I am really skeptical of any analysis that is predicated on the polls being off in one direction or another. In my experience, the average of polls is rarely off by a whole lot. Maybe a couple of points, but when the polls say you are going to lose, you are almost definitely going to lose. In 2004, we tried to console ourselves that the pollsters weren’t picking up enough voters who only used cell phones. That was probably true, but we still lost and the polls still pretty much predicted the result. So, when I see someone arguing that the pollsters aren’t surveying enough Latinos or the right kind of Latinos, I immediately have a negative reaction. However, one example where pollsters were badly wrong was in predicting Harry Reid’s demise in 2010. Using a very similar methodology to what he is using now, Nate Silver gave Reid less than a one-in-six chance of winning reelection.
The presumption that Reid was unelectable rested on a series of public polls, nearly all of which showed Reid behind Angle. Indeed, in October alone the Nevada press reported on 14 surveys, only one of which showed Leader Reid ahead.
It turns out that those polls made three major errors. They did a poor job of separating likely from unlikely voters, they didn’t work hard enough to poll hard-to-reach people, and some of them were precluded by law from contacting cell phones. All three of these errors featured prominently in a major underestimation of the Latino vote. It turns out that people who were resistant to answer phone surveys on the first or second attempt skewed heavily for Reid. And it turned out that Spanish speakers were most likely to use cell phones exclusively and the least likely to respond to phone surveys. And it turned out that Latinos were more likely to vote in general than the pollsters had assumed. As a result, the pollsters missed the result badly and Harry Reid won by six points.
Even within the Latino sample, the pollsters missed something. Naturalized Latinos supported Reid more heavily than native-born Latinos, and they were harder to reach because of a stronger language barrier. This led the pollsters to underestimate how strongly Reid would perform with the Latino community even as they were underestimating their percentage of the electorate.
How many of these mistakes have been addressed by the polling firms in the field right now?
Booman, agree 100% with the idea that hoping the polls are wrong is a losing (and a loser’s) game.
But Nevada was wrong not only in 2010, but also in 2008, where a narrow polling victory was instead an Obama blow-out. I don’t see any evidence that this has changed. Take a look at http://www.ralstonflash.com/, which is tracking the early voting in Nevada. He thinks the polls are making the same mistake in 2012, and has some good numbers and analysis to back this up.
I’m skeptical of the Nevada polls for that reason. But elsewhere I haven’t seen as much of a bias. So I’m not counting on an uncounted Latino vote to push things over the top for Obama, say in Colorado, if he is trailing there. Although it would nice!
Agreed 100% about Nevada and Colorado. That state (CO) has had me baffled, to be honest. Some argue it’s the marijuana issue, but I doubt it. Unlike California which essentially has no regulation, Colorado is an ideal model for going forward, and their state has been left alone for the most part.
This article by Latino Decisions addresses this issue very thoroughly and suggests errors that have been made in the past are still missing the Latino vote.
http://www.latinodecisions.com/blog/2012/10/23/why-pollsters-missed-the-latino-vote-2012-edition/
Given the current political environment with regard to immigration, it is highly unlikely that Latinos will be accurately polled no matter how hard polling firms try.
Why btw is going to make it very hard to estimate how much the Latino vote was suppressed by GOP intimidation tactics.
There are some biases in a particular year’s polls that cannot be fixed. And the best thing to report is that states like Arizona, Nevada, and Florida could be dramatically different than expectations–one way or the other. Which if accounted for would also mean that Democrats should see legal protection of everyone’s voting rights in those stat as a reasonable return on investment.