Nov

1

Eddy's Mom is the brains in the family so, like Vic, Russ, Rocky and the other smart people, she does her best to ignore politics. She tolerates my historical obsessions because, as she said to Eddy the other night, "it keeps your father off the streets". Now that it is only a week before the election, she has relented enough to listen to my data babble. I went over the polls from early last week - to remove all possibility of their results being tainted by "the news".

What I was looking for were the thumb prints, where the pollsters had done their best to skew the results based not on the survey responses but on the sampling assumptions. I looked at 3 polls: ABC, IBD and CNN and went far enough into the footnotes to find out how they weighted their samples among Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

ABC's electorate: 36D, 27R, 31I IBD: 37D, 29R, 34I CNN: 37D, 31R, 32I

The Gallup people have stopped doing election campaign polls, but they continue to do periodic surveys of the registered voter party affiliations. The most recent one, taken in December 2015, showed 42/43R, 35/36D, 21/22I, and 1 3rd Party. I trust those numbers for one very simple reason: they reflect the actual distribution of elected representatives among the 3 party groups. Measured by solely by ballot box results, the country is 7/5 Republican.

If you take the data from the ABC,IBD and CNN surveys and allocate the results using Gallup's distribution of party affiliations, you get ABC: Clinton - 40, Trump - 39 IBD: Clinton - 37, Trump - 37 CNN: Clinton - 39, Trump - 41

The announced results by the pollsters, using their own distributions, were quite different:

ABC: Clinton - 50, Trump - 37 IBD: Clinton - 41, Trump - 41 CNN: Clinton - 51, Trump - 45

When I showed these numbers to Eddy's Mom, she was not surprised. Neither was I. But, what she said was something that I have heard only from Pat Caddell among the public figures; and he made the remark tangentially, in discussing the "undecided" voters. This is, announced the EMom, an "undisclosed" election. In public here in Tar Heel land, Vic's wardroom rules generally apply; people don't think it is productive or polite to discuss politics in public gatherings. But, this year that is overwhelmingly the case. The only people who think they have an open invitation to discuss "the election" are the Democrats' hard-core patronage constituents: the professional academics and the people of color who are on the dole.

In 1980 a week before the election the "undisclosed" were 12-15% of the electorate; this year they may be closer to 20%. If the "undisclosed" split evenly and the decline in black turnout in Virginia does not continue (their early voting is down nearly 50% from 2012), Mrs. Clinton will squeak through. If the "undisclosed" vote the way Independents have polled (6/7 out of 10 for Trump), the incumbent party will lose as badly as they did in 2008.


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  1. Rich Berger on November 1, 2016 5:50 pm

    I tried to find the Gallup results you have quoted and found surveys taken on a semimonthly basis, with one taken in September. Democrats have a slight advantage over Republicans and the series is a bit noisy.

    Where did you get your numbers?

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