News

Majority of Nevadans support Sisolak’s handling of COVID-19 pandemic, poll shows
By Rory Appleton
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Published March 3, 2021

Nevadans have favorable views of how Gov. Steve Sisolak and President Joe Biden are leading the state and nation, according to results of The Nevada Poll released Tuesday.

More than half of those surveyed supported Sisolak’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Nevada Poll surveyed 500 likely voters across the state by phone and online from Feb. 26 to March 1, with a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.

About 47 percent of respondents approved of Biden’s overall performance, compared to 40 percent who disapproved.

Gov. Sisolak’s approval was similar, at about 48 percent, with 43 percent disapproving. This marked an increase in both approval and disapproval for the governor since October, when 47 percent of respondents favored him and 40 percent did not.

“What’s changed for Sisolak since October is the independents, who were at 35 approve to 40 disapprove, have come around, as well as what we call the gray-collar workers — people without a college education who make more than $75,000 per year,” said Trevor Smith, research director for WPA Intelligence, who conducted the poll on behalf of the Review-Journal.

More than half (53 percent) of respondents approved of Sisolak’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. About 43 percent did not.

A little more than one-third (36 percent) of those surveyed were unhappy with the state’s vaccine distribution under Sisolak, while 49 percent approved of his work marshalling the mass-vaccination.

As is typical for the state, Biden and Sisolak, Democrats both, have slightly positive approval ratings in Washoe County, stronger support in Clark and much more negative ratings in the rural counties.

Smith also noted that while just 17 percent of Republican respondents approve of Sisolak’s overall performance, more than one-quarter (26 percent) approve of his vaccination plans.

Sisolak is up for re-election in 2022, and has been raising money for a second bid for the office, though he has not officially announced his intentions.

“The governor’s complete focus is on reopening safely, getting Nevadans vaccinated and helping get people back to work,” said Jim Ferrence, spokesman for Sisolak’s campaign. “The results clearly indicate Nevada voters support the governor’s leadership and steady hand during these incredibly trying times.”

On Tuesday, Biden announced the country will be able to vaccinate every American by the end of May.

The state’s vaccination process also ramped up on Tuesday, as vaccination lanes opened up for more frontline workers.

The political party registration breakdown of the latest Nevada Poll’s respondents was 38 percent Democrat, 36 percent Republican and 26 percent nonpartisan or third party. About 46 percent said they had voted for Biden in 2020, while 44 percent chose former President Donald Trump.

Two-thirds of the Nevada Poll’s respondents identified as white, 14 percent as Hispanic or Latino, 9 percent as Black or African-American, 5 percent as Asian-American and 3 percent as another race or ethnicity.

Slightly less than half (49 percent) of respondents identified as men, and 51 percent as women.

Parties react

The Nevada Republican Party criticized Sisolak in a statement Wednesday, saying he has subjected Nevadans to “a year of tyranny” and has failed to provide unemployment benefits to vulnerable Nevadans.

“Governor Sisolak has failed Nevadans at every turn during this pandemic,” the state GOP said. “What the polls do not reflect are the heart-wrenching stories of business owners and families struggling to make ends meet while the governor unilaterally shuts down our state with no meaningful plan for reopening.”

Nevada State Democratic Party Chair William McCurdy II cheered the poll results in his own statement.

“Despite relentless and baseless attacks from the Nevada GOP, Nevadans know what we know: Governor Steve Sisolak continues to put working families first when faced with incredibly difficult decisions regarding our state’s response to COVID-19,” McCurdy said.

“Nevada is among the hardest hit states, but with Governor Sisolak at the helm, we’ve been able to reopen safely, get Nevadans vaccinated, and get employees and small business owners back to work.”

This article was originally published here.

Newsom tours Long Beach & Central Valley to promote vaccine “Through-Put”
By John and Ken staff
KFI AM, Published Feb 22, 2021

Gavin Newsom is touring the state and trying to get the heat off him.

Newsom was in Inglewood and Boyle Heights over the weekend. We’re pretty sure he’d rather be drinking some wine somewhere.

He is asking the public for optimism, saying the state can administer vaccines with “through-put” and an “equitable overlay” within months.

What a maroon.

Check out this internal poll released over the weekend by the National Review:

An internal poll from WPA Intelligence for former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s (R) campaign (Feb. 12-14; 645 LVs; +/-3.9%) found 47% of respondents would vote to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), while 43% would not.

Of Republican voters, 80% would vote to recall Newsom. Of Democratic voters, 26% would vote to recall the governor, compared to 64% who were opposed and 10% who were undecided. For those with no political party preference, 53% would vote to recall Newsom, 35% were opposed, and 13% were undecided.

You have to hear John & Ken react to audio of Newsom talking today in Long Beach and the Central Valley!

Gavin Newsom is officially in panic mode.

This article was originally published here.

The Failure of Mike Bloomberg’s ‘Data-Driven’ Approach
By Tobias Hoonhout
National Review, Published November 12, 2020

Mike Bloomberg likes his money well spent, even in politics.

“‘I’m not in the business of wasting money — I want to put money into races that can be won with extra effort,’” top political adviser Kevin Sheekey recalled the billionaire telling him ahead of the 2018 midterms.

And after a spending spree in the 2018 midterms netted 21 Democratic wins out of 24 targeted races, the former New York City mayor decided to double down on his data-driven approach this cycle.

What came next was Hawkfish, a Bloomberg-backed firm founded in 2019 by Silicon Valley insiders with the aim of boosting Democrats’ digital efforts. The former New York mayor put the firm to work during his Democratic primary run, spending $100 million to buy up troves of voter databases. And even after Bloomberg’s campaign faltered, Hawkish saw itself as the best way to help Bloomberg achieve his ultimate goal of ensuring a blue wave in 2020.

The firm “argued for a plan where Bloomberg would no longer need the ground operation and consultants, and could scale down to the quants, the engineers and the data teams,” according to a Wired profile.

With a wealth of information at its fingertips, Hawkfish set out to help Democrats in the general election, inking contracts with the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Super PACs American Bridge and Unite the Country.

“Because we have this better raw data set than our competitors do, we’re able to help campaigns make smarter decisions about who they target for voter registration, who they target for persuasion, and then who they target for turnout,” Hawkfish senior consultant Mitch Stewart bragged in August.

But as the dust continues to settle from November 3, Hawkfish’s impact — and Bloomberg’s efforts writ large — appear to have fallen flat.

Despite spending over $100 million to boost Joe Biden in Florida, Ohio, and Texas, Bloomberg failed to turn any of the three battleground states blue. A $60 million outlay to defend the Democrat majority in the House and pick off vulnerable Republicans also fell flat, with the GOP having gained six seats so far — of the 21 races Bloomberg helped win in 2018, Republicans have flipped back three and are currently neck-and-neck in California’s 25th district.

Some have argued that the spending was successful in forcing Republicans to divert resources. “Our goal was to make Trump fight for a state he was taking for granted and draw resources from blue-wall states, allowing Joe Biden to become more competitive in those states,” Sheekey explained to CNBC.

Outgoing DCCC chair Cheri Bustos (D., Ill.) echoed the rhetoric. “By building a big battlefield, triggering Republican retirements, and going on offense, we stretched Republicans,” she reportedly said on a Wednesday caucus call.

But others remain unconvinced. “I think the vendors should refund the money they charged,” prominent pollster Frank Luntz told National Review when asked about Bloomberg’s 2020 efforts.

At the state level, Republicans believe that Bloomberg’s strategy of flooding the airwaves and big data focus on mail-in and early-voting turnout failed to make up for the lack of a Democrat ground game — especially in Florida.

“Bloomberg seemed to have been playing a 2000-era ‘save it all to the end and go negative on TV’ in an election with massive vote by mail and in-person early voting,” Republican data analyst Chris Wilson said in an email. “Especially with the partisan split where most of the votes left at the end were hard core Republicans, he was talking when very few persuadables were left listening.”

On October 21, Hawkfish CEO Josh Mendelsohn told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle that “the Trump team has far more ground to make up on election day than Democrats should.” While Florida Democrats led the early-vote margin by over 460,000 at that point, 13 days later the lead had shrunk to only 113,000. Hawkfish’s own modeling showed that Trump had narrowed the gap by five points from October 20 to November 2, but still showed Biden in the lead. Republicans surged on Election Day to overtake the race and boost Trump’s margin from 2016.

“Florida is not for sale,” Florida GOP executive director Helen Aguirre Ferré told National Review. “There is no substitute for a strong grassroots effort to connect with the community.”

Ferré explained that, under Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Republicans went to great lengths to register new voters and narrow the gap to 134,000 — “the smallest difference between the two parties in Florida history” — while Democrats “did nothing.”

“Florida’s impressive results on Election Day were a direct reflection on the entire Republican Party of Florida team effort, which saw record numbers of volunteers knocking on doors, making phone calls, putting up signs and donating their talents in myriad other ways,” she stated, pointing to shifts among Latino voters as proof of work paying off. While Bloomberg spent millions in get-out-the-vote advertising for Florida Latinos, Democrats lacked the same canvassing, with fears over the pandemic driving the party away from traditional efforts and towards Bloomberg’s cash.

Similar scenes played out in Ohio and Texas, where Bloomberg — citing internal polling — pumped $15 million in additional ad buys over the last week of the race. “We believe that Florida will go down to the wire, and we were looking for additional opportunities to expand the map,” Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson told the New York Times. “Texas and Ohio present the best opportunities to do that, in our view.”

The result? Democrats faltered, with local officials complaining that the spurning of direct outreach in favor of macro trends hurt their chances

“What did we expect was going to happen?” South Texas Democrat organizer Amanda Salas told the Wall Street Journal after Trump made record gains in the traditionally blue area that Democrats ignored.

“The message that Democrats were pitching nationally, it was not going to resonate,” Representative Henry Cuellar (D., Texas) said bluntly. “Hispanics in South Texas or in South Florida and other areas, we might have certain similarities but then you have to fine-tune the messaging.”

This article was originally published here.

Public Polling’s Predicted Blue Wave Meets Red Reality in Texas
By Brad Johnson
The Texan, Published November 6, 2020

The election four years ago became almost synonymous with erroneous polling. While the national popular vote polling was within spitting distance of the outcome — which matters not a lick in this federalist electoral system — the polling in a handful of key swing states were errant enough to get the Electoral College outcome substantially wrong.

This go-around, public polling — meaning publicly available, mostly media-based polling aiming to take a snapshot of voters’ opinions at a moment in time — had just as bad an evening, if not worse.

And Texas was a focal point.

Unofficial results show President Donald Trump emerged victorious by 5.8 percent in Texas. Substantially lower than his 2016 margin of nine points and significantly dwarfed by Mitt Romney’s 15-point 2012 victory in the state.

But the RealClearPolitics (RCP) polling average — an aggregated average of all public polling — projected a Trump +1.3 environment. RCP’s average is not a proprietary poll, but a calculation of other polling outfit’s results.

These outfits include national firms such as Quinnipiac, Emerson, Rasmussen, UMass Lowell, and the NY Times/Sienna.

Averaged out, Quinnipiac’s polling had Trump at +0.2 percent throughout the race — a virtual dead heat. Similarly, Emerson’s average projected Trump +0.75 percent. UMass Lowell’s averaged out to Trump +2.5 percent and, closer than most other national outfits, Rasmussen’s one poll from early October projected Trump +7 percent — which was errant in the other direction.

Local outfits had more mixed results.

The Dallas Morning News was wildly off, with its average projection of Biden +0.5 percent, and its most recent poll to Election Day had Biden up three percent in the state.

The University of Texas and the Texas Tribune’s polls averaged out to Trump +5.25 percent, strikingly close to the final result.

A University of Houston poll conducted from October 13 to 20 had Trump +5.3 percent.

In the other big statewide race, the U.S. Senate, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) walloped Democratic challenger M.J. Hegar by 9.8 percent. The Senate polling was less mistaken than in the presidential race, but the RCP average was still 3.3 points off.

The NY Times/Sienna was nearly spot-on in their late-October poll, putting the race at Cornyn +10 percent. Emerson, meanwhile, had Cornyn +5 in their home stretch poll.

Quinnipiac, despite its wild error in the presidential race, was not so far off in the Senate race with an average of 7.6 percent. However, their final poll, conducted from October 16 through 19, projected Cornyn +6. UMass Lowell was about the same.

Rasmusssen’s one poll showed Cornyn +9.

Locally, the Dallas Morning News erred the opposite way, but less severely than its presidential portfolio, averaging Cornyn +11.25 percent while its October poll projected Cornyn +8 percent. The University of Houston’s October survey showed Cornyn +7 percent and the University of Texas/Texas Tribune’s had Cornyn +8 percent.

Broken down between national and local, the average of national outfit’s Texas polls were off substantially. Their averaged polling collection projected Trump +1.8.

Locally, they didn’t fare much better at a Trump +2.5 average. However, when the Dallas Morning News polls are removed as potential outliers, the average jumps to a much more accurate Trump +5.25 percent.

Derek Ryan, Texas political consultant and founder of Ryan Data & Research, highlighted the local-national divide, telling The Texan, “The local pollsters were much more accurate. They have a far better understanding of the state than do pollsters thousands of miles away.”

With the exception of the Dallas Morning News, Ryan is spot on.

“I’d trust any Texas polling firm more than a national one,” he underscored.

Chris Wilson, CEO of conservative data and polling firm WPA Intelligence, told The Texan, “This was a tale of two stories: the media polling was historically bad, but the private polling I was privy to was really quite good.”

One of WPA’s polls in Nevada, done for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, showed the state very close, contrary to much of the publicly available polling which projected an easy Biden win, and the state is still too close to call with Biden in a narrow lead.

Wilson expounded on an evolution he sees within the GOP polling industry by which more accurate turnout models are built by abandoning the voting history focus and moving more to an algorithm-based voter score model.

The scale he and WPA use is zero to one, and any voters above a 0.5 rating are likely voters while those below are not.

Building an accurate turnout model is hard work. Ryan stated, “It’s getting harder and harder to get prospective voters to answer polling calls. Oftentimes it can take 30 to 40 calls to get one answer from the identified voter.” This all compounds the time and resources necessary to complete the job.

Wilson, as a pollster himself, employs a varied approach which does include traditional phone calls from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. However, when it becomes difficult to reach an identified voter, WPA and the other polling outfits he works with often text or email the voter in advance to set up a phone interview. That way the voter can pick the time that works best for them.

Just as became popularly known after the 2016 election, an errant turnout model will swing results vastly. In short, lots of voters who had little-to-know voting history showed up to vote for then-candidate Donald Trump, who were not accounted for in many of the turnout models.

This time around, a late-October Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Democratic candidate Joe Biden up 17 points in Wisconsin. When the dust settled on Wednesday, Biden had won the state only by 0.5 percent. “It’s difficult to argue that a poll such as that did not discourage in some respect Wisconsin Republicans from turning out — when your guy is behind that much, it’s dispiriting,” Wilson added.

Media polling, Wilson stipulated, is different than private industry polling because the latter faces much more competition. If a pollster gets their client’s race wrong, that reputation builds until, eventually, they’re out of business. “The attrition from just a short time ago of polling outfits is immense, and it’s because if you don’t get it right, nobody will hire you.”

Media outlets’ financial security does not hinge on the accuracy of their polling.

He continued, “I see two crimes among the media polling, one of omission and one by commission.” Omission constitutes errant assumptions of who will turn out to vote. By just analyzing voting history, pollsters cannot account for drastic voting population changes in their models. In 2016, that was the aforementioned Trump voters with next to no voting history.

This year, the models were wrong in not accounting for a proportional turnout uptick among Republicans as was projected for Democrats. In Texas, millions of new Democratic voters turned out to vote, but so did millions new GOP voters. And so, the “Blue Wave” projections turned out to be no more than a ripple.

Ryan’s early voting reports illustrated this trend. His final report showed that 28 percent of early voters had Republican voting histories whereas only 22 percent had Democratic voting histories. No turnout advantage materialized at all for Democrats, which became apparent Tuesday as Democrats made virtually no electoral gains in Texas.

“The crimes of commission are where a firm starts out to build a narrative. Most media firms don’t do that, but some do such as Public Policy Polling,” Wilson continued. In that effort, firms will ask a loaded question on the front end that inevitably shifts the opinion of the respondent — also known as a push poll.

When analyzing the veracity of polls, Wilson and Ryan offer some advice.

Ryan points to the question phrasing, knowing that if a push poll-type question comes up, the poll is likely bunk.

He also looks to the “cross tabs” or breakdown of the responses based on things like age, race, and partisan history. The weight placed on those categories, compared with comparison weighting, is another factor Ryan identifies.

“If your poll has a higher rate of urban turnout versus suburban and rural and the environment doesn’t reflect that, then it’s going to be off,” he added.

If obvious errors arise in the demographic makeup, then that calls the poll into question, which goes hand-in-hand with Wilson’s point on voter sample construction.

For Wilson and WPA, they have an employee whose job it is to find reasons within a poll that show it to be wrong. Surface level exploration can be done looking at the margin of error and the sample size, but that only gets one so far.

Wilson keys in on the more in-depth methodology in terms of how the sample is built, which isn’t always publicly available. But in those cases for which it is, on balance, a poll that used voter probability — the aforementioned scale methodology — as opposed to voter history is a good place to start.

An example of this played out in Texas with Hispanic voter projections being so off, specifically within the southern border region. Numerous counties that voted heavily for Hillary Clinton in 2016 narrowly went for Biden this time, and some even flipped to Trump entirely. That exposed errors in the modeling. It also reflected the increased difficulties of getting likely voters on the phone.

When analyzing a poll, Ryan further underscored, “I always ask, who’s releasing the poll? Do they have a reason to release it?” Many of the polls that appear in fundraising and outreach emails from campaigns are designed to motivate supporters into opening up their wallets or getting out the vote.

After the 2016 results, much of the public polling industry engaged in introspection, hoping to find the errors within their practices. And after this year’s election, and the polling which led up to it, that introspection is still left wanting.

This article was originally published here.

Polling outlets draw fire after missing mark again
By Jonathan Easley
The Hill, Published November 4, 2020

The polling industry and election forecasters suffered another embarrassing election night that will call into question the usefulness of public opinion surveys and horse race political coverage that appeared to once again underestimate President Trump’s support.

Votes are still being tallied in critical battleground states, meaning the final verdict on polling and forecasting may not be known for several days, but the results so far are much closer than most analysts predicted in the lead-up to Election Day.

The polls in Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Texas — all states won by President Trump — were mostly wrong, though Democratic nominee Joe Biden appears to have the upper hand in the race for 270 electoral votes and is the favorite to be the next president.

Pollsters failed to register the possibility that Trump would not only hold on to his support among white working-class voters in the Midwest, but that he would also add scores of new Latino voters to his coalition in battlegrounds that were flooded with polling, such as Florida and Texas.

The polling was even worse down-ballot, where Democrats were heavy favorites to win the Senate and expected to pick up five to 15 seats in the House to expand their majority. Republicans are now in a better position to keep control of the Senate and might pick up several House seats.

Democratic all-stars such as Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, who was running even in the polls with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R), were routed despite outspending their GOP rivals by tens of millions of dollars.

Democrat Sara Gideon has conceded to Sen. Susan Collins (R) in Maine, where not one major public poll released this year found Collins in the lead.

“To all the pollsters out there — you have no idea what you’re doing,” Graham said in his election night victory speech.

Not all of the polls were wrong. In battlegrounds such as Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona, it’s possible that the final spread will be in line with public polling.

Vote tallies indicated Biden is continuing to build on his national popular vote lead, although it is unlikely that he will end up winning by the double digit margins that many polls indicated.

The punditry and polling leading up to Tuesday suggested a broad victory for Biden was likely, both in the popular vote and the Electoral College.

In the FiveThirtyEight model, Biden started Election Day with a 90 percent chance of winning the White House, and analysts talked up Biden’s chances of winning right-leaning states like Iowa, Florida, Ohio and even Texas based on public polls.

Trump won Florida by more than 3 percentage points — a large margin for the perennial swing state — despite being down in both the FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics (RCP) averages on Election Day.

Both the FiveThirtyEight average and RCP average showed Trump ahead by only 1 point in Texas. The final Dallas Morning News poll found Biden ahead by 3 points. As of early Wednesday afternoon, Trump leads by more than 6 points with 96 percent of the votes in, and he improved on his 2016 totals by 20 points in a half dozen of the counties with the heaviest Latino populations in the state.

In Ohio, both FiveThirtyEight and RCP also showed Trump leading by 1 point. Quinnipiac University, which routinely found massive leads for Biden all over the map, showed him ahead by 4 points in Ohio in their final poll. Trump leads by 8 points — his 2016 margin — with 90 percent of the vote counted.

Wisconsin is headed for a photo finish, although Biden led by 7 points in the RCP average and by 8.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight average of state polls. One late survey from ABC News and The Washington Post found Biden ahead by an astonishing 16 points in Wisconsin, a survey that has already become a talking point for the Trump campaign.

In Iowa, the averages showed Trump ahead by 1 or 2 points. He leads by 7 points.

The Des Moines Register, viewed as the gold standard in the Hawkeye State, nailed the Iowa race. However, when that poll was released, many experts dismissed it as an outlier.

One of the major issues for election analysts was the abject dismissal of polling data that was favorable for Trump throughout the cycle.

The Trafalgar Group was a prime target, as pollster Robert Cahaly told anyone who would listen that there was a submerged Trump vote that was not being picked up in states like Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin.

The Trafalgar polls — which were mocked by some of the biggest names in election analytics — are poised to be among the closest to the outcome in key states, and possibly in a few others.

“Polling is an inexact science, but we were more exact than anyone else,” Cahaly said.

Republican pollster Chris Wilson said the 2020 race is different from 2016, when the polls were close but many analysts ignored the data because they didn’t think Trump had a legitimate chance to win.

Rather, he said it’s more like the 2012 polling miss, when former President Obama’s support among Black voters was underestimated compared to the eventual turnout. This time around, it looks like pollsters failed to account for higher turnout among rural and working class whites, who were viewed as a tapped out demographic from 2016.

A lot of pollsters also missed the seismic shift among Hispanic voters, who appear poised to end the cycle as a key voting bloc in the Trump coalition.

However, Wilson saved his most withering critique for the data analysts who determined that Trump and the Republicans had a far worse chance of winning than they did in 2016.

FiveThirtyEight, after giving Trump a 30 percent chance to win in 2016, gave him only a 10 percent chance in 2020. Trump is on track to win all five of the states that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rated as toss-ups.

The major congressional handicapping outlets also forecast significant gains for Democrats in the House and Senate, but it appears that most of the toss-ups and many of the lean Democratic seats are breaking for Republicans. Cook had estimated Democrats would pick up five to 15 House seats.

“The forecasters have a lot more to answer for,” Wilson said. “They’re just throwing math at data and what they’re producing has a lot more to do with their preferences than it does a real attempt to probe where the input data might be wrong, what it might be missing or what the counterfactual might be.”

Raghavan Mayur, the head pollster for the IBD-TIPP poll, which routinely found Trump doing better nationally than other polls, likened the 2020 experience to landing an airplane.

The final IBD-TIPP poll found Biden leading by 4 points nationally, which may end up being spot on or at least very close, while many others found Biden with a double-digit lead.

“Pilots trying to land their planes shouldn’t look outside the plane or you’ll get scared, just look at your own instruments,” Mayur said. “If you look outside it can wrack your nerves to see other polls where the difference is 10 point or more. But you shouldn’t look elsewhere, you just go by what you get and if it’s a kamikaze mission in the end, so be it.”

This article was originally published here.

Legacy Fund investment in N.D. has bipartisan support
By Keith Norman
The Jamestown Sun, Published October 20, 2020

Chris Wilson, partner and CEO of WPA Intelligence, a polling and research firm, said he found several things unique about a recent poll his company did in North Dakota regarding how Legacy Fund money should be invested.

“We don’t usually see any issue where Democrats and Republicans agree,” he said. “Here, there is clearly a bipartisan feeling on how the Legacy Fund should be invested.”

For example, 79% of likely voters in North Dakota supported investing more of the $7 billion Legacy Fund in North Dakota. Looking at Republicans and Democrats separately, the percent favoring more in-state investing was within the 4.4% margin of error.

The survey was funded by the Jamestown/Stutsman Development Corp. which plans to cost-share the expense with other economic development agencies in the state.

Other findings included 72% of North Dakotans thought investing Legacy Fund money in North Dakota could include riskier investments that those found outside the state, 15% were in favor of investing the entire Legacy Fund in North Dakota, and 40% thought there should be no investments of Legacy Fund money outside the United States.

The Legacy Fund was created by a constitutional amendment passed by North Dakota voters in 2010. The fund accumulates money from taxes on oil and gas production. The amendment does not specify how the funds are to be invested.

Shawn Wenko, economic development director in Williston and president of Economic Development Association of North Dakota, said investments from the Legacy Fund could help bring primary sector businesses to the state.

“From an economic development standpoint, we look at this period where there is a downturn in the global economy,” he said. “It is a good opportunity to explore the opportunities of the Legacy Fund to draw business here.”

Jon Godfread, North Dakota insurance commissioner and a member of the State Investment Board, initially proposed the idea of investing 10% of the $7 billion in the Legacy Fund in North Dakota.

Godfread was not available for comment Tuesday but has called for an Investment Advisory Committee to review in-state projects before possible investment of Legacy Fund dollars.

“The proposed advisory committee will welcome investments in North Dakota that can provide a market rate of return, assist in the diversification of our state’s economy and get a multiplier effect with monies circulating in our communities,” Godfread said, in a written summary of his plan to require 10% of the Legacy Fund be invested in North Dakota.

The North Dakota State Investment Board meets Friday and could continue the discussion of possible changes of policy regarding the Legacy Fund portfolio.

The poll was conducted Oct. 13-15 by WPA Intelligence and contacted 500 people who said they were likely to vote in the upcoming election. The pool of people responding was split equally between people in the Fargo and Valley City demographic area and the Bismarck, Mandan and Dickinson demographic area. There was also an equal split between people who used cellphones as their principal communications tool and those who had a landline phone.

Wilson said the poll’s sample size was fairly large for the state of North Dakota and resulted in a relatively low margin of error of 4.4%.

The survey could also lay the groundwork for a statewide ballot initiative in 2022 when the voters could add the words “within the state” to clarify the current constitutional language, Wilson said. That simple change would require the State Investment Board to invest 100% of the Legacy Fund within North Dakota.

This article was originally published here.

The Nevada Poll™: Just two-thirds of Nevadans would get COVID vaccine
By Mary Hynes
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Published October 14, 2020

A new poll shows only two-thirds of Nevadans want to get a vaccine for COVID-19 if and when one becomes available to the general public, a statistic one national vaccine authority described as “frightening.”

The Nevada Poll™, conducted for the Review-Journal and AARP Nevada by WPA Intelligence, found 63 percent said they would get the vaccine, either right away or eventually.

But 38 percent said they either would never or may never get it, according to the poll of 512 likely voters in Nevada. Conducted Oct. 7-11, it has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.

“The numbers are frightening because so many people are betting on a vaccine to help work their way out of this pandemic, and it’s clear that many Nevadans are nervous,” said Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, who wrote a 2017 book on vaccine ethics and policy. “The number who say they’re not going to do it is much higher than the usual numbers you see from the usual vaccine resisters.”

He continued, “I think that’s very disappointing because if we had an approved vaccine, we would need the vast majority of people to take it in order to get the maximum benefit, which is herd immunity.”

With herd immunity, enough of a community has protection against a particular disease to keep it from easily spreading to newborns and those others who can’t or won’t be vaccinated as well as those for whom a vaccine is less effective.

Caplan thought that members of the public may have concerns over the safety of a vaccine stemming from pauses in vaccine trials and new strategies for vaccine development. The latter include Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s program to deliver doses by early next year, if not sooner.

“What appears to be of concern is Operation Warp Speed — which at the time sounded like a great name — has given a lot of people fears that corners will be cut and vaccines that are available may not be proven safe,” said Walter A. Orenstein, a professor of medicine at Emory University and the former director of the U.S. Immunization Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One thing Nevadans agree on

Pollster Chris Wilson said the polling didn’t show major partisan differences over willingness to get a the vaccine, despite the politicization.

“The one thing that Nevadans agree on is that they’re not going to rush out and get a shot,” Wilson said.

Just 16 percent of those polled said they would get the vaccine immediately, including 18 percent of Republicans and 14 percent of Democrats. Yet 23 percent of those identifying as liberal said they would immediately get the vaccine, compared with 21 percent of conservatives.

Men are more likely than women to want the vaccine. Seventy-one percent of men said they would get the vaccine, in contrast to 55 percent of women.

The oldest Nevadans, who have higher rates of complications and deaths from COVID-19, want the vaccine the most of any age group. Of those 65 and older, 74 percent want the vaccine. But the second most likely group to get the vaccine was the youngest group polled, with 64 percent of those 18 to 34 saying they would get it.

The age group least likely to get the vaccine was those age 35 to 44, of whom 56 percent said they would get the vaccine.

Racial divergence

Wilson said he did not see major differences based on education level but did see striking racial differences.

Twenty-three percent of Asians said they would get the vaccine right away, compared with 18 percent of whites, 13 percent of Hispanics and just 2 percent of Blacks.

Twenty-three percent of Blacks said they would never get the vaccine, the largest number of any racial group, despite suffering disproportionately from the disease. Overall, 18 percent of respondents said they would never get the vaccine.

One expert said the result made sense.

“One thing I think that sometimes we underestimate, particularly in minority communities and in my community, the African American community, is that there’s a true historical context around a fear and a distrust of the medical system that is real,” said Dr. Margot Savoy, an associate professor at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, speaking with journalists in August.

“We talk about the history as though it happened millions of years ago when, for some of us, that happened to our grandparents, who we knew and loved and they were in our lives,” said Savoy, who gives her patients a “very strong, favorable recommendation for vaccines.”

From the early 1930s until the early 1970s, the U.S. government conducted a study of the effects of untreated syphilis in Black men in Macon County, Alabama, and failed to provide the men with penicillin when the drug became available.

Work to do

Work needs to be done to overcome the concerns of “some subgroups in the population who are especially worried that they’re going to be turned into guinea pigs or the medical establishment is not looking out to protect them,” Caplan said.

Building trust across communities will be critical, both Caplan and Orenstein said. This is likely especially true in Nevada, which has some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country.

Clark County’s public health authority said it has partnerships and a plan.

“The Health District has ongoing partnerships to provide information to the public about the safety of vaccines and the importance of getting immunized to protect their individual health and those around them,” Jennifer Sizemore, a spokeswoman for the Southern Nevada Health District, said in an email. “These efforts are being extended to our planning for the availability of a COVID-19 vaccine.”

Caplan believes that the number of people who say they would never get a vaccine could decline in the face of an effective vaccine.

“My belief is if you got the vaccine out there and it seemed safe and people seemed OK and getting protection, I think that number would fall,” Caplan said. “In reality if things go well, then I think many people might change their minds.”

This article was originally published here.

Poll: Voter support for Sisolak’s coronavirus response tumbles
By Bill Dentzer
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Published October 14, 2020

CARSON CITY — Nevada’s struggle to contain the spread of COVID-19 and manage its economic impacts appears to have sharply eroded public support for Gov. Steve Sisolak’s handling of the crisis, but he remains the person Nevadans trust most to manage the pandemic, according to a new poll.

The Nevada Poll™, conducted by WPA Intelligence for the Review-Journal and AARP Nevada, found 48 percent of respondents now disapprove of Sisolak’s handling of the pandemic and restrictions he ordered on businesses and public gatherings, while 46 percent approve. In May, the same question found 64 percent of respondents approving of Sisolak’s actions, while just 28 percent disapproved.

Even so, respondents put the greatest faith in the governor to make the best decisions about the coronavirus compared to President Donald Trump, the federal government, local officials, or individuals and businesses, though numbers for all groups were low. Just more than one-third, 35 percent, said they trusted Sisolak the most; 16 percent named either local governments or individuals and businesses; 15 percent named the president; and 7 percent said the federal government generally. Eleven percent said they did not know or refused to answer.

Overall, 47 percent of respondents gave the Democratic governor a thumbs-up, with 31 percent saying they strongly approve of the job he is doing; 40 percent disapproved, with 30 percent disapproving strongly. Thirteen percent said they did not know or did not answer.

Results within the margin

The poll of 512 likely Nevada voters was conducted Oct. 7-11. Results regarding both the governor’s overall approval and support for his pandemic-related actions are within the poll’s margin of error of 4.4 percentage points, meaning respondents are potentially split evenly.

Overall, the findings mostly reflect the sharp partisan divisions between Democrats and Republicans, said Chris Wilson, a Republican pollster and CEO of WPA Intelligence.

“If you’re a Democrat, you think the governor is doing a good job overall. If you’re a Republican, you think he’s doing a bad job overall,” Wilson said. “Those people who are most concerned about the economy and most concerned about unemployment, getting back to work, though, they’re the ones who believe he’s doing a bad job. Those who are most concerned about the coronavirus, they think he’s doing a good job.”

The governor’s office did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment on the poll’s results.

Demographic breakdown

On overall approval, women and those 65 or older gave the governor his highest scores, with 49 percent of women approving, compared with 44 percent of men, and 52 percent of the over-65 group, compared with a low of 43 percent for those ages 35-44. The next-highest approval came from those ages 18-34, with 47 percent supporting the governor.

By level of education, Sisolak’s support was 50 percent or above for those at the college graduate and postgraduate level but 46 percent or lower for those with only some college or less. By income, those earning $50,000 or less gave Sisolak the highest marks — 51 percent — while those earning over $100,000 gave him the lowest, at 44 percent.

Those same splits were closely mirrored in the response to the governor’s specific handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the extremes, 57 percent of those 65 or older approved of the job the governor has done, 49 percent strongly approving, while 60 percent of the $100,000-and-over earners disapproved, 48 percent of them strongly.

“You’re probably looking at a lot of your small-business owners in those numbers,” Wilson said of the higher disapproval among bigger earners. “It tends to be the small-business owners, the small employers that are overwhelmingly negative toward him.”

Bad numbers for trust

On the trust question, Wilson said he interpreted the 35 percent support for Sisolak more as a negative, noting that it was 11 points below the governor’s rating on his handling of the virus thus far.

He also drew attention to the findings among those who identify as independents: 56 percent disapprove of Sisolak’s handling of the virus, with 38 percent approving, and 22 percent trust him going forward, compared with 19 percent who trust local officials, 18 percent who trust individuals and businesses, 17 percent who trust the president, and 11 who trust the federal government in general.

“Bottom line is, people in Nevada don’t know who to trust right now,” Wilson said. “If there is one person that they’re listening to, it’s certainly the governor, but their responses on that are so overly partisan … (and) independents are all over the map.”

This article was originally published here.