Posted on 09/26/2012 12:18:38 PM PDT by smoothsailing
September 26, 2012
Matthew Sheffield
With no manufactured outrage to hammer Mitt Romney at the moment, liberal journalists are now eagerly touting a series of polls which appear to show President Obama pulling away from the GOP nominee in several key states.
Unfortunately, these polls are relying on sample sizes which are skewed tremendously leftward with far more Democrats than Republicans and as such, they are unlikely to be good predictors of actual Election Day turnout. Do the pollsters themselves actually believe in their own sample sizes though? At least one appears not to.
Interviewed last month by conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac polling operation was particularly squeamish about sampling under tough questioning from Hewitt about a poll which Quinnipiac had released showing Democrats with a 9 percentage point advantage in the state of Florida.
In the conversation, Brown defended Quinnipiac’s sampling techniques but admitted that he did not believe that Democrats would outnumber Republicans to that degree in Florida come November. Pressed by Hewitt, the pollster said he believed that was a “probably unlikely” scenario. Instead, Brown kept saying that he thought his poll was an accurate snapshot of reality at the time.
“What I believe is what we found,” he insisted while also touting his organization's record of polls closer to actual elections.
Unfortunately, this cavalier attitude toward accuracy is actually widespread throughout the entire polling industry. As NewsBusters noted in June, exit polls, which rely on far larger sample sizes than those conducted by Quinnipiac and others have long been known to oversample Democrats, sometimes even drastically. Sadly, the awful record that many pollsters have is something that most people barely know anything about. As such, it is one of the media’s “dirty little secrets” since Americans certainly won’t hear about it from the press.
Despite not believing that Democrats would have a 9-point advantage, Brown defended his organization, claiming that he and his colleagues were not intentionally trying to skew their sample size:
“We didn’t set out to oversample Democrats,” he protested. “We did our normal, random digit dial way of calling people. And there were, these are likely voters. They had to pass a screen.”
But what if that screen is simply not enough? The 2012 presidential election is unlikely to have an electorate which is similar to the ones before it. In the 2008 election, young and black voters turned out in record numbers and voted in even higher percentages for Obama. As specific surveys of these two voter groups have shown, however, both are dispirited this time around and are less likely to turn out for Democrats.
This point is particularly crucial given that the electorates in the years following 2008 have been much more Republican skewed. It could be argued that these were off-year elections and thus less likely to have blue-collar and college kid Democrats turn out to vote but ultimately no one knows today what the party breakdown will be November 6.
That’s why it’d be best for pollsters like Peter Brown to double-check their work the way that Scott Rasmussen does against a running party ID poll, especially considering by Brown’s own admission that Quinnipiac’s process for determining who will actually vote is “not a particularly heavy screen.”
A partial transcript of this highly illuminative interview is provided below courtesy of Hewitt show. Please see this link for the complete discussion. (Hat tip to Da Tech Guy who has more on the sampling controversy.)
HUGH HEWITT: Why would guys run a poll with nine percent more Democrats than Republicans when that percentage advantage, I mean, if you’re trying to tell people how the state is going to go, I don’t think this is particularly helpful, because you’ve oversampled Democrats, right?
PETER BROWN: But we didn’t set out to oversample Democrats. We did our normal, random digit dial way of calling people. And there were, these are likely voters. They had to pass a screen. Because it’s a presidential year, it’s not a particularly heavy screen.
HEWITT: And so if, in fact, you had gotten a hundred Democrats out of a hundred respondents that answered, would you think that poll was reliable?
BROWN: Probably not at 100 out of 100.
HEWITT: Okay, so if it was 75 out of 100…
BROWN: Well, I mean…
HEWITT: I mean, when does it become unreliable? You know you’ve just put your foot on the slope, so I’m going to push you down it. When does it become unreliable?
BROWN: Like the Supreme Court and pornography, you know it when you see it.
HEWITT: Well, a lot of us look at a nine point advantage in Florida, and we say we know that to be the polling equivalent of pornography. Why am I wrong?
BROWN: Because what we found when we made the actual calls is this kind of party ID.
HEWITT: Do you expect Democrats, this is a different question, do you, Peter Brown, expect Democrats to have a nine point registration advantage when the polls close on November 6th in Florida?
BROWN: Well, first, you don’t mean registration.
HEWITT: I mean, yeah, turnout.
BROWN: Do I think…I think it is probably unlikely.
HEWITT: And so what value is this poll if in fact it doesn’t weight for the turnout that’s going to be approximated?
BROWN: Well, you’ll have to judge that. I mean, you know, our record is very good. You know, we do independent polling. We use random digit dial. We use human beings to make our calls. We call cell phones as well as land lines. We follow the protocol that is the professional standard.
HEWITT: As we say, that might be the case, but I don’t know it’s responsive to my question. My question is, should we trust this as an accurate predictor of what will happen? You’ve already told me there…
BROWN: It’s an accurate predictor of what would happen is the election were today.
HEWITT: But that’s, again, I don’t believe that, because today, Democrats wouldn’t turn out by a nine point advantage. I don’t think anyone believes today, if you held the election today, do you think Democrats would turn out nine percentage points higher than Republicans?
BROWN: If the election were today, yeah. What we found is obviously a large Democratic advantage.
HEWITT: I mean, you really think that’s true? I mean, as a professional, you believe that Democrats have a nine point turnout advantage in Florida?
BROWN: Our record has been very good. You know, Hugh, I…
HEWITT: That’s not responsive. It’s just a question. Do you personally, Peter, believe that Democrats enjoy a nine point turnout advantage right now?
BROWN: What I believe is what we found.
The poll also could have called more Republicans, but they got weeded out as unlikely voters. Considering that the Democrat base adores Obama and he's their dream candidate, and Romney is more disliked by the base than any Republican nominee in living memory, the polls are not hard to believe. Even the establishment that handpicked Romney did it because they said he would appeal to "independents." He might, but they assumed the base would come out no matter what just to vote against Obama. But many of them are sick and tired of the battered wife syndrome with the GOP and won't do it.
You decide what your total univese is ~ in politics that'd be Americans who vote ~ and then you randomly sample among them.
If you have unlimited resources you can set up an elaborate sample in some sort of matrix, or stratification ~ virtually none of these polls we see dragged in front of us on FR derive from a stratified sample selection process ~ they're just small polls where random sampling was used.
No one has ever had to jigger the data to come up with more Democrats and that's because there are always more Democrats. More recently they've added Independents but that's just garbage because there are no independents ~ and if you dig deep enough you can categorize them as Rep or Dem based on their own reported prior voting history.
Massively skewed polls will help make massive Dem vote-fraud-influenced results more credible.
Yep, we can even tag Romney as the "Comeback Kid" - that would really make some liberal heads explode.
I agree with you, in the end the pollsters will want to protect themselves. It will be entertaining to watch them try to explain it! LOL!
The magic is gone. There’s no way in hell the demholes have the same enthusiasm and turnout they had in ‘08. In their wildest dreams the demholes know it wont be a 2008-like turnout for their side. Conversely, everything that produced the Tea Party / conservative / republican enthusiasim & turnout in 2010 is still there, with a foreign policy cluster-f*#% to boot. I’ve seen some opinions that a reliable poll would need to split the turnout model difference 1/2 way between 2004 and 2008. I’d argue that half way between ‘08 and 2010 would be a better way to go.
I would laugh, but lies that jeopardize the commie’s defeat aren’t really funny.
“Recognize that in 2008 the Democrats turned out 15% more Democrat voters than the Republicans turned out Republican voters.”
Not even close. Where do you get your facts, Mother Jones?
You are wrong. Turnout is not random it’s as simple as that. Determining who will make up the voters (LV’s) each years is what separates good pollsters from bad ones.
Furthermore, according to some pollsters (ie Rasmussen) there are more self described Republicans than Democrats.
I had long suspected you were just a disruptor on here. This thread removes any doubt.
Your facts are not only completely incorrect, they are an exact replica of the Democrat talking points regarding the polls.
Nice work, Moby.
You Think??? How about Ohio? or Pennsylvania??
why not try a poll with 1/3 D 1/3 R and 1/3 I??
Not true, at least according to Dick Morris. DM claims Ras has a +2.5% Dem skew.
Simply dividing the difference in the two vote totals by the total number of votes don't tell you anything about the difference!
Either the Democrat vote was 14% larger than the Republican vote, or the Republican vote was 16% smaller than the Democrat vote.,P>Also, remember, the Democrat totals do not vary with the Republican totals. Most voters would prefer to NOT vote for the other brand every single time.
Here is what Rasmussen says are the current numbers and trends in party affilitation in the U.S.:
Republican 37.6 Democrat 33.3 Other 29.2 August 2012
Republican 37.0 Democrat 33.7 Other 29.3 November 2010
Republican 33.8 Democrat 41.4 Other 24.7 November 2008
I find it hard to believe that Democrats will have a higher turnout than Republicans six weeks from now.
You missed the R in Skrewed.
True. However, depending on the random digits involved (just the last four numbers, or were prefixes involved in the randomness?), you might be able to randomly call people in an area with a demographic most likely to achieve the desired result. Harlem vs. Manhattan, for instance...
So much depends on the finer points of the technique, and we don't have those to analyze.
Absolutely correct.
Chicago voter registration down compared with 2008, election officials say
When Chicago registration is down from '08, that means it's Democrat registration that is down. When it's down in that bastion of Democrat voters, it strongly suggests a national trend.
I’d argue that half way between ‘08 and 2010 would be a better way to go
It makes sense, and is probably similar to the Rasmussen model.
You cannot sit down and randomly call just Democrats or just Republicans unless you have lists composed exclusively of such folks and all you want is a random sample of current Democrat or Republican thought.
Stop and think about this a moment. How is registration down in Chicago? They never remove anybody up there ~ so what happened?
He might use D+2 or D+2.5 for his LV turnout model but that isn’t what he has determine the true party ID percentages to be. The fact that he doesn’t use party ID as his only guidance for a LV model as some idiots argue supports my contention that is ISN’T random.
http://m.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/partisan_trends
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