Bush Takes Back The Lead As 'Primary Effect' Wanes

[12th Doctor]

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Gallup is still very good.  They used to be all alone at the top, and now there are a bunch of other highly skilled firms, but yes.. Gallup is still excellent.

Where Gallup has really lost their lustre is that the tracking poll they ran in 2000 was a disaster.

Gallup signed a contact with CNN/USAToday to do a tracking poll and agreed to design the thing to be hair trigger responsive to even very slight changes.  Componding this fact was that the sample size Gallup used was very small (+/- 180 people a day or so) so on top of a wildly over sensitive turnout model, they also had huge amounts of plain old statistical noise that resulteds from the samll sample size.

The result was utterly predictable - the 2000 Gallup tracking poll had wild, crazy, absurd swings - Candidates would go from down 10 to up 12 in like 4 days...

The (highly) abreviated version of what is wrong with the CNN?Gallup tracking polls is as follows.

1) We know that turnout is usually a tad over 50% - if you simply ask if people are going to vote, about 80% or so say they will... This is where the mythical "likely voter" comes in.

2) There are two basic approaches to sorting the "likely" voter from the "unlikely" voter.  

One way is to base your judgement on past behavior - Did you vote in the last presidential election, Did you vote for Governor, Do you know where you polling place is, etc...  Based on these replies a score of some kind is assigned to each respondant, and then an assupmtion is made as to likely turnout.  For example, if you ASSUME turnout to be 50%, you take the 50% of the respondants who had the highest "scores" and you count them in your result.

Gallup does things (or at least did in 2000) things a bit different - they asked, in addition to the questions above, a bunch of attitude questions.. How exited are you about the race, how closely have you been paying attentiion, etc.  Based on how "excited" a voter was they were then deemed to be likely, or not...

This method wildly skewed the pool of people deemed likely to vote, and produced just crazy numbers...

To use a sports anaology, lets say you wanted to do a poll on if more people were fans of the Green Bay Packers or the Miami Dolphins.  In reality, this ratio would be relaitively fixed, and is highly unlikely to change by 20% in two days.

Suppose now that the Packers just played the Dolphins and won 38-6.  If we did a poll among "likely" Football fans and you were a Dolphin fan and I asked you "How excited are you about the dolphins" - fewer Dolphin fans are likely to answer that, at that moment, they were excited...  Similarly, more Packer fans would likely be excites as their team had just won..  The net effect is that you would get a wildly inflated score amoung "likely" football fans in this poll..

As a consequence, depending on the weeks events, the number of "likely" voters on either side bounced around like a yo-yo and gave rather crazy results...

Now if you are many a week away from the election, this methodology works just fine, but 8 months, or even 2 months out... it produces gibberish...

I notices that the last CNN/UsaToday poll arbitrarily padded their turnout to 50%, so the MAY have changed their methodology for 2004 (I hope so!)

This is the highly abbreviated answer about how "good" gallup is.

Good analysis.  Another thing that I would say that you have to consider when you do a poll amoung 'likely voters' is that a lot of people who say they will vote don't know voting laws.  Some of them think that you can just show-up at the poll and vote.  They don't understand that you have to be registered.  Ex. My cousin lives in Reading.  Her husband works for the 911 call station down there and he knows the guy responsible for organizing elections down there.  He said that during that on election day in 2000 there were thousands of people who showed-up at the polls thinking that they could just vote.  He and many others had to explain to them that they couldn't vote because they weren't registered.  Many people started throwing fits about this and one black woman even grabed the list and riped it up and stated screeming about how racist the poll monitors were and who racist a country the United States is and how the racist Bush was going to win the election.  (In hind sight, she may have been a plant from the Dems, but who knows).

[zachman]

Why don't we just require that you can prove you are 18+? When you leave the polls you get your hand stamped with a code, which will stay for one day.

[12th Doctor]

Why don't we just require that you can prove you are 18+? When you leave the polls you get your hand stamped with a code, which will stay for one day.

Yeah, that wouldn't get abused.

[angus]

Voters in this state wisely turned down same-day voter registration by a 60-40 margin in November 2002.  You can try to run that up the flagpole in your state.  Who knows?

[classical liberal]

If the state WAN is good, same day couldn't be abused.  There is some cool new biotech coming out that could help the idea of a one-day lasting stamp.

[minionofmidas]

Just automatically register all citizen residents.
Then you don't need to worry about stamping people's hands, they do that in some parts of the third world btw.

[classical liberal]

That would work as well.

[angus]

Sidebar:
A Field Poll conducted in early September found that 36 percent of likely voters supported the plan, while 42 percent opposed it. Twenty-two percent of voters were undecided.  Compare to results above.

[JFK-II]

As a Kerry supporter i am not worried about this poll. This is all apart of the GOPers coordinated strategy of trying to paint an image of Bush being ahead. The truth is the race is very close but Kerry is still in the lead. Rasmussen just released a poll today showing Kerry AHEAD in Florida.