Eighty-Four Percent Say They'd Never Lie To A Pollster by Ann Coulter (more by this author) Posted 10/15/2008 ET Updated 10/15/2008 ET
With an African-American running for president this year, there has been a lot of chatter about the "Bradley effect," allowing the media to wail about institutional racism in America.
Named after Tom Bradley, who lost his election for California governor in 1982 despite a substantial lead in the polls, the Bradley effect says that black candidates will poll much stronger than the actual election results.
First of all, if true, this is the opposite of racism: It is fear of being accused of racism. For most Americans, there is nothing more terrifying than the prospect of being called a racist. It's scarier than flood or famine, terrorist attacks or flesh-eating bacteria. To some, it's even scarier than "food insecurity."
Political correctness has taught people to lie to pollsters rather than be forced to explain why they're not voting for the African-American.
This is how two typical voters might answer a pollster's question: "Whom do you support for president?"
Average Obama voter: "Obama." (Name of average Obama voter: "Mickey Mouse.")
Average McCain voter: "I'm voting for McCain, but I swear it's just about the issues. It's not because Obama's black. If Barack Obama were a little more moderate -- hey, I'd vote for Colin Powell. But my convictions force me to vote for the candidate who just happens to be white. Say, do you know where I can get Patti LaBelle tickets?"
In addition to the social pressure to constantly prove you're not a racist, apparently there is massive social pressure to prove you're not a Republican. No one is lying about voting for McCain just to sound cool.
Reviewing the polls printed in The New York Times and The Washington Post in the last month of every presidential election since 1976, I found the polls were never wrong in a friendly way to Republicans. When the polls were wrong, which was often, they overestimated support for the Democrat, usually by about 6 to 10 points.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter narrowly beat Gerald Ford 50.1 percent to 48 percent. And yet, on Sept. 1, Carter led Ford by 15 points. Just weeks before the election, on Oct. 16, 1976, Carter led Ford in the Gallup Poll by 6 percentage points -- down from his 33-point Gallup Poll lead in August.
Reading newspaper coverage of presidential elections in 1980 and 1984, I found myself paralyzed by the fear that Reagan was going to lose.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan beat Carter by nearly 10 points, 51 percent to 41 percent. In a Gallup Poll released days before the election on Oct. 27, it was Carter who led Reagan 45 percent to 42 percent.
In 1984, Reagan walloped Walter Mondale 58.8 percent to 40 percent, -- the largest electoral landslide in U.S. history. But on Oct. 15, The New York Daily News published a poll showing Mondale with only a 4-point deficit to Reagan, 45 percent to 41 percent. A Harris Poll about the same time showed Reagan with only a 9-point lead. The Oct. 19 New York Times/CBS News Poll had Mr. Reagan ahead of Mondale by 13 points. All these polls underestimated Reagan's actual margin of victory by 6 to 15 points.
In 1988, George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis by a whopping 53.4 percent to 45.6 percent. A New York Times/CBS News Poll on Oct. 5 had Bush leading the Greek homunculus by a statistically insignificant 2 points -- 45 percent to 43 percent. (For the kids out there: Before it became a clearinghouse for anti-Bush conspiracy theories, CBS News was considered a credible journalistic entity.)
A week later -- or one tank ride later, depending on who's telling the story -- on Oct. 13, Bush was leading Dukakis in The New York Times Poll by a mere 5 points.
Admittedly, a 3- to 6-point error is not as crazily wrong as the 6- to 15-point error in 1984. But it's striking that even small "margin of error" mistakes never seem to benefit Republicans. In 1992, Bill Clinton beat the first President Bush 43 percent to 37.7 percent. (Ross Perot got 18.9 percent of Bush's voters that year.) On Oct. 18, a Newsweek Poll had Clinton winning 46 percent to 31 percent, and a CBS News Poll showed Clinton winning 47 percent to 35 percent.
So in 1992, the polls had Clinton 12 to 15 points ahead, but he won by only 5.3 points.
In 1996, Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole 49 percent to 40 percent. And yet on Oct. 22, 1996, The New York Times/CBS News Poll showed Clinton leading by a massive 22 points, 55 percent to 33 percent.
In 2000, which I seem to recall as being fairly close, the October polls accurately described the election as a virtual tie, with either Bush or Al Gore 1 or 2 points ahead in various polls. But in one of the latest polls to give either candidate a clear advantage, The New York Times/CBS News Poll on Oct. 3, 2000, showed Gore winning by 45 percent to 39 percent.
In the last presidential election the polls were surprisingly accurate -- not including the massively inaccurate Election Day exit poll. In the end, Bush beat John Kerry 50.7 percent to 48.3 percent in 2004. Most of the October polls showed the candidates in a dead-heat, with Bush 1 to 3 points ahead. So either pollsters got a whole lot better starting in 2004, or Democrats stole more votes in that election than we even realized.
If anything could cause bigger headaches than campaign ads, it's the up-and-down, back-and-forth nature of polls. The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama has a solid lead against John McCain. Today he's up by more than 7 points in the Real Clear Politics poll averages. (Those numbers feed the Yahoo! News political dashboard.) The Illinois senator has had a similar lead for about a month now.
But just as journalists nationwide were starting to write their landslide stories, in comes this week's AP poll ... with McCain behind by just one point. That might as well be a tie. If you factor in the margin of error, then McCain could actually be ahead.
If the AP poll was the 1 in a McCain 1-2 punch, then in came the IBD/TIPP Poll with it's left hook. It too had McCain down by 1, with the momentum among key voting blocks going to the Republican. This from the polling firm who says they were the "Most Accurate Pollster" of the 2004 election.
Weird thing is, these polls came out at the same time other major polls showed Obama with a double-digit lead.
So, what gives?
The short answer: The devil is in the details.
Polling isn't an exact science. Not even close. It's really an informed estimation game that leans on some speculation about who is showing up on Election Day. Pollsters can't ensure that they talk to a perfectly proportional representation of the people who will vote. So they weigh the responses they get to match the demographics of who they think will actually show up and pull the lever.
Confused yet? While the execution can be messy, the concept is pretty simple.
We'll use that AP poll as an example. Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic gives a specific example about keeping healthy speculation when debating poll findings: "44% of the likely voter sample in the AP/GFK-Roper poll... are self-identified evangelicals. That's about double the weighted average that pollsters generally assume."
Ambinder is saying most pollsters don't assume that many voting people are evangelicals. But that doesn't mean AP is wrong -- no one knows for sure who is showing up on Election Day.
Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight gives the IBD/TIPP poll the same speculative treatment, only in this case Silver questions the number of young people they say plan to vote for McCain: "IBD/TIPP has John McCain ahead 74-22 among 18-24 year olds. Who knew the kids were groovin' on J-Mac these days?
IBD/TIPP puts an asterisk by this result, stipulating that 'Age 18-24 has much fluctuation due to small sample size.'"
Conventional wisdom (backed by Gallup) says young people will vote for Obama by an incredible margin, so as Silver points out, these numbers don't make sense in a conventional way. While we're on it, there's one more important thing to note on the youth vote. No one knows if the youth turnout is going to be as dramatic as most people say it's going to be. This fact explains another reason for the AP poll discrepancy. AP does not assume a high youth vote on Election Day. And they aren't the only ones. Bloomberg did a story about polling today that quotes Republican pollster Ed Goeas: Some pollsters have an ''unrealistic'' expectation that the youth vote will dramatically increase this year.
Since we've got another week until we know who's showing up to vote, what are we poll-obsessed folks to do in the meantime? Well, the answer, as my mother would say, is to be patient and wait for Election Day.
Logged
