Polling problems of today
Michael Barone summarizes a number of things we have been talking about here for years:
In 2002, 75 million people voted. In 2004, 122 million did. My hunch is that people who identify themselves as independents are substantially less likely to vote this year than people who identify as Republicans or Democrats — which would be good news for Republicans, since independents give Bush low job ratings. Another hunch is that the Republican turnout apparatus, with which the Democrats haven’t yet caught up, will boost Republican turnout as it did in 2004, and that the resulting electorate will be more evenly divided in party identification than the electorates shown in most of the public polls.
Serious pollsters concede that there are some problems with polling. Americans have fewer landline phones than they used to, and the random digit dialing most pollsters use does not include cell-phone numbers. Larger and larger percentages of those called are declining to be interviewed.
Interviewers can inject bias in the results. The late Warren Mitofsky, who conducted the 2004 NEP exit poll, went back and found that the greatest difference between actual results in exit poll precincts and the reports phoned in to NEP came where the interviewers were female graduate students — and almost all the discrepancies favored the Democrats.
Leading, of course, to Bob Shrum’s most awful professional moment. Democrat rout? Republicans hanging on by the skin of their teeth? Something in between? Here’s a point to consider: even the polls that will be proved to be correct in eight days might have only guessed right this one time.
UPDATE
One of the themes advanced by pollsters in this election cycle is the greater enthusiasm of Democrats to vote. We just remembered that, according to the polls, that was also the case in 2004, with 37% of Democrats, versus 27% of Republicans, saying 2004 was “the most important election” of their lives.