- Polling got Andrew Gillum’s victory in Florida very wrong. 8 experts on how that happened.
Going into the Florida governor’s primaries on Wednesday, top-line polls had the eventual Democratic winner Andrew Gillum in fourth place, with most showing him getting just 12 percent of voters’ support on average. Gillum — the state’s first African-American gubernatorial nominee — ended up pulling off a major upset and taking the nomination with more than 34 percent of the vote.
The unexpected outcome led to many observers wondering how exactly the polls — which consistently favored a victory by establishment candidate Gwen Graham — could have gotten it so wrong, again. Polling experts say there are likely a few factors at play, including the heightened volatility of polling in primary elections, when it can be more challenging to identify likely voters.
“Only a small percentage of the electorate actually vote and that electorate is not stable from election to election,” said Chris Jackson, a vice president at Ipsos, a market research firm. Because of this, “it’s tougher sometimes to get a representative sample [during primaries],” Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown said. The sample of people polled may not have fully captured what the ultimate electorate ended up looking like.
Young voters and African-American voters — who ended up turning out heavily for Gillum — were potentially among the groups that were underrepresented in these polls, Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, said. Undecided voters, who accounted for more than 20 percent of the folks who were surveyed, on average, and whose preferences were likely masked in earlier surveys, appeared to go heavily for Gillum on Election Day as well, according to Florida-based political consultant Doug Kaplan.
- The battle to stop 3D-printed guns, explained: Policymakers are trying to stop the spread of firearms that could bypass federal and state laws.
With 3D printers, getting a gun could be as easy as downloading it. A person could find a schematic for a firearm online, plug it into a 3D printer with the right materials, and boom — a gun is created on the spot. No background check required, no serial number to trace the gun if it’s used in a crime.
Some policymakers are trying to prevent this method of getting firearms from going mainstream. In July, they landed a big victory: US District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle issued a restraining order that halted an activist’s plans to release 3D-printed gun designs online, arguing, “There is a possibility of irreparable harm because of the way these guns can be made.” Lasnik effectively extended that order on Monday.
After Monday’s order, though, the blueprints’ owner, libertarian activist Cody Wilson, found a workaround: Instead of publishing the blueprints for free on the internet, he’s selling them (for a price people can pick on their own) and distributing the blueprints via a mailed flash drive or, potentially, email or secure download links.
While Lasnik forced the State Department to continue blocking Wilson from publishing his 3D-printed gun blueprints, Lasnik also wrote that the blueprint files “can be emailed, mailed, securely transmitted, or otherwise published within the United States.” The idea is that the regulation used to block Wilson only stops an international transfer, while these other means of distribution can be solely domestic.
The wide release of the 3D-printed gun blueprints has become an issue now in large part due to President Donald Trump’s administration.
- The North Carolina gerrymandering chaos that could upend the midterms, explained: North Carolina might have to redraw its House maps mere weeks before the midterms.
A US district court ruled earlier this week that North Carolina’s partisan gerrymandered congressional districts were unconstitutional, raising the very real possibility that new maps might need to be drawn mere weeks before the 2018 House elections.
New districts would likely be a boon for Democrats: Though North Carolina is evenly or nearly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, Republicans currently hold 10 of the state’s 13 House seats. In their quest for a House majority, even one or two newly competitive seats in North Carolina would be a major boost to Democrats’ chances of taking over at least one chamber of Congress.
But first, state officials and the courts need to figure out if drawing new districts is even possible in such a short time and whether the congressional elections might need to be delayed in order to accommodate the court-ordered redistricting. Looming over all of it is the US Supreme Court, which could put a stay on the lower court’s decision and bring the whole mad dash to an end very quickly.
North Carolina Republican leaders accused the federal court’s decision of introducing “unmitigated chaos” to the state’s 2018 elections — and while they are surely peeved at the thought of losing congressional seats, they aren’t wrong in thinking the court has upended the 2018 landscape in North Carolina and nationwide.
