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Polling Perplexity
Almost every day, I check the Presidential polls at RealClearPolitics, and then I shake my head. Ordinarily, there is some variation. This year, however, the differential is dramatic. Right now, for example, CNN/ORC has Clinton ahead by five points. Rasmussen Reports has Trump ahead by two. IBD/TIPP has it all tied up. The ABC News Tracking Poll has Hillary ahead by a whopping twelve, and the LA Times Tracking Poll (not listed by RealClearPolitics) has her ahead by one point.
There may be some method to this madness. I can think of two alternative explanations. The first is that the pollsters do not know what they are doing; the second is that some fancy footwork is going on.
It is easy to see why the pollsters might be baffled. When they do a poll, they ordinarily take a sample, and then they make adjustments after comparing their sample with the population (i.e., either the general population or the voting population). They want their sample to be representative of women and men; the various ethnic groups; Catholics, Protestants of various stripes, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and the like; Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; and so forth and so on. So they weight the sample in light of these categories to make sure that it is representative. In ordinary circumstances, this is tolerably easy to do. When the world is in flux, a lot of guesswork is involved. This year there will be Republicans voting for Hillary Clinton and Democrats voting for Donald Trump. They all note this, and they try to adjust. Polling is not a science. It is an art. So the differential could be due to the fact that some of the pollsters are — in all honesty — making the wrong assumptions.
The other possibility is that we are on the receiving end of a massive con — and that the polling results are designed to encourage or discourage voting on the part of the supporters of one candidate or the other.
Here, Wikileaks may be of use for, as Tyler Durden at Zerohedge informs us, the recent dump of emails shows that John Podesta received a message some time ago from Atlas Reports, detailing how to produce polls of use to the Clinton campaign by way of oversampling certain groups, and he points out that the recent polls by Reuters, Pravda-on-the-Potomac, and, yes, ABC News have greatly oversampled Democrats.
The name of the game could be to subvert the Republicans and depress voting for their candidates by conveying to the general public that the election is over, that Trump has already lost, and that there is no point in turning out. Would such respected outfits as CNN. Reuters, Pravda-on-the-Hudson, and ABC News be party to such a maneuver?
Would these and other news outlets work closely in tandem with the Clinton campaign to get the Republicans to nominate Donald Trump, to protect Hillary Clinton from interrogation, and to trash Trump after he got the nomination?
Of course, not. That would be unAmerican. Right?
This year, I have no idea where the corruption stops. We can trust the FBI. Right?
Published in General
IBD/TIPP – Trump +2
ABC – Clinton +12
Fourteen point difference! Nothing to see here, move on, move on!
Here’s another pollster? with a prediction.
I’m not sure the language will pass the Ricochet test. MA only.
But well worth listening to to help explain what might be happening behind the curtain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pADHLsECWxY
The poll perplex is attracting attention elsewhere as well.
It’s a useful conversation but it’s hard to argue with conventional wisdom and Nate Silver.
Professor Helmut Norpoth seems ready to do just that.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/5181232293001/professor-stands-by-prediction-that-trump-will-win/?#sp=show-clips
Nate Silver and Five Thirty Eight use a very elaborate prediction model.
Here is a user’s guide to the 538 prediction model.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-users-guide-to-fivethirtyeights-2016-general-election-forecast/
Here’s an excerpt.
There are five adjustments, listed here in the order in which the model applies them. (The trend line and house effects adjustments are generally the most important ones.)
I think that Trump will lose by about 6.5 percentage points. I think Evan McMullin will win Utah. I think Hillary Clinton will win all states Barack Obama won in 2012, including close contests in Iowa and Ohio. I also think Hillary Clinton will win North Carolina and Arizona.
Hopefully Republicans will learn that the paranoid talk radio mantra of blaming everything on the Republican establishment backfired. The GOP selected an outsider and the outsider got crushed by his own boorish behavior and his New York Leftist clap trap. Republican imported a Leftist Democrat into their party and the Leftist Democrat stunk up the joint.
Methinks we pay too much attention to polls.
Every election there’s hand-wringing about the polls, the accuracy, oversampling/undersampling, rigging, etc, etc. Then, immediately after the election there’s discussion and debate about which poll was more accurate, who had the right sample size, etc, etc.
Personally, I don’t pay any attention to the polls. They are all operating on the premise of predicting the unknown based on the unknown. I’m not denying the science of polling or the hard work that some pollsters do to get their data right, but none of them know the key data points necessary to predict the future. Those key data points can’t be known except until they become known shortly after election day.
What is the source of this information? The RCP average page for 2012 (here) does not support this. It does not report a LAT poll after August. IBD was not notably accurate.
Obama beat Romney by 3.9%. The final RCP poll average was Obama +0.7%. This is entirely inconsistent with the idea that the pollsters systematically favor the Democrat.
There doesn’t seem to be enough data available to draw a reasonable conclusion about which poll was “most accurate.” I did a quick analysis from the RCP numbers, and based on averages of the reported polls, National Journal was the “most accurate,” with an average of Obama +4. But this is based on three polls, as follows:
These gave an average that turned out to be accurate, but this result looks more like luck to me.
Of the polls released in early November 2012, the most accurate were Pew and ABC/Wash. Post, both at Obama +3. Two had Obama +1 (IBD and NBC/WSJ); three had a tie (Politico, CNN, Monmouth); two had Romney +1 (Rasmussen and Gallup).
Fortunately this isn’t true. Polling is an art as well as a science. We know that certain factors like partisan & ideological affiliation, age, ethnicity, and past voting behavior, correlate with a voter’s preference on a candidate/issue. Most voters aren’t as unpredictable as you suggest.
That being said, campaigns are fought at the margins, where the undecided voters are, and in battleground states. Many moving parts in a race can distort a poll. People should take them at a face value and not over-emphasize or ignore them.
In a normal year, I think you are right, but this year I know several dems who could conceivably stay home if they think its in the bag. They can’t stand Trump, but don’t really want to vote for Hillary either.
Most polls ask whether you intend to vote, and who for. But this year is so different, because so many people who don’t want to vote for either candidate will likely knuckle under and wind up voting anyway, despite their disgust at both candidates. I suspect a lot of people were asked whether they were going to vote, and they said no – but what they meant (unintentionally) was really that they didn’t want to. Those people – and I assume most of them would eventually vote for Trump – would have been excluded from the poll on the grounds that they’d said they weren’t going to vote.
I wouldn’t be surprised by anything this year, but if you told me that many Trump voters had been excluded from polls because they’d told pollsters they weren’t going to vote, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.
They want polls to show a big win so that fraud is less likely to be questioned. If voters don’t turn up, they still vote their name.
If you give four different pollsters the same exact data, you will get four different poll results. Everybody has their own models and methods – otherwise, why have all these different polling companies?
As for RCP averages, I wouldn’t necessarily trust them to be accurate. I did a quick analysis of these last primaries, and the RCP average didn’t turn out so hot. I figured 4 points off was reasonable, and only 6/27 averages for the Democrat and 7/23 for the Republican primaries (they don’t have an average for states with caucuses, nor even for all the states with primaries) were within that range. And they were off in all ways, sometimes significantly. Only two states were within 4 points of correct for both parties’ primaries: Connecticut and Florida.
I would pay attention to what the campaigns are actually doing (or at least the Clinton campaign, since they seem to know what they are doing):
Reason #1 Polls May Be Wrong…
First, as ZeroHedge, Rush Limbaugh and others have noted, many of these major polls are assuming that there will be seven to nine percent more Democrat voters than Republican voters (Reuters is showing a 14-percent margin for Democrats!), when the average over the past eight presidential elections is less than four percent.
Reason #2 Polls May Be Wrong…
The second reason the polls may be wrong is demographic oversampling. Because Democrats have such a huge advantage with, for example, African Americans, even a small oversampling of African Americans in the poll could sway the results by two to four percent overall.
The polls generally do not publish the ethnic/demographic breakdown of those being polled, but we now know from the Wikileaks Podesta emails that Democrats have been engaged in demographic oversampling.
Nate Silver’s 538 web site has another interesting feature. It’s called What Would It Take to Turn Blue States to Red.
The 5 main categories are:
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-swing-the-election/
You can adjust the percentage of the vote for the candidates and you can adjust the turnout percentage. As you make your changes, you will see states switch from Blue to Red or Red to Blue. You can look at the bottom of the page to see how each state breaks down in terms of voting population. Washington state, Oregon, Minnesota, Michigan, Vermont has very few Hispanic voters. So, moving more Hispanics into Clinton’s camp impacts Colorado and Arizona more than those other states.
Not everything is a Democratic conspiracy against the right.
Brian Ward at comment #8 explains that oversampling is common practice and why it’s done.
Here’s another explanation from Pew Research:
And when the same survey goes on to describe or make estimates about the national population, “[the] members in the oversampled group are weighted to their actual proportion in the population.”
Yeah, I think you’re probably right about that. He does quite a lot of analysis, but has a pretty good reputation. It’s a good point that if there was some sort of underlying collusion going on, his models might not catch it. But that is an extremely unlikely underlying presumption.
See, I don’t think that’s true. If you are inaccurate, then nobody will be able to cite you for much of anything. Even those people whose bidding you want to do won’t find your services particularly useful. I suppose the graft would need to occur at the very thin margins. Same goes for much voter fraud. It only matters if the election is close. I don’t think Donald is making it close, but if we find ourselves in a Bush/Gore situation, we’re in the margin of fraud.
Given 2012, it is somewhat ironic to be discussing “why the polls are wrong” on a Paul Rahe thread. While I found his hunches very comforting with regards to Romney, I think we were all equally disappointed with the outcome. The lesson I learned was that polling is more accurate than we would like to believe. The country is not conservative right now. We should be fighting as hard as we can for school choice, having lots of kids, and reading them Adam Smith.
Unfortunately, even the Donald Trump contingent does not believe in traditional conservative economics or foreign policy. That means we need to be having a lot more of that sort of conversation on the pages of Ricochet (and elsewhere) as soon as all the emotion of the election has died down. Tariffs either are or are not disastrous for our economy, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with individuals or patriotism or national pride. Once we get conservatives thinking clearly about these things, we can move on to national elections.
If you explain what this is, it would help. Foreign policy used to mean, “If you would have peace, prepare for war.” It didn’t mention sabre rattling from weakness. That used to be called foolhardiness.
Economics ? Corporate tax rate ?
Let me put it bluntly.
Trump’s trade ideas are similar to that of Herbert Hoover: Place an economic embargo on the United States so that it is difficult for Americans to purchase goods and services produced in other countries. So, if a cure for cancer is found in Brazil, Trump would prevent US citizens from purchasing the cure because it would cause pharmaceutical jobs to move overseas.
Clinton is probably better than Trump when it comes to trade policy because she probably realizes that NAFTA was good for Canada, the United States and Mexico. Preventing Americans from purchasing oil from Canada or red potatoes from Mexico is economic malpractice. But malpractice is Trump’s middle name.
Despite Trump’s objections, we should enter into a free trade agreement with Great Britain and we should go forward with the TPP. And, no. We should not have Trump renegotiate NAFTA. Trump’s views would give us Hoover’s results all over again: Another great depression.
Nate Silver’s 538 web site just put up a podcast discussing the state of the race, the data on early voting in various states.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/elections-podcast-countdown-12-days/
I think Harry Enten’s comments about Nevada are the most interesting.