WaPo/ABC Poll: Obama 49-Romney 46

[The Vorlon]

If you throw this poll into the mix, we get, give or take fractions of a %, a tied race.


Partisan divisions in this survey, Democrats-Republicans-independents, are 33-22-37 percent
among the general population, 34-25-36 percent among registered voters and 35-26-33 percent
among likely voters.

Partisan divisions in the 2008 exit poll were 39-32-29 percent

The whole issue of partisan "weighting" is more complex than it is made out to be by many.

Firstly, a great many folks who "on the first pass" identify as independents will, if pushed, say they lean to one party or the other. 

This poll did not "push" the independents for a soft party affiliation.  Republicans "typically" pick up a few % on the party ID question if you "push" the independents a bit.

My general rule of thumb is to look at the exit polls for 2004 and 2008.

In 2004 it was pretty much a dead heat GOP to Dems, in 2008 the Dems had about a 7% advantage.

This 0 to D+7 range seems to me to be the "rational" playing field.  Clearly the nation is less enthusiastic than the were in 2008 for Obama, but on the other side of the coin, historically the GOP and Dems being even is also pretty rare. - I think this common sense approach pretty much sets the boundries of a reasonable party ID.

[The Vorlon]

It's nice to see a non-tracking national poll for a change. Hopefully there will be more to come in the next day or two.

I suspect everybody and their dog will have one out in the next two days as pre-debate snapshots.

[The Vorlon]

Sad that they had to jack the sample from D+3 to D+9 in order to still eek out an Obama lead.  Romney +3

Not this sh!t again!

the basic question is do you believe that Democrats are going to turn out 9 pts higher than Republicans in exit polls this time around?

Lots of former Republicans are now identifying as conservatives.

A helpful graph to this effect:

http://www.people-press.org/2012/06/01/trend-in-party-identification-1939-2012/

So what you are saying is that since PEW showed partisan ID advantages of 3% and 11% in 2004 and 2008 respectively for the Dems, while the actualy exit poll results were 0% and 7%, that PEW pulls 3 or 4% to the Dem side?

So based upon this, PEW current 8% advantage is actually 4 or 5% then?

[The Vorlon]

Exit polls are polls, and as such they're not much more "actual" than the Pew numbers. Pew is already polling thousands of people, so their MoE is about as low as you can get. And exit polls and the Pew surveys ask partisan ID questions in slightly different ways, and at different points in the surveys, yadda yadda, so I wouldn't lose a whole lot of sleep over the finer details.

Actually, PEW and Exit polls are different..

The exit polls are reweighted after the fact to exactly match the results of a real election.

They are not perfect, but after they have been reweighed, they are awfully darn close.

But returning to PEW...

PEW said a D +11 in 2008, and now PEW says D +8, ie a 3% R improvement

The trend line identified by Pew is the gap has narrowed by about 3% since 2008, so this would suggest 2012 exit polls of Dem +45or so? based on a 3% change from 2008, as per the PEW trendline?