Posted on 10/26/2008 9:19:37 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
I have been noting that national polls and some state polls may be way off based on optimistic voter turnout models which are historically nonsense (see posts here and here). One of the first indicators of whether Obama really is enjoying some massive lead is the early voting opportunities, which have not shown what Obama and the media have been saying is a huge democrat wave, like 2006.
First there was early voting and registration in Ohio, where Obama’s campaign promised to make huge gains - only to fall 80% short of their mark. All the hype in Ohio was pure fantasy when it came to Obama getting out the vote with this massive wave, which turned out to be barely a ripple.
Second, Gallup came out with poll numbers showing the amount of early voters between Obama and McCain show no huge wave for Obama, but actually a dead even race. Even though Gallup’s own national poll models showed a huge lead for Obama, it was not showing up in the early voting.
(Excerpt) Read more at strata-sphere.com ...
What? Rasmussen just adjusted his weighting so that Dems are sampled 8% more than Republicans. *chortle*.
The pollsters are going to have egg all over their face on the 5th.
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The turnout model scam of 2008 will be the big story of this election. In my last post on polls I noted how many of the polls out there are starting to fall into two camps. The first camp is the traditional approach using historic turnout models where party affiliation is actually quite close as both sides turn out their base equally well. The second model is new and unverified, and assumes there will be a huge difference in party affiliation turnout this year.
The first class of polls show a very tight race, the second class are so heavily weighted towards the dems they assume all the anger with the direction of the country has no impact on Democrats and their media puppets. The DC/NY Political Industrial Complex is mostly liberal in its make up, and it has recently become more and more isolated in its echo chamber. Just look at how it reacted to Sarah Palin. The end result is the polls of polls are showing a classic bimodal result with clusters of polls at one of these two modes: “traditional’ and “extended” - just like the two turnout models now being openly produced by Gallup.
If we’re going to analyze early voting Party ID, we’d need early voting Party ID numbers from the last few elections.
That is what I have been saying all day. In the absence of any historical perspective or baseline from 2004, there is no basis for comparison to today’s early voting numbers. These breathless articles from these second string conservative sources are just noise until then.
www.redstate.com had a very interesting article on California early voting....basically stating that Obama has no lead at all.
Actually, there are some models and from what I’ve seen in MOST cases the GOP has dominated early voting in almost every state that has it. That is, the GOP has traditionally OVERperformed in early voting vis-a-vis the finaly tally.
This year that hasn’t been the case—it’s been pretty even and in some states the Democrats have come out in force (NC and FLA in particular).
Time will tell, of course, but looking at these “early voting” number is a pretty nutty way of predicting the final vote.
From what I remembered from past elections, party ID for early voting generally favored Republicans.
If so, any “evenness” today is bad news.
I do not think Party ID will reach 7 or 8%, but it might reach 5, and 6 is possible.
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If one looks at the polls in the election they are showing a two clusters of results. One cluster shows a runaway race for Obama, the other a very possible close win for McCain. For example, let’s look at the Polls in Ohio. We have 8 polls now on the RCP list
today (which Jay Cost notes all RCP does is average, no real analysis and processing).
4 polls cluster in at one mode: Ohio Newspaper Poll (Obama +3), CNN/Time (Obama +4), FOX News/Rasmussen (McCain +2) and NBC/Mason-Dixon (McCain +1), which averages out to Obama +1 - a clear tie.
The other 4 cluster at another mode: Politico/InAdv (Obama +10), Big10 Battleground (+12), Quinnipiac (+14) and Suffolk (+9), which averages out to Obama +11 - a romp.
What this tells me is there are two classes of turnout models in play. One is the traditional model using historic turnout models to weight their results. They reflect the Gallup “traditional’ model which shows a very tight race. The second set of polls is using the untested or unverified turnout model which tries to claim that willingness to answer a poll has a strong and equal relationship across party affiliations (and other factors) with willingness to vote. These polls are analogous to the Gallup ‘extended’ model - which could be (and I am almost willing to predict is) pure fantasy.
Early voting is relatively new.
Yes, I do believe Obama is well organized and his GOTV effort will equate to a higher tally for him.
But, there is an opposite enthusiasm against Obama that we might not have seen with Hillary.
So the question is...which one is bigger.
I clicked the link, Ernest. I think the big whoop-di-do about California early voting being some positive sign of anything puts a big pock-mark on the rest of the analysis. The GOP always runs ahead in absentee votes and they’ve had a massive early-voting push on for many months. I got two phone calls months ago from the GOP telling me to watch my mailbox for important mail. What was it? An application for an absentee ballot.
I don’t trust any of the polls. I agree with ladyvet:
Screw the polls...stay the course!!! VOTE!
Early voting has favored Dems in the past
I for one am waiting for Election Day to cast my vote. I don’t trust early voting or absentee. There’s too much time before the actual counting to make ‘mistakes’.
I guess no one knows for sure until they provide some numbers, but I remember specifically the mention of a greater % of Republicans utilizing early voting (and absentee).
Now we can make money from the inaccuracies in the polls.
Intrade has Contracts for Beating the Spread on Polling Numbers
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2115426/posts
It may be that the pollsters and the MSM are acting in unison to do a push/pull for Obama; the MSM pushing his candidacy with lies, omissions and spin, while the pollsters create the impression that America is buying what the media is selling. If so, it’s the biggest con-game in history.
You may be correct on absentee, but I don’t think on early voting.
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# Huanon 26 Oct 2008 at 9:40 am
I do not have a background in polling statistics, but I do have a background and a familiarity with biostatistics. Both deal with people in population. Here are my thoughts regarding the RCP poll average. I think it is erroneous to be averaging polls using the polls themselves as a unique data point each. What the RCP really should do is a true meta-analysis and increasing the data points. Each poll should be weighted based on the numbers of people sampled. Then calculate the their polled choice (McCain, Obama, & Undecided), their assignment of the political parties, and their margin of error as weighted by poll size. A poll that has 600 people should not be simply averaged with that of one that polled 1200 people. A poll that weigh 35% democrats cannot be simply averaged with one that weigh 40% democrats. Finally, the RCP should not be expressed as an average difference as this is meaningless without considering the error margins. I think it would be better to report a statistical tie as a tie rather than a raw number without statistical references.
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