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Pity the poor pollsters — 38 Comments

  1. I am like you, neo, but I don’t even answer my phone unless it’s someone I know! And it rings constantly, all day long!

  2. 1. I’ve never in 59 years been polled, not by phone or in person nor by Mail. This is why I don’t believe in polls and their results, it’s not real each poll serves it’s own agenda. Therefore it’s suspect.
    2. Many people fear to answer when a future administration with more power and less regard for free speech may just seek out the polled for their views which do not fit the agenda of the winners of the election or the culture war for revenge or elimination.
    3. I fear my answer may just affect me in years ahead by my belief that free speech will protect me from the ones who wish my views be declared “hate speech” and me being punished.
    POTUS Obama wishes my and every ones free speech curtailed to suit the religious views of a violent and intolerant religion per his speech at the UN recently.

  3. CathyB brings up a good point. Caller ID may be an even greater obstacle to pollsters than cellphone-only users.

  4. OldereandWheezier: I think that caller ID has to be a large factor. But that in and of itself wouldn’t matter, if those who screen calls that way are random. The important question is whether those who screen their calls that way differ in some other important way from the population as a whole. I don’t think anyone knows.

  5. Neo:

    I don’t remember ever having been polled until this year, and I have now been polled at least a half dozen times. I live in NV, a swing state (that probably explains part of the interest in my political persuasion), but I am also being exposed to a type of poll I had heretofore not experienced.

    What is new to me is the push poll, a large number of which have come my way. You know the kind: “Do you plan to vote for Dean Heller even though he has voted twice to end Medicare, or for Shelley Berkley, who is committed to increasing Medicare funding?” Some are more subtle than this, others are insulting to the intelligence.

    The problem for me is that I have little confidence I recognize all of them for what they are, and even less confidence that my neighbors will. The obvious ones just get hung up on; the more subtle ones are treated as an honest effort. This is probably a mistake: I should either treat all telephone polls as one or the other and furthermore, either answer all polls honestly or answer none.

    The point is, the polling industry is going the way of the American educational establishment. An honest attempt to accomplish something of value has been recognized as a method of imposing someone’s will on the rest of us, and so has lost its value.

    Which makes me gnash my teeth in impotent rage. Some days I wake up thinking the only answer for the mess we’re in is to hope the Mayan calendar has it right.

  6. Guess I’m the odd man out because I want to answer the pollsters. To get some points for the Right side.
    I had never been called before either until Virginia became a swing state.
    Neo: who would be using a 2010 model for polling? Mid- term election years skew older/ more Republican. I’ve read that the model will be more like 2004, a base turn-out election.

  7. I still have a landline and ignore all calls that come from suspected telemarketers (that is, any “unknown” name or number I don’t recognize).

    However, during the 2004 election I actually received a call from Quinnipiac (sp?) Said so on the caller ID. I knew it was a pollster and was happy to pick up and participate. I took much glee in telling them that I was a registered Dem, planning to vote GOP.

    Since then I have made the official party switch (but only because I can’t vote in the primaries as an independent in PA).

  8. KL Smith: who would be using a 2010 model? Someone who thinks that enthusiasm for Obama is tepid, and objection to him strong.

    It’s anybody’s guess, but that seems as good a theory as any.

    And looking to polls to answer the question of how enthusiastic voters are isn’t all that helpful if they’re using the wrong model in those very same polls.

    This poll is a bit outdated (it’s from July), but it shows a diminished amount of enthusiasm among Democrats. And this CBS/NYT poll from around the same time shows GOP enthusiasm rising. I can’t find any newer polls on this in a very quick search, although I imagine there might be some.

  9. I’m in PA, and a couple of months ago I was getting called for polls a lot. Then I donated to Romney, and the calls for more money started coming almost daily. Added to this is that charities have unwisely chosen this time to start calling also. Breast cancer called three times last week – twice in one day! Now, I thank God for caller id, and don’t answer the phone unless it’s a friend or family member.

  10. Part of the reason for declining response rates is over-polling. With a dozen calls a day from political parties, pollsters, and telemarketers, some peoples’ willingness to participate declines. Sort of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle – the more you try to measure, the less reliable your results.

  11. Wellll, an oversimplification, but here goes.

    Polling can be broken down into two parts:

    -1- Do the sampling, and
    -2- get the appropriate weighting on the subgroups within the sample.

    Item -1- consists of categorizing those polled; are you male or female, what’s your age, what’s your 2011 income, what’s your race, etc.

    Item -2- consists of weighting the categories, and this is where using 2010 or 2008 (or some other) turnouts come into play.

    I’d say pollsters will easily get item -1- right, as it’s little more than bookkeeping and STAT 101. I’d say further that they very probably ^do^ get item -1- right — but it’s only the first step in the (oversimplified) two-step process.

    The issue is in item -2-, concerning which little more need be said that hasn’t already been said in this forum.

    There’s no way of knowing whether a late September poll for a November 6th election is correct; there’s nothing with which to compare, except for other polls. So we can say, as an example, Pew has Obama up by 8 percent, whereas the others have him up by 4 percent. Maybe Pew’s correct (in this example), and the others are wrong — but more fundamentally, who’s correct and who’s not?

    I saw something last night, that referred me back to a RealClearPolitics web page from 2008. Pew had Obama beating McCain by 14 percent two weeks out, and by 15 percent one week out. At election time, Pew had it about right, which is to say, what? — was it 6 or 7 percent?, in the only tally that counts and can be used to compare.

    Does anybody this side of sanity believe McCain closed that gap to that extent [or was there never such a yawning gap to begin with?] in the week before the election?? — especially when no other polls were registering that huge a difference?

    My point: what were the Pew folks smoking (and then suddenly sobered up)? *OR*, was there an agenda lurking behind item -2-?

    Okay, time to quit . . .

  12. Neo asked (3:07), “MJR: in those Pew polls from 2008, did the percentage of Democrats sampled change?”

    Neo,

    The party breakout of those sampled is not included in the published data (although, obviously, it’s out there ^somewhere^ if one digs deep enough). For what it’s worth, here’s the web page I referenced:

    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/general_election_mccain_vs_obama-225.html

    Many poll results from many numbers of weeks out.

  13. Neo: agree enthusiasm for Obama is down, etc. but, mid- term turn out is always lower than presidential year elections.
    Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics, Jay Cost at Weekly Standard, and Rasmussen Reports have the best unbiased info on polling.
    And of course the one that matters the most is on Nov 6.

  14. I think Presidential polling as currently implemented suffers from a serious case of over thinking and complexity.

    It makes about as much sense as figuring out how many Americans eat broccoli, by first weighing broccoli’s sales 4 years ago and deducing a portion of its current support must be negated or added to to arrive at an accurate figure. Then of course you have to know the race, gender and socio economic status of the broccoli eater to determine if he actually buys the broccoli he eats.

    WTF?

    How about just ask 1000 random people in polls on a repeatable basis, who they support for President or whether they eat broccoli and trust that the sheer mathematics of it makes all the other BS obsolete?

    Where am i wrong here?

  15. I’ve been polled a couple of times in past years, but recently I became so sick and tired of telemarketing calls that I started leaving my answering machine on all the time. (I still have a landline and no cell phone.)

    I get 4-5 calls per day, and most of them are hangups. I don’t know if they are pollsters or not. I would decline to participate in polls now. I believe that polls are more about molding public opinion than reflecting it.

  16. The things you learn on the internet. I’ve read more poll analysis in the last three weeks than I ever wanted or needed to. You’re not the only one who is analyzing the polls, neo.

    It is plain that polls can be a good way to gather information, but they can also be massaged in many different ways to give desired signals to voters. Thus, most of us don’t trust the polls, but like all humans, we want to be able to see into the future. The polls give the appearance of doing that. Is there anything about the way the game of politics is played in the U.S. that hasn’t been corrupted?

    Fifty-two years ago I didn’t really worry about whether Nixon or Kennedy won. I expected the country to continue pretty much as it had. Today is much different. Is it because I’m old and senile? Or have things really changed in those years. I think the latter.

  17. Kennedy ran as a conservative Democrat. In some (if not many) ways he managed to run to the right of Nixon. Nixon’s reputation was as an anticommunist, but Nixon himself was more of a go-along-to-get-along statist domestically and internationalist in foreign policy.

    I agree, the country was going to continue along the way it had been, regardless of who won in 1960.

    I think 2012 is mi-i-i-ighty different. (You ain’t senile.)

  18. Neo wrote: “there’s the problem of people calling themselves “independents” but who really are disaffected former members of a party”

    and likewise people who claim to be undecided who really have already decided. Dick Morris’ clarifying question is that being an “undecided” voter is like being asked to answer the question “Will you be married to the same spouse next year?” Any answer other than “Yes” is an equivocating statement about the voter’s relationship with any incumbent, and presumably why most “undecideds” historically break for the challenger.

  19. MJR @ 3:01 pm wrote:

    My point: what were the Pew folks smoking (and then suddenly sobered up)? *OR*, was there an agenda lurking behind item -2-?

    Remember pollsters earn there street cred by getting the correct results at election time, but they earn their income in the time before the election when they are constantly adjusting changing variables.

  20. SteveH @ 5:14:

    How about just ask 1000 random people in polls on a repeatable basis, who they support for President . . . ?

    Where am i wrong here?

    Because “random” is probably not truly random. All kinds of biases enter into whom to call. If you choose any one person from each of the 50 states, that is no longer random; you’re choosing one person per state. If you choose one person from every other page of the phone book, THAT isn’t truly random. In fact if you can insert the phrase “if I choose . . .” as the lead-in to any criterion, your choosing has negated a truly random effect.

  21. Like a lot of other things in our world some of the assumption on which polls are based almost certainly have changed. Like are polls even trying to be honest or are they postmodern? It was said at the time that the polls blew ’48 because they used the phone book and undersampled folks who didn’t have a phone – who it was assumed were more likely to vote for Truman. (Hey. maybe that was Dem spin 40s style?) Now every generation uses the phone differently. Stats and social science methods have gotten better, but I’m postmodern too and would have no trouble practicing alternate narratives with pollsters. Still people like Jay Cost, who has feet on the ground, seem to take polls seriously. Still, I have never doubted them before – particularly in aggregate like the RCP average – but this year I feel like the ground is changing underneath our feet. I wont be surprised if they get it very wrong.

  22. I believe that the most accurate polls are the internal, confidential polls done for the presidential candidates.

    We can’t see the results of these polls, but we can see where the candidates are campaigning.

    Obama is now campaigning in Ohio. Would he be wasting his time in Ohio if he was really seven points ahead of Romney?

  23. “”Because “random” is probably not truly random. All kinds of biases enter into whom to call.””
    T

    I respectfully disagree. If you pick 1000 names at random out of a random American phonebook and repeat that 10 times, you’ll get an amazingly accurate result. Do it 100 times and you’ll get an undeniably accurate result. Do it 1000 times……

    This isn’t rocket science. It’s just simple mathematics that doesn’t know what a bias is.

  24. Lorenz Gude,

    “. . . are polls even trying to be honest or are they postmodern?”

    I’d like to think it’s both. IMO Rasmussen and Gallup (even under DOJ Lawsuit threat?) are interested (IMO) in an accurate aork product, at least to a point. PPP, on the other hand, has shown definite willingness to falsify (not just “massage”) its polling; remember PPPoversampled Republicans by +9 in the wake of the Todd Aikins controversy to convince him to stay in the race. A +9 Republican sample? In what universe?

  25. The other point to make here is that just about all of the people who issue, analyze and study these various polls all exist within a bubble. The other night Brit Hume, whose opinion and insight I regard very highly admitted being dumbfounded as to just how Obama continued to “defy gravity” (his words) in the polls.

    The point here is that even someone that insightful and who tries to be very objective is, IMO, unaware that he can’t see the forest for the trees. Implicit in his remark is the belief that the polls reflect the reality on the ground.

    What if they don’t? What if the reality on the ground is really reflected by the results of unskewed pollsd.com and the Colorado study (i.e., Romney/Ryan leading and winning by ~53%)? IF this latter is true, then the answer to Hume’s gravity defying question is easy; Obama’s NOT defying gravity. He’s like a David Copperfield who makes it seem that he is levitating, but any onlooker knows it really can’t be done. This transforms Brit Humes’s question from the implied “How is he surviving all of the foreign and domesti meltdown so well?” to “how does he appear to float even though we know it is really not happening?”

    Neo’s table in her essay would seem to support this latter interpretation (polls possibly becoming less predictive). It is in this inability to recognize such a possibility that even astute observers like Brit Hume fail beause they don’t recognize their own bubble.

  26. Perhaps the most important quote from Jay Cost cited above (p.3):

    . . .a big “tell” here is that Obama cannot build any kind of a lead among independent voters. That suggests to me that his advantage is built entirely on Democratic enthusiasm, which right now is above its historical trends and clearly on a post-DNC bump. Nobody in the postwar era has won the presidency by carrying less than 49 percent of independents, and Obama is quite a ways below that mark, even if some polls show him at or above 50 percent nationwide and in the key swing states.

    If Jay Cost is correct, then this answers Brit Humes’ question about defying gravity. Obama is not. defying gravity, it is only a “David Copperfield effect” in which he temporarily (and under very limited conditions) appears to be in the lead.

  27. IMO the flaw is in the use of any weighing based on party affiliation. People will cross lines in voting for President as witnessed by Reagan democrats and Obama republicans. Which makes weighing a rather useless step that pretends such things don’t occur.

    The uncanny abscence of Obama bumper stickers this year tells anyone with common sense that a party affiliation model is of little or no use in this election.

  28. SteveH,

    You mention the “uncanny absence of Obama bumper stickers.”

    IMO this is another “tell” that indicates something is going on that is not represented (at least not yet) in the polls.

    I’ve already made th epoint that by itself it doesn’t mean very much, but when added to other like events that are occurring nationwide it implies that something is afoot.

  29. I’ve cooperated with phone pollsters a few times over the years.

    But the last one was about a week ago, to my cell phone, and I just flat out said no.

    First, I was pretty busy with work-related issues.

    Second, and more importantly, it was going to take 15 minutes plus to get through this one. On my cell phone.

    I laughed at the lady when she told me how long it would take, after she followed up with “…was now a good time?”

    I replied by asking if she knew that this was a cell number, and remarked that it was never going to be a good time. It was a cell call.

    Oh, all very politely, of course. I’m generally not overtly mean with people who are just trying to do their job. (With managers, I’m not nearly as forgiving.)

    But.

    Y’know? – I pay for my cell minutes during the day.

    What the hell is wrong with these morons.

  30. SteveH: but actually (I don’t have time to find the link right now, but I’ve seen this statistic a couple of times) party affiliation matters a great deal this time. Something like 90% or more of Republicans plan to vote for Romney, and something close to that of Democrats say they plan to vote for Obama.

  31. Neoneocon,

    Agreed. As for my point several threads ago, there is unconscious bias, conscious bias and downright misrepresentation (aka fraud). I would place that particular PPP poll in the last category.

  32. Low response rate is a huge issue because it depends on the willingness of the contact to complete the process. Not only is the number of questions important, but any perceived bias in the pollster can cause a non response. Given that most conservatives/tea party types consider pollsters (media sponsored) as part of the MSM, they will be reluctant to respond. My guess is this introduces a huge bias (10% or more?) towards the dems. Party affiliation may be a good marker for this.

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