Posted on 09/26/2012 12:18:38 PM PDT by smoothsailing
September 26, 2012
Matthew Sheffield
With no manufactured outrage to hammer Mitt Romney at the moment, liberal journalists are now eagerly touting a series of polls which appear to show President Obama pulling away from the GOP nominee in several key states.
Unfortunately, these polls are relying on sample sizes which are skewed tremendously leftward with far more Democrats than Republicans and as such, they are unlikely to be good predictors of actual Election Day turnout. Do the pollsters themselves actually believe in their own sample sizes though? At least one appears not to.
Interviewed last month by conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac polling operation was particularly squeamish about sampling under tough questioning from Hewitt about a poll which Quinnipiac had released showing Democrats with a 9 percentage point advantage in the state of Florida.
In the conversation, Brown defended Quinnipiac’s sampling techniques but admitted that he did not believe that Democrats would outnumber Republicans to that degree in Florida come November. Pressed by Hewitt, the pollster said he believed that was a “probably unlikely” scenario. Instead, Brown kept saying that he thought his poll was an accurate snapshot of reality at the time.
“What I believe is what we found,” he insisted while also touting his organization's record of polls closer to actual elections.
Unfortunately, this cavalier attitude toward accuracy is actually widespread throughout the entire polling industry. As NewsBusters noted in June, exit polls, which rely on far larger sample sizes than those conducted by Quinnipiac and others have long been known to oversample Democrats, sometimes even drastically. Sadly, the awful record that many pollsters have is something that most people barely know anything about. As such, it is one of the media’s “dirty little secrets” since Americans certainly won’t hear about it from the press.
Despite not believing that Democrats would have a 9-point advantage, Brown defended his organization, claiming that he and his colleagues were not intentionally trying to skew their sample size:
“We didn’t set out to oversample Democrats,” he protested. “We did our normal, random digit dial way of calling people. And there were, these are likely voters. They had to pass a screen.”
But what if that screen is simply not enough? The 2012 presidential election is unlikely to have an electorate which is similar to the ones before it. In the 2008 election, young and black voters turned out in record numbers and voted in even higher percentages for Obama. As specific surveys of these two voter groups have shown, however, both are dispirited this time around and are less likely to turn out for Democrats.
This point is particularly crucial given that the electorates in the years following 2008 have been much more Republican skewed. It could be argued that these were off-year elections and thus less likely to have blue-collar and college kid Democrats turn out to vote but ultimately no one knows today what the party breakdown will be November 6.
That’s why it’d be best for pollsters like Peter Brown to double-check their work the way that Scott Rasmussen does against a running party ID poll, especially considering by Brown’s own admission that Quinnipiac’s process for determining who will actually vote is “not a particularly heavy screen.”
A partial transcript of this highly illuminative interview is provided below courtesy of Hewitt show. Please see this link for the complete discussion. (Hat tip to Da Tech Guy who has more on the sampling controversy.)
HUGH HEWITT: 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?
PETER BROWN: 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.
HEWITT: 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?
BROWN: Probably not at 100 out of 100.
HEWITT: Okay, so if it was 75 out of 100…
BROWN: Well, I mean…
HEWITT: 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?
BROWN: Like the Supreme Court and pornography, you know it when you see it.
HEWITT: 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?
BROWN: Because what we found when we made the actual calls is this kind of party ID.
HEWITT: 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?
BROWN: Well, first, you don’t mean registration.
HEWITT: I mean, yeah, turnout.
BROWN: Do I think…I think it is probably unlikely.
HEWITT: And so what value is this poll if in fact it doesn’t weight for the turnout that’s going to be approximated?
BROWN: 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.
HEWITT: 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…
BROWN: It’s an accurate predictor of what would happen is the election were today.
HEWITT: 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?
BROWN: If the election were today, yeah. What we found is obviously a large Democratic advantage.
HEWITT: 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?
BROWN: Our record has been very good. You know, Hugh, I…
HEWITT: That’s not responsive. It’s just a question. Do you personally, Peter, believe that Democrats enjoy a nine point turnout advantage right now?
BROWN: What I believe is what we found.
Then where did obama get all those votes 4 years ago? looked like an awful lot of democrats to me! 69 million of them!
Remember what i Taught you about the Egyptian Variable ~ the number you multiply your answer with to get the right answer? That's what the independent category is. just a number, and when they vote they vote democrat ~ more often than not ~ and that's why they are Democrats.
like being homosexual ~ you do the act that's what you be ~ not something else!
An SNL skit from the late ‘70s / early ‘80s. A PSA for Carter and current Obimbo voters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6o3qTykxKU
BTW, I think that Bambi is a Marxist-Mohamedan, not a fish.
I suspect these pollsters now realize the gig is up. People have become wise to their intentional bias. But they need some kind of event to use to hide the move back to unbiased numbers. So after the debate next week, they will start backing out the Democrat over-sampling and then falsely call it a surge for Romney as a result of his “stellar” debate performance.
Yeah...That'll teach us. Obamageddon.
I would be interested In determining the average difference From final result with each pollster in the past. Which had to adjust least To be correct on their final few polls? How much did each have to adjust to bring their poll into alignment with the final result. We know that rasmussen was best in the 2008 election. That says that rasmussen’s methods are better. I’m betting that his adjustment number would be best also. The adjustment number would suggest he was also correct throughout the entire race.
and Mormons
I was thinking this very thing! People forget early polling pretty consistently but if you are off by 10 points (or more) when you get near election day, your credibility starts to tank. It looks especially bad when there is only ONE polling service that is even close to accurate.
We have people who seem to believe THAT CAN'T BE but, of course, it's always true ~ because there are more Democrats.
Of course there are. What I'm wondering is how the pollsters get cellphones down to all those dead people, interpret the answers from the housepets and measure the felon vote for those that don't get mail in solitary.
They use the most direct and easiest way ~ XEROX
All telephone sampling is bull flop. It’s based on the one home telephone model of the last century and disregards the modern cell phone culture.
Probably Unlikely? What does that even mean? 
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