CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013, OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WHY MANY POLLS WERE WRONG: NEW VOTERS ACTUALLY TURNED OUT”
Think back to last fall’s election, when many analysts –
especially Republicans – were amazed that President Obama won the popular vote
by almost 4 percent over Republican Mitt Romney, a 51-47 percent margin that
was fully three percent higher than the final average of nine major polls, from
Gallup to Public Policy Polling.
Even the most accurate of those surveys – the
ABC/Washington Post poll and Pew Research – understated the Obama margin by a
full percentage point.
The
explanation has now arrived, courtesy of California Secretary of State Debra
Bowen. It is that the vast majority of newly registered voters actually cast
ballots. That’s something to think about as new poll begin to appear, now that
the 2014 election season has informally begun.
The turnout among new voters confounded many pollsters, who
often change their survey models in the final weeks before a major election to
concentrate on what they call “likely voters.”
When some polls stuck to the registered model late last
September and into early October, Republicans complained loudly of alleged bias
among pollsters, saying that polls based on registered voters overstated the
Democratic vote and undershot the number of Republicans who would turn out. For
everyone knows, they said, that higher percentages of Republican registrants
than Democrats come out for elections.
They even set up a Web site titled “Unskewedpolls.com”
which took poll results and changed them to give Romney an eight-point edge one
month before Election Day. (After the election, Unskewedpolls.com headlined that
it was foiled by “revenge and racism.”)
Historically, the Republican presumptions are correct. They
are more correct, though, in primary elections and special elections than in
presidential votes, where the historical average turnout in California – which
represents a decent cross-section of American voters – runs to about 79 percent
of all registered voters, about 30 percent more than typically vote in
primaries.
But something different went on last fall, and it suggests
that pollsters will need to change.
Two factors altered things markedly: heavy registration of
new Latino voters (26 percent more registered to vote last year than four years
earlier) and online voter registration.
No major polling organization figured those new voters into
sampling calculations when they began, late in the election cycle, to separate
likely voters from the general pool of registrants.
Registrants have usually been judged as likely voters based
on their prior turnout records and their levels of enthusiasm about current
candidates.
But information gathered by Bowen, California’s top
election official, suggests that new registrants in 2012 were more likely to
vote than the average veteran voter.
In Orange County, for example, 82 percent of those who
registered online after it became possible in mid-September actually voted.
That’s a spectacular showing for persons who are not longtime, habitual voters
that pollsters would usually classify as “likely.” Plus, 81 percent of new
registrants who used the old-fashioned paper methods to sign up actually turned
out. Equally spectacular and unexpected by the so-called experts. And much
better than the overall performance of all registrants, only 67 percent of whom
cast ballots.
In Santa Barbara County, the numbers were exactly equal
among those newly signed up online and on paper, at 86 percent compared with an
81 percent overall turnout.
Those numbers were pretty much matched all around the
state. And since almost two-thirds of those signing up for the first time last
year registered Democratic, it turns out the polls were skewed to make the
Republican turnout look significantly better than it actually was, not the
other way around, as GOP activists and officials charged. So much for
Unskewedpolls.com.
In a post-election talk at the Sacramento Press Club,
California Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo, whose surveys turned out far
more accurately than many of his national counterparts’, observed that the
results square with human nature: If someone makes the effort to register in
the waning weeks of a campaign, chances, it’s because he or she is deeply committed
to some candidate or issue.
Polls disregarding those individuals, as every national
measure of so-called likely voters did last year, will always be wrong, always
behind the latest developments.
Which means that pollsters, like everyone else, must adjust
to cope with today’s brave new online world – or else they will become
obsolete.
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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The
Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the
Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover
fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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