Another Errant Poll by Associated Press

What’s Wrong with the Polls?
A lot, but I can’t know precisely what without inside information, which I do not have. However, several polls were released yesterday that cannot exist statistically in the same world; meaning, they are so different that they all cannot be correct.

• The Associated Press/GFK Poll, released a couple of days ago, has Obama at 44 percent, McCain at 43 percent or a one point lead for Obama, with the race to close to call.
• The ABC News/Washington Post Poll, also released yesterday, has Obama at 54 percent, McCain at 43, or an 11 point lead.
• News week released on the 24th with a 12 point margin, and CBS/New York Times had a 13 point margin.
• The daily tracking polls continue to lag the one time polls, with margins of from 5 to 10 points, with an average about 7.5 points.

All of these polls, conducted largely at the same time, cannot be correct. The difference on the vote for Obama is over 10 percentage points, and that is so far outside of the confidence interval (or margin of error) that the difference cannot simply be a sampling difference.

The huge gap is between the Associated Press and the others, all of which are one time polls and not the tracking polls that I have already discussed, so it is not the call back problem I’ve discussed in the past.

How Does One Select When the Polls Are so Different?
There are a number of criteria that I use when I’m confronted with this problem. First, the other polls and the statewide polls all tend to support the major network polls – not quite by that big a margin, but much closer to it. The average spread among all the polls, tracking and one time, is 7.5 points, with Obama at 50, McCain at 43, and the remainder undecided.

Second, the state - wide polls, of which there are now a large number and growing daily, all support the view that Obama is headed toward a substantial victory, but short of a landslide, winning over 350 electoral votes and most of the close states.

Third, the ABC News/Washington Post Poll is conducted by people that I know pretty well, and trust that they do their job with knowledge of the problems of polling in America. GFK is a very large and reputable German firm, where their polling in the States is relatively new, and I do not know the people there well enough nor trust their experience.

Fourth, the AP interpretation for the supposed shift they find just doesn’t hold water at all. They claim that it is because of the debate, and that is totally impossible because Obama’s performance was preferred by a majority after the debate and the difference between the candidates was simply not great enough to have much of any impact on the vote.

The Interpretation is the News;
The news media is a very competitive business. The AP story, which runs counter to the prevailing results among other pollsters for the national media, makes news because it is different. The fact that it is probably bogus, based on an errant poll or improper weighting, will be forgotten in the ongoing rush of coverage of the campaign. The AP made news, and that seems to be all the matters. The poll, however poor, will be rebroadcast over the Internet to Republicans by the McCain Campaign to shore up their sagging optimism.

I know that this attitude is not the case with some of the other polls, but it is more common that you think. The “conventional wisdom” is not newsworthy. Polls that support other polls which got there first are not newsworthy. The AP story is newsworthy only because it is way out of alignment with the other polls, national and statewide, so it gets the top news story for the day.
They do not worry about “being right” because there is no day of reckoning until the final poll before the election, when all the polls are compared by the National Council of Public Polls against the actual results as reported for the states and nationally. Before the final poll, are errors and bad polling are simply forgotten.

My conclusion is as follows: the AP poll is probably just an errant poll, and the interpretation of an errant poll is flawed on the face of it. They certainly will never acknowledge their error, but the other polls are entirely independent and I do not believe that they will show convergence of the candidates at all.

The AP/GFK Poll created the “story” that “makes the news” for a day or two, that make marks success in the competitive business of journalism. The buzz about this poll will fade and it will be forgotten, just as AP will want it forgotten when other polls over the next week do not confirm their results. If the other polls trended toward their results, you can bet there would be a follow up story on “how AP got it right.”

OK – Where Do We Stand Today, October 25th?
I would offer the following as an interpretation of where I think this election stands at the moment:

• Senator Barack Obama enjoys at least a 10 point lead among those who have decided for whom they will vote.
• Governor Sarah Palin has turned out to be a real disaster, confirming one of my earlier blogs on her. She’s not competent to be President of the United States, no matter what the Republican apologists say, and the American voters have finally figured it out for themselves. The Conservatives, of course, will blame it first on the media, and later on McCain.
• The turnout is going to be substantial, exceeding 2004 by four to five points, mostly in new young voters and a surge of African-American voting all across the Country.
• The “surge” means that Democratic candidates for other offices who are close are going to win most offices in most places where they are competitive, resulting in a huge shift of office holding at the national and state level.
• The remaining “undecided” voters will probably split slightly for Obama, but many of them will not vote as in past elections.
• This is the beginning of a realigning period that will push up Democratic registrations and partisanship for a long time to come, weakening the Christian Coalition and the most conservative Republicans in general elections, but making them actually stronger in the nominating process.
• The Republican right wing will blame this election on McCain rather than on George Bush and his cronies, and we will see a “right wing theory” that exonerates the right wing of the Party and their apologists in the National Media.

The election is becoming amusing, frankly. Politics is such an entirely disgusting business, but necessary. The electorate in America moves through huge cycles that approximate generations, and the biggest “earthquakes” alter the landscape whenever one party captures the young decisively. These are termed “realignments.”

When a political party, this time the Republicans, oversteps the moral and ideological boundaries of the electorate, making it badly out of touch with the young voters under 35, in this case the Administration veering far to the right on religion, foreign policy, environmental issues, domestic spying, and a host of other issues, precisely at the time that younger voters are moving toward the left; the American electoral system corrects and it is now in the process of correcting.

The Republicans of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and FOX Broadcasting are in the very real process of losing the new generation in politics by a margin of more than two to one, and that new generation is where the future lies, at least for the foreseeable future. They have also ridiculed their opposition for nearly a decade, heaping filth on Democratic candidates in "last minute" discoveries that are fraudulant, but which cannot easily be refuted in the final couple of weeks of the campaign.

They made the bed that most Republicans embraced with great enthusiasm, often tinged with intolerance, arrogance and bellicose self-righteousness, and now they get to sleep in it for a long time to come. George (Herbert Hoover) Bush gets to rest for eternity on the dung heap of history, but Hoover genuinely was a finer and more competent man. Frankly, it serves them right and I feel no sympathy at all for them.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black