Gallup’s Editor-In-Chief tells us to stop asking impertinent questions, the polls are just fine.
Now if a given poll in Ohio in this election shows Obama with a 10-percentage-point lead, one should just ask, “How likely is it that Obama would be ahead by 10 points if he won by five points in 2008?” — forgetting party identification, which we assume is going to be higher for the Democratic Party if Obama is ahead, anyway.
In a column full of weak arguments (exit polls use different questions! party ID changes! we don’t ask 2008 affiliation!), this is a particularly egregious sin against logic. It assumes we can’t know more about the expected party ID breakdown on election day than we know about the expected election results, but of course that’s nonsense, in fact we know quite a bit more: Gallup has recorded a 38-point swing in enthusiasm (from D+26 to R+12) to the GOP since 2008, in swing states the Democrats have lost 800K registered partisans to 80K for the GOP, the net favorable/unfavorable view of the parties has reached an all-time high of R+3 (down from D+25 in 2008), and Rasmussen party affiliation has reached an all-time high of R+3.7 — higher even than in Sept 2004, when the actual election split that year was even.
So this doesn’t begin to explain why so many polls are using D/R/I splits that are so ridiculously pro-Democrat. Some have gone as far as D+16, even though this election appears be headed for a roughly even exit poll split. But have you ever seen an R+16 national poll? Have you ever even seen an R+6 poll? Of course not, that would have Mitt Romney up 10 or 20 points. Doesn’t fit The Narrative.
The problem isn’t that the polls are just inaccurate based on party ID, it’s that they’re strongly biased to Democrats, except for the occasional obvious agenda poll from Plainly Partisan Polling that tries to keep Akin in the Missouri Senate race in preference to a stronger GOP candidate.
And as the always-perspicacious Jay Cost has pointed out, there’s a bimodal distribution here, which means the error is not random. I won’t claim to know how much of this is blatant partisanship (ahem, PPP) and how much is just honest error, pollster groupthink, or a “fight the last war” tendency after 2008’s Dem wave, but the 2012 polls are clearly off-kilter in a fairly deliberate way.
So how to cut through the chaff? A salutary (if overly optimistic) effort has been made to reweight polls to the Rasmussen affiliation numbers, but there’s a very simple rule to interpret national polls: whoever is winning independents is winning the election. You can safely ignore the rest of the information in a national poll — while it’s just barely possible to very narrowly lose independents and win the election, as Bush did with 49% in 2004, a lead outside the MOE is a pretty strong indicator.
Comments
4 responses to “Blue Polls And Red Herrings”
This is directed toward the conservative blogs/media in general not the owner of this blog in particular. I appreciate this blog and space to make comments.
If the errors were unintentional you would see polls overweighted toward the GOP nearly as often as toward the DNC. That not being the case, you should ignore the polls because they are incompetent or because they are inaccurate. “What if my preference isn’t just like that of others? How will I survive?”
One of my big complaints about conservative media is their interminable examination of the bias in the liberal media. After a few decades of documenting the dishonesty perpetrated by the MSM, isn’t it about time we just advance our goals instead of picking up the dog crap the MSM left in the yard and bringing it to the dinner table to examine and analyze?
Even when conservatives should have a factual/historical advantage conservatives go out of their way to play on the other team’s home field. Conservative media does as much to advance the MSM’s talking point of the day as does the MSM. The excuse the conservative blogs and radio use is to pretend that if they didn’t correct the record nobody would be able to figure it out on their own. This is like the liberal groups that search out subtle forms of racism to be outraged about on behalf of some special group. If conservative “civilians” can’t analyze the MSM junk for them self the conservative media has been useless.
It’s possible that many of us wingnuts are sufficiently disgusted with polling organizations that we’re refusing to answer questions.
See Joseph’s comment above. Also note that many non-wingnuts (probably on both sides) are sick and tired of being called just at dinner time (“just a few political questions, but 20 minutes of demographic questions” – and are hanging up the phone.)
WE know who we’re going to vote for. Let them wonder.
[…] All of which is too bad for Romney, because right now the polls say he’s winning (for a simple, accurate measure, disregard topline numbers and DRI split — whoever is winning independents is winning the election). […]