Expect more polling error in 2014We asked pollsters if they expected more or less error in Senate election polls — the difference between what the latest pre-election polls show and actual vote margins — this year than two years ago. Ten said they expected a higher average error, while just five predicted lower error.
No one cited low response rates as a reason to expect poll error. Perhaps that’s because pollsters have managed to maintain strong national-election records despite declining response rates.
Instead, the top reason cited was the difficulty of forecasting turnout in midterm elections, without a presidential race to bring voters to the polls. And the crucial midterms are in states that don’t usually have close races. “The key Senate battlegrounds this year are also places like Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, etc., where most of the public pollsters don’t have a ton of experience,” one pollster said. “It’s not the Ohios and Pennsylvanias and Floridas of the world that we’re all used to polling a lot.”
Some also cited an increase in unproven polling techniques by pollsters. “Many are attempting to use Internet surveys with untested methodologies to determine likely voters,” said Darrel Rowland, the Columbus Dispatch’s public affairs editor, who conducts the newspaper’s Dispatch Poll. “As often happens to pioneers, there could be some grim results.”
Another pollster echoed a lament we’ve made here: “There are far too few quality polls in 2014 and that is saying something, given what we saw in 2012.”
One pollster who predicted lower error this time around said lower turnout makes it easier to predict the vote of those who do show up on Election Day. Another, Gregg Durham of We Ask America, said that pollsters have gotten better at weighting the responses of the people they interview, to better represent the views of people who don’t respond.
One pollster who expected higher error had an even gloomier forecast for the industry — expect polling to be dead by 2030. “Like chickens whose heads have been severed but who do not yet realize they are dead, pollsters continue to torment respondents by barging into respondents’ lives unannounced. At present course and speed, pollsters will have obsoleted themselves before Nate Silver turns 50.4 When that day arrives, pollsters will have no one to blame but themselves.”
It’s hard to poll all over the mapMy colleague Nate Silver wrote recently that Alaska is hard to poll. We asked pollsters where they had the hardest time, and collectively they mentioned 14 states and Washington, D.C., by name, plus several broad regions (New England, “urban” states, southern states, states with small population sizes). The states tying for the highest number of mentions were New York and Hawaii. Two also cited Alaska. One reason is common to both of the non-Lower 48 states: “Hard-to-reach populations,” said John Anzalone of Anzalone Liszt Grove Research.
Hawaii’s ethnic makeup in particular makes it hard to model using national databases. “Japanese ancestry voters and Chinese ancestry voters have very different voting patterns and are both key voting blocs, but are not differentiated in the databases,” said Seth Rosenthal of Merriman River Group. “Also, voter databases tend to mislabel Filipinos — another important voting block in Hawaii — as ‘Hispanic.’ “
Two pollsters said New York had extremely low response rates, with one identifying New York City residents as particularly unresponsive. California, Florida, and Washington, D.C., all also got multiple votes. All were mentioned by pollster J. Ann Selzer, of Selzer & Company, as difficult because residents move in and out of the states and take their phone numbers with them, making them hard to find by area code.
Some pollsters also named Nevada as challenging, saying Nevadan Hispanics and blacks who answer polls tend to vote more conservatively than their counterparts who don’t. Tom Jensen, of Public Policy Polling, said that many Las Vegas residents keep unusual work schedules that make them hard to track down. Another pollster added, “Too much happens under the radar for opinion pollsters to pick up. … Nobody gets elections right in Nevada.”
Pollsters had various strategies for handling low response rates among blacks and Hispanics. For instance, six said they typically overweight black respondents, and eight said the same about Hispanic respondents, to account for lower response rates in those groups. And 11 said they oversample blacks or Hispanics for polls specifically covering racial issues.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/pollsters-predict-greater-polling-error-in-midterm-elections
