The Election Isn’t Held Today

Interpreting Polls Legacy blog posts

So far, we have been talking about the limitations of polling, a topic that we will discuss in great detail going further. However, with a slew of new polls coming out today, it’s probably worth a quick discussion of my read on where the race stands today.

Let’s step back for a moment. What is it that we are trying to measure? Is it what the endless sports metaphors in the media suggest, a “race,” a “marathon,” featuring a “sprint to the finish,” in which candidates may be “neck and neck,” or one might be “surging” or, say it ain’t so, building an “insurmountable lead?”

No, it isn’t.

What we are really following is an ongoing decision making process involving upwards of a hundred million voters. There are no “points on the board” yet; just millions of individual voters pondering a decision most will effectuate for another six weeks.

Roughly 65-70% of those who will ultimately cast ballots in November (and probably 99% of MP readers) had their minds made up long ago about whom they would support in November. Most of those decided voters also know that neither rain, snow nor dark of night will deter them from casting a ballot. But the remaining 30-40% of those who will vote are still thinking it over. Roughly two thirds of these are leaning strongly in one direction right now, and most will likely find ways to reinforce those opinions in the coming weeks. Others may go back and forth and remain unsure up until the final moments in the voting booth. Also, there are literally millions who are considering casting a ballot who will opt out at the moment for reasons that will materialize on Election Day. And a very big number – I won’t hazard a guess how many –have no intention of voting right now, yet will find the motivation to register and vote for the first time.

Polls released today include empirical support for much of this argument. Look at the follow up questions that measure strength of support in the longer reports available online. In the Fox poll, for example, roughly three quarters of Bush and Kerry supporters say they are certain of their vote. Do the math, and you get a total of 35% of the “likely voters” who are less than certain about their choice, including 12% completely undecided. A similar calculation of the Marist poll results shows 32% less than certain, including 7% completely undecided.

The challenge for pollsters right now is that they are trying to accomplish three rather difficult tasks at once:

1) Draw a truly representative unbiased sample of the general population
2) From that sample, identify the appropriate portion of the population that will actually vote
3) Get those future voters to say how they will vote if the election were held today

Most of the debate raging about polls right now concerns how they are doing at tasks 1 & 2. While no one poll or likely voter model has a monopoly on truth, I believe that collectively, they are giving us a pretty good sense of where the true likely voters (or registered voters if you prefer) are leaning at the moment. If you look at the summary of the polls of likely voters conducted this week provided on realclearpolitics.com here and here, you’ll see an average Bush advantage of 4-6 percentage points. Examine the differences between registered and likely voters in polls that report on The Polling Report (something I promise to do in a more comprehensive way next week), and you’ll see that the race is a bit closer among all registered voters. If the election were held today, Bush would have a slight advantage.

However, even if the polls are doing all three tasks above perfectly, the election is not held today! The race is certainly within the common sense margin of error that contemplates the very real potential for attitude change over the next six weeks…in either direction.

More to come soon…

[…but probably not until Sunday. For the next 24 hours, I will be observing Yom Kippur. L’shana Tova!]

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is the principal at MysteryPollster, LLC. With decades of experience in polling using traditional and innovative online methods, he is uniquely positioned to advise survey researchers, progressive organizations and candidates and the public at-large on how to adapt to polling’s ongoing reinvention. He was previously head of election polling at SurveyMonkey, senior polling editor for The Huffington Post, co-founder of Pollster.com and a long-time campaign consultant who conducted and analyzed political polls and focus groups for Democratic party candidates.