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.
“Quinnipiac Pollster Admits: ‘Probably Unlikely’ That Electorate Will Feature Massive Dem Skew”
That’s right, jackwagon. Start walking that cart back to reality-ville.
“polling equivalent of pornography” - LOL!
For a Cleveland Browns fan Hewitt can be funny at times.
Why is newsbusters putting this out now? That interview is pretty old, I remember hearing it a day or two after it happened.
Quinnipiac University BS'ing in their polls for years.
Hey, my husband is a Browns fan and he is funny ALL the time!...
Gee, ya think?
It's kind of funny, the defense the guy offers is actually a good defense of the honesty of the poll if he's telling the truth, but it would also mean that it's an honest poll that has no connection to reality at all. The pool you called had more Democrats? Well great, but unless 9% more Dems show up on Nov 6 than Republicans, your poll means squat.
When you do that it's not a random sample poll anymore.
Do you seriously believe the polls should be weighted and adjusted ~ .......... ~ isn't the background complaint that the Democrats are weighting and adjusting the polls so they no longer reflect the reality?
Do you think you can have it both ways ~ pure random selection polls that are not weighted and adjusted unless they are weighted and adjusted!?
Recognize that in 2008 the Democrats turned out 15% more Democrat voters than the Republicans turned out Republican voters. 15% is a huge difference and Hewitt is quibbling over 9% ~ is he the source of this utterly confusing and baseless debate over oversampling (as some call it)
Peter Brown is the guy at Qunnipiac who is responsible for the most recent set of distorted polls.
Here are the rest of the gang. A bunch of liberal hacks.
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-and-centers/polling-institute/staff
april.radocchio@quinnipiac.edu
Michael Blair, manager of polling information and technology, michael.blair@quinnipiac.edu
Carmen Carranza, assistant manager of interviewer operations, carmen.carranza@quinnipiac.edu
Dorothy Donarum, manager of interviewer operations, dorothy.donarum@quinnipiac.edu
Ralph Hansen, manager of data analysis, ralph.hansen@quinnipiac.edu
Terri Vitelli, polling institute assistant, theresa.vitelli@quinnipiac.edu
Jonathan Wigglesworth, manager of CATI operations, jonathan.wigglesworth@quinnipiac.edu
It's pretty good timing on NewsBuster's part, IMO. Quinnipiac just came out with another one of their corrupt polls today.
This Morning’s Polls Project More Heavily Democratic Electorates Than in 2008
You base your post on the assertion that what the pollster said about “that’s how he found it” is true. I don’t agree with that assertion.
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.
PRICELESS!!!!! :o)
The go to pollsters for CBS and the New York Times. The results are so predictable.
Used to work with a very bright woman who was convinced that half the people in America were black and half were white, and there were just a handful of others.
A review of the Census was not enough to convince her otherwise ~ she wanted it half and half, and that was the end of that.
So, you do know there are, in general, more Democrats than Republicans, right?
Polls are weighted to generate a turnout model. There are biases (or outside forces) that determine which party is more likely to turn out. Only an idiot would believe that turnout is random. For example, if Obama suddenly declared that he has a preference for urinating on the Bible do you think this would impact turnout or would turnout still be ran-dumb?
That's a poll BTW.
Rarely. He reminds me of Oriely. Flopping around in the middle so to keep as many listeners/readers as possible.
In 2008, the advantage for Democrats was +8, nationwide
In Florida, it was +3 for the Democrats.
There is one silver lining to the skewed polls.
Eventually, the pollsters are going to slant more evenly for the sake of their own reputations. When they do, that will look like Romney is gaining and it will be hard for them to resist using the “momentum” word when discussing Romney’s rise in the polls. When voters here Romney is gaining momentum just before the election, they may be more inclined, not less inclined to think their vote matters enough to push him across the finish line.
It’s possible the Dem strategy is going to backfire on them. It may be helping them now but when Gallup, ARG and the rest want to protect their own credibility in November, they are going to have to start showing momentum for Romney.
Ask yourself why you ask such juvenile questions.
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