Posted on 08/21/2012 7:04:17 PM PDT by RobinMasters
In the most shocking survey this election cycle, a poll released today finds Mitt Romney leading President Barack Obama by 14 percentage points among likely Florida voters.
Foster McCollum White & Associates, Baydoun Consulting and Douglas Fulmer & Associates, of Dearborn, Mich., questioned 1,503 likely Florida voters Friday and found Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, leading Obama 54%-40%. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.53%.
Although recent Florida polls have been trending slightly in Romney’s direction (+2% and +1% in the most recent surveys), the jaw-dropping 14-point gap is a shocker. Future polls will determine if this result is ahead of the curve or merely an outlier.
In the U.S. Senate race in Florida, the poll found Rep. Connie Mack IV, R-Fort Myers, leading incumbent Bill Nelson 51%-43%.
(Excerpt) Read more at news-press.net ...
Second, there has been pretty good evidence that people do not, on average, lie to pollsters.
Third, it greatly depends on the screening procedures for the pollster. For example, in the M-D poll I took, they asked the same question about four different ways, but placed throughout the interview so that at the end, they had a pretty good placement of my views. (One was on Iraq, and whether I "favored" US continued involvement or not. Well, I did IF we were in it to win. So I can't recall how I responded back then.
The trends are pretty sharp for Romney, if anyone cares to look: all the "Obama up" polls have massive oversamples of Dems---anywhere from 9-13 points---and often (not always) they are registered voters, not likely. All the recent polls of Romney being up are of likely voters with a small, if any, Dem oversample.
So when you combine the TRENDS: northern VA poll showed Zero up 4 when he won this region by 23; FL seniors AARP poll showing seniors favor Romney (oops. So much for Medicare cuts working); WI polling, twice in a row has Romney up by one; MI poll has him up five after being up one; two different "swing state" polls have him up everywhere but CO, where he is 1 down on RCP; poll out today of FL has him up huge (over 10), but with no internals; Cook Co. poll has Obama winning Cook Co., but by a much narrower margin than in 08 and not enough to carry even IL.
These TRENDS add up to a pretty big Romney win. Don't know if you'd call it a "landslide," but over 320 EVs.
Really. Of course, they won’t count this because it’s not a “serious” poll. LOL.
Throw WI and/or MI into the mix = whole new ballgame
Awesome analysis!
The Northern Virginia trend is FLAT if you start in April, and maybe a little bit up for Romney since June.
Doesn't matter how you measure a trend though provided all your polling is done the same way ~ e.g. adults, registered voters, likely voters, etc.
All the polls ask people to self-define their political affiliation though ~ so unless they are the more expensive kind taken from a pre-determined base of semi-pro poll answering folks, there can be no "oversamples" by party.
Reporting is different though. If your question is "How are Democrats answering" you just strip out all the non-Democrat respondents.
Part of the clue to figuring out all of this is to note that few Republicans are attracted to any Democrat candidate, and vice versa, so if you want to win you must turn out your own base.
Romney's advisors abandoned that strategy long ago ~ guess they thought they could use Democrat voters or something.
Now all his cabinet appointees will have to be Conservatives, as will the judges. Anything less than that and it's gonna' be IMPEACHMENT TIME, and you know how that goes if the OTHER SIDE likes the idea too!
That Romney is comfortably ahead in FL (and other key states, for that matter) would not surprise me. If he weren’t, I believe he would have tapped Rubio for VP with the hope of boosting Hispanic turnout and votes. Also, he would not have touched the third column of Medicare and SS with a ten foot pole.
Rahm Emanuel has a smug smile on his face. He told them not to go for Obamacare and that it would be a losing issue for them going forward, but he was shouted down by Jarrett, Axelrod and Obama's stooges in Congress. Emanuel got out shortly after that and washed his hands of that bunch. He still has a political future.
This was, in fact, the methodology we were given at the state level in 2004 by Karl Rove to identify "the base." But it's much different than just saying, "Are you a Republican or a Democrat?"
I cannot speak for the senior citizens here but the 50-and-under crowd is pissed that a state as robust as ours is floundering. I personally see R/R winning Florida comfortably even with the illegals and dead voting in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale. Bill Nelson is toast unless Connie Mack implodes and pulls an Akinism.
There are other independent surveys taken all over the place through a variety of means to get a better idea of what "the base" really is.
You can use that to validate/verify the probability of a recent survey to more correctly reflect the popular sentiment.
BTW, there also some expensive ways to do this that are used frequently in marketing. First you get your peeps to sample. You know everything about them. Then, you hit them with questions down the line ~ on all sorts of things. You correlate your KNOWN UNIVERSE OF RESPONDENTS to product market penetration, or politics, or whatever.
The biggest problem I can see with using that method for politics is that it's more expensive than you need AND people do shift political preferences over time so you'd need to keep updating your universe.
According to Ras, if the person was a registered R for three consecutive presidential elections, he's a reliable R for polling purposes.
All I can tell you is that the Rove model that we followed in 04 was dead on. I found ONE registered Republican in all my door to door activity who wasn't going to vote for Bush.
On the other hand, if AS MOST POLLSTERS DO, you say, "did you vote Democrat or Republican in the last election?" or "What is your political affiliation, Democrat or Republican?" you will get much higher Dem % this time around---meaningless.
I know several who intend to vote for Obama again.
They are
2 gay guys
4 black people
3 committed diehard liberals
All resort to name calling when cornered and asked WHY they will support Obama again.
There are only so many ways to stuff a porkchop, but there are a million ways to stuff a cat.
The polling firms constantly change their methodologies because, as it turns out, none of them are perfect, and even those that are reliable a few times will suddenly fail to be even reasonably close.
So, what is the point you wish to make ~ that Rasmussen did so and so, and somebody else did something else, and then...............
There's no perfect approach to polling public opinion, and there's no one way to ask the same question. I can ask you how you describe your preference (a common way), or ask you who you voted for BY NAME, BY PARTY, BY SEX, BY RACE ~ etc.
There's a lot of variation in the methods.
I think I told you the other day I'm thinking of moving into data mining to see if we can track public opinion that way. The secret may be in the trendlines, and if we can catch trends early we can all get rich!
I'm not arguing that Ras is consistently better than everyone else, only that this time around he appears to have already adjusted his sample correctly based on the 2010 and 2011 turnout models---which admittedly were not presidential election years. But the question is not who is best on average over time, but who seems to have the right sample this time around. And there is NOTHING anywhere to suggest that there are MORE Dems out there now than there were in 08, and a great deal of evidence to suggest that those who are Dems or who are planning to vote Dem is down substantially.
The danger is that Bambi will get desperate and start a war or something.”
Bingo. He thinks he cant cheat enough to win, lookout.
When they vote they vote for the winner in a single member district!
Republicans can beat Democrats every time simply by convincting a bunch of Democrats to not show up to vote, while simultaneously convincing a bunch of Republicans to show up to vote who would otherwise ignore the election.
Both parties have such folks. With Republicans Socons and Religiouscons have demonstrated that they will stay away at the drop of the hat so as a rule of thumb clever politicians just lie to them. Only a fool would tell them to go away, or mess with their primaries.
In the case of Democrats any African American politician will tell you that as soon as black voters detect weakness in the Democrat they'll stay home. They are less prone to vote on social issues, but they will vote on long term unemployment problems.
This is the reason so many Democrat mouthpieces accuse Republicans of attempting to suppress the vote BTW ~ and as long as there are more Democrats than Republicans they will continue to make the charge.
The pollsters look for some reflection of this balance in all of their results. If anything gets really out of whack they don't report it.
So, this year the Republican problem is that Obama got 69 million votes last time, and that's 4 million more voters than we have even if everybody shows up. We also seem to have soured a number of Socons and Religiouscons on the idea of voting ~ and we may have even PO'd some of the Fiscalcons.
It's clear that suppressing the Democrat vote would be useful. Photo IDs might tackle a few hundred thousand of them, but how do you talk the others out of voting? Not clear we've got a story sufficient to cause the Democrats to give up all hope ~ so that means we are depending on them to come to that conclusion themselves.
Folks, it won't work!
It takes more effort than the Republican party is currently prepared to muster. Not to sound like a gloomy gus, but I'm waiting on someone to tell us how we will do it ~ and poll watching ain't the way.
Yep.
In one deep red suburb of Dayton, for ex., it was the first one we went to on election night to look at the raw #s: This should have been over 95% McCain. In fact, he was at about 75%. A female judge acquaintance---WAY up in the county and state GOP---was talking after dinner. She said she couldn't believe her daughter (a Republican) voted for Obama. Her son said, "Mom, don't you know that ALL your children (5) voted for Obama?" Now, I can say with near certainty that if any of them vote again this time, it won't be for Obama.
Of that 80m, a HUGE chunk are "Reagan Dems who despise what Obama has done. A majority? Course not. But of your 80M Dems, how many are located in three states---IL, CA, and NY---that don't matter any way as they are never in play?
The real question you should be considering, and the only number that matters is, outside those three states, how many Dems do you have? Because outside those three states, I think some Dems are VERY "coachable" and yes, coachable by Romney and Ryan.
And all "poll watching" is is observing the only evidence we have. And so far, the evidence is pointing to a significant GOP electoral victory---and I keep harping on that because CA, NY, and IL are NOT IMPORTANT. They are already factored in as hopeless.
When you see repeated polls from MI saying Romney is ahead, or in WI saying Romney is ahead, or other "Dem" states where Romney is ahead or even, it says something. And what it says probably ain't what you want to hear, which is, maybe Romney isn't as bad as you hope, and maybe he DOES appeal to an awful lot of voters. And, if we had any semblance of a truly objective press, you would already know that. So to the extent that it's possible, people like me have to try to convince people like you---who already are biased against Romney---that in fact he's doing damn well.
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