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Barone: When it comes to polls, readers
beware
Michael
Barone is one of the few observers of the political scene
whom I still respect. That doesn't mean he's always right, it means I
think he earnestly tries to get it right. Here
he weighs in on the "controversy over whether the polls are
accurate."
This point has been made in the past, but I've not seen it articulated
this election cycle.
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... today
the percentage of households without land-line phones is increasing.
Under federal law, cellphone numbers have to be hand-dialed rather than
dialed by computer, as land-line numbers are now even when live
interviewers ask the questions.
Cellphone-only
individuals tend to be younger and more Democratic than land-line
owners. Most pollsters are conducting a set number of interviews with
cellphone-only households.
But they can
only guess at what percentage of the electorate they'll constitute.
Oversample them and you'll get overly Democratic results.
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Barone sees some indication that the blasé Democrat base is more
motivated since their convention, but there are so many variables (like
"discrepancies between exit polls and actual results were in precincts
where the interviewers were female graduate students) that it's all a
crap-shoot.
Rush Limbaugh of course goes at it his own
way. And, more succinctly:
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"Voter
registration in [Ohio] is down by 490,000 people from four years ago.
Of that reduction, 44% is in Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County,
where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one. ... An
August study by the left-leaning think tank Third Way showed that the
Democratic voter registration decline in eight key swing states
outnumbered the Republican decline by a 10-to-one ratio.
"In Florida, Democratic registration is down 4.9%, in Iowa down 9.5%.
And," get this: In New Hampshire, where this NBC poll says Obama is
pulling away now, Democrat voter registration is down 19.7%. (New
Castrati impression) "So, Mr. Limbaugh? What does that have to do with
it?" I'll tell you what it has to do with it, Mr. New
Castrati. It means that oversampling of Democrats in these polls
is ridiculous.
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