YouGov/Economist

Yougov seems to have forgotten about whites.

Which is why they're over two-thirds of this poll, I'm sure.

Should be about 5-6% more than they are in the poll, no?

They should be higher I would agree. What we don't have though is the actually data for how each racial group said they would vote. So we can't realy bump up numbers because we don't have them. For those who like this sort of thing, the sample is R+1

Here's an explanation as to what YouGov do.

http://today.yougov.com/news/2012/10/23/obama-stays-ahead-just/

''In the case of YouGov’s weekly nationwide polls for The Economist, we apply the same overall principle as in Britain. That is, we draw on baseline information in order to ensure consistency in the political profiles of our samples. Specifically we know the party ID of most panel members last December, and also how they voted in 2008 and/or 2010, from what they told us at the time. (What’s important is not that the month we collected a mass of ID data happened to be last December; rather, the point is that we have a common baseline for anchoring this year’s polls.) This doesn’t remove all risk of sampling variation – sadly, we have been unable to repeal the laws of probability – but it does reduce the risk of a rogue poll in which our sample is demographically fine but politically skewed.

That is not all. YouGov has also conducted two large-scale surveys in 25 states for CBS News, one before the first TV debate and one afterwards. These covered all the battleground states, plus the largest states such as California, Texas and New York. The key point is that this was a true panel study. We questioned the same people twice. This allowed us to investigate what change, if any, took place at the level of individual voters, NOT by comparing results from different samples. Any change in the numbers in such panel studies reflects real changes by real voters. And our overall sample was much larger than normal. We polled almost 33,000 electors in September, and reinterviewed more than 25,000 of them after the first debate.

The message from this study was clear. The Romney bounce was tiny. Overall, YouGov found just a one-point narrowing of Obama’s lead.

Or rather, those were the published figures. Had we adjusted the raw data only for demographics, and treated the two polls as separate samples then we would have reported a five-point shift, from an Obama lead of 4% in these 25 states to a Romney lead of 1%.

However, when we compared the intentions of the people who completed both surveys, we found hardly any net movement. Those who backed Obama in September divided as follows after the first debate: Obama 93%, Romney 3%, undecided 4%. Romney’s September supporters divided: Obama 3%, Romney 94%, undecided 3%. (The modest numbers of those who did not take sides in September, but who did this month divided evenly between the two men.)

So we have a discrepancy between what we reported – only a tiny net movement after the first debate – with what we would have reported had we acted like most other most other pollsters.

Here’s the reason. Those who supported Romney in September were more likely than Obama supporters to respond to our follow-up survey after the first debate. The recontact rate was 80% for Romney supporters and 74% for Obama supporters. That’s why the raw numbers – and the demographically-only adjusted numbers – for the post-debate poll appeared to tilt the whole contest towards Romney. Had we reported these, we would have been in line with most other pollsters.

We didn’t because we take one side in a specific argument about political polling. It is whether party ID is stable or not in the short term. At YouGov, we believe – and experiments from time to time support this – that party ID changes only slowly. Other companies argue that it can change sharply in response to specific events, such as a successful party convention, or a TV debate in which one candidate emerges as the clear winner (as Romney did in the first debate)."

	Welcome, Guest. Please login or register. Did you miss your activation email? April 30, 2024, 09:21:22 AM

News: Election Simulator 2.0 Released. Senate/Gubernatorial maps, proportional electoral votes, and more - Read more