EricF
Newbie
Posts: 3
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« on: August 21, 2012, 11:20:12 AM » |
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Hello.
My name is Eric Foster, President of Foster McCollum White & Associates. I am the lead pollster for our firm and our partnership with Baydoun Consulting and Douglas Fulmer & Associates and I wanted to address a couple of items that may be creating some confusion in our polling release.
First, our polling call list was weighted to the historical weights for age, gender, race, region and congressional district area. Our list is also comprised of voters with previous voting histories in Presidential, state and local elections. We include the moderate and low performance voters, but the call files do contain a significant portion of voters who have a likely history to participate. We do not call voters who have never participated in elections but are registered.
When we call through the list, we report the demographics of the respondents. We viewed the respondents to our data models for Florida and also considered the recent spike in Presidential election rates for the younger age groups and the representative portion that each group makes up of the registered voting base.
Our PVBA model reviews election statistics for age, gender, voting participation pattern, gender and socio-economic factors to determine the likely voting universe for an upcoming election. Our turnout models are based on state based historical turnout statistics provided by the county clerks and secretaries of state’s office for age, gender, party, ethnicity and voting method (early, absentee, poll location) instead of exit polls. We trust the reliability of the election stats from the clerks to give us value data reads on future elections. For example, our PVBA model for the Primary election in Wayne County Michigan (the largest voting county in Michigan.) was within 0.316% of the actual August 7, 2012 primary. We projected a total county turnout of 246,299 voters for all 43 communities including Detroit and actual turnout was 245,450 (after spoiled ballots were discounted for partisan contest).
The reason we take the historical data for a state is to give us a baseline for each precinct within the state and then build models up from there. We work to identify solid trends of turnout over a series of primary and general election contest so that we can remove outliers within turnout, age, gender, partisan (if collected) and ethnicity and determine the true participation base for that precinct. We can then project out for the variable election conditions (type, advertising impact, voter mobilization, outlier ballot issue impact, etc.) that allows us to determine our high moderate and low performing turnout and voter models.
For example, Michigan has a historical Presidential participation variance of 18.4% from the baseline voter model and has an -18.08% historical Gubernatorial participation variance. The swing is equal to 2.3 million moderate and low performance voters in Michigan for every given Presidential election who primarily leave the participation rolls for the Gubernatorial election. The difference between a Governor Snyder and Governor Bernero was the complete absence of the low performance voters and a 15% participation rate among moderate participation voters. If Bernero gets the participation rate of Granholm’s re-election in 2006 (85% moderate performing voters and 25% low participation voters) He defeats Snyder by 200,000 votes and wins 40 counties. This model allows us to help our political clients understand their election audience more clearly than exit polling. We then use it in assessing our polling models to help us gauge data quality and participation models.
Florida’s base of high performing voters for a presidential and gubernatorial election is significantly older. The moderate and low performance voting demographics skew heavy towards the younger age groups. The impact of changing the rules for early voting and a general excitement gap among younger voters could produce a result where a minimum of 70% of Florida’s voters are over the age of 51. It is a trend line that we will continue to monitor. Based on the respondent universes, we made the adjustment weight for the five underrepresented groups. Even though our model projects a lower turnout among primarily voters under 50, we weighted the voters ages 18 to 30 at 12% of the possible election universe and voters ages 31 to 50 at 15%, for a total of 27%. Re-elections for Democrats tend to draw fewer younger and Minority voters then their initial election, per our historical analysis models. We believe that these groups tend to feel that they accomplished the major task of placing their change agent candidate into office and those they should have built enough of a base to sustain themselves.
Our call file was reflective of the projected weight of Florida voters by race. The fact that the unweighted demographics were lower than expected reflects a possible enthusiasm gap for Democrats with these voting groups. Additionally, we found that Obama is trailing among Hispanic voters. Our methods are based in solid historical analytics versus exit polling. The interest of voting groups to participate must be taken into account and we report based on what the respondent identify as their selections to the questions.
Additional factors within our cross tabs relate to the shift in Obama’s fortunes in the state:
• White Women – He is losing both in Florida and in our Michigan poll
• People ages 31 to 50 – He won this group handily in 2008, but with the economic challenges and housing struggles, this group is more disenchanted then before.
• Florida Latino voters – the Cuba community seems to be coming home to the Republican party.
• People don’t understand Obama’s plan to Ryan’s plan – Paul Ryan has provided Mitt Romney with cover for lacking details about his economic and budget plans. People can at least understand and make sense of what Ryan wants to change about Government. President Obama’s plan still seems vague to most voters. It isn’t in clear easy to understand bullet points.
• Joe Biden – Biden is not helping Obama with white men, Catholics and seniors anymore. His foot in mouth syndrome takes the Obama campaign off message.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Eric Foster, President
Foster McCollum White & Associates
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