Sep 18 2012
2012 Will Be Another Tea Party/Libertarian Election, Like 2010
The Political Industrial Complex (made up of Politicians, their Handlers, Lobbyists, the News Media, etc) have not realized that the 2012 election is going to be Part 2 of the 2010 shellacking of the government-knows-best, government-only-solutions party (i.e., Dem0crats). The fact is you cannot screw up indefinitely, throwing away people’s money and destroying their hard earned wealth, without repercussions. Voters will fire failures.
And this view of the 2012 election cycle has just been confirmed by a new Gallup poll:
A majority of Americans (54%) continue to believe the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses, although that is down from the record high of 61% earlier this summer. About four in 10 Americans (39%) say the government should do more to solve the nation’s problems.
That is a 54-39% “cooked in” deficit for the Democrats right now. At the national level that spells another Carter/Mondale route. At the State level, that could have (if not for lose-lips Akin) lead to a GOP Senate. And here is the kicker, Independents are solidly against the party of big government:
More than six in 10 independents agree that the government is doing too much.
Here this split is 2 to 1 against (62-29%). There is no way Dem GOTV can fight that kind of defection at the center. None.
Worse yet for the Dems, this is a poll of adults, not likely voters – which means the voting will be worse..
I still maintain that the 2010 insurgent voter is so fed up with government (and the two parties) they are rejecting the pollsters, and therefore represent a very large voter poll not being sampled. If I am right, then today’s tight polls are a fiction, and Obama is the lamest of lame ducks.
I sure hope your assessment is correct AJ.
I hope yor right AJ, but I do not see those numbers reflected in the current general Presidential polls.
Obama should be 10 points behind!
My only question to you AJ is the same the question I ask myself. “Are you projecting?” If I am projecting then I see myself in more other people around me. If the likely voter is like me then Obama is toast. But perhaps the likely voter is not the libertarian, independent that me myself am. And perhaps they are not you yourself are. What do you think? Are you projecting?
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Patriiticduo,
Am I projecting or wearing rose-colored glasses? Who knows.
My views were over confident in 2008, but spot on in 2010. I feel I correctly predicted 2000 (though not how close it would be) and 2004.
But I do think the pollsters risk misreading their data *IF* the Tea Party/Libertarian voters have resisted being measured. Polls REQUIRE equal participation by all sides to reflect the general population.
So we shall see.
Lets face it, Romney and the GOP handlers are incompetent and afraid. If he wins it will be by accident. If you want to see how to win watch the Democrats. They are tough and smart.
The 53% er’s need to have a tax revolt and make the 47% wake up!
I’ve been over to the Progressive sites .. the Tea Party is dead, they tell me over and over again. They say that the “fat cats” who funded the whole thing have moved on.
Let’s not break the spell just yet.
The media only cover “Romney screwups” but the “leaks” have moved the campaigns sideways and I’m sure that Team Obama isn’t too happy with where they wandered.
It’s back on the economy and taxes.
Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a member of the Democratic leadership, said on Monday that her party is prepared to allow all of the Bush-era tax cuts to expire and for automatic spending cuts to kick in unless Republicans give up their opposition to tax increases on the wealthy.
Many Democrats are running from this line, but Pelosi has been saying for months that she and the Democratic leadership want all of the Bush tax cuts repealed.
Neo: “I’ve been over to the Progressive sites .. the Tea Party is dead, they tell me over and over again. They say that the “fat cats” who funded the whole thing have moved on.”
Let’s hope they think so. I know a lot of people that are real ‘tea partiers’ and they still are and it is not because some ‘fat cat’ funding anything. If you believe that the 545 need to be turned out, you are potentially a tea partier. I agree that the vote is going to be huge against the incumbents, but it is going to be really hard to outvote all the dead people in the swing states.
One thing I think most of us realize is that few of the polls represent anything realistic. They are conducted by persons that want the libs to win and they are reported by those that want the libs to win. They basically don’t represent anything factual. I recognize that the news people have been Dimocrats (at least every since the 50’s) and support the Dims, but the fact that so many Dims now have gotten on federal and state payrolls and are voting to benefit themselves, it is getting harder to outvote them. So with all the dead voters this year, it is going to be very important for all the live ones to turn out also.
This link should help with understanding whether this is “projecting” or “wishcasting”
http://datechguyblog.com/2012/09/17/demoralized-as-hell-the-poll-the-media-isnt-talking-about-edition/
The key is the Party ID. It’s historic. The trend over the past 8 years has been Dems +3. In 2008 it was Dems +8. 2010 it was GOP +1
Today? A whopping GOP +4
Read the whole thing and then reflect on the junk polls you see in all major media (including FOX).
When you oversample Dems by +10, and Obama is only up a few points? No way.
Every poll that comes out, the first thing you should do is click into it and scroll down to the party ID. If you see Dems 37, GOP 32, Other 31, you know it’s crap.
Cheers.
Ed
AJ,
The issue of skewed poll results have been out there for at least 10-15 years.
There are two very important developments in polling that break the present from the past.
1) The non-response rate, which is now on the order of only 1 in 10 usable responses per phone call,
and
2) The rate at which people lie to the polls.
The mass turn over to cell phones and unlisted land line phone numbers is playing hob with whether political polls are in fact statistically representative of the actual voting public.
The polling companies just don’t know and the only alternative is much more expensive face to face polling surveys.
Most media political polling companies cannot do them let alone do them well.
The second issue of “lying” is even more touchy with pollsters because telemarketers — in addition to making people less likely to answer without call screening — also makes people actively hostile and much more likely to lie than answer truthfully.
The extent of the second problem was explained to me in 2008 by a friend who moonlighted with political polling firms from his academic social researcher day job.
He explained to me what it would take to do accurate political polling election model, if you assumed a “hostile field protocol,” after a political blogger I read spotted the following in a TIPPs poll.
The TIPPs poll asked the following question:
“Do you display the American Flag”
…with the result being: “Obama 38/ McCain 52/ undecided 9.
and the political blogger stated something to the effect:
“People who wave a flag are undecided? Does anyone really believe this?”
For which my day-job academic said the following:
Your blogger seems to have hit on the idea of “hostile field polling” questions without being a pollster.
Yeah, that would be the start of it; if I were getting paid to do it and I thought of the flag question, I’d use it.
As he explained it to me, hostile field polling is what dictatorships use to find out what their people really think, because the people answering the questions are afraid to tell the truth. Pollsters in such situations have to ask very indirect questions, use huge sample sizes and take multiple polls. It is impossibly expensive for news organizations.
Americans are increasingly like folks in foreign dictatorships and will only describe reality to pollsters if they ask indirect proxy questions on polarized subjects like Gay marriage.
My pollster semi-pro then continued with this detail:
Typically for a sample size big enough to cover 67 stratifications (the current [2008] minimum number you need to adequately cover the American public — you’d need more to do it state by state, maybe as much as 3x as many) you need around 1200 respondents.
To do a good ‘hostiles protocol’ you need about 15 stand in questions for the one that you think they’re lying about (if you think they’re lying about more than one, you can overlap some questions, but obviously that produces a spurious correlation in the results. Or at least that’s obvious to me and the people who know what they’re doing; I’ve seen a lot of researchers screw that one up).
The 15 stand in questions all need to correlate with each other at about 60% or better.
And now you see why no network even tried it this time (2008).
To get those 15 questions you probably would need to test around 100 good ideas, in about 25 nationwide surveys (since they won’t all start out in the same survey and you have to see how they interact, so you’d test say 7 surveys in your first round … maybe 3/4 of questions would look promising in the second round, so you’d test 5 …. then 3 … then start doing mix-and-matches that would easily use up another 10 surveys).
You’d have to pay for 25 polls to make your polls be accurate again.
Forget all ideology; Fox wasn’t going to pay for anything like that any more than MSNBC.
By 2012, though, they may all have to.
I have not heard a whisper of any of the major political polling firms having done 24 national polls, of 1,200 people each, just testing out “how is the public lying to pollsters this election” questions.
At a guess it would cost $100,000 to $250,000 to set up the initial questions, with $50,000 of analysis per poll adjustment, and $500,000 per poll using best face to face polling techniques to get that answer.
And the answer would only get you the _Right Polling Question Methodology_.
You would still have to do the polls using that methodology.
And to be really sure, you would have to take the same poll via face to face, and via phone only, to know the difference between the two polling methods so you could sell them via cost/quality/speed to your political consumers.
And that still leaves a polling team people problem. It takes a good, stable, team of experienced professionals to properly develop & execute a poll time after time.
The reason Bill Clinton was so good, and one of the reasons Hillary got blind sided by Obama, was that Bill Clinton kept the same polling team from two years before he was president through his entire presidency.
Hillary’s Senate campaign was deeded that polling team by Bill.
She got rid of that team for money reasons before she started her Presidential run. That was why she was always a day late and a dollar short with Obama.
Her replacement polling team was no where near as good, even if it was cheaper.
Point in fact, the MSM’s dropping ad revenues mean they are going with increasingly cheap polls with skewed results they want, rather than good methodology.
Lying is cheaper.
The Tea Party is not only more active in 2012 than they were in 2010 they are more organized.
Must-See Proof: Corrupt Media, Corrupt Polls
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2012/09/must-see-proof-corrupt-media-corrupt.html
Doug Ross’ most excellent article. The chart really smacks you in the face.
Nice post, Trent. Very informative.
Thanks for your informative polling post, Trent.
As for the state of this election, I have one word —> “confusing.”
The polls makes one’s head spin, in how they seem to differ in their internal standards and voter screens. They appear manipulated to me. But how can so many of them be that way?
As for the media’s objectivity, it seems to be absent. Events like the ME violence seem to be reported without questioning the POTUS as to some of the conflicting details. Trivia takes the front page, while important issues grace inner pages, if they are there at all.
Then we have Obama running off to Vegas while Libya burned. But, criticism of Romney, getting out in front and lambasting this act of violence, is what was discussed by the MSM, followed by the next act of the secret tapes. When does a candidate take all the heat for his opinion on foreign events and domestic policy, when the guy sitting in the Oval Office is given a pass for doing nothing!!!!!!
My frustration with the media is mirrored by another poster, on another site:
jan: ” They appear manipulated to me. But how can so many of them be that way?”
Saw a piece by Rove that all of the polls over sample Dimocrats very much. In fact, according to the last election there are generally more Repubs voting than Dimocrats, but the polls continue to sample more Dims. Some polls by as much as 11%. Like 40% Dim vs 29% Repubs. (I don’t exactly recall Rove’s numbers, but the only poll that sampled the same percentage of each party is Rasmussen and that poll gives Romney the edge. The Fox News poll sample 5% more Dims. So it is easy to see that if 40% Repubs vote and 35% Dims the vote will likely favor Repubs, but if the poll is 35% Dims vs 31 % Repubs the poll is likely to favor Dims. I can see why some polls do this:NBC, CBS, etc, but I don’t know why Fox News oversamples Dims also.
I think the polls are wrong as conducted, but even more so, I don’t think they are picking up the Tea Party at all and I think that is going to be a Tsunami against the Dims. (hope so)
Boy, I hope your’re right too, Redteam. This election has me on pins and needles.
On the ground in Northern Virginia. This gives some credence to those who see the polls as not reflecting what is going on in real time on the ground.