I am reluctant to rebuke you, Gorsnak, but this is a bit much. Here we have adaher presenting faultlessly non-partisan sources, such as the much esteemed Breitbart and Fox News. And you let down the team by referencing a bomb-throwing Trotskyist radical like Mark Blumenthal?
We will never get the respect for our views that we crave if we persist in presenting such obviously biased sources when he relies strictly on non-partisan sources! Need I remind you that, had it not been for Breitbart’s support for a plucky young investigative reporter, we might never have known about ACORN’s plot to flood America with pre-pubescent Honduran hookers!
In Ohio, at least the last time I was a poll worker, in order to vote in the other party’s primary you had to sign a form that said you were voting in that party’s primary in good faith, and your party identification would change as of that point.
If you think about this, this means that there are probably a whole lot of democrats and independents who changed to be republicans this spring so that they could vote in the primaries.
That’s super. Now how about you actually explain what you really think is happening? Why are you so hesitant to engage with the actual question, which is: If what you claim is true, how is it happening and why?
Why should they? If you gained or lost 20 pounds since the last time you renewed your driver’s license, would you go down to the DMV and get your license updated with correct info, even though your license had another few years to run before you needed to renew? Of course not - why make unnecessary work for yourself?
Same thing here - other than at primary time, it doesn’t matter one bit which party I’m registered as a member of. So if you started thinking of yourself as a D rather than an I since, say, late June when Obama started upticking in the polls, you’d just be a D rather than an I, without having to do anything about it.
Here’s what I wonder: the pollsters go out and contact people randomly. A certain proportion of them respond that they’re Democrats over and above those who self-identify as Republicans.
What are conservatives expecting them to do then? Keep on polling until the numbers even out? Toss out a random number of Democratic responses?
That’s precisely why getting someone to say what they think is going on is so important. Adaher says it’s not a conspiracy, but he’s also claiming all of the pollsters know their numbers aren’t to be trusted, so it’s a conspiracy of silence at the very least.
Conservatives seem to be expecting them to do the same thing they do when other demographics in their sample don’t match known distributions. For example, younger demographics are harder to poll than older demos, because they’re more likely to be cell-only and to screen calls from unknown numbers. So pollsters ask people their age and then weight their sample based on age distributions known from census data. Conservatives are arguing that for whatever reason (most likely those same phone habits, which correlate not only with age but also with political views, possibly only because age correlates with political views) people answering polls don’t match up with known demographics. In so doing, they’re conflating voter registration numbers with the voter party ID in the polling interview. The problem with this is that the two aren’t the same thing.
The funniest thing about this is that when you read the Blumenthal piece I linked above, you find that he was making precisely this point in response to precisely the same arguments made by Kerry supporters when polls showed Bush ahead and poll-reported party ID was skewed Republican relative to voter registration stats.
TPM presented a similar table yesterday. Recent trends are unexceptional, in terms of changes, though the level that the Republicans have hit is pretty low relative to Pew. (22% vs. 28%)
How is this possible? Surely people know what party they are registered in. But that’s not the question that is asked. Gallup: Here is how Gallup asks party identification: “In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent?”
Note that this question does not ask, “What was your party identification in November 2008?” Nor does it ask, “Are you registered with one party or the other in your state?” Our question uses the words “as of today” and “consider.” It is designed to measure fluidity in political self-identification.
We know that party identification moves over time – sometimes in very short periods of time, just like other political variables. Generally, if there is a political tide toward either of the two major parties, all questions we ask that are of a political nature will move in that direction. This includes the ballot, job approval, party identification, among others. “Do you consider yourself…” is simply a different question than, “What party are you registered under?”
Yes, but there’s a difference. Kevin Drum compares: But it’s what happened next that’s instructive. A couple of years after the 2004 election, a guy named Nate Silver started deconstructing polls in minute detail and explaining exactly what made some polls good and others bad. His approach was unsparingly rigorous and his overarching message was: don’t kid yourself. The numbers are what the numbers are, and they don’t care if you’re a liberal or a conservative. Week after week, Silver dug deep into the minutiae of how polls are put together and how they’re conducted, writing lengthy, table-laden posts that often meandered through several thousand words. Liberals loved it. Before long he was, for all practical purposes, the liberal patron saint of polling. In contrast, the modern conservative polling hero Dean Chalmers claims a big conspiracy between NBC, CBS, and ABC. Never mind that Fox News polls show the same effects. Chalmers doesn’t apply much rigor: just reweights the polls. It’s kind of nutty, but the conclusion is reassuring to a certain mindset, so Republicans lap it up. It’s a very different mentality.
Not defending **adaher **at all, but Nate Silver at 538 admits to using a healthy dose of skepticism with his polling and his predictions are very good. Polling is only valuable if your sample is random, and for this that is damn near impossible no matter what the hell they tell you.
Don’t kid yourself. Liberals would have lapped up Chalmers-like shit in 2004. It remains to be seen how conservatives will respond if Romney doesn’t pull a rabbit out of his hat in the next few weeks and the pollsters are proven right. The only way to cling to the skewed polls hypothesis in the face of losing the election is to posit massive electoral fraud.
Oh dear.
I thought this exact thing yesterday. It would be the perfect way to lay the groundwork so you could keep squawking about Obama being illegitimate to serve should he win.
But we have a test. Chalmers makes a pretty simplistic argument, and if it was ever made at the Daily Kos in 2004, it never got any traction. What did get buzz were complaints about Rasmussen’s house bias. Which were established subsequently.
I take your point about electoral fraud though. And I’ll raise you by conceding that its existence may have trumped the lame re-weighting argument. Liberals didn’t have to make dubious claims, since they had factually grounded concerns on their side. Moving forwards, I’d say that voter suppression and Citizens United will prove to be pretty durable excuses. Of course they also undermine that public interest on their own, no contradiction there.
Back in the 1950s, roles were reversed: Republicans could justifiably complain about irregularities associated with machine politics in Chicago and Texas. They didn’t have to rely on crackpot theories. But they do now.
Actually, there’s been only two polls taken entirely after the debates other than the tracking polls. We always trusted Gallup and Rasmussen. Now we just have to see what the internals are on the polls to come.
What annoys me is Nate Silver showing Obama with an 85% chance to win in his “nowcast” despite being up 0.5 in the RCP average. What happens if Romney goes up 0.5 tomorrow? Silver’s model isn’t making sense right now.
It’s simple really. If much of Romney’s gains are in red states that he is going to win anyway, his increase in national polls is meaningless. If his support in, say, Miisiisippi goes from 70% to 85%, who cares? It won’t affect the electoral outcome if he doesn’t see movement in swing states. And right now, that movement is negligible. National polls do not reflect electoral reality.