Posted on 11/03/2008 5:34:17 PM PST by tatown
Monday, November 03, 2008
BARACK OBAMA, JOHN MCCAIN, HORSERACE
Obi-Wan: The Pollsters 'Seem To Have Slipped Into a World of Easy Assumptions.
As promised, Obi-Wan Kenobi checks in... and the points he raises almost make me want to change my close-but-no-cigar forecast for McCain.
Okay, last night’s homework assignment was to look at Battleground and Rasmussen to see if there was any decay – as noticed by IBD poll released on Sunday – in the Obama lead. There wasn’t. Obama went up by a point or two. Then IBD came out today and showed a similar Obama increase – making the race not a two pointer anymore but more like four and change.
So just when this seemed like a bad news day for McCain, along comes a pile of polls in key Battleground states from multiple firms showing McCain gaining in many places, winning in several and within reach –even the easy reach of a few points — in most of them.
Look, the real drama to this election is being provided not by the candidates but the polling community. By which I mean the decision they made to stake out — as Campaign Spot has noted — a remarkably bold position, that the Democratic Party turnout is not only going to exceed a recent historic advantage of 4 percent but go to 6.5 percent (Rasmussen) to 8 percent in many polls to even 12 percent in one.
I keep looking for the justification for this. Not easy to find. Rather like the academics' one-time belief in the Aristotlean spheres and an earth-centered universe, it just seems to be a pretty good working theory — some sort of way to make sense of observable phenomena and keep all the smart people talking agreeably and pleasantly among themselves.
Part of this is the fascination or maybe the better word is shock of the political commentators and the consulting community as well as their cousins in the polling world with the role of voter turnout in the 2004 Bush victory. You want turnout (instead of TV spots)? We'll give you turnout, the Democrats seemed to have been saying the last few years. (For all of that, they only got themselves up to a 3 percent advantage in 2006.)
So the question is this? Did the Democrats make the mistake of fighting this election on the basis of a lesson learned in the last one? And then persuade everyone else this was the key to understanding the political universe. And by everyone I mean the polling companies.
In the old days the networks had political directors like Marty Plissner and Hal Bruno who kept an eye on the tendency to politicize the number-crunchers. What happens when that sort of internal check is lost was evidenced by the spectacular embarrassment – the debacle — of the exit polls in 2004. (Obi ) The polite explanation was that the skewing resulted from the fact that Democratic voters are more likely to talk to polling representatives at the polls. What got buried was the fact studies found that the cultural-political backgrounds of the exit-poll employees was a big factor.
Anyway, back in the days when exit polls were reliable — if a first or second wave of numbers were seen similar to the McCain-Obama battleground polls that came out today the network insiders would have been saying: hold everything, this is a very close one. (That's because they usually wacked two or three points off the Democrats' total since urban areas get better represented in the exit polls.)
So, if the polling community is basically right in their turnout models, this is looking like '64 — a nightmare scenario for the GOP. But if they are off to any significant degree, the state polls seen today (even though some of them favor a high Dem turnout model) make this a very different race. And what about the outlier polls in Pennsylvania and even one in Minnesota showing a close race?
And there are other questions. What about the reaction to media bias (Obamamania, the resentment towards Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber) driving up Republican turnout? What about the extent to which Reagan Democrats in Florida are being urged to the polls by the McCain campaign?
And the reason that the polling community, not to mention the Obama campaign should be uneasy is that finding the justification for their heavy Democratic weighting isn't readily accessible. And that is the point – along with failing to themselves take note that in this period of unprecedented economic turmoil and therefore any predictions this year might be questionable or at least hugely complicated, the pollsters and media gurus never really put their own premises about voter turnout front and center and asked for questions, objections and evaluations.
They seem to have slipped into a world of easy assumptions. Always dangerous for those whose job is to quantify and track the stars and planets of an ever-changing, ever-moving political universe.
Expect a mid-morning or afternoon update from Obi-Wan tomorrow.
Interesting! But what the heck does he mean by CLOSE-BUT NO CIGAR forecast for McCain? HUH? Interesting read in as much that the pollsters after this election are SOOOOOOOOOOO screwed with the public!!!
How come the polls were so off in the democrat primaries ?
OK. This is it. Obi-Wan is hereby grounded with no TV till the election is over.
I am tired of this 6 year old boy dressed up in his Star Wars costume waving his Light Saber posting these inane posts.
Just about ANY Freeper can and DOES post more coherent articles than the one supposedly inspired by the Master Jedi.
What a crock pot! Won’t give a prediction!
..only ONE of several reasons why McCain will prevail...
Dem turnout only matters in states where the results aren’t a foregone conclusion. Every single Democrat could turn out to vote in NY and California, and the Zero would get the same number of electoral votes. This is, no doubt, why the libs want the electoral college abolished: it blunts the effect of already-dem pockets like the big cities.
On the other hand, Repub turnout in the more rural states, and particularly in Ohio and PA, will be a critical aspect of this election.
Yeah, and if I remember correctly in ‘06 “Obi-Wan” said don’t worry about the polls... Republicans will keep the house and Senate.
The polls were correct.
Obi Wan is actully giving me some hope tonight.
Suppose your a pollster for, say, Ohio. You look at the registration numbers to set your targets for polling and see that 200,000 more Democrats are registered than in 2004. You adjust the percent of Democrats upward accordingly to reflect this change in your polling population. You take your poll and find Obama with a 4% lead, release your results and head out to dinner.
But there's a problem. The 200,000 additional registered Democrats were signed up by ACORN and about 175,000 of them are fake -fake regestrants falsified by some ex-con who was getting paid $5 a signature.
Come election day, "Mr. Mickey Mouse," "Mr. Osama B. Ladin" et. al. don't show up at the polls. Suddenly, that 4 point lead is a 4 point deficit.
In other words, what if the Left is right. What if there has been massive voter registration fraud, but that's all there is. Obama may have just spent the last days of the campaign wasting time in places that weren't that important(Arizona, for example) when he should have been in states where his lead didn't really exist.
And all because he was misled by registration drives conducted by his own people.
It would be one heck of an irony.
I’m beginning to believe there is an racial angle to this years polling that no one is saying out loud! Most of the pollsters are assuming that there will be WAY more blacks democrats voting because there’s a black democrat in the race. But black folk have been dragged out to vote heavily democrat in every election in recent memory. It’s quite possible that there aren’t many more available black democrat voters than in elections past. This false assumption (of HYPER-INCREASED black turnout) may be one factor in the polls’ over-sampling of dems overall.
Jim was saying he personally is calling for a close loss by Mc. His big thing is he thinks VA will go O.
Obi was NOT saying that, Jim was. The rest of the stuff below that quote you mentioned was Obi’s statement.
Not sure, but some certainly were and were wrong and the polls were right.
We will see who is right this time.
That isn’t true.
Don’t know what Obi said in 2006, but I know the Senate was *barely* lost. The Montana and VA barely lost their seats by less than 1%. If either had won, we would have had a majority in the Senate, right?
“By which I mean the decision they made to stake out — as Campaign Spot has noted — a remarkably bold position, that the Democratic Party turnout is not only going to exceed a recent historic advantage of 4 percent but go to 6.5 percent (Rasmussen) to 8 percent in many polls to even 12 percent in one.”
Those turnout assumptions are wrong. I am convinced that is the source of the bias and discrepancy.
WE WONT KNOW UNTIL WE SEE WHO SHOWS UP AND VOTES but I’ve seen enough evidence that the young voters are not showing up and that GOP energy has been building to match / exceed Dem energy.
Now saying we win, but I am saying those assumptions of big Dem advantage are shaky at best.
“If either had won, we would have had a majority in the Senate, right?”
You are correct, MO was close as well.
A 10,000 vote shift and we would have retained the Senate.
I keep meeting and talking with Democrat after Democrat who is NOT voting for Obama.
These Democrats have already voted for McCain or intend to, even though they loathe Republicans. It is because they admire and trust McCain and the qualities he possesses.
Why? Because Obama is a liar, a cheat, believes our Constitution is flawed, and dislikes everything about the United States.
Just because there are more Democrats than Republicans voting, doesn’t mean they are all voting for Obama.
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