Nate Silver: Michigan is NOT a toss-up

[WI_DEM]

In this update, I’m going to focus on the polling we’ve seen in one particular state, Michigan, where there is an exceptionally wide spread between firms showing relatively strong numbers for Barack Obama, and those which have good numbers for Mitt Romney instead.

The national polling firms, like Rasmussen Reports, Public Policy Polling, and Marist College, show Mr. Obama ahead by an average of seven points in Michigan. By contrast, the Michigan-only pollsters show him ahead by only two points.

The advantage of the national pollsters is that we have a good sense for how to interpret their results. Some are Democratic-leaning and some are Republican-leaning — but whatever “house effect” they tend to show, it is usually fairly consistent from state to state.

The head of Mitchell Research, Steve Mitchell, wrote a long memo accompanying his poll release on Monday. In that poll, he weighted the survey to assume that African-Americans would make up only 8 percent of Michigan’s turnout. By contrast, black voters represented 12 percent of the turnout in Michigan in 2008 according to exit polls, and 14 percent according to another source, the Current Population Survey. Blacks also made up 13 percent of Michigan’s vote in 2004 and 11 percent in 2000, according to exit polls. African-American participation is sometimes lower in midterm election years, but blacks were 12 percent of Michigan’s electorate in 2006, the exit poll reported that year. (There was no exit polling in Michigan in 2010.)

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

[JaneQPublic]

1. There seems to be a higher bar for Obama...

...to earn lead status in a state than for Romney.

They should establish the exact number of points a candidate needs to lead in a "poll of polls" before being awarded lead status in a previously identified toss-up state and apply that standard to all states.

[MrScorpio]

2. I'd say the bar is set higher for the President for everything than it is for any Republican

We always have to clear a higher bar, while they're stepping over theirs.

It's the old double standard.

[jeff47]

3. It's more the model than the numbers

The pollsters are producing results of "likely voters" - the mix of people who they think will show up on election day.

If you decide that 8% of the voters will be African-American, then Romney does better.
If you decide that 12% of the voters will be African-American, than Obama does better.

So the pollster can manipulate the result of the poll by manipulating their model of who's gonna show up. So even if you make some hard-and-fast line for "lead status", the pollsters can still tweak the results.

The conspiracy theory about Rassmusen is they start with a Republican-favored model, and then tweak the model towards reality when it gets close to the election. That way they look like they "got it right" by being close to the election results, but they can give Republicans a big perception boost in the months leading up to the election. Since they don't release the relevant data to refute this, I have no idea if it's true or not.

[JaneQPublic]

4. Very interesting.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and insight.

[NashvilleLefty]

5. As far as Rasmussen is concerned, they admitted

several years ago that they weighted towards Republicans - their justification was that there are more Republicans than Democrats.

Ever since that admission, I would look at their polls and adjust it by 5 points in favor of the Democratic candidate and it almost always matched the average of other polls.

And remember this: in the 2004 election Rasmussen was the only pollster that was close to the results - despite the many reported problems with that election (read "stolen&quot .

[roguevalley]

6. I want mutt to lose utah