Minor League Baseball Attendance

Ted Nesi of WPRI 12 today had a good piece about the attendance numbers for the Pawtucket Red Sox (who are interested in building a new stadium in Providence). Ted’s great chart made me interested in digging deeper, so I looked at the attendance over the past ten years for all 14 teams in the International League.

  • Correlation between capacity & attendance? Nope.

    Minor League attendance 1There is 0.22 correlation between the capacity of a stadium in the league and the annual average attendance numbers for that stadium. That’s not much correlation. Basically, people don’t choose whether or not to go to minor league baseball games based on how big the stadium is.

  • A new park can be great for attendance! Or very, very bad.

    Minor League attendance 2Four of the fourteen teams in the league built new stadiums in the past ten years: the Charlotte Knights, the Columbus Clippers, the Gwinnett Braves, and the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. Three of those saw attendance numbers go up (all three significantly, 5000, 2000, and 2000 per year) but the Gwinnett Braves’ attendance fell significantly after moving to their new stadium, by about 2500 per year.

    Also, the 2015 numbers are not for a very large quantity of games yet. It’s interesting to see that all the teams are down for 2015 in this chart. I take that to mean that the games later in the season are pretty universally more well-attended than games earlier in the season. That makes sense.

  • But what about the popularity of MiLB overall?

    Minor League attendance 3But what about the popularity of minor league baseball in general? How do we account for that when looking at an individual team’s attendance numbers? Here’s how: control for the total league attendance. This third chart, instead of looking at the number of people who came to each team’s games on average, looks at what percentage of the league’s total attendance was contributed by each stadium.

    If every team’s home games contributed equally to the league total, each team would contribute 7.1% of the total. Therefore, we can see which teams are over- or under-performing against the league as a whole by seeing whether their contribution to the league total is above or below that line. In this chart, you can see that the PawSox have been having good seasons for attendance relative to the league average ever since 2008. Their share of the total league attendance has been declining, but it is only in 2015 that the share has dropped below 7.1%. Keep in mind the note from before, though, that this year’s numbers are based on a smaller sample size and have a lot of opportunity to change before the end of the season.

the season.

Baseball stadium parking

mccoy parking

By now you may have heard the news that the Pawtucket Red Sox have been purchased by a new ownership team, and those new owners have announced their interest in moving the team away from their longtime home at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket. The owners have said they would like to build a new stadium in downtown Providence, on the land made available by the moving of I-195.

Here are the parcels under the jurisdiction of the 195 Commission. Orange parcels are still available, gray parcels have pending purchase & sale agreements, and green parcels are set aside for parks. The blue line is the proposed route for a streetcar line. If you click on the different parcels below, you can see more information about them.

The new owners have announced (and it has been proclaimed far and wide in the media) that they are interested in the West Side parcel abutting the river. It should be noted that this would be difficult, because displacing the public park that is planned for that parcel would require a revision of the authorizing legislation. Even more tricky, it would require equal area in the district to be set aside for a replacement public park.

While I believe the adjacent site (parcels 22 & 25) would be a better place for the stadium, that’s not my biggest concern. Downtown Providence has a parking problem already. Storing cars is a horrendously inefficient use of land, and downtown Providence, the core of our city, is overrun with surface lots and street-deadening garages. We should all be concerned by this PawSox news that it would result in acres and acres of new asphalt wasteland in a place that desperately deserves to be a welcoming environment to walk or bike in. Parking is necessary when you’re expecting lots of people to come to the place you’re building, but it is my hunch that plenty of parking already exists close to the proposed stadium site.

So, to that end, I went to Google Earth and started counting parking spaces. Parking that is within 800 feet of a destination is close by, within 1200 feet is a medium distance, and within 1600 feet is a long but tolerable walk. Of course, for some people 100 feet is a big barrier; that’s why handicap parking spaces & permits exist.

Parking in downtown Providence

All those lots total about 2800 spots within a short walk, 4050 within a medium walk, and 5100 spaces within a long-but-tolerable walk, plus four garages that I couldn’t find space counts for (plausibly 200-500 spaces on average). Let’s estimate that those four garages total 1000 spaces.

There are over 200 street segments within a short walk as well, totaling more than 10 miles of street length. Based on parking spaces 32 feet long and a GIS analysis of the width of those street segments, there is room for about 1400 spaces of on-street parking within a short walk of the proposed stadium location as well.

That means, all told, a reasonable estimate of existing parking close to the proposed stadium site is 7500 spaces including both on-street and off-street. Of course, many of these spaces are used for other purposes as well. And there is no guarantee that their owners would be willing to enter into shared-use agreements with the stadium ownership. However, the number is still twice the estimate cited in the ProJo last week for the number of parking spaces required to fill the stadium.

For comparison: McCoy Stadium parking

There are actually fewer spaces in parking lots around McCoy stadium than around the proposed site in downtown Providence. Within a short walk of the main gate (mostly on-site) there are only about 860 spaces, a medium walk will get you to 1220, and within a 1600 ft long walk, there are about 2400 spaces available in parking lots.

I don’t have the widths readily available for Pawtucket streets, so I assumed each street segment within 1600 feet of the stadium entrance was packed with cars along both sides of the street. Folks really love the PawSox. That would result in space for another 2400 cars, bringing the total parking capacity around McCoy stadium to about 5000 spaces.

In Conclusion

There’s a lot of parking in downtown Providence near the proposed stadium (7500 spaces by my count). It’s just also used for other things. I would encourage any owners of parking facilities downtown to contract with the stadium ownership for a shared-parking agreement. It would raise the economic tide for all of downtown.

The area around McCoy stadium, in contrast, has far fewer spaces; 5000 is a generous estimate. While the seas of asphalt around the stadium itself may be single-use (in other words, vacant and uninviting the rest of the time), about 4000 of those spaces are behind businesses, in hospital or school parking lots, or clogging both sides of residential streets with parked cars.

To look at it differently, McCoy Stadium has gotten along fine with no more than 1000 parking spaces on site. Any more than that (and perhaps any at all) built for a new stadium might be money better spent elsewhere.

Where do people actually bike in Providence?

I have been excited recently by the heatmap published by the Strava app showing where its users go when tracking their trips. It’s beautiful, and it seems like great data for planning bike infrastructure. However, after a tip from a friend, I did some research and found that Strava users are not necessarily very representative of the cycling demographics or travel patterns of the general public.

  • Strava users are, in the words of another friend who is an avid user, “a group that is heavily skewed toward recreational, performance-oriented cyclists, although it should be noted that there is often a lot of overlap between commuter cyclists and recreational cyclists”
  • There are reports suggesting that Strava’s user base is approximately 90% men, which is substantially higher than the 65-75% of cyclists nationally who are men. Strava does not relase information about the age, nationality, or location of its user-base.
  • Most suggestively, when Oregon DOT bought Strava’s detailed data in the spring of 2014, they compared the Strava count of cyclists crossing Portland’s Hawthorne Bridge, a prominent commuter cyclist connection, to a physical counter’s tally. They found that only 2.5% of the actual trips across the bridge were reflected in the Strava data.

While these are important limitation to keep in mind, the data is still useful. In Providence, according to a Strava rep I contacted, the data is based on 1440 users making 10,835 trips, 30% of which were commuting. In Rhode Island as a whole, there are 5996 Strava users and 61,625 trips.

For comparison, the data generated by VHB for the 2013 Bike Providence plan used an app which has between 100 and 500 downloads on the Android store, suggesting a user base roughly between 250 and 1250 (iPhone’s market share in RI is 58% compared to Android’s 41%). The users of the VHB app, because of its singular purpose, were also an unbalanced sample of all users.

To increase the sample size of the data, I have used GIS to combine the Strava data (created May 2014) and the VHB data (March-May 2013) into one composite bike traffic metric for all Providence streets:

PVD bike_traffic

I would note that, though existing traffic patterns are an excellent aid in determining where new bike infrastructure should be created, providing reasonable access to the whole city is also an important consideration. For example, Smith Street only shows moderate existing bike traffic in these data sources, but installing a protected bike lane along that corridor would provide better access to a whole swath of north Providence that would otherwise be underserved by bike infrastructure. Similarly, Plainfield St and Hartford Ave in the Silver Lake & Hartford neighborhoods would provide important access to residents who are not currently along well-trafficked corridors.

One of my favorite aphorisms with regard to bike infrastructure is that it would be ridiculous to reject a proposal for a bridge because too few people swim across the river. Approach this existing traffic data with that in mind.

It’s time to stop waiting for the bus in Rhode Island

This post originally published on Rhode Island Future.

I like RIPTA. Transit agencies struggle to provide direly needed transportation access to thousands of people, and they don’t get to take a day off if they’re not feeling up to it. I’ve seen some RIPTA staff in action, and they impress me. I’m also pumped about the redesigned Kennedy Plaza; for all the flak it gets, I think it’s an excellent thing for transit service in Rhode Island and a boon to rejuvenating downtown Providence.

But this is the 21st century.

In the 21st century, people don’t want to wait around in the cold for a bus, because they don’t have to. They have the internet, which can tell them, based on real-time location data, exactly when their bus is going to arrive. Or, maybe they live in an urban area that values its transit system enough to provide frequent enough service such that, even if you miss one bus, the next one will be along before your toes fall off from frostbite.

Unfortunately, neither of those things is true in Rhode Island.

Google Maps and other transit apps are still waiting for RIPTA to provide them with real-time data, instead relying on scheduled bus arrival times. When you’re standing out at a stop in the cold, and you have a meeting or interview you need to get to, what do you do with the statistic that a majority of buses arrive at each stop within 5 minutes of their scheduled time? Do you wait to see if the bus will come? Or do you walk over to the next transit corridor to maybe catch that bus? Or, more likely, you just don’t rely on the bus, because you don’t know whether it can get you there. When you can’t rely on the bus, it’s not a good alternative to car ownership for most people.

Or wait! Even if there’s some major technological, bureaucratic, budgetary, or other reason RIPTA can’t set up a process to format its data in the necessary fashion and provide a feed for Google and other apps (or even *gasp* citizen developers!) it doesn’t matter, right? There are a lot of bus lines; people can rely on the schedule and function pretty okay, yeah?

Except the problem is, RIPTA’s bus service is on the low end of frequency. Transit expert Jarrett Walker categorizes transit service based on off-peak frequency into four categories: buses every 15 minutes or less, every 30 minutes or less, every 60 minutes or less, and occasional service. If you miss those most frequent buses, no worries, because another will be along soon. If you miss the less frequent ones, you know the drill. Walk home, and tell that fantastic job or client you were really excited about that you won’t be able to make it.

So here’s a map of Providence with RIPTA routes colored according to frequency. Red is the best, then blue, then green, then orange is practically nonexistent service.

 

But look! There are lots of red lines there! Except if you notice, those red lines are mostly along limited-access highways, without much in the way of transit access to the people living next to them. I could count on one hand the corridors outside of downtown with actual frequent transit access:

  1. North Main (paragon of pedestrian friendliness that THAT is)
  2. West Broadway
  3. Cranston Street
  4. Broad
  5. Elmwood
  6. Waterman/Angell
  7. Eddy (only to Thurbers)

Okay I borrowed two fingers from the other hand. But THAT’S IT. No frequent service to RIC or PC. No frequent service to the Wards of City Council members Narducci, Ryan, Correia, Igliozzi, Hassett, or Matos, and hardly any to Councilman Zurier’s Ward 2 or Council President Aponte’s Ward 10. And really, the frequent coverage ain’t great in many other Wards; they just have one or two frequent lines running through them.

Ideally RIPTA would solve both of these problems, but of course there are budgetary constraints and an imperative to cover the whole service area with service. As Walker states in this awesome video (yes I’m a geek), there is a tension between the goal of coverage and the goal of frequency. And indeed, with the R-line and suggestions of further focus on the highest-potential routes, RIPTA is headed more in the direction of frequency than it has been historically.

But the other problem? C’mon RIPTA. We’re living in the 21st century. Get on it. Or tell us why you’re failing in this way. Do you think we don’t care? Or that you’ll look bad? We do care. You already look bad when you don’t tell us why you’re deficient in this area. Here are some links to help get you there if you’re not already on your way: GTFS-realtimeMBTA’s live-feed page. Transit Camp 2015 conference notes.

Analytics of #AskElorza Twitter Town Hall

Today from 1:00pm to 2:00pm I participated in a Twitter Town Hall with the new mayor of Providence, Jorge Elorza. The idea is, the mayor’s office announced a specific hashtag (#AskElorza) and people asked questions, appending that hashtag, and then the mayor answered them. I was curious about topical trends, so I exported and broke down the tweets that used the hashtag.

askelorza

The mayor received 141 questions during the hour, and replied to 34 of them. 3 of the questions were offered in Spanish. Here were the most common topics:

  1. Softballs (answered 6/12) e.g. “Do you have a dog?”, “How was your run yesterday?”, and “Read any good books lately?”
  2. Alternative transportation (0/10) e.g. “What will you do to make the city safe and inviting to pedestrians and bicyclists?”, “Where can the city combine road diets and stormwater management?”, and “How will you restructure the street design process to slow down cars?”
  3. Volunteer (3/9) e.g. “Where do I go if I want to help give back to the city?” or “How can my organization work with the administration?”
  4. Schools (3/8) e.g. “How can we get more of our kids going to college?”, “Any thoughts on implementing restorative practices in Providence schools?”, and “How will you support parents to speak up as their kids have about schools?”
  5. Public Safety (1/8) e.g. “There is crime! What are you doing about it??”
  6. Outreach (3/7) e.g. “Quiero saber si la página Web de la ciudad tendra mas material en español?”, “Are there plans for a constituency Twitter and mobile app similar to NotifyBoston?”, and “What will you do to improve customer service at City Hall?”
  7. Promotion (1/6) e.g. “How are you planning to promote Providence to the world?”, “How are you planning to promote tourism?”, and “How do we help the Providence Cyclocross Festival keep happening?”
  8. Potholes (1/4) e.g. “There are potholes! What are you doing about them??”
  9. Open Government (1/4) e.g. “Will more data be put up on data.providenceri.gov?”
  10. Small business (1/4) e.g. “How can we work together to make locally owned businesses thrive and compete?”
  11. Development (0/4) e.g. “Baltimore offers large tax incentives in their vacant properties, should we do the same?”
  12. Arts Festival (2/3) e.g. “What is the progress on the Arts Festival you talked about during your campaign?” and “How can residents get involved?”
  13. Chief Innovation Officer (1/3) e.g. “What, specifically, will your Chief Innovation Officer be doing?”
  14. Healthcare (0/3) e.g. “Como resolver el problema de seguro de salud que los empleadores no quieren pagar a sus empleados acortando las horas de trabajo?”
  15. Sidewalk Snow Removal (0/3) e.g. “Snow hasn’t been removed from the sidewalks! What are you doing about it??”
  16. Superman building (0/3) e.g. “What’s going on with the Superman building?”

You can read the whole conversation here.

PVD Police Dept one of least racially representative in the country

This post originally appeared on RI Future.
PVD police

A lot of American cities have police departments that don’t proportionally represent the racial mix of residents. And Providence is one of the worst.

According to data provided by the office of the Public Safety Commissioner, the 444-officer Providence Police Department is 76.3 percent White, 11.7 percent Hispanic, 9.0 percent Black, 2.7 percent Asian or Pacific Islander, and 0.2 percent American Indian. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the city as a whole is 37.8 percent White, 38.3 percent Hispanic, 16.1 percent Black, 6.5 percent Asian or Pacific Islander, and 1.4 percent American Indian.

That means the white portion of the PPD is 38.6 percentage points overrepresentative of the city as a whole, while the Hispanic portion is 26.5 percentage points underrepresentative, the black portion is 7.1 points underrepresentative, the Asian/P.I. portion is 3.8 points underrepresentative, and the American Indian portion is 1.2 points underrepresentative.

These numbers seem vaguely interesting without context, but in the context of other cities, they’re far more troublesome.

On October 1, data journalism blog FiveThirtyEight.com published an analysis of the 75 largest municipal police forces in the country. Providence has approximately the 90th-most officers in the country, so was not included in that analysis. The main thrust of that analysis was examining the effectiveness of residency requirements (tldr?: They actually correlate with worse representativeness). However, there is an excellent visualization putting all 75 departments side by side, ranked in order of how racially misrepresentative they are of their cities. I highly recommend checking it out.

So Providence wasn’t included in that analysis, and there are about 15 other departments that also weren’t included and have bigger departments than we do. But how do we compare to the 75 cities included in the analysis?

PVD_policeracechart

Only three of the cities FiveThirtyEight looked at have police departments worse at representing their communities than Providence. So that’s a problem.

In a statement, Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven Paré said, “Recruiting a diverse workforce is always a priority.  We hired two recruit classes for the PFD and one recruit class for the PPD.  It was one of the most diverse classes we’ve had in our history.  Our goal is to mirror the community we serve.  The challenge is to reach out to the available workforce in the region and recruit the best candidates.”

The new class of 53 police officers was the most diverse in 20 years, with 9 Hispanic recruits and 13 other minorities. But the class itself overrepresented white Providence by 20%, and barely budged the underrepresentation of Latinos.

When it comes to recruiting new and diverse officers, Paré said he’s “battl[ing] the perception that you need to have a connection to become a police officer,” he said. “It exists in the profession.” He acknowledged the fire department “can do a better job…recruiting more women. It is always difficult to get women interested in the fire services because of the physical demands that is required.” (What, because women have trouble doing physical work? *facepalm*)

Importantly, Paré welcomes ideas from the community. “We have invited community stakeholders to become part of the process for their input, ideas and recommendations to improve how we hire police and fire,” he said. “They have been critical partners in these last 3 training academies.”

There’s racial misrepresentation to address in Providence Public Safety, but with willing leadership and the active participation of community groups, maybe we can solve the problem together.

How blue is Rhode Island, by town

Originally posted on Rhode Island Future. They have lots of great stuff, so head over and check it out!

In the sensationally titled “Revenge of the Swamp Yankee: Democratic Disaster in South County,” Will Collette argued emotionally that despite statewide wins for Democrats in Rhode Island two weeks ago, South County was a sad place for the party. He makes a strong case that local South County races, through low turnout and Republican money, had a night more like the rest of the country than the rest of Rhode Island.

Will focuses on General Assembly and Town Council races, but his post made me wonder how different towns around Rhode Island voted compared to the state averages. So I dug into the numbers for statewide races. Here’s what I came up with:

Democratic Lean by Town Population

RI_election2014

Democratic Lean by Town Density

RI_election2014_density

statewide election results_small

This is a little confusing; here’s what I did:

  1. I looked up what percentage of the votes in each town the Democrats and Republicans for each statewide office received.
  2. I subtracted the GOP candidate’s percentage from the Democrat’s for each town, giving the percentage margin the Democrats won (or didn’t) by.
  3. I then averaged together the margins for each statewide race, roughly giving each town’s Democratic lean.
  4. I then subtracted the average statewide Democratic lean from each of those town leans, giving us an idea of how each town compares to Rhode Island as a whole.

Those are the numbers you see above. Here’s my spreadsheet. A few observations:

  • Hardly anyone lives in New Shoreham. But we already knew Block Island isn’t a population hub. (These population numbers are from Wikipedia and could be wrong.)
  • There’s a clear trend of the denser and more populous cities voting more for Democrats than less populous towns. I ran the correlations and it’s 0.55 for population and 0.82 for density. Both are reasonably strong.
  • Imagine the vaguely logarithmic trendline that would best fit these points. For the density graph the formula for that trendline would be y = 0.084*ln(x) - 0.6147. It’s in relation to that trendline that I’ve made the map at right. Gray towns are those that voted about how you’d expect based on their density, blue towns voted more Democratic than density would suggest while red towns voted less Democratic.
  • Remember this is one point in time, November 4, 2014. It can’t tell us a lot about how things are changing or how all those people who didn’t turn out would vote if they did.

So at the end of the day, what does this tell us? Municipalities with higher population & density tend to vote for Democrats more than towns with lower populations. This isn’t just true in Rhode Island, it’s true across the country. But what is interesting here is how different areas of the state deviate from that implied trendline.

Providence Racial Geography

Racial geography really interests me. I think too often white people steer clear of neighborhoods where mostly people of color live due to a feeling that those neighborhoods are “unsafe” when really we’re just being accidentally racist. I think it’s important to be aware of where people of different races live so we don’t accidentally prejudice services, investments, or attention to white neighborhoods while the neighborhoods of people of color suffer.

To that end, here is a map I made using 2010 Census block-level data. It shows which racial group made up the plurality of residents of that block (i.e. the biggest group, e.g. 38% – 33% – 25% – 4% even though it’s not a majority). A few notes:

  • I want to also include indicators on this map of how big a plurality each block is, as well as the relative population of each block.
  • The average population of the census blocks in Providence is about 75 people, the median is about 50.
  • Remember that this is from 2010, and we’re almost halfway to the next decennial Census. It’s old data, but it’s precise data.
  • Providence has sizable Cape Verdean and West African populations, and I’m not sure how they present in this data.
  • Furthermore, there are distinctions between Irish, Italian, and hipster white Providence residents, as well as between Dominican, Guatemalan, Puerto Rican, and other Hispanic residents. These distinctions are relevant, but not captured in this data. I would love to capture them in future maps.
  • Also, race is a social construct. My interest in studying it is mainly to fight racism.

PVD racial geography

Elorza won throughout Providence

It was a bad night for Democrats nationally, but a good night in Rhode Island. I was working most closely on the mayoral campaign, doing data analysis and managing the website for the Jorge Elorza campaign.

I was a little disappointed by the media narrative about Elorza’s victory, though, which focused more on the election as a referendum on Cianci, and the East Side as kingmaker. While those factors were certainly a piece of what happened, Jorge Elorza was a great candidate, and many parts of Providence contributed to his victory.

Campaign status

We can see in this map based on precinct-level results from the RI Secretary of State’s website that while the East Side went strongly for Elorza and was crucial to his victory, so did a wide swath of the rest of Providence. Big pieces of the West End, Elmwood, and Reservoir went for Elorza by 10-20 percentage points. And Federal Hill, formerly a bastion of the Italian-American community that gave Cianci a lot of his power, went to Elorza, as did parts of Smith Hill, Valley, Olneyville, and Hartford.

Outside of his strongest areas of support in the northern and eastern neighborhoods of the city, Cianci really didn’t have very much support. He won Upper South Providence by a healthy margin, and Washington Park. But the real narrative of this race should be, as with the topline numbers, it was a close race, and both candidates won about half the city, splitting areas outside their bases rather evenly.

I hope to have more analysis at a later time, but now I need to get ready for the Providence Symposium, which I’ve been working on for the Providence Preservation Society for several months and begins tomorrow night. You should go!

Update Nov 10 @ 5:00pm

Thanks to Dan McGowan at WPRI, I got the post-mail-ballot precinct totals. Also, Andy Grover reminded me that there are some precincts that just don’t have many people in them, so they shouldn’t necessarily be shown on the same scale as densely populated places. Finally, Frymaster was uncertain about these neighborhood boundaries, so you might be interested to know that these are the official neighborhood boundaries that the city uses.

Mayoral results

Applying the Nate Silver methodology to polls for RI Governor

poll headlineI’m a big fan of FiveThirtyEight.com, which takes an intellectually honest, statistical approach to a number of topics, especially political polls. Its creator, Nate Silver, started it as an independent blog in 2008, and since then it has been funded by first the New York Times and now ESPN.

I’m also a political geek at the local and state level, and have seen pretty standard overreactive headlines for the polling in the current Rhode Island gubernatorial race. So I applied something like FiveThirtyEight’s poll model methodology to polls so far released in this race.

Here are the polls that have been released recently for that race:

  • Oct 28, Brown (David Binder): Raimondo 38%, Fung 35.4%, Healey 11.8%, Other 1.6%, Undecided 11.2% → Raimondo +3.4
  • Oct 23, Brown (Portable Insights): Raimondo 41.6%, Fung 30.5%, Healey 9.1%, Other 0.8%, Undecided 18% → Raimondo +11.1
  • Oct 23, NYT/CBS (YouGov): Raimondo 40%, Fung 35%, Healey/Other 10.3%, Undecided 21% → Raimondo +5
  • Oct 9: WPRI/ProJo (Fleming & Associates): Raimondo 41.8%, Fung 35.6%, Healey 8.1%, Other 0.8%, Undecided 13.7% → Raimondo +6.2

News headlines today were of the nature, “How do we explain Raimondo’s drop in support??” when a less frantic attitude would be to look at the polling average. Weighting for poll recency, sample size, pollster bias, and pollster accuracy rating, I averaged these and previous polls together to reach the conclusion that the race is probably more stable at something like Raimondo 41.1%, Fung 34.2%, Healey 9%, Other 1%, and Undecided 15.1%, in other words, Raimondo +6.9. You can see my work here.

Now, I don’t have the hubris to expect this forecast to be more accurate than those of more experienced commentators on RI politics, but I do know that taking the polling average tends to be more accurate than looking at individual polls by themselves. Absolutely there is still a margin of error, but one week from election day, there’s a big difference between +5% and “effectively tied”. I would guess that the governor’s race is closer to the former.