Why Polls Tend to Undercount Democrats

[n2doc]

By Nate Cohn

Polls show that the Republicans have an advantage in the fight for control of the Senate. They lead in enough states to win control, and they have additional opportunities in North Carolina and New Hampshire to make up for potential upsets. As Election Day nears, Democratic hopes increasingly hinge on the possibility that the polls will simply prove wrong.

But that possibility is not far-fetched. The polls have generally underestimated Democrats in recent years, and there are reasons to think it could happen again.

In 2010, the polls underestimated the Democrats in every competitive Senate race by an average of 3.1 percentage points, based on data from The Huffington Post’s Pollster model. In 2012, pre-election polls underestimated President Obama in nine of the 10 battleground states by an average of 2 percentage points.

A couple of elections in which polls tilt slightly Republican aren’t enough to prove anything. The polls have erred before, only to prove fine over the longer term.

But the reasons to think that today’s polls underestimate Democrats are not based on just the last few years of results. They are also based on a fairly diverse set of methodological arguments, supported by extensive research, suggesting that many of today’s polls struggle to reach Democratic-leaning groups.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/upshot/why-polls-tend-to-undercount-democrats.html

[merrily]

1. IMO, a lot of public polls seek to set opinion, not simply measure it.

When it comes to elections, public polls seek to be self-fulfilling prophesies.

Can I prove that? No. Hence, I prefaced my comments with "IMO."

I think that, when the people who pay for polls want to know what is really happening, they do private polls (aka internal polling) and do not make the results public unless the results are ones they think would help them if the public learned of them.


Bottom line: there are more Democrats than Republicans. If a lot of people vote (and no one rigs), Democrats win.

If you care about election results, start way before the next election day. Get your state to go to paper ballots or at least machines that give the voter a paper verification. Make sure people in your area know what they have to do to vote. Help register people. Help people in nursing homes get absentee ballots, etc. Help people get registered.

Support causes and candidates of your choice with however many dollars you can and/or volunteer. If you can speak, you can phone bank from just about anywhere in the country for the candidate of your choice.

Meanwhile, for Tuesday, do what you can. Call your state Democratic Party and see what they need. Show up at the polls with signs, whatever. (Google to see what your state's law says about content of election signs, how far away from the balloting you must be, etc.) And, yes, vote, but I assume all DUers vote. ( If you care enough about politics to post, but not enough to vote, get a brain, moran!)

And make sure all your Republican friends know November 5 is election day.

[n2doc]

2. I agree

All the doom and gloom is there to suppress the vote. "Why vote if you're only gonna lose". Well, fuck that shit. GOTV.

[merrily]

3. "Why vote if you're only gonna lose".

Because people died so I could vote? Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War II.

If people could die so I can vote, I can haul myself (and others) to a polling place (the correct one, please) so I can vote.

[RGinNJ]

4. Don't polls rely on phone lines?

The only people I know with land line phones are people my parents age.

[Jim Lane]

6. Pollsters use various methods for addressing that.

Some polls use robo-calls placed to randomly selected numbers. This gets them the cell phone numbers (along with the pizza parlors and the inactive numbers, but robo-calling is cheap, hence the appeal).

Whether or not they call random numbers, I think all pollsters weight their samples. For example, even among landline users, you might reach fewer young people, if they're more likely to be at work or out having fun. (I'm stereotyping that older voters may be more likely to be at home to answer the phone, but this is just for illustration purposes.) If, in your pool of respondents, only 20% are young, but the electorate is 25% young, then you take the collective answers of the young respondents and multiply the numbers by 1.25 before computing your average.

The biggest difficulty for pollsters is figuring out who's in the electorate. If you manage to poll each demographic in exact proportion to its representation in the population, you still have to consider that some groups (such as the elderly) are more likely to vote than others.

Of course, the consequence of that issue is that just about any campaign, confronted with an unfavorable poll, will extol its GOTV operation and the enthusiasm of its supporters and volunteers, and will confidently explain that the pollster is missing the expansion of the electorate, and underestimating the turnout among that candidate's supporters.

[Calista241]

5. The Repubs said the same thing in 2012

And got their asses kicked.

[AtomicKitten]

7. polls can be manipulative

sometimes intended to suppress the vote which makes gotv so important

[kelliekat44]

8. I fear the media is giving the GOP enough juice to steal any close elections. nt

[Takket]

9. do we even need polls?

The alternative is, without polls telling people who they should vote for, that people actually have to research and make an informed choice of the candidates on their own.