Posted on 10/21/2012 11:37:40 AM PDT by dila813
Per Frank, Party affiliation follows the way a person is currently inclined to vote and party affiliation doesn't drive how someone votes.
We only ask the person after we have polled them who they currently self-identify with at the end of the poll for informational purposes.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
In theory a random poll should find the statistical identification. But they aren’t truly random. Too many lifestyle issues interfering, IMHO. R’s either don’t or won’t answer because of cultural proclivities...
Exactly correct. With only 9 out of hundred randomly chosen people responding, the possibility of self selection bias is very large. Conservatives are busy people who distrust polls and the media for good reason.
Couldn’t find the full link, but n’ertheless Gallup (and other polling institutions) may be truthful when they say they do not weigh their samples after party affiliation. However, if there is reason to believe that the party split is 35/35/30 then a result showing a 30/40/30 split should raise questionmarks? However, they never seem to question their onw polls that way.
Recently, as has been discussed on a number of threads, the weighting that is carried out, namely according to race and gender, has skewed the polls towards Obama (surprise, surprise) by over-weigthing for women and reducing the number of white voters. Of course this will show up also as a smaller number of GOP voters.
If you’re not weighting by party affiliation it doesn’t matter when or if you ask the question of party preference.
Now that I know Gallup doesn’t weight by party affiliation I understand their poll a lot better.
If true, that conservatives are not as likely to answer polls, that would invalidate the entire theory.
They have to make sure that who they are polling are representative of who is going to vote on election day, otherwise these polls will always be skewed towards Democrats.
Remember, their theory is “Party affiliation follows the way a person is currently inclined to vote and party affiliation doesn’t drive how someone votes.”
Bottom line is that I think the likely result is somewhere between how people self-identify and what actually occurred in 2008. Having said that, then Romney's lead is bounded on the lower end at 0 and on the high end at 7...a pretty good place to be two weeks out.
I actually think that is a valid methodology so long as the screen for likely voters is valid. What did he say about their likely voter screen methodology?
Correct! There is always a certain amount of crossover voting. Some Ds vote R and some Rs vote D. There is no way to know if a particular voter votes a straight party ticket before an election.
They know some groups are more likely to vote than be contacted by and answer a poll.
But weighting to “fix” this can just make it less accurate.
Some polls weight by party assuming the ratio will be same as 2008. Not likely.
Waiting for rush of seeing Drudge headline on this . , , ,
A national poll of likely voters of sufficient size taken over a span of a week should be reasonably representative. Gallup has a pretty good track record on that.
The only time Gallup has missed outside the MOE is Dewey/Truman. And their misses within the MOE don’t favor either party. If you look at Gallups history on polling Presidential races in October/Novemeber they are historically very, very good. Which is why I knew McCain was done in October of 2008.
You need to compare the party affiliation cited by respondents, to the known party affiliation numbers in the population. That way, you can make the adjustments (weighting, after the fact being the usual way to do this) to make the sample more representative of the population being polled. WriteOn and marktwain have it right.
Mr. Newport is referring to another technique for attempting to match a sample to the population — by asking for party affiliation first. That way, they could balance the sample by calling until they had sufficient Republicans (or independents, or whatever they were short of). They would only interview people, if they were affiliated with the underrepresented party. They don’t do that — fair enough. However, they should have made the mathematical adjustments, as described in my first paragraph.
I have noticed that immediately before the election they are accurate, but I have felt for a long time that 6-8 weeks out from the election that they weren’t.
It is almost like the data radically shifts.
Most people wouldn’t measure someone’s accuracy to forecast only 1-3 days before an known event, they would do it based on several points in the past to see how well it predicted the final outcome.
I prefer to use weeks, 1, 4, 13, 26
Let’s hope history holds true...
Yup. I think the Gallup result will be the one we’ll see November 6th. Romney wins by a landslide.
Its the economy, stupid.
He specifically said they don’t do this.
He said they ask party affiliation at the end of the poll questions and their responses are for informational purposes only and they don’t do any weighting by party affiliation.
He we very specific.
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