Many Republican Polls Are Measuring a Unicorn Electorate
For the GOP this year, the polls are more important than ever—and they're positing an electorate that never existed.
Jul 29, 2015 5:01 AM EDT
Ken Goldstein
Recent elections around the world have not been kind to pollsters. In contests in Israel and Britain, and in a referendum in Scotland, pre-election polls all showed tight races that ended up being, well, not so tight. Although American pollsters have not had to explain errors of such magnitude, there were some danger signs in the last two elections in the United States, with some pollsters doing much better than others. On average, pre-election polls underestimated the magnitude of Obama’s victory in 2012 and of Republican victories in the 2014 midterms. There’s a variety of possible culprits for these discrepancies. One clearly is tied to the challenge in correctly measuring both the size and the composition of the electorate. There’s some evidence that the polls that underestimated Obama’s margin in 2012 erred by underestimating the non-white and Democratic share of the electorate. The problem in 2014, on the other hand, was a kind of mirror image. Many polls erred by counting drop-off voters—individuals who voted in presidential elections, but not in midterms—who happen to be more Democratic.
In an article earlier in the week, I discussed whether Iowa and New Hampshire polls were getting the electorate right. Given the prominence and importance of national primary polls in the Republican contest for deciding who is in and who is out of the first GOP presidential debate, and also creating the self-fulfilling impression of momentum, are these national polls getting the “who votes” question right? Are they correctly gauging the size and composition of their supposed target population, the Republican primary electorate?
The first problem with trying to measure the attitudes of a target population of the national Republican primary electorate is that such an electorate does not actually exist in the quite the same way that other electorates do. The presidential nominating process is a dynamic one, with primaries and caucuses that could theoretically play out over a five-month period. The size and shape of the electorate in each state will be determined by whether the race is still competitive when it reaches a particular state and by the number of candidates still running. Put another way, probably only Republican caucus goers in Iowa and, perhaps, primary voters in New Hampshire, will have the chance to choose between the current crop of candidates. And that’s making the outlandish assumption that none of the candidates drop out in the next few months.
What percentage of registered votes or how many people do these surveys assume will take part in the GOP nominating process? Let’s look at the recent Fox News poll. The survey sampled 1,019 registered voters and was conducted by a Republican firm, Shaw and Company, and a Democratic one, Anderson Robinson Research, using high-quality methods such as live interviewers and a standard dual frame design including both landline and cell phones. The results on a variety of questions such as whether voters approve of President Obama’s job performance are perfectly in line with all the other public polls that have recently been released.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-29/many-gop-polls-are-measuring-a-unicorn-electorate
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