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The Tarrance Group's Ed Goeas expressed concerns about the following "Swizzle Sticks" in the 9/14 Last Call! of National Journal:
1.) "Memo to Battleground pollsters: if you are going to do a 'turnout model' in your tracking poll, why not use a more realistic percentage. 70%? Come on! Since 1960, the highest turnout we've hit is 63%."
2.) "Memo to news orgs.: the supposed 50-44% Bush lead in the Battleground poll is a 'projection' based on a turnout model, not the poll's result. Today's Battleground RESULT is Bush 41-38%."
Goeas writes:
"While I always appreciate press attention of the Battleground survey, I am also very proud of the record Celinda Lake and I have developed over the last nine years, and feel that your comments need to be corrected. On the first point you make reference to and mock the seventy percent (70%) turnout model and point to the fact that turnout has not been over sixty-three percent (63%) since 1960. While that is true of Voting Age Population (VAP), what we are dealing with in our surveys is turnout of registered voters. In the case of registered voters, turnout has averaged around seventy percent (70%) over the last several decades. As a point In fact, in the 1992 presidential election 105,750,424 of 137,848,178 registered voters (or 76.7%) went to the polls. In the 1996 election 96,456,345 of 146,211,960 registered voters (or 65.97%) voted. As far as your comments to news organizations about the 'projection' of the turnout model, Celinda and I certainly agree the media focus should be on the overall numbers until the final weeks of the election. However, the term 'projection' in not accurate. What we use is a matrix that creates a model of 'likely' presidential voters using the components of age, education, intensity to vote, and intensity for the presidential candidates. In effect, it is another form of 'screening' for likely voters using four component parts rather that using a single screening question. More to the point, it was this 'likely' presidential model or screening that resulted in the Battleground poll being the most accurate poll of both the 1992 and 1996 presidential election's" -- Ed Goeas (e-mail, 9/14).
posted by aaron at 12:21 AM on September 16, 2000
First, Goeas and Lake asked 1,000 registered, likely voters the following question: "If the election for President were being held today, and you had to make a choice, for whom would you probably vote?" The pollsters named no names; respondents had to come up with Bush and Gore on their own. In the most recent "unaided ballot" -- through Wednesday, September 13 -- Bush is ahead with 38 percent to Gore's 33 percent. Ralph Nader has two percent, and Pat Buchanan commands just one percent (a variety of even smaller candidates account for another two percent). The remaining 24 percent told pollsters they were unsure how they would vote.
And they are the key. Many analysts seem to think that they are a large mass of voters who will eventually choose one candidate or the other, but, according to Goeas, most of them won't vote at all. "Right now there are a lot of younger voters who are saying they're definitely going to vote," Goeas says. "But a lot of them will be non-voters." To try to determine which of today's "likely voters" will actually cast a ballot, Goeas and Lake work with something called a "turnout model," a formula that gives extra weight to those undecided voters who are statistically most likely to vote. The pollsters take four factors into account: 1) how definite respondents are in saying they will vote; 2) how strongly they favor a particular candidate; 3) their age; and 4) their education level. It's all fairly complicated, but in short, the older, more educated, and surer the respondent is, the more likely he or she is to actually vote.
Given all that, the Battleground people put together a turnout model from their polling data. They came up with the following results, as of September 12. If the election were held that day, Bush would have received 50 percent of the vote and Gore would have gotten 44 percent, with Nader at four percent and Buchanan at one percent.
The numbers are strikingly different from most of those being reported in newspapers and on television. And they're particularly encouraging for Republicans because the survey was done after Bush had suffered two straight weeks of negative reporting. But the results should be viewed with great caution; the election is still a long way off, and a million things could change before November 7. Because of that, Goeas says he and Lake will not publish the turnout model results again until a couple of weeks before Election Day, when daily fluctuations will take on a critical importance. In the meantime, he simply stresses that the race is very close.
posted by aaron at 12:28 AM on September 16, 2000
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posted by johnb at 10:58 AM on September 14, 2000