From: jmk@cbnews.cb.att.com (joseph.m.knapp)
Subject: Re: Estimating the Nth party vote (was Re: McPoll 10/8)
Organization: AT&T
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 11:51:52 GMT

king@cogsci.ucsd.EDU (Jonathan King) writes:
>Here's how it works: Take Clinton's definite-not total of .26, and
>subtract Bush's definite-for total of .22 and Perot's definite-for
>total of .02.  The remaining total of .02 is the proportion of those
>polled who can't stand Clinton, but who are either undecided (or at
>least uncommitted) on whom to vote for or who have decided to vote for
>one of the Nth party candidates.
>           ...so that it appears that definite-for Libertarian support
>is AT MOST 2% right now, and probably somewhat even less.
>

I agree with your analysis, 2% is maximum support for not-Bush, not-Clinton,
and not-Perot, at least as indicated by this poll. And that would not be
too surprising, as total 3rd party voting in 1988 was less than 1%.

I did some analysis along the lines you did, although I wanted to classify
the undecided voters rather than estimate Nth-party support.

                                   Clinton      Bush         Perot
would definitely vote for:            33          22            2
would definitely not vote for:        26          48           70

Note: the following assumes a three-way race (apologies to LP, et. al.):

If you add up all the people who have definitely made a choice, it comes
to 57%. So 43% are still potentially undecided. I call these the PU voters. :-)

I would like to try to classify these PU voters
further. For example, 26% of people will definitely not vote for
Clinton. This number must include the 2% who are definitely voting
for Perot and the 22% definitely voting for Bush. That leaves 2%
(26-(22+2)) of people who are definitely not voting for Clinton,
but may go for either Bush or Perot. Similarly, the following table
can be produced:


might vote for:   %
===============  ==
B or P, not C     2
C or P, not B    13
B or C, not P    15
B or C or P      13
                 ==
                 43% total PU

The "B or C or P" number was obtained by subtracting the other numbers from
43%.

In the table below, for example PC ("potential Clinton" voters) is taken
to be "C or P, not B" plus "B or C, not P" plus "B or C or P." The table
shows the percentage of PU, PC, PB or PP voters who reject a given
candidate.

      % of     reject            reject           reject          reject
     voters    Clinton            Bush            Perot           no one
PU     43          5               30               35              30
PC     41          -               32               37              32
PB     30          7               --               50              43
PP     28          7               46               --              46

One thing that comes out of this is that very few of the people who have
not definitely made up their minds yet reject Clinton.

Another conclusion I am less sure of is that since almost half of potential
Perot supporters can't stand Bush, these votes are coming out of Clinton's
hide. This conclusion might be suspect, though, since the PP block includes
many voters leaning heavily for Clinton (and Bush), they just have left
open the *possibility* that they might vote for Perot. So the residual that
ultimately ends up voting for Perot might come from either Bush or Clinton.
---
Joe Knapp    jmk@cbvox.att.com
Newsgroups: alt.politics.elections,talk.politics.misc