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Posted on 03/27/2017 11:11:40 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
As they investigate the forces behind the party’s stunning losses in November, Democrats are coming to a troubling conclusion. The party didn’t just lose among rural white voters on Election Day, it may have failed to capture them in its pre-election polling as well.
Many pollsters and strategists believe that rural white voters, particularly those without college degrees, eluded the party’s polling altogether — and their absence from poll results may have been both a cause and a symptom of Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in several states.
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. Determining what exactly happened is one of the most pressing problems facing the out-of-power party. In order to win those voters back — or figure out a future path to victory without them — party strategists say they first need to measure the size of that rural and working-class cohort.
John Hagner, a partner at Clarity Campaign Labs, a D.C.-based Democratic analytics firm, said 2016 taught the party a hard lesson about polling in the Trump era.
“The folks who would talk to a stranger about politics just aren’t representative of people who wouldn’t,” he said.
The first evidence of the party’s polling blind spot surfaced in a governor’s race, the 2015 contest in Kentucky. Both public and private polls going into the election showed Democrat Jack Conway and Republican Matt Bevin running neck-and-neck — Conway had a 3-point lead in the final RealClearPolitics average — but Bevin won by a comfortable, 9-point margin.
Like some of the more Democratic states where Trump upset Clinton last year, Kentucky has a large rural and a large working-class white population (often there is considerable overlap in the groups). Whites make up 88 percent of Kentucky’s population, and fewer than a quarter of Kentucky residents over age 25 have a college degree.
Demographic trends confirm that these voters have been moving toward Republicans, but they don’t provide an easy answer for why pollsters have struggled to capture them in surveys.
Hagner sees some similarities between Bevin and Trump — both businessmen who initially positioned themselves as insurgent candidates within the GOP. In both cases, there were signs of what’s known as "social-desirability bias," the idea that voters won’t admit for whom they intend to vote because they think others will look unfavorably on their choice.
“With both Bevin and Trump, every newspaper endorsed against them,” Hagner said. “The right answer, in air quotes, was, ‘I’m not going to vote for them.’ … There’s a small group of people who knew that, at some level, they didn’t want their support for Trump to be scrutinized.”
Pollsters are still analyzing whether a “shy Trump voter” effect may have been decisive in some states. Like the public polls, Democrats struggled to measure the presidential race in private polls in a number of Upper Midwest states with large numbers of working-class white voters.
Clinton’s campaign mostly ignored Michigan and Wisconsin — where public and private surveys showed Clinton consistently ahead — until the final days of the race and was edged narrowly on Election Day by Trump. And the campaign invested heavily in Iowa and Ohio — two traditional battlegrounds where she trailed — only to lose both by larger margins than expected.
“We projected Clinton to lose Ohio by 200,000 votes,” said Hagner, “and she lost by 450,000.”
Democrats’ polling problems might not only be voters hiding their intentions from pollsters — some voters may have been hiding altogether.
That bias against responding covers a number of different elements, including geography. One top Democratic strategist who requested anonymity to discuss candidly what went wrong with the 2016 polls pointed to difficulty in reaching voters in more rural districts because of spotty cellphone service.
The same strategist added that many of these voters also may choose not to participate in polls “because they don’t like the establishment and they don’t want to take a survey.”
The yawning education gap among white voters’ preferences — Trump clobbered Clinton among white voters without a college degree, while the two ran neck-and-neck among those with a degree — means that nonresponse bias may have been determinative, said Democratic pollster Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group. And it may have been going on for some time.
“I think it’s very plausible that for years pollsters have been over-representing educated voters, and that it only came back to bite us recently because it was a key driver in vote preferences this time,” Gourevitch said.
It’s too early to say for sure that this explains Democrats’ struggles over the past two election cycles — or that these issues will still be relevant in 2017 and 2018. Most Democrats — along with Republicans and nonpartisan analysts — are waiting for more states to collect and publish data of which voters did and did not cast ballots, a process expected to conclude later this spring.
Democrats aren’t ready to prescribe remedies yet, but officials at the national party committees are sending strong signals that they plan to hold pollsters to a higher standard in the upcoming midterm elections. Rep. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, who is chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for the second consecutive election cycle, ruffled feathers last month when he suggested that “unreliable pollsters will not be invited back to the DCCC.”
A committee spokeswoman, Meredith Kelly, clarified last month that pollsters’ reliability isn’t just going to be determined by their 2016 results, but also by their willingness to participate in a DCCC-driven effort to test various polling methods.
“It’s more about unreliable data combined with an unwillingness to do better and to learn from that,” said Kelly, the DCCC’s communications director. “That’s when we’ll stop working with people.”
To that end, the DCCC plans to use this year’s races for other offices to test its pollsters — and different methods to reach the voters who caused problems in recent elections. That could include using its own automated survey infrastructure.
“We’re going to use the 2017 elections to basically ask multiple pollsters to test rural and exurban areas that have overlaps with some of our [target] districts,” Kelly said. “It’ll be an ongoing thing, so we’ll have a way to test whose approaches worked and were most predictive.”
Elisabeth Pearson, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, said her organization conducted a review after the 2015 Kentucky governor’s race and intends to use it as a model for how to proceed headed into the next two years, when gubernatorial elections will be held in 38 of 50 states.
“I’ve seen a ton of openness from pollsters. We’ve done a couple of these meetings where we’ve brought all these pollsters that we worked with and had a great conversation about best practices, deep dives into things like sampling,” said Pearson. “I think they all understand that it’s in their best interests.”
... and that's on top of the party elite considering you to be a racist if you happen to be white. Yeah, being labeled and "ignorant racist" makes me want to vote for your candidate. No surprise that pollsters get ignored.
A friend recently took a pollster call regarding the GA 6th District race, the special election for the seat opened up by Tom Price joining the Trump Administration as HHS Secretary.
He told the pollsters who his first choice was (Handel IIRC), and when asked who his second choice was, told them Jon Ossoff. Well Ossoff is the Dem candidate in this open, no party primary, massive field special election, and in reality, there are more than a dozen candidates in the race this guy would vote for, before he would vote for Ossoff. In fact, he would write in a name before voting Ossoff.
Do NOT underestimate the effect of large numbers of people messing with pollsters.
See my previous for some anecdotal insight to part of what has been going on with polling.
The Progs will never get it. You lost the election for one reason. You ran a sack of crap, lying, corrupt, criminal, Hillary Clinton.
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And now, all that political inbreeding has exposed them as the irrational humans that they are.
Either that, or Democrats have been photo-shopped in and it has all been a joke.
I always lie to pollsters.
When they are automated, I am a 43 year old, hispanic, demonRAT, lesbian, that hates Trump and loves hildabitch and hiawatha.
The other side of the failed polling results by sampling by state population, i.e. kalifornicator and ny will always skew the results toward the demonRATS, but pollsters don't adjust them because that is the result that they want to see.
These dumb bastards fool themselves...on purpose.
>> The party didn’t just lose among rural white voters on Election Day
The Democrat Thug Party got hammered. And whatever ‘winning’ support it garnered came from the illegal urban vote.
The vast majority of counties in New York went for Trump.
You know--Those people that DemocRATS despise.
If you look at it from a “makers and takers” perspective, the Democrats offer nothing to the makers, or those who want to be makers. Statistically, there are more takers than makers, so Dems still have a chance, provided they can get the takers to the polls.
Emotionally mature people never answer phone calls from strangers, especially pollsters. Liberal moonbats, on the other hand, will trip over each other to take a phone call from anyone. There’s your blind spot.
I believe you’re right; when Hillary is pandering for black votes in the Deep Ghetto (Philly) the day before the election, while Trump was heading out to Dem states, it was clear both knew what was happening. The media’s attempt to create an air of invincibility about Hillary failed miserably. In the end, for every whiny feminazi weeping in NYC on election night, there was a woman elsewhere cheering Trump’s win.
At some point Dems might figure out it isn’t worth criminalizing “whiteness”...
Progressives know and believe that if they want something hard enough, it will come true - like from a materializer on star trek. Thus there is no need for polling those they deem unfit for the future.
Poor democrats. It is scary not knowing why you got beat at the polls when there is no reason why it should have happened. Almost like the republican right has a cloak of invisibility that needs to be rendered useless.
“The folks who would talk to a stranger about politics just aren’t representative of people who wouldn’t”
When people are labeled “ignorant racists” whenever they deviate from the Democrat Party Line, they tend not to answer political questions from strangers. This article makes the ignorant, racist assumption that these people are all ignorant racists, i.e., in Leftspeak, “rural white people without college degrees”.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner!
The democrats still don’t get it. The pre-election polling was fake. They were designed to create the impression that Clinton was going to win, in the hope that creating that impression would create that reality.
++++
Spot on and my take as well. I don’t buy the premise of the article at all.
Phony, wishful thinking, Dem-oversampled polling that was obvious to the average Freeper is what really went on. And that’s not something the Pollsters are willing to confess to since they plan to use that same technique in 2018. And 2020 and 2022 and ...
I do not answer calls on my phone from numbers I do not recognize - especially from area codes like DC, NY, Chicago and LA. If it’s important enough to them they’ll leave a message and a call back number. If it’s important enough to me, I’ll call back.
This started way back: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2067223/President-Obamas-2012-campaign-abandons-white-working-class-voters-favor-minorities-educated.html
Yesterday was first voting day to fill the GA seat vacated by Tom Price.
Local Democrats could not find a qualified candidate. So Nancy Pelosi’s faction chose Congressional staffer Ossoff who didn’t live in the district. Pelosi is spending big, both on Polling, TV, and ground game.
Ossoff is polling 40%-44%, impressive in a field of 18.
Dan Moody, candidate of the governor and establishment Republicans is spending the most of any Republican, is on TV almost as much as Ossoff, and has only 2%-5% in 5th or 6th place behind other Republicans who are spending little.
Trump carried this 6th District in a squeaker. But Tom Price carried it with 60%.
How accurate are the polls? Each media source reports a different number for each candidate from exactly the same March 22-23 Fox poll. So not only are the polls in question. But the media reporting on those polls is in question.
There was no serious attempt to convince some Republicans to drop out. Thus the vote of many Republican factions is split.
https://ballotpedia.org/Georgia%27s_6th_Congressional_District_special_election,_2017
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_6th_congressional_district_special_election,_2017
This is a slur that many salesmen have used for decades. When the person say something like “my dad always drove a Chevrolet” the salesman comes back with something like, “let me guess that he probably had a high school diploma or less. A GED? We see that Chevrolet is very popular among those without higher education.”
Mattresses, cars, life insurance all have been sold by implying that the competitor’s adherents are ignorant, uneducated people.
Ignore it. Its just a tactic.
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