This follows a Karl Rove book of several years ago and
Catherine Shaw’s Campaign Manager.
She is a Democrat. The first thing to
realize in polling is that not everybody votes.
240 million adults over age 18, 187M registered, but only 126.46M voted
in 2012 election. (75% of adults are
registered. 65% of Registered vote in typical Pres. election.) The second thing
you need to know is that only about 1/3 of the people asked to respond in a
poll do so. Thus, the task of making an accurate
data base is difficult. If Hispanics
represent 14% of population but vote 8% of the time, and your poll of 1000
voters had 7% Hispanics, do you weight them by doubling or do you multiply
their influence by 1.14? Af-Ams typically vote at 12% of the total vote, but
represent 13% of the population.
However, in the Obama years, they voted heavily representing 14% of the
total vote. And do you weight it according to minorities
or age or something else? Seniors vote
heavily and millenials vote sporadically. Jews are just 2% of the population
but vote at 3% of the total. Altogether,
there is a huge guessing game of weighting the groups and putting in fudge
factors to reflect participation.
You are excused if you are
thinking at this point that polls mean nothing. Gallup has dropped out of the
Presidential polling, but for none of the above reasons. It was once easier because the pollsters
could get a copy of county voting records.
Voters are listed by party, address, and number of times they have voted. So if a phone call to an address was picked
up and the voter identified themselves, the pollster could assess likelihood of
voting. “Mrs. Jones voted twice out of the last 4 general elections so
she has a probability of showing up this time of ½.” Cell phones, disposable phones, unlisted numbers
have shredded this scheme. On-the-street
interviews are good, but people don’t have time, answer (in public) according
to what they think the pollster wants to hear and have very low response
rates. Internet polls have no controls
for partisans who do multiple votes. All
of this is chancy science.
Poll results are often all over
the map in variation. Real clear politics
takes an average of recent polls to assess a race. But even if they get more accuracy, they don’t
tell you about a very important fact.
When an incumbent is below 47%, even if he’s ahead, he is probably in
trouble. Rove summed this up by studying
outcomes versus final polls taken. If an
incumbent polls 48% he has a better than 50% probability of winning. If it is 43%, this shrinks to less than
10%. The reason for this is that when people
answer a poll and give a well-known incumbent, say, 46%, this means that 54%
are looking for “other alternatives.”
Typically the number of undecideds will go 60-85% for the
challenger. So as I write this, Senator Burr
of NC and Sen. Ayotte of NH lead their races by a percentage point. But with 45 and 46% respectively, they are
less than half probable of winning. I’ll give you a self-depreciating example
of this. When Steve ran for the House in
2010, the State Republican Party did a 100 person phone poll of our
district. No demographic corrections
were done. They found he was behind 39
to 43%. Steve thought he had lost and I
would have agreed if he’d have shared this with me. But the state party rejoiced—he had a chance!—and
soon he was talking to some big donors for direct mail funds. It turned out he won by 53-47%. That is, of the 18 points undecideds (100-39-47=18),
he won 14 of them. (Golly, we were so uneducated
about political science when we won that first race! We didn’t know that the probability of
beating a 3rd term House member was less than 1%. And Luttrell had won with 60% of the vote in
2008!)
They do exit polls on many
things. One question is “how far in
advance did you decide to vote for the guy you did?” Answers vary from “I decided 40 years ago, I’d
never vote for another Democrat!” to, “Never heard of him. I didn’t know who I
was voting for when I checked his name.” Results are consistent however. The number of people who decide within the
final two weeks of an election is usually 1 or 2%. Almost everyone has their minds made up two
weeks out. But Television never says
this! Indeed, they broadcast a myth
about polls changing radically the last week.
Why? They get advertizing money from campaigns wanting to convince that
last tiny group of undecideds. And
campaign season is like the Christmas season for broadcasters. They make big bucks. And they spread a myth of the Independent as
a careful standoffish voter who can’t decide.
This is only true of about 1 out of 5 Indies. Indies come in a lot of flavors. Some are hidden partisans who just don’t want
to get in an argument with their dad or wife by joining the other party. So
they play coy. As an Independent they
can “constructively” criticize dad’s party.
Or they are at odds with both parties—fiscally conservative but socially
liberal, or have some single issue that neither party addresses. Independents vote only half as often as
partisans.
The pollsters and TV guys play a
game with viewers, claiming that “polls are tightening in the last week!” More likely, the pollster knows that his
results versus outcome will be measured closely and decide his future
business. He is trying his best to
weight for “likely voters” (previous polls were ‘registered voters’ or ‘general
public’) and get an accurate poll.
Previous polling done in earlier months for a new organization are often
just to feed their talking heads. Pollsters
give the sponsors polls that reflect the sponsors point of view. They tell them what they want to hear.
Changes in polls can then be cited by the news organization for reason for the
candidates to spend more money in last minute advertizing.
And then pollster just sometimes
blow it. Brexit was supposed to have
Remain win by 5%. They lost by 5%. Reagan was supposed to lose to Carter by
5-10% and won by 12%. In both cases,
enthusiasm was sky high for the eventual winner compared to the loser. As mentioned, Romney lost because his base
didn’t turn out. That affected the
weighting factors. JFK had huge Catholic
turnout which swamped anti-Catholic turnout, but he still wouldn’t have won had
he not carried Illinois which was determined by dead people voting in
Chicago. Gore won the popular vote but
it was not just FL that killed him with narrow loss. He narrowly lost his home state of TN—which would
have won the election for him. Botton
line: It’s the election that counts.
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