Another day and another round of polling descends upon us, and once again many are left with squinting eyes and wrinkled noses while looking at the results produced by Zogby in New York. In the same three day period when ABC/Post, Gallup, Newsweek, Rasmussen and Research 2000 all show Obama with leads varying from eight to twelve points and expanding, John Zogby shows a race that is at a 5.3% margin and closing. The only other one near that range seems to be the highly conservative Investors Business Daily which has it at four. How do we arrive at such divergent results?
One interesting clue comes from a somewhat-unrelated piece by Nate Silver at 538. He is examining various polling models, and raises one critical question about Zogby specifically.
By contrast, you probably aren’t likely to see John Zogby offer a coherent explanation of why he his poll contains as many Republicans as Democrats in a political environment where Democrats have a 10-point generic ballot advantage.
The point he is making is that registration levels change on a year by year basis. It seems that Zogby is still building their cross-tabs on samples where they force an equal number of Republicans and Democrats even when sampling in an area where Democratic registrations have been resurgent, such as we’ve seen in Pennsylvania this year. Once you reach the desired number of Democrats to poll, if you keep throwing out Democrats until you achieve a comparable number of Republicans, it would seem to follow that you’d get a much closer spread.
The linked piece from Nate Silver was part of a larger discussion he had with another pollster who contacted him to defend their new polling predictive models for likely voters. As Rick Moran already helpfully pointed out to us in “The GOP and the Dead Parrot Scenario,” some pollsters, such as the one here, are actually worried that they are underpolling Obama this year.
Most pollsters have built their models through careful study by focusing on both intentions and past behaviors, which has worked well in the past. But in 2008 we are all concerned about how all of the new voters, who will likely be disproportionately young and minority voters favoring Senator Obama, will affect those models. No one knows for sure and this requires everyone to make untested assumptions about what is going to happen.
Still, none of this has stopped eternal optimists such as Hugh Hewitt and Saul Anuzis from quoting IBD and Zogby as they whistle past the graveyard. Other conservatives, of course, aren’t see the picture as being quite as rosy. As my friend Ron Beasley pointed out this weekend in his analysis of some gloom and doom saying from David Frum, it is sometimes darkest just before the picture goes totally black.
In these last days before the vote, Republicans need to face some strategic realities. Our resources are limited, and our message is failing. We cannot fight on all fronts. We are cannibalizing races that we must win and probably can win in order to help a national campaign that is almost certainly lost.
Is it just me, or did anyone else read that and have a brief mental flash on to Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings? He’s in the mines of Moria reading the blood soaked final entry from a book prised from the skeletal hands of a dead dwarf.
“Hey, Gandalf! Do you hear that booming sound coming from caverns below us? I think it’s… it’s.. the Democrats!
“They are coming. They have taken the bridge… and the second hall. We have barred the gates… but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes. We cannot get out. A shadow moves in the dark. We cannot get out. They are coming…“
Yes, my Republican friends. It’s the Democrats. And I’m afraid they are indeed coming.