Here's any easy bet to win today in Washington (or anywhere else where true political junkies gather): Where did polling miss the mark most yesterday, in Florida's Republican primary for Governor or Florida's Democratic primary for Senate?
Judging by the tweets I've seen (and my own snap judgment), most of you may be thinking the polls were most off in the Governor's race, where most of the final polls showed Bill McCollum leading. If so, you'd be wrong. The three polls fielded in the last week on the Democratic Senate contest understated Kendrick Meek's margin by an average of 11 percentage points. The three final week polls on the Republican Governor's underestimated Rick Scott's margin by an average of just 5 points (the absolute value of the errors was 7.7; all of these numbers are based on the unofficial count with all precincts reporting).
Thus, we have another example of the pre-election pollster's paradox: The errors that get noticed are those that are just wrong enough to give everyone the wrong impression about the likely winner.
But let's focus on the Republican primary for Governor, for now, since theories are flying about why some polls missed Scott's looming victory. I asked our Pollster.com colleague, University of Wisconsin Professor Charles Franklin, to run one of his patented "bullseye" polling error charts. The chart below displays each poll as a dot, with the vertical axis representing Scott's percentage, the horizontal axis representing McCollum's percentage, and the center of the bullseye representing the actual result.
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