Posted on 08/03/2012 11:43:38 AM PDT by StAnDeliver
Is there any professional pollster who has heard or read this interview who cares to comment on how Quinnipiac conducted this poll?
This interview exposes Quinnipiac as completely unprofessional, in my opinion.
“The polling guy seems to be inferring that he is getting his turnout model from the D vs. R responses from this specific poll. I really don’t think this is the the standard polling methology.
The normal.scheme is to poll the R’s and D’s and I’s and determine the best estimate of how each of these 3 groups will split their vote between Obama and Romney. Then they prorate this result based on their independently developed turnout model.
Am I right about this?”
Sort of right.
If they’re really doing it right, it all starts with the actual voter turnout numbers for previous elections, Then they’d look at voter registrations since those elections and look for trends that would change the balance. Then they’d do some polling to try to determine voter “enthusiasm” and compare it to the “enthusiasm” polls that they took before other elections and determine if there’s any trend in those polls that change the balance. Then they stir that all together with some secret sauce and they come up with the the numbers they think will match the voter turnout for this election.
BTW, they don’t just go by party affiliation. There’s a bunch of other demographics in the mix too. Age, sex, race, income, blah, blah, blah. So, for example, with Nobama on the ticket, they’ll bump their black turnout number up a bunch of points to account for him drawing more blacks to the poll. If Hillary had won the primary instead of Nobama, they would have left the black number as is and bumped the female turnout number a bit.
I think all those pollsters are hoping that Mitt is such a wishy-washy, milquetoast, barely just a step or two to the right of a flaming-liberal candidate, that he won’t draw any voters to the polls and their D+9 number will hold up.
His answers indicate either a huge problem in getting a random sample of responses or an underlying huge shift of tidal proportions from republican and independent to democrats.
Wow. What a complete a$$ kicking.
Agreed, and more important, it doesn’t matter WHERE the “identification” comes from, when you have 36% Ds, you quit polling Ds.
Someone posted a link to this story about “The Poll That Changed Polling” yesterday, the 1936 Literary Digest poll that predicted Roosevelt would lose in a landslide:
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/
Some of the defenses of that poll in the article sound just like what this Quinnipac guy is spinning.
Quinnipac: “This is how we’ve always done our polls. Our record is very good in terms of accuracy.”
Literary Digest: “For nearly a quarter century, we have been taking Polls of the voters in the forty-eight States, and especially in Presidential years, and we have always merely mailed the ballots, counted and recorded those returned and let the people of the Nation draw their conclusions as to our accuracy. So far, we have been right in every Poll.”
History repeats itself.
Yes, you are correct. The standard procedure is to weight your raw results based on the predicted turnout. This interview makes it sound as if Quinnipac skips that step completely.
If I ever need the services of a lawyer, I can only hope that I get one who is as perceptive and adroit as Hewitt.
(Full disclosure: My one and only exposure to the legal system so far is that my own attorney was an idiot, so it wouldn’t take much to do better than that. The person who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer - but at least it’s less expensive than paying for a real foolish lawyer.)
Ping to related thread.
I have an unnamed source at Qunnipiac that says that they are actively fixing the polls for 0bama. Now, let them prove that they are not staffed by 0bama supporters and sympathizers.
As Mark Levin said, a can of orange juice could beat Obama. When Romney wins (and he will)the damage he will do to the country in the name of the Republican party will make us wish for the good ole days of "conservative" George W Bush. All, the lefty polices we ended we had to defend to keep the Democrats out of the White House was awful, and now in 2012 we have the bad choice of of going off the cliff at 55 MPH or the worse at 90 MPH, but we're still on the move in a terrifying direction and we're not going to stop just because the letter next to the name changes from D to R.
Hewitt led the charge to make this happen since 2002, just like he led the charge to put Arnold in the Governors seat in California instead of even trying for a more conservative who might have been about to do something to stop the collapse of the west coast economy.
I'd be a lot happier if he just went back to teaching, or the law full time and stopped pretending to be anything but a moderate pretending conservatism like he plays on the radio.
As Mark Levin said, a can of orange juice could beat Obama. When Romney wins (and he will)the damage he will do to the country in the name of the Republican party will make us wish for the good ole days of "conservative" George W Bush. All, the lefty polices we ended we had to defend to keep the Democrats out of the White House was awful, and now in 2012 we have the bad choice of of going off the cliff at 55 MPH or the worse at 90 MPH, but we're still on the move in a terrifying direction and we're not going to stop just because the letter next to the name changes from D to R.
Hewitt led the charge to make this happen since 2002, just like he led the charge to put Arnold in the Governors seat in California instead of even trying for a more conservative who might have been about to do something to stop the collapse of the west coast economy.
I'd be a lot happier if he just went back to teaching, or the law full time and stopped pretending to be anything but a moderate pretending conservatism like he plays on the radio.
The big tipoff was the even '1000' polled. So they robocalled 1000, stopped, and set the populations as they laid. That's not just unorthodox, that's fraudulent methodology.
Hewitt knows some polling, and Brown obviously wasn't prepared for that.
You set your populations however you want. You hopefully true your internals first (as Hewitt hammered home), then sample until the picture emerges (or the money runs out).
Morris did a monster DvR national LV sample in May that I have a lot of respect for:
"From May 5-11, 2012, I conducted a survey of 6,000 likely voters. On such a mammoth sample, the margin of error is less than 1 percent. I found that Romney has amassed a sizable lead over Obama of 51-42, far in excess of what published polling and surveys of registered — as opposed to likely — voters are indicating."
This post was so prescient...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.