Posted on 11/18/2014 5:36:00 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Were the polls wrong? It’s a question asked after every election. Sometimes, as in 1948, the answer seems as obvious as the answer to the question, “Why did Custer lose at Little Bighorn?” Sometimes the answer is less obvious, as it is this year.
“The polls were skewed toward the Democrats,” writes Nate Silver, who as proprietor of FiveThirtyEight has earned the distinction of being the nation’s most assiduous polling analyst.
Silver gives short shrift to partisans — Democrats this year, Republicans in 2012 — who complained that polls were systematically biased against their side. The skew varies unpredictably, he says, perhaps because pollsters overcompensate in response to previous mistakes. He finds polls skewed against Democrats in 2006 and 2012 and against Republicans in 2002 and 2014 — all winning years for those parties.
Silver measures the skew by comparing the percentage margin for candidates in his website’s average of the most recent pre-election polls to the percentage margin for candidates in the actual results. He finds that Republicans this year won bigger margins than in the polls in 24 of 36 Senate races and 28 of 35 governor’s races.
Here’s another way of looking at it: concentrating on those races that were seriously contested. In seriously contested Senate races — the chief event of this election cycle — the polls were quite accurate in presaging the percentages received by seven Democratic incumbents. Those Democrats ran from 3.2 percent ahead to 1.7 percent behind their Real Clear Politics polling averages. Also, three of the four Democrats running in open Democratic seats ran within that range of poll results.
Where the polls missed was in projecting Republicans’ votes in Republican-held seats. Pat Roberts ran 10.6 percent ahead of polls in Kansas, Mitch McConnell 7.2 percent ahead in Kentucky, and David Perdue 5.2 percent ahead in Georgia.
There’s a similar but not identical pattern in seriously contested races for governor. In seven states where Democrats were defending governorships, Democratic nominees ran very close to the polls in five. Only in two close New England races, where polls had high undecideds, did they run further ahead.
In nine states with Republican-controlled governorships, Republicans all ran ahead of their poll numbers, from 3.2 percent in Alaska (where final results are not in at this writing) to 7.4 percent in Kansas.
All this suggests that pollsters did a better job of finding Democratic voters than they did of finding Republican voters. That accounts for the Democratic tilt in polling that Silver finds when looking at candidates’ percentage margins rather than percentage totals.
One possible reason is that Republican-leaning voters were more hesitant than Democratic-leaning voters about committing to vote for their party’s candidates. The bulk of those undecided in polls in Kansas, Kentucky, and most of the states with Republican governors were Mitt Romney voters in 2012.
There has been a similar phenomenon when pollsters ask people to rate the two parties’ members of Congress. During most of this campaign cycle (but less so toward the end), Republicans in Congress were getting lower ratings than Democrats in Congress because more Republican voters gave their own party’s members negative ratings.
Another possible reason, advanced by Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is that pollsters are doing a poorer job of sampling opinion in rural areas than in large metropolitan areas. Outside their states’ three major metropolitan areas, Roberts won 63 percent of the vote, and McConnell won 61 percent. Polls seem to have missed this.
A third possible explanation — and all three may be overlapping — offered by Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende is that local pollsters were able, because of their greater experience and understanding of their states, to spot Republican trends that national pollsters missed. Trende credits the University of Arkansas poll, Ann Selzer’s Des Moines Register poll in Iowa, and Charles Franklin’s Marquette University Law School poll in Wisconsin.
Pollsters face an increasingly difficult task. Telephone polling techniques were developed in a nation with universal landline phone service and a population that answered the phone when it rang. We no longer live in such a nation.
Only 9 percent of pollsters’ calls resulted in completed interviews, the Pew Research Center reported in 2012. Maybe rural Republican voters are harder to reach or maybe they’re too grumpy to commit until they have to.
In 1948, Gallup famously stopped polling eight days before the election, and “Dewey Defeats Truman” became one of history’s most famous headlines. Gallup stayed in the field later after that had happened. The good news is that today’s pollsters, too, can learn from experience.
― Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor, and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics
They disregard the possibility that some of those polled did not tell the truth about their intentions. Only a small number of people would need to do this in order to screw up the polls.
Dems used the polls to sway votes with questions negative to republicans. I quit answering surveys. I must have received 10 calls a week. Anyone with a landline is unindated.
Or, they were push polls trying to manufacture conformity and manipulate the lo-infos.
Pollsters using their media access to set expectations for democrat wins/republican losses?
Attempting to discourage republicans and conservatives from voting?
It wouldn’t be the first time and it won’t be the last.
When pollsters call at 8:50pm, call on my business line, call from an unidentified number, call with what becomes a push-poll after WASTING 15 minutes - I’ve said to EVERY POLLSTER to leave me alone!
BOVINE EXCREMENT.....
This was the “Push Poll” election.
I find pollsters offensive, and I always feed them a line of bull.
Spin
The pollsters overestimated voter fraud. I guess the Democrats couldn’t afford it this election or they didn’t buy enough votes to overcome the backlash against the Democrats
IMHO Democratic leaning pollsters knew it was going to be bad so many decided to delay rather than make it worse for their party.
They knew Obama was being an Albatross around candidates necks and they knew the national focus on Ebola and ISIS was going strongly against them.
So many of the pollsters simply went AWOL and so did the mainstream press.
When they did decided to poll, they used largely Democratic areas and applied the 2012 polling data to approximate what the Republican polls would be.
With the results of this bad polling, I imagine some pollsters will be out of business next time.
For them I will cry a few tears.
/Naught
That's because the Dems are all at home sitting around talking on their Obamaphones and watching Oprah.....................
Assuming polls are even conducted and results aren’t simply made up (which I don’t) - what purpose do they serve, other than manipulating public opinion?
Follow the money. Whoever pays for these polls has something to gain, or why do them?
Data gathering/compalation. Widely shared. Fed into systems like Catalist.
Anyone who answers polls these days is nuts, is willingly surrendering their privacy on whatever answers they provide.
The republicans were at work?
Posters are still unable to adjust for the disappearance of landlines. I’m 64 and don’t have one but the bulk of people without them tend to be the young. Whatever reducing factor they use to adjust for this change is probably faulty.
They do them to decide best where to concentrate their advertising dollar. Where they are way ahead or way behind they don’t want to waste advertising dollars. Where it is close, money can make the difference.
Money!
The money boys like Rove need some idea where to spend money and where not to. If a candidate is running way behind they may decide to pull his plug.
The other is manipulation. So called “strategists” can manipulate opinion in certain areas with a poll that suits them. This allows them to crow about “oh shucks, ole Charley Smith is 15 points down, he doesn’t have a chance”. Contributions for Charley dry up......and so on.
A fourth possible explanation: Republicans don’t like to talk to pollsters.
Pollsters are having an increasingly hard time getting ahold of people these days. Many have dumped their landlines for cellular only and don’t answer calls from people they don’t know. In addition, many people are hesitant to tell the truth, even to a stranger over the phone because we have been taught that opposing anything by Obama and his party is evidence of racism. Combining these factors contributes to the lack of accuracy in polling data.
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