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.
LOL, you picked up on that! That was the subtle point I was trying to make. Glad you saw it! :)
I am not sure I know what you mean.
People who voted Democrat are not the same as Democrat voters in the polls being discussed.
I do not think that you are talking about the number of votes for Obama vs McCain, are you?
Certainly the overall vote was much higher for Obama, but that is not what the discussion is about.
If you call Manhattan only numbers ~ if such a thing is actually possible anymore ~ you have 1 in 10 who are Republicans. A poll taken there would look quite reasonable with 9 Dems for each 1 Rep. If there were a 50/50 split, that would be unreasonable.
Even in the bogus polls, The GOP is going more for Romney than the Dems are going for 0bamugabe
I believe that's true too. Once a pollster sets his baselines for an election, they don't usually change their methodology.
Polls like the ones we are discussing are NOT PREDICTIVE ~ PRESCRIPTIVE PERHAPS ~ telling Romney NO MORE MR NICE GUY ~ OR ~ Start the campaign for gosh sakes.
Read the article, it will help you answer your questions.
Helpful hint: The answer is in the title.
Lists of registered Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are readily available. Calling those lists randomly in predetermined percentages designed to show what you expect turnout to be, based on party affiliation, is easily done.
We have people who seem to believe THAT CAN'T BE but, of course, it's always true ~ because there are more Democrats.
Except there ain’t D+9 or D+13 party affiliation numbers nationally that support the LV models the pollsters are using. Have you noticed that Romney’s numbers have gotten ‘worse’ since the pollster have went to LV models? It’s because they have gone more dem that a ‘random’ same just like the example you just gave.
http://m.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/partisan_trends
Using numbers party ID numbers from the best pollster on the planet, can you tell us why a D+9 or D+13 model is statistically valid? Well neither can the pollsters that are publishing them.
In states without party registration, there are no such lists.
Not any more, according to Rassmussen. That organization shows more Republicans than Democrats for the last nine months.
Well, that shows the demographic would work out to be biased and that could affect the outcomoooiiiiioo. Numerous prefixes would give similar results, and some Area Codes...
Maybe for once see a poll that reflects the accurate party breakdown on planet Earth for once. The only time they did more Rs was to keep Atkins in the race.
“Ahhh they didnt think the could fool a Corleone did they “lol
It’s been posted many time but he refuses to acknowledge it.
Do you think Rassmussen is skewing data toward Republicans? Is there some dynamic that I am missing there?
He won by being a friendly face with some good ideas and he got more Republicans to turn out than you can shake a stick at.
Mike knows how he won, and so did he.
So, the Democrats have turned to using Michael Reagan as a source for talking points?
Well, just darned eh!
You need to distort anything ~ just count all your calls, or exclude some.
Rasmussen also seems to screen for age ~ which adds another factor to the poll ~ which means he has to make more calls.
He claims it improves his effectiveness ~ others disagree ~ they say more smaller polls and that will give you a trendline that's as close as Rasmussen by election day.
let me put it this way ~ they’re still gd democrats no matter what they say. they’re trying to hide from the abusive democrat robocall system ~ but we also have pollsters determining through questioning how the subject/victim actually voted in previous elections ~
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