Posted on 11/18/2014 4:03:05 AM PST by Kaslin
Were the polls wrong? It's a question asked after every election. Sometimes, as in 1948, the answer seems as obvious as the answer to the question, "Why did Custer lose at Little Bighorn?" Sometimes the answer is less obvious, as it is this year.
"The polls were skewed toward the Democrats," writes Nate Silver, who as proprietor of FiveThirtyEight has earned the distinction of being the nation's most assiduous polling analyst.
Silver gives short shrift to partisans -- Democrats this year, Republicans in 2012 -- who complained that polls were systematically biased against their side. The skew varies unpredictably, he says, perhaps because pollsters overcompensate in response to previous mistakes. He finds polls skewed against Democrats in 2006 and 2012 and against Republicans in 2002 and 2014 -- all winning years for those parties.
Silver measures the skew by comparing the percentage margin for candidates in his website's average of the most recent pre-election polls to the percentage margin for candidates in the actual results. He finds that Republicans this year won bigger margins than in the polls in 24 of 36 Senate races and 28 of 35 governor's races.
Here's another way of looking at it, concentrating on those races that were seriously contested. In seriously contested Senate races -- the chief event of this election cycle -- the polls were quite accurate in presaging the percentages received by seven Democratic incumbents. Those Democrats ran from 3.2 percent ahead to 1.7 percent behind their RealClearPolitics polling averages. Also, three of the four Democrats running in open Democratic seats ran within that range of poll results.
Where the polls missed was in projecting Republicans' votes in Republican-held seats. Pat Roberts ran 10.6 percent ahead of polls in Kansas, Mitch McConnell 7.2 percent ahead in Kentucky and David Perdue 5.2 percent ahead in Georgia.
There's a similar but not identical pattern in seriously contested races for governor. In seven states where Democrats were defending governorships, Democratic nominees ran very close to the polls in five. Only in two close New England races, where polls had high undecideds, did they run further ahead.
In nine states with Republican-controlled governorships, Republicans all ran ahead of their poll numbers, from 3.2 percent in Alaska (where final results are not in at this writing) to 7.4 percent in Kansas.
All this suggests that pollsters did a better job of finding Democratic voters than they did of finding Republican voters. That accounts for the Democratic tilt in polling Silver finds when looking at candidates' percentage margins rather than percentage totals.
One possible reason is that Republican-leaning voters were more hesitant than Democratic-leaning voters about committing to vote for their party's candidates. The bulk of those undecided in polls in Kansas, Kentucky and most of the states with Republican governors were Mitt Romney voters in 2012.
There has been a similar phenomenon when pollsters ask people to rate the two parties' members of Congress. During most of this campaign cycle (but less so toward the end), Republicans in Congress were getting lower ratings than Democrats in Congress because more Republican voters gave their own party's members negative ratings.
Another possible reason, advanced by Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is that pollsters are doing a poorer job of sampling opinion in rural areas than in large metropolitan areas. Outside their states' three major metropolitan areas, Roberts won 63 percent of the vote, and McConnell won 61 percent. Polls seem to have missed this.
A third possible explanation -- and all three may be overlapping -- offered by RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende is that local pollsters were able, because of their greater experience and understanding of their states, to spot Republican trends that national pollsters missed. Trende credits the University of Arkansas poll, Ann Selzer's Des Moines Register poll in Iowa and Charles Franklin's Marquette University Law School poll in Wisconsin.
Pollsters face an increasingly difficult task. Telephone polling techniques were developed in a nation with universal landline phone service and a population that answered the phone when it rang. We no longer live in such a nation.
Only 9 percent of pollsters' calls resulted in completed interviews, the Pew Research Center reported in 2012. Maybe rural Republican voters are harder to reach or maybe they're too grumpy to commit until they have to.
In 1948, Gallup famously stopped polling eight days before the election, and "Dewey Defeats Truman" became one of history's most famous headlines. Gallup stayed in the field later after that had happened. The good news is that today's pollsters too can learn from experience.
I think in general somebody who votes Republican is probably more hesitant to tell strangers who they are voting for; there is no reason to do so.
Good article. I’ve been polled a couple of times when I answer the phone. The problem is that there are so many questions and then clarifying questions, that I get tired of answering and hang up, which may then invalidate my answers to the other questions. Maybe they need to do that because so few people pick up the phone anymore.
“....rural Republican voters are harder to reach or maybe they’re too grumpy to commit until they have to.”
It’s a good quote. Having grown up in the rural section of America....I’d say that you just don’t if you have a four-star harvest until the last stalk of corn has been gleaned...you’ve added up the expenses...and figure your bottom line for the year.
It’s not that such people are too grumpy to commit until the end....but they keep waiting till every single fake promise has been made, and they’ve finally reached a stage where they add up the bogus promises and figure out which guy might accidentally deliver more than the other.
Maybe Republican voters a little suspicious their responses will be passed along to IRS through the data mining that is rampant. The girls who came into our neighborhood to door-to -door campaign for Democrat state office holders skipped past us , even though I was in my front yard. “They know where you live.”
Polling just serves to manipulate the electorate. The only poll that counts is the tabulation of legal votes on election day. But oh what havoc can be made with “current polls say....” or “the majority of Americans want...” or whatever.
As with homo. marriage. The votes said most people did not favor it. But ever since then all the pollsters tell us they do favor it, and judges actually site that as an excuse to overturn the people. It is an outrage.
Or people might lie to pollsters in order to ambush the opposing party…..
How about this as a reason:
Polling with a Democrat voter skew would serve to validate a corrupt election.
Simple, they over estimated (especially in Virginia with new voter ID laws) their ability to vote illegally.
Another factor may be people hanging up on pollsters or screening calls and not picking up calls from numbers they don’t know.
Consider the government’s abysmal failure running the do not call registery. My land line and cell phone are inundated with solicitation calls every day. As a result I will not pick up a call from a number I do not know. Legitimate callers will leave a message, robocalls, pollsters, and solicitors move on when voice mail connects.
That is possible
When I voted this November I was in a long line of very tense very angry people and the fat Democratic poll watcher could tell it was not going to be a good day
It is in vogue to say you support Obama at my son’s college; those who can get student loans, are following their dreams in the “arts” and not working towards job training degrees do not grasp the economic implications, thus you could find this same type of non-economic understanding at the root of the polls and vanishing support for the liberalism in general.
I don’t answer calls from numbers that I don’t recognize. I have a specific ringtone on my smart phone numbers that I don’t recognize, but I always do a search for the number and if it is a important number I call it back, most though they leave a voice message. Otherwise it goes in my reject folder. My house phone has a voice ID and announces the number that calls. This way I do not even have to answer the call, but as with calls to my smart phone I do a search for the numbers
We use caller ID to scan before answering. We do get fooled when callers are using local landlines. Otherwise, even though we run two businesses, one of them local, we assume a real caller will leave a message. If we are fooled into answering, we hang up as soon as it’s clear who is calling.
As for knowing where we live, I am sure they do. To that end, we are not on social media, although we really had to discuss that option several times before deciding there was more loss of privacy downside than client gain upside.
We do not rate Netflix views. If we want to recommend something, we do it in a private email.
We try to not tag our emails, especially to those w/a gmail account,with any information. We will use a bland subject line and a link, only.
We do review a very few and exceptional Kindle reads. Maybe 4-5 a year, total, and we try to stick to crit of the writing.
On our main computer, I use Do Not Track Me and Better Privacy. I suppress pop-ups except for things like printing shipping labels, where it aborts the process. I see no ads, except on my ISP’s web mail, where I seem to have no choice. It turns out not to be the ISP, but their partner, Yahoo. So, even though I am on an email list that goes through Yahoo, I have cancelled my Yahoo account.
I am rural, so there are no doorknockers. We stopped donating at all to political campaigns after 2012. “Fool me once...” sort of thing. Also, it became very clear that huge money flows to candidates who are already wealthy on their own. They can fund their own campaigns, since they all seem to favor taxing/regulating me excessively once elected. I really hated the out-of-state campaigns that solicited my donations. My representative gets most of his funding from out of state and never has voted in my interest, let alone responded realistically, sans boiler plate, to my concerns.
They may know where you live, but you can starve them of a lot of other information.
The Polls Were Skewed Toward Democrats
If once, just once, the lefty-libertarians would just stay out of a race, it wouldn't be close. We would be near a 60 vote majority in the Senate.
I remember all too well Perot’s candidacy, and the impact on Bush I. It was some comfort to see Al Gore lose Florida with sufficient votes going to Ralph Nader (who deflected criticism for it, blaming Gore’s loss squarely on Gore himself).
I believe it would be great if citizens would just tell all of the pollsters that they are ‘undecided’. ...The pollsters would go nuts and the campaigns wouldn’t know what to do.
I have only a land line phone. I pay the bill for MY convenience of being to call someone; NOT to provide convenience to others wanting to call me.
My family and friends know I will not answer the phone and that I’m often up all night and sleep during most of the day. Therefore, when my phone does ring it goes unanswered and I don’t have to deal with telemarketers, pollsters and political robocalls.
I would never answer a poll... it is not any business.
If you take every race that was stolen (VA this year, ND in 2012), or bungled (MO in 2012), or a recruitment failure over the past 3 cycles we’d be closing in on 67.
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