Day 2010. I guess in 2016, Feingold will have a "miss me yet?" argument against what the Republicans have done with Congress. But 2016, unlike 2010, is a presidential election, and our fixation on the presidency will keep us from thinking too much about Congress.

Which brings us back to Cohn. He observes that all 3 of Walker's victories came in non-presidential years, where Republicans get the advantage of lower turnout from the younger people who tend more toward Democrats. That is, Wisconsin is and remains a blue state, where Walker should lose, but elections are skewed in the off years.

New Quinnipiac poll puts Scott Walker at 18 percent and Jeb Bush at 16 percent.

Here.

New Jersey Gov. Christopher Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee are at 8 percent each... Physician Ben Carson has 7 percent, with 6 percent each for U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and 5 percent for U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida...

If Walker does not run, Bush gets 18 percent, with 10 percent for Carson, 9 percent each for Christie and Huckabee, 8 percent each for Cruz and Paul and 7 percent for Rubio.

If Bush is out of the race, Walker gets 20 percent, with 10 percent for Christie, 9 percent for Huckabee and 8 percent each for Carson and Rubio.

Isn't it strange that taking Bush/Walker out of the mix doesn't do anything for the other guys?