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Illustrating the Silliness of Polls
Over at Open Left, they've noted something about national polls in the general election. Specifically, they've found that two of the most famous polling companies, Rasmussen and Gallup, consistently poll a closer race everyone else. In the 34 Gallup and Rasmussen polls taken since the general election began, Obama has been up an average of 2.2%. In all the polls taken by 11 other polling companies, Obama has been up 5.4%.
Most times a Gallup or Rasmussen poll comes out, it fuels the conventional wisdom that Obama is under-performing because he is locked into a dogfight in a election season heavily favoring Democrats. As a result, everyone from the media to committed Democrats freak out.
It's nonsense. The counterfactuals could easily go in either direction. If Gallup and Rasmussen were more in line with everyone else, Obama would be seen as having a thin but comfortable lead. If a few more polling companies were like G & R, McCain might even be winning. The lesson? Don't freak out and don't get overconfident either. Things on the whole are better for Obama than the media's evaluation of his performance suggests (after all, as Nate Silver noted, "If you had told a Democrat a year ago that, on the last day of July, their candidate would be ahead in Ohio and Florida, well ahead in Pennsylvania , way ahead in California, tied in Montana, within single digits in a couple of states that went really red in 2000 and 2004, they'd be pretty thrilled with that set of polling.") but things can change at any moment, and have in the past.
RealClearPolitics.com, one of the best (maybe I should say "most rational") websites for political information publishes a sort of "stock ticker" of electoral votes that one can keep track of, and which is much more useful than nationwide polls, which obviously reflect popular opinion, ergo likely popular vote outcomes, but not electoral vote outcomes.
As of right now, Obama is leading by a lot, according to RCP, but they also acknowledge that many states are currently in "toss-up" status. Interestingly, RCP also publishes Intrade Market Odds for Obama and McCain victories, with Obama at a whopping 59% and McCain at only 37 and change.
However, the main stream media's reporting, as always, tends to focus on metrics that A. Fox viewers can understand and B. give the impression that the election is a very close race between two evenly-matched ponies. Obama hardly has this in the bag, but his lead at this point represents a demoralizing, uphill battle for Republicans. That, of course, is not the best story for the media to tell, however, if your metrics for success are web hits, Nielson (sp?) ratings and total circulation.
Thanks for this much more sober (and accurate) reporting of this really pleasantly boring horse race, Stein.
Also, kudos to me for beating Bill Nighe for first comment.