WSJ: Al Hunt- What if the Polls are Wrong?

[liveoaktx]

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB109536730469420041,00.html?mod=todays%5Ffree%5Ffeature

(Who's he married to again?)

But there is reason to suspect those criteria are outdated, especially in an election where both sides say the intensity level is much higher than four years ago and get-out-the-vote organizations are considerably better than ever -- few people on Nov. 2 will be in the dark on where the voting polls are.

"A formula that made sense years ago may not recognize all the changes in society," notes Mr. Hart. "It gives more credence to past behavior and too little to current interest."

"For low-turnout elections those old models work well," suggests Bill McInturff, a Republican, and the other WSJ/NBC News pollster. "But in today's presidential election those models tend to a little older, a little more white, a little more affluent and a little more Republican voters. They may miss some of the extraordinary activity going on in African-American and Latino communities."

The registered-likely voters dichotomy also is evident in some of Gallup's state surveys including last week's Ohio results." Among registered voters in the Buckeye State, Bush-Cheney had a 48%-to- 47% edge, a dead heat. Among likely voters, however, this poll had the Republicans up 52%-44%; that garnered all the attention, followed by a spate of stories suggesting this key battleground state was moving to the president.

[lancdem]

1. Nice article. Thanks for posting this

I found Bill McInturff's comments interesting about nonwhites being underepresented.

A lot of DUers also have speculated the polls are undereporting first-time voters, many of whom will vote for Kerry.

[DaveinMD]

10. that is exactly the problem in the polling

that caused everyone to be wrong about Gore's strength in 2000.

[jayfish]

2. Al Hunt,...

Mark Shields and (sometimes) Lou Dobbs... the only reason to watch CNN anymore.

Jay

[maine_raptor]

3. Agreed, those 3 plus

Carville and Begala

Plus ever once in a while, it's fun to watch ol' Douchebag explode.

[gasperc]

6. we'll have to see if Rove's new paridymn emerges

namely, that the key to elections is to energize the base to maximize base voter turnout thereby winning by swamping the opposition's turnout.

evidence points to a large pool of self identified partisan voters that rarely or never vote ie only 55% of eligible voters voted in the last election. However, as mydd pointed out, a large if not huge number, I think well over 70% of registered voters DO or DID vote. so the pool of new or undecided voters may not be as large as one may think. we shall see won't we.

[oasis]

4. Actually there is no "what if" to it. The polls are owned and operated by

the media. They get their crumbs from the table (access to the WH) by Karl Rove's direction.

[desertalien]

5. Al Hunt is married to

Judy Woodruff!

[tblue37]

8. And it was Hunt and Woodruff, with their 4-yr-old child,

who were subjected to Bush's drunken, profanity-laced threats while they were at dinner in a retaurant, simply because Bush didn't like something Hunt had written. This drunken outburst occurred, interestingly enough, after Bush was supposed to have stopped drinking altogether.

And yet Judy Woodruff is as abject a media whore as anyone might wish. She spins pro-Bush all the time.

[oasis]

11. The restaurant scene may have been equivalent to a "horsehead in the bed"

as far as Judy was concerned.

[oasis]

9. Welcome to DU desertalien. Great name.

[Catfight]

7. I think the Repugs have a back up EXCUSE when Bush loses by

a landslide they will all say, "the polls didn't really reflect how badly the country wanted change." Americans will be heard very loudly November 2nd! Bush is NOT on the right track.

[Chili]

12. I found out last night about polling...

...first hand. My first night of phone banking. I got through to real people only 25% of the time, and of those few live bodies, only 3 were willing to tell me who they were voting for (all Kerry - yay! - and one of them would only tell me after pressing me hard for who, exactly, I was calling for). The others would only say "undecided," but frankly, I only believe one of them. The other "undecideds" were, in my opinion, clearly reluctant to say who they were voting for, NOT undecided. The large majority of calls went into answering machines. So what does that say? It says (1) that national polls using phone calls as their methodology are already off the mark before they even dial the first number - there's no way to fairly determine such a small percentage of responses when so many people are just not home (and the not-at-homes were predominantly in younger age groups, too), and (2) that undecided number, I'll bet, is way inflated.