This is the only town-hall style debate where audience members are allowed to ask questions, so some are wondering how the audience members were selected.
Mark Blumenthal has the answer. Participants were selected with the help of Gallup based on the pollster’s criteria for “likely voters” and with the intent of finding people who mirrored Nashville’s undecided voter population. Gallup’s Frank Newport explains what that means for the final result:
This is a population of uncommitted voters who are in some ways not representative of the total population. But given that stipulation, we recruit randomly from the Nashville metropolitan area, 13 counties, and then we do seek some balance, by gender, by age and race, but overall they are intended to reflect uncommitted voters in this general area rather than all voters in the area or all voters across the country.
Politically they’re more independent, although that’s not one of the criteria we use here, but they tend not to be minorities, because we know that African Americans in this election, most elections are fairly strongly committed to the Democratic candidate. They tend not, for example, to be evangelical white Christians, because those types of people are committed to the Republican candidate. We have young people represented, but you know, young people generally are more strongly committed to the Democratic candidate so that pool of uncommitted voters tends to be kind of, more middle of the road, generally more white, more average in terms of education and in terms of age.
I don’t think this is a major problem, although an audience more representative of the entire population might produce different questions. Just wanted to add a little info for all the political junkies before we get started.