To: puborectalis who wrote (683186 ) 11/5/2012 12:43:23 PM From: Brumar89 Read Replies (2) | Respond to Yawn. The scenarios: 5-Gallup electorate poll is right bob 2012 Above the Fold Nate Silver New York Times prognosticator assured us that elections were the sum of their parts. It’s just that he focused on the wrong parts: instead of looking at state races, he should have watched the underlying issues and demographics that were pulling Obama down. The clues were out there: 13% of the President’s 2008 voters in one comprehensive poll defected undertow support Dan McLoughlin “If you averaged Obama’s standing in all the internals, you’d capture a profile of a candidate that looks an awful lot like a whole lot of people who have gone down to defeat in the past, and nearly nobody who has won.” Meanwhile, in what should have sent up alarm bells across the land, Barack Obama’s campaign was diminished to arguing that it would win on the strength of its get-out-the-vote efforts with youth and minorities. Second to mentioning Harry Truman, this is the last refuge of the losing side. Almost never is depending on sporadic voters a recipe for success. Even in 2008, Obama’s leads with those demographics only padded the margin he had already won because of his eight point lead with independents. Falling precipitously from his earlier indy numbers, he and his acolytes calamity lay ahead The last two times that a Republican challenged a Democratic incumbent (1996 and 1980) the polls overestimated Democratic support by 5.1 and 7.2 points. And ‘96 was not even in bad economic times . The biggest gap was not one of gender, but between the opinions of those who voted and those who did not. Those most likely to vote–whites, property owners, investor class, church-goers, married, and the elderly–despised where Obama had taken the country by margins of sometimes more than 20 points. Singles, minorities, and the youth still backed the President, but with diminished support and turnout from four years before .only nine percent of the electorate wished to talk to pollst ers, projecting who that was likely to be, became a fool’s errand. But statisticians are not above being fooled. A look at any one of those demographics–even the ones that still supported him–would have showed the President’s downward shift from four years before. But it was too easy to weight bad samples toward a guesstimate of a turnout model instead. Only Gallup They went from a 12-point advantage in party identification among likely voters in 2008, to a one-point disadvantage in just four years .early voter polling early voter numbers massive plunge OK, that is too optimistic, I think. OR, NV, NM, NJ, ME, MI - surely they'll go Democrat ... won't they? We'll know soon. What I'd really love to see is for Obama to lose IL. bobkrumm.com
