Democrats up 6, 10 points in new averages of New Jersey and Virginia governor polls

Aggregators take note: We found that many polls in these contests are sponsored by or affiliated with GOP campaigns, increasing the potential bias of (unadjusted) polling averages

Two announcements before we get started:

First, like Strength In Numbers did for the first No Kings Day event in June, we will be producing an estimate of total turnout for this weekend’s anti-Trump protests across the country. This estimate is based on crowdsourced accounts of protest turnout provided by organizers, local officials, and attendees, and collected by me and Alex Ip, a data scientist and journalist for the independent news outlet The Xylom.

SIN is doing this crowd-counting work for two reasons. First, because major media outlets crave data after large protest events — but since high-quality estimates aren’t usually available (academic accounts take months to come out), they tend to rely on anecdotes, ad-hoc estimates from organizers (which are typically inaccurate), or worse. We use crowdsourcing and simple statistics to provide a sensible initial estimate while academics do their thing. Second, the charts we can make with protest data are very informative for other stori…