Jack:
Did you see a D+6 turnout a week before the election? Did you see it sooner than that?
I think if you check jack’s posts you will find what you are looking for. He wrote a lot of nuts & bolts stuff that’s worth reading.
“Jack:
Did you see a D+6 turnout a week before the election? Did you see it sooner than that?”
To be honest with you, and this is going to sound really weird, I saw a higher dem turnout in Spring 2011 when the U.S. Census Bureau released its second in the series of 2010 census briefs.
The census data is free to the public and posted online for anyone to view. The demographic changes between 2000 and 2010 were mind-blowing. If you graph the changes of each race/ethnicity in 2000 to 2010, you can get a really nice regression line that lets you project the electorate makeup change between 2008 and 2010.
The 2008 black, hispanic and lower white electorate percentage was not a “hope and change”, “first black president”, “youth vote excitement for a hip president” election year. It was the new normal.
Anyway, so back in the Spring of 2012 when some national polls started getting ramped up and serious, I couldn’t believe that people like Rasmussen were making adjustments to his surveys like he did. There’s no way he would have done that if he had simply looked at the Census data and the geographic distribution of it.
Gallup actually thought the white vote would be 78% of the vote and in light of the census data, when I saw that, I could NOT believe that anyone with common sense would dare publish that garbage. But there it was, being quoted day and night on TV, front pages of USA Today and one of only two polls trumpeted over and over by Drudge.
But back to your question, it’s not whether I saw Dem +6 but whether I believed it. And because I was fully aware of the new demographic makeup of America as of 2010, I was able to put my own bias and wishes aside and believe it. Once I accepted the demographics as real, then I started tracking the trajectory of the race with all of the polls except Gallup and Rasmussen because they were obviously unaware of the census data or worse, inserting their own bias and purposefully ignoring it.
“Jack:
Did you see a D+6 turnout a week before the election? Did you see it sooner than that?”
Here’s a good summary of the second in the 2010 census series. If you wanna have your mind blown, compare the demographics in this link with the exit polls from election day:
http://2010.census.gov/news/releases/operations/cb11-cn125.html
So after reading that, can you see how you could have made a good guess about this election in March of 2011 and be not too far off?