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| quote: | | In 3 of the last 4 presidential elections (including the last one), Gallup's final RV (registered voter) reading was actually closer to the final result than their final LV (likely voter) reading! |
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Here is a summary of the case against Gallup's LV data:
...Gallup decides who likely voters are based on 7 questions about their interest in voting, attention to the campaign and knowledge about how to vote (e.g., where their polling place is located). The interested/attentive/knowledgeable voters are designated “likely� and the rest are thrown out of the sample. But as a campaign progresses, the level of interest among voters tends to change, particularly among those with partisan inclinations whose interest level will rise when their party seems to be mobilized and doing well and fall when it is not. Because of this, partisans of the mobilized party (lately, Republicans) tend to be screened into the likely voter sample and partisans of the demobilized party (lately, Democrats) tend to get screened out. But tomorrow, of course, the Democrats could surge, in which case their partisans may be the ones over-represented in likely voter samples.
That suggests the uncomfortable possibility that observed changes in the sentiments of “likely voters� represent not actual changes in voter sentiment, but rather changes in the composition of likely voter samples as political enthusiasm waxes and wanes among the different parties’ supporters. And that is exactly what political scientists Robert Erikson, Costas Panagopoulos, and Christopher Wlezien find in their analysis of Gallup's 2000 RV/LV data in their forthcoming paper, “Likely (and Unlikely) Voters and the Assessment of Campaign Dynamics� in Public Opinion Quarterly: “shifts in voter classification as likely or unlikely account for more observed change in the preferences of likely voters than do actual changes in voters’ candidate preferences.�
That means that, instead of giving you a better picture of voter sentiment and how it is changing than conventional registered voter data, likely voter data give you a worse one since true changes in voter sentiment are swamped by changes in who is classified as a likely voter.
...And then there's this: the LV data haven't been working so well lately even right before the actual election. In 3 of the last 4 presidential elections (including the last one), Gallup's final RV reading was actually closer to the final result than their final LV reading!
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| quote: | | 1. The latest Gallup Poll has Bush ahead of Kerry by 52-45 percent among likely voters but by only 49-48 percent among registered voters. Based on the numbers of registered and likely voters in their sample, this means that Gallup is projecting that 89 percent of Bush supporters will vote but only 79 percent of Kerry supporters will vote. That seems unrealistic. It is way out of line with data from the American National Election Studies on turnout among registered Dems and Republicans in recent elections. For the past three presidential elections, the turnout gap between Republicans and Democrats has averaged 3 percentage points and was never larger than 4 percentage points. The smallest gap was in 1992 (1 point), the election with the highest overall turnout. Assuming that 2004 will be another relatively high turnout election, we should probably expect a relatively small turnout gap, similar to 1992. |
| quote: | | But if the party identification distribution is fairly stable and tends to change rather slowly, why would polls suddenly be turning up unrealistically high numbers of Republican identifiers? The best explanation, in my view, is that when the political situation jazzes up supporters of one party, they are more likely to want to participate in a public opinion telephone poll and express their views. An increased rate of interview acceptance by that party's supporters would then skew the sample toward that party without the underlying distribution having changed very much, if at all. |
the rest of this article continues to reinforce the position that there is something fishy with the normalization techniques used nowadays. i'd prefer not to cut and paste the entire thing.
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. Like I said if these people fill out on the questionaires that they are definetely going to vote or whatever the question is, it's somewhat difficult to discount that voter because your overall GOP voter turnout number isn't kosher with what it was in the last election. As for new voter registration, keep in mind that Gallup polls only contact participants with telephones. Perhaps many of these new registrants are 18-24 year olds or whoever and they do not have or really use their telephones? 
