Posted on 09/17/2004 6:44:37 AM PDT by Mike Fieschko
Presidential elections are poll-driven. The candidate ahead in the surveys usually gets better coverage, and the results energize supporters. The one behind often comes across as doing little right, and campaigns and constituencies lose confidence.
But what if the polls are wrong, and we aren't surveying the real likely electorate?
This might be more than an academic issue. A number of polls this presidential race show a gap in the preferences of registered voters vs. likely voters. In these models, the president usually does better with likely voters, the figure most news organizations emphasize. To get to likely voters, all polling organizations use what is called a "screen," asking questions to determine who is likely to actually turn out on election day.
These screens differ greatly, as there is no consensus among experts on what works best. "This is an art, not a science," says Peter Hart, the prominent Democratic polltaker who has helped conduct The Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey for 15 years.
This controversy will be fueled by today's just-released Gallup poll that shows George Bush with a 13-point lead over John Kerry. That is at variance with other surveys this week, which suggest a tight race with a much smaller Bush tilt. But the likely voters margin also is considerably larger than the eight-point advantage in Gallup's registered voters in this survey. The likely voters match-up invariably gets more attention.
Gallup explains it has what it considers a time-tested formula for determining most likely voters. It asks eight questions, such as current intensity of interest, past voting behavior and interest, and whether you know where your voting place is.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
They can't even get it right using exit polls, as demonstrated by the Florida debacle. Why give them the time of day?
Al Hunt searches desperately for the silver lining of the cloud that Gallup dropped on the rats.
LOL!
Of course, they also believe that the CBS documents are real, the Kerry daughters are hot, and George Bush causes hurricanes.
The sky is falling in! The Sky is falling in!
(It will for the DU'rs in November! *L*)
George Bush doesn't cause hurricanes?
I didn't read past the Al Hunt byline...
All polls are innaccurate. They are all based on assumptions. When polls give a margin of error, that assumes their assumptions are true. But most of the assumptions in polls are simply best guesses. Whenever any poll says +/-3% I have to laugh because with the assumptions of the models the margin of error is several times higher than that.
Bush Favored By Those Who Do Not Have Caller ID
My impression is that these pro-Kerry "ignore the polls"
rants (and the various bent polls showing closeness) are
primarily intended to prevent hemoraging in the Kerry
campaign staff.
We already have reports of both volunteer and paid
camp workers not showing up.
However, the behavior of the high-level staffers is
more consistent with a hypothesis that they are fully
aware that the campaign is doomed, and at this point
they're just fighting over who gets to personally
pocket the contributed and matching funds (as, um, ah,
commissions, yup).
Al Hunt "jumps the shark," and lands in a pile of warm, coodly democrat goo called self-delusion.
If the polls were reversed, with John Forged Kerry in the lead, Hunt wouldn't be concerned about the inaccuracy of polling. The Dems and their fellow travelers like Hunt and his wife Judy Woodruff are whistling in the graveyard. My prediction: 338-200.
The problem with this? It assumes the people are lying. Most polls have at least one incredibly sophisticated "likely voter" screening question that goes something like this: "How likely are you to vote this year?". Or "how strongly do you feel about this election?", or "will you be voting in November?".
The other problem is that the polls themselves give an indication of how wrong that theory is. The polls which re-balance their results based on some "turnout model" from last election ALL show a smaller lead for Bush than the ones that don't rebalance. So they are consistently adjusting the "republican turnout" implied by their "will you be voting" data downward because they have "oversampled" Republicans.
If that were happening half of the time you could say it was correcting for sampling error. When it's consistent you must assume that the polls are actually indicating Republicans are more likely to vote this year than in 2000.
I've heard this theme several times over the past week or so from some lefty activist types I know. They claim the war is so unpopular with many younger voters and seniors that normally wouldn't vote, that these people are going to turn out in such numbers that it will swing the election to Kerry. I'm not buying it. I have no empirical data on this, but I would venture to say that seniors already vote in larger numbers than other age groups, so their numbers are acurately reflected in current polls of likely voters. And maybe I'm completely off my rocker, but I don't see the anti-war, ant-globalization, anti-civilization, unwashed "masses" we see at anti-IMF demonstrations and the RNC in NY turning out in large numbers. I doubt most of these folks even know where their polling place is. Heck, most of them are so out of it, they probably don't even know what day is election day.
This is Hunt's way of saying that very thing for the Kerry campaign.
If the polls were showing a K+E 13 point lead - NOONE would be questioning methodolgy of the highest spread polls and would be DISSING the harris, etc.
None factor in the massive scale of vote fraud in the U.S.
Asa Hutchinson says we can't get rid of illegals. He won't even stop them from voting. Traitor!
I wouldn't discount a strategy involving A. a co-ordinated "stealth" vote, below the radar and distorted polls/polling; B. a healthy "absentee" (read mail-in, since nobody is really absent) ballot of niagran proportion and C. usual outright voter fraud and D. intensive litigatory nonsense.
if there wasn't a draft - most of the young voters would have been split or would have supported our efforts to free Vietnam. I don't think the left is thinking their analysis through well enough. Bush wins - big time.
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