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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (669901)	8/29/2012 1:39:08 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1579791

Crosstabs are not available. However, one was a Democrat polling organization and the other set out its methodology in detail. You can choose to believe whatever you want to. The Democratic pollster Baydoun/Foster got Romney+4. Mitchell Research called it a tie. The last poll Mitchell did was two weeks earlier and it got Obama+5. I'd say these facts give these polls some credibility. First of all its questionable whether Baydoun is a democratic pollster.....its a local pollster and not enough is known about them. And we don't know who ordered the poll. Secondly both polls are outliers. Outliers typically don't hold up in the long run. Romney is going to take MI and that is a game changer because it makes OH (also tied) nonessential for Romney. We'll see. Now for some detailed analysis of the two polls: In Michigan, there are two local polling firms in particular that have shown poor numbers for Mr. Obama. One is Mitchell Research, which just published a poll showing a tie there. The other is Foster McCollum White Baydoun, which had Mr. Romney ahead by four points in its last survey. Foster McCollum White Baydoun actually does survey one state apart from Michigan: it released a poll of Florida last week. In that survey, it showed Mr. Romney ahead by almost 15 points — perhaps the biggest outlier we’ve seen in any individual poll so far this year. As I mentioned when that Florida poll came out, this firm anticipates a big decline in participation among groups like younger voters that are ordinarily inclined to support Democratic candidates. The initial news release of the Florida poll appeared to show that the firm anticipated that just 11 percent of Florida voters would be under age 50 — in contrast to about half the Florida electorate in 2008, according to exit polls. A principal of the firm, Eric Foster, later wrote me to say that the news release had been incomplete, and voters under the age of 50 had actually been weighted to make up 27 percent of the poll instead. That’s still an implausibly large drop-off, in my view, from 2008. It may be because the Foster McCollum White Baydoun likely-voter model looks for voters who, as they described it, participated in “odd year municipal and county elections” — where turnout is tiny as compared with what it will be on Nov. 6. In any event, this method seems likely to produce extremely Republican-leaning results — whether applied to Michigan, to Florida or to any other state. At least Foster McCollum White Baydoun have a methodology of some kind, even if it isn’t one that I would recommend. What Mitchell Research is doing in Michigan is a little more troubling. The head of Mitchell Research, Steve Mitchell, wrote a long memo accompanying his poll release on Monday. In that poll, he weighted the survey to assume that African-Americans would make up only 8 percent of Michigan’s turnout. By contrast, black voters represented 12 percent of the turnout in Michigan in 2008 according to exit polls, and 14 percent according to another source, the Current Population Survey. Blacks also made up 13 percent of Michigan’s vote in 2004 and 11 percent in 2000, according to exit polls. African-American participation is sometimes lower in midterm election years, but blacks were 12 percent of Michigan’s electorate in 2006, the exit poll reported that year. (There was no exit polling in Michigan in 2010.) So why only 8 percent this year? Mr. Mitchell wrote that he simply doesn’t believe the exit polls: “African-American participation in this poll is 8%, not 12%, which is the percentage of the population but not likely voters. I do not believe blacks represented 12% of the vote in 2008 and I don’t believe they will in 2012. Having polled this state for 26 years, blacks have represented about 7%-8% of all votes cast in every statewide race. At best, it went to 9% four years ago. It will not reach that level this year.” What is the evidence for Mr. Mitchell’s claim? He didn’t present any of it in the memo. The exit polls certainly aren’t perfect, but they’ve been consistent from year to year and also seem to agree with Census Bureau data. (Another fact that Mr. Mitchell cites — that African-Americans represent 12 percent of the overall population in Michigan — is also slightly incorrect; they made up 14 percent of Michigan’s population as of 2011, according to the Census Bureau.) Perhaps Mr. Mitchell means that only about 8 percent of respondents are black when he takes his surveys. But response rates to political surveys have been much lower among African-Americans for many years. The problems may be worse in a survey, like Mr. Mitchell’s, that does not call cellphone voters, since African-Americans are more likely to rely on cellphones in lieu of landline phones. It is precisely because of this problem that essentially all polling firms do weight by race, usually calibrating their numbers based on Census Bureau or exit poll data. Mr. Mitchell, however, seems to have his own ideas about what Michigan’s electorate will look like. There is a certain amount of art in political polling, but I’ve never heard of a pollster treating the demographic makeup of a state as essentially a matter of opinion. Mr. Mitchell’s demographic weights account for much of the difference between his polls and those of the other firms that are active in Michigan; a decrease in the African-American vote from 12 percent to 8 percent would harm Mr. Obama’s numbers by a net of about four percentage points there. If you have some reason to discount the Mitchell Research and Foster McCollum White Baydoun polls, it is much harder to make the case that the presidential and Senate races in Michigan are a “tossup,” as some other Web sites have characterized it. To be clear, our forecast model doesn’t “know” all of this detail about the Mitchell Research and Foster McCollum White Baydoun polls. It discounts the results from these firms simply because that’s what it’s programmed to do whenever it encounters a local polling firm whose results diverge substantially from the consensus; this method works to Mr. Obama’s benefit in some states, and Mr. Romney’s in others. But my personal view is that the model is making the right inference in the case of Michigan, and that the methodological choices that these polls have made are hard to defend. Perhaps 90 or 95 percent of the time, taking a simple average of the polls will work just about as well as the more complicated FiveThirtyEight method. But this is rare instance where taking all the polls at face value may be a mistake, and the additional checks-and-balances the FiveThirtyEight method applies are worth the trouble. fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com