I was thinking today.... Why don’t ALL these friggin pollsters take an equal percentage from both sides of the political spectrum when they do these polls?? Why do I always see, for example, 38% Dems polled and 30% Republicans. What the hell?
Because (as someone put it to me recently) Most republicans are at work when the pollsters are calling during the weekdays and on the weekends they are out w/ their families - that’s not to be taken the wrong way since dems work too but ya know...
Is the electorate equally divided?
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I was thinking today.... Why don’t ALL these friggin pollsters take an equal percentage from both sides of the political spectrum when they do these polls?? Why do I always see, for example, 38% Dems polled and 30% Republicans. What the hell?
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I just touched on this. The pollsters are big believers in the new paradigm of Dem registering everything that walks on two legs. They saw the big numbers voting in the Dem primaries and it has scared them.
They make random calls and they Don’t Arrange It, but they do get X% Dem, Y% GOP and Z% Independent. That’s who answered the phone. Then they weight them with all sorts of stuff based on who they have persuaded themselves are going to show up . . . but are homeless and have no phone.
Party ID is self identified from the call. More Dems than GOP are responding. Don’t presume that GOP call recipients are family people and refuse to respond more than Dems. Maybe they do, but pollsters have been able to observe this a long time and if such a bias existed, they would weight for it.
UNLESS. Unless behavior changes. And it may. Advertising saturation can turn off the electorate and it can do so in a non equal manner. Turnout might not be what is expected so those models can be wrong. Apparently turnout is expected to be not just huge, but gargantuan and if that proves true, the additional black vote to occur plus maybe some extra appearances from the young may be simply swamped out by the sheer numbers of others.
This election is not over. The leads are potentially invalid. The leads are so diverse that it’s clear that there is no consensus among pollsters as to turnout.
The pollsters use data from the number of registrations for different parties in the local area. For instance if in your county you happen to have 75% democrat registration then the polls will represent 75% democrats.
So if Acorn is out there stuffing the registration rolls with cartoon characters and household pets then you’re going to get an oversampling of democrats.
That’s my story and i’m stickin to it.