Posted on 08/03/2012 11:43:38 AM PDT by StAnDeliver
HH: I’m joined right now by Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Polls, Quinnipiac in the news today along with CBS and New York Times for swing state polls, which surprised a lot of people. Peter, welcome, thanks for being on the show.
PB: My pleasure.
HH: I want to start with the models, which are creating quite a lot of controversy. In Florida, the model that Quinnipiac used gave Democrats a nine point edge in turnout. In Ohio, the sample had an eight point Democratic advantage. What’s the reasoning behind those models?
PB: Well, what is important to understand is that the way Quinnipiac and most other major polls do their sampling is we do not wait for party ID. We ask voters, or the people we interview, do they consider themselves a Democrat, a Republican, an independent or a member of a minor party. And that’s different than asking them what their party registration is. What you’re comparing it to is party registration. In other words, when someone starts as a voter, they have the opportunity of, in most states, of being a Republican, a Democrat, or a member of a minor party or unaffiliated.
HH: Okay.
PB: So what’s important to understand is what we are doing is we’re asking voters what they consider themselves when we interview them, which was in the last week.
HH: Now what I don’t understand this, so educate me on it, if Democrats only had a three point advantage in Florida in the final turnout measurement in 2008, but in your poll they have a nine point turnout advantage, why is that not a source of skepticism for people?
PB: Well, I mean, clearly there will be some people who are skeptics. This is how we’ve always done our polls. Our record is very good in terms of accuracy. Again, remember, we’re asking people what they consider themselves at the time we call them.
HH: But I don’t know how that goes to the issue, Peter, so help me. I’m not being argumentative, I really want to know. Why would guys run a poll with nine percent more Democrats than Republicans when that percentage advantage, I mean, if you’re trying to tell people how the state is going to go, I don’t think this is particularly helpful, because you’ve oversampled Democrats, right?
PB: But we didn’t set out to oversample Democrats. We did our normal, random digit dial way of calling people. And there were, these are likely voters. They had to pass a screen. Because it’s a presidential year, it’s not a particularly heavy screen.
HH: And so if, in fact, you had gotten a hundred Democrats out of a hundred respondents that answered, would you think that poll was reliable?
PB: Probably not at 100 out of 100.
HH: Okay, so if it was 75 out of 100…
PB: Well, I mean…
HH: I mean, when does it become unreliable? You know you’ve just put your foot on the slope, so I’m going to push you down it. When does it become unreliable?
PB: Like the Supreme Court and pornography, you know it when you see it.
HH: Well, a lot of us look at a nine point advantage in Florida, and we say we know that to be the polling equivalent of pornography. Why am I wrong?
PB: Because what we found when we made the actual calls is this kind of party ID.
HH: Do you expect Democrats, this is a different question, do you, Peter Brown, expect Democrats to have a nine point registration advantage when the polls close on November 6th in Florida?
PB: Well, first, you don’t mean registration.
HH: I mean, yeah, turnout.
PB: Do I think…I think it is probably unlikely.
HH: And so what value is this poll if in fact it doesn’t weight for the turnout that’s going to be approximated?
PB: Well, you’ll have to judge that. I mean, you know, our record is very good. You know, we do independent polling. We use random digit dial. We use human beings to make our calls. We call cell phones as well as land lines. We follow the protocol that is the professional standard.
HH: As we say, that might be the case, but I don’t know it’s responsive to my question. My question is, should we trust this as an accurate predictor of what will happen? You’ve already told me there…
PB: It’s an accurate predictor of what would happen is the election were today.
HH: But that’s, again, I don’t believe that, because today, Democrats wouldn’t turn out by a nine point advantage. I don’t think anyone believes today, if you held the election today, do you think Democrats would turn out nine percentage points higher than Republicans?
PB: If the election were today, yeah. What we found is obviously a large Democratic advantage.
HH: I mean, you really think that’s true? I mean, as a professional, you believe that Democrats have a nine point turnout advantage in Florida?
PB: Our record has been very good. You know, Hugh, I…
HH: That’s not responsive. It’s just a question. Do you personally, Peter, believe that Democrats enjoy a nine point turnout advantage right now?
PB: What I believe is what we found.
HH: Geez, I just, and an eight point in Ohio? I’m from Ohio. Democrats haven’t had an eight point advantage in Ohio since before the Civil War. I mean, that just never happens, but Peter, I appreciate your coming on. I’m not persuaded that Quinnipiac Polls haven’t hurt themselves today, but I appreciate your willingness to come on and talk about it.
End of interview.
Is there any professional pollster who has heard or read this interview who cares to comment on how Quinnipiac conducted this poll?
This interview exposes Quinnipiac as completely unprofessional, in my opinion.
“The polling guy seems to be inferring that he is getting his turnout model from the D vs. R responses from this specific poll. I really don’t think this is the the standard polling methology.
The normal.scheme is to poll the R’s and D’s and I’s and determine the best estimate of how each of these 3 groups will split their vote between Obama and Romney. Then they prorate this result based on their independently developed turnout model.
Am I right about this?”
Sort of right.
If they’re really doing it right, it all starts with the actual voter turnout numbers for previous elections, Then they’d look at voter registrations since those elections and look for trends that would change the balance. Then they’d do some polling to try to determine voter “enthusiasm” and compare it to the “enthusiasm” polls that they took before other elections and determine if there’s any trend in those polls that change the balance. Then they stir that all together with some secret sauce and they come up with the the numbers they think will match the voter turnout for this election.
BTW, they don’t just go by party affiliation. There’s a bunch of other demographics in the mix too. Age, sex, race, income, blah, blah, blah. So, for example, with Nobama on the ticket, they’ll bump their black turnout number up a bunch of points to account for him drawing more blacks to the poll. If Hillary had won the primary instead of Nobama, they would have left the black number as is and bumped the female turnout number a bit.
I think all those pollsters are hoping that Mitt is such a wishy-washy, milquetoast, barely just a step or two to the right of a flaming-liberal candidate, that he won’t draw any voters to the polls and their D+9 number will hold up.
His answers indicate either a huge problem in getting a random sample of responses or an underlying huge shift of tidal proportions from republican and independent to democrats.
Wow. What a complete a$$ kicking.
Agreed, and more important, it doesn’t matter WHERE the “identification” comes from, when you have 36% Ds, you quit polling Ds.
Someone posted a link to this story about “The Poll That Changed Polling” yesterday, the 1936 Literary Digest poll that predicted Roosevelt would lose in a landslide:
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/
Some of the defenses of that poll in the article sound just like what this Quinnipac guy is spinning.
Quinnipac: “This is how we’ve always done our polls. Our record is very good in terms of accuracy.”
Literary Digest: “For nearly a quarter century, we have been taking Polls of the voters in the forty-eight States, and especially in Presidential years, and we have always merely mailed the ballots, counted and recorded those returned and let the people of the Nation draw their conclusions as to our accuracy. So far, we have been right in every Poll.”
History repeats itself.
Yes, you are correct. The standard procedure is to weight your raw results based on the predicted turnout. This interview makes it sound as if Quinnipac skips that step completely.
If I ever need the services of a lawyer, I can only hope that I get one who is as perceptive and adroit as Hewitt.
(Full disclosure: My one and only exposure to the legal system so far is that my own attorney was an idiot, so it wouldn’t take much to do better than that. The person who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer - but at least it’s less expensive than paying for a real foolish lawyer.)
Ping to related thread.
I have an unnamed source at Qunnipiac that says that they are actively fixing the polls for 0bama. Now, let them prove that they are not staffed by 0bama supporters and sympathizers.
As Mark Levin said, a can of orange juice could beat Obama. When Romney wins (and he will)the damage he will do to the country in the name of the Republican party will make us wish for the good ole days of "conservative" George W Bush. All, the lefty polices we ended we had to defend to keep the Democrats out of the White House was awful, and now in 2012 we have the bad choice of of going off the cliff at 55 MPH or the worse at 90 MPH, but we're still on the move in a terrifying direction and we're not going to stop just because the letter next to the name changes from D to R.
Hewitt led the charge to make this happen since 2002, just like he led the charge to put Arnold in the Governors seat in California instead of even trying for a more conservative who might have been about to do something to stop the collapse of the west coast economy.
I'd be a lot happier if he just went back to teaching, or the law full time and stopped pretending to be anything but a moderate pretending conservatism like he plays on the radio.
As Mark Levin said, a can of orange juice could beat Obama. When Romney wins (and he will)the damage he will do to the country in the name of the Republican party will make us wish for the good ole days of "conservative" George W Bush. All, the lefty polices we ended we had to defend to keep the Democrats out of the White House was awful, and now in 2012 we have the bad choice of of going off the cliff at 55 MPH or the worse at 90 MPH, but we're still on the move in a terrifying direction and we're not going to stop just because the letter next to the name changes from D to R.
Hewitt led the charge to make this happen since 2002, just like he led the charge to put Arnold in the Governors seat in California instead of even trying for a more conservative who might have been about to do something to stop the collapse of the west coast economy.
I'd be a lot happier if he just went back to teaching, or the law full time and stopped pretending to be anything but a moderate pretending conservatism like he plays on the radio.
The big tipoff was the even '1000' polled. So they robocalled 1000, stopped, and set the populations as they laid. That's not just unorthodox, that's fraudulent methodology.
Hewitt knows some polling, and Brown obviously wasn't prepared for that.
You set your populations however you want. You hopefully true your internals first (as Hewitt hammered home), then sample until the picture emerges (or the money runs out).
Morris did a monster DvR national LV sample in May that I have a lot of respect for:
"From May 5-11, 2012, I conducted a survey of 6,000 likely voters. On such a mammoth sample, the margin of error is less than 1 percent. I found that Romney has amassed a sizable lead over Obama of 51-42, far in excess of what published polling and surveys of registered — as opposed to likely — voters are indicating."
This post was so prescient...
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