...but just in case Americans turn out to be a bit smarter, they will continue to hedge their bets.
"Big Commie Lead in Ohio, Florida, and Virginia" read the stories about the scientific polls paid for by the AmericaLast pinkos, but notice how the national polls they conduct are too close to call.
Take it from someone who's been there, kiddies: polls can be made to say whatever you want them to say.
From National Journal via Yahoo News:
The debate has been amplified as the pace of public polling has
accelerated after party conventions. Pollsters are finding diverging
results, with consumers of political media left to decide which surveys
better reflect the reality on the ground -- or to accept the polls most
favorable to their partisan leanings. New, less expensive methods for
taking polls have led to a proliferation of surveys with varying
results, so both sides have ample data to fit their desired narrative.
Gripes about the party-ID composition of poll samples are certainly not new: Eight years ago, Democrats were claiming polls showing a surge in Republican identification did not accurately reflect the makeup of the electorate.
Now, it's Republicans making the case their voters are undersampled.
Schwartz, whose institute conducts polls in battleground states for CBS News and The New York Times, asserts that pollsters who weight according to party identification could miss the sorts of important shifts in the electorate that could be determinative.
"A good example for why pollsters shouldn't weight by party ID is if you look at the 2008 presidential election and compared it to the 2004 presidential election, there was a 7-point change in the party ID gap," Schwartz said. Democrats and Republicans represented equal portions of the 2004 electorate, according to exit polls. But, in 2008, the percentage of the electorate identifying as Democrats increased by 2 percentage points, to 39 percent, while Republicans dropped 5 points, to 32 percent.
John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster and consultant to GOP candidates, told the conservative National Review last week that Democrats are lobbying media pollsters "to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models."
"The intended effect is to suppress Republican turnout through media polling bias," McLaughlin said.
Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is unconvinced. "Why would pollsters want to look inaccurate?" Miringoff asked rhetorically in a phone interview.
Miringoff, who is conducting three battleground-state polls each week for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, called the focus on party identification "too narrow."
"Big Commie Lead in Ohio, Florida, and Virginia" read the stories about the scientific polls paid for by the AmericaLast pinkos, but notice how the national polls they conduct are too close to call.
Take it from someone who's been there, kiddies: polls can be made to say whatever you want them to say.
From National Journal via Yahoo News:
It has become a recurring refrain among some Republican pundits and observers each time a new poll shows President Obama or downballot Democrats doing well: Check the party composition.
Critics allege that pollsters
are interviewing too many Democrats -- and too few Republicans or
independents -- and artificially inflating the Democratic candidates'
performance. Pollsters counter that the results they are finding reflect
slight changes in public sentiment -- and, moreover, adjusting their
polls to match arbitrary party-identification targets would be
unscientific.
Unlike race, gender or age, all demographic traits for which pollsters weight their samples, party identification
is considered an attitude that pollsters say they should be measuring.
When party identification numbers change, it's an indication of deeper
political change that a poll can spot.
"If a pollster weights by party ID, they are substituting their own judgment as to what the electorate is going to look like. It's not scientific," said Doug Schwartz, the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, which doesn't weight its surveys by party identification.
Gripes about the party-ID composition of poll samples are certainly not new: Eight years ago, Democrats were claiming polls showing a surge in Republican identification did not accurately reflect the makeup of the electorate.
Now, it's Republicans making the case their voters are undersampled.
Schwartz, whose institute conducts polls in battleground states for CBS News and The New York Times, asserts that pollsters who weight according to party identification could miss the sorts of important shifts in the electorate that could be determinative.
"A good example for why pollsters shouldn't weight by party ID is if you look at the 2008 presidential election and compared it to the 2004 presidential election, there was a 7-point change in the party ID gap," Schwartz said. Democrats and Republicans represented equal portions of the 2004 electorate, according to exit polls. But, in 2008, the percentage of the electorate identifying as Democrats increased by 2 percentage points, to 39 percent, while Republicans dropped 5 points, to 32 percent.
Asked specifically about GOP complaints regarding the party-ID composition of public surveys, Schwartz said: "They're the ones trailing in our swing-state polls."
"There are more people who want to identify with the Democratic Party right now than the Republican Party," he added.
Many Republicans, however, think pollsters are wrong to assume their results, which in some cases mirror the 2008 electorate, are accurate.
"Far too many of the public and media polls
have set their likely voter screens and models to something looking
more optimistic than the 2008 turnout model," GOP consultant Rick Wilson
wrote in Sunday's New York Daily News, "which even Obama's most dedicated partisans think is highly unlikely."
"The intended effect is to suppress Republican turnout through media polling bias," McLaughlin said.
Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is unconvinced. "Why would pollsters want to look inaccurate?" Miringoff asked rhetorically in a phone interview.
Miringoff, who is conducting three battleground-state polls each week for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, called the focus on party identification "too narrow."
"It's an easy target in a sense
because you can look at the last [election], see the difference and jump
on board," he said. Marist, like Quinnipiac, does not weight its
results according to party ID.
Not
every Republican pollster finds fault with the publicly-available
surveys. Dan Judy, vice president of North Star Opinion Research in
Alexandria, Va., told National Journal, "A lot of the media organizations this cycle seem to have gotten better."
"Most of the media polls are
good, professional polls," Judy added, "in terms of making sure that the
way their samples are constructed are fairly consistent."
But the GOP narrative that most public surveys are biased endures. On Monday, the news website Buzzfeed interviewed a Virginia-based blogger
who re-weights public polls to reflect the partisan trends reported by
automated pollster Rasmussen Reports. Dean Chambers, the blogger, then
presents the adjusted data in charts on his website, unskewedpolls.com.
As of late Monday, Chambers'
website claimed that an average of polls conducted since Labor Day show
Mitt Romney leading Obama, 52 percent to 44 percent. The website and its
findings were trumpeted on the Drudge Report, the conservative-leaning
news-aggregation site that has tended to highlight polls more favorable
to Romney and less favorable to the president.
The pollsters continue to stand
by their results, but the complaints are nevertheless getting through.
Marist's Miringoff, for instance, was lambasted by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt earlier this month over a poll in Hewitt's native Ohio that the radio jock deemed "biased" for its 10-point party-ID advantage for Democrats. Miringoff admitted to National Journal that he is now taking note of the party-identification results in the polls he is conducting.
"I look at our party-ID spread
because I want to anticipate the reaction," he said. He added: "I guess
it makes for good pundit sport at this point."
Nate Silver: Obama The Clear Favorite, But We Could Be Surprised
Nate Silver -- author of "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--But Some Don't" and polling
guru for the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog-- recently spoke to
TPM about the state of the election, what makes a good forecaster, and
the experience of writing his first book. Which pollsters do you think
have most accurately captured the state of the race to this point? I
think ...
- TPM via Yahoo! News
By this time next week, there should be enough national and state-level polling
data to present a pretty clear picture of where this election stands,
post-Labor Day and after whatever bounces the candidates may have gotten
from the conventions. But we have seen enough data in recent weeks to draw some preliminary conclusions about the contests for the White House, the Senate, and, to a lesser ...
- National Journal via Yahoo! News 
No comments:
Post a Comment