Polls, Polls, Polls (Can you take my polls?)

Sep 29, 2004 · 2 minute read

The campaign has moved on from Swift boats and National Guard records; now it’s an all-out assault on the most heinous of all evils: the polling companies (death to Joey Lucas!).

Specifically, Democrats are fuming about Gallup's polling for the past three months, which has been consistently showing a large lead for Bush over Kerry, contradicting the results from almost all of the other polling companies. Some are questioning Gallup's reliance on what it calls The Likely Voter Model; this method involves asking seven questions of the pollee (no, I know it's not a real word), and throws out answers by people who score below a certain threshold (supposedly, you need either six or seven correct answers to be included in Gallup's sample). And this model creates a split in the sample, indicating that Republican voters will outnumber Democrat voters by six to eight percentage points (the rest of Bush's lead comes from independent voters). But, historically, voters who identify themselves as Democrats outnumber the Republicans at the actual polls. In fact, if the Gallup data is true, then the change in vote would be almost equal to the shift towards FDR in the 1930s. It could happen, but none of the other polls are predicting such a huge shift. If Gallup's LV data is re-weighted to 2000's turnout, then the race narrows to Bush 48-47 Kerry. (Also, the high lead masks that Kerry is leading smong independent voters)

Here's MoveOn.org's advert from yesterday's New York Times.