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May 13, 2013 09:05 AM UTC

Gallup Explains What Went Wrong, Except The Obvious

  • 14 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

Politico:

After misreading the 2012 presidential election and facing criticism in the aftermath, Gallup polling has undertaken an internal review and will announce the findings next month.

“We are in the process of finishing a full review of all methodological issues relating to our 2012 election polling. The process is being led by a blue-ribbon group of outside experts. We will be reporting our findings at an event on June 4 at our offices in Washington,” Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport told POLITICO’s Mike Allen in Playbook on Monday.

Once considered a gold standard in public polling, Gallup's failure to correctly forecast the winner of the 2012 presidential election, and consistent track to the right of what turned out to be voter sentiment last year, have hurt their credibility in much the same way as CNN's recent string of "breaking" misreports on the Boston bombing have tarnished what was once an inviolate reputation.

There's a larger context to Gallup's mistaken assumptions about "likely voters" in the last election, and Gallup was far from the only "credible" news source whose presumptions about the 2012 electorate were proven wrong. Based on assumptions that serviced partisan desires, datasets skewed by those assumptions, and a massive nine-figure marketing campaign, a very large number of Americans bought into an artificial and ultimately false sense of certain GOP victory. From talk-radio listener to pollster, assumptions were made first, then self-serving datasets were used to reinforce them. We called all of this as it happened, and were ourselves accused of partisanship.

Fixing the mechanics of Gallup's polling will be the easy part.

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14 thoughts on “Gallup Explains What Went Wrong, Except The Obvious”

  1. You sly partisan dogs. 🙂

    I think those who tried to skew Romney into a win last year really thought it would work. And they came close enough to making that bubble into a majority just by repeating it over and over.

    For now, 2012 showed the limits of creating a bullshit bubble, which to me the tea party represents. But we must beware lest they manage someday to fake it until they make it.

    1. Of course, to many in the Tea Party universe this didn't prove that pollsters like Gallup were wrong. It simply proved that the election was stolen. Whatever happens, the wacko minority will always find a way to make it fit their reality.

  2. It's important to remember that the Obama campaign created legions of new voters witht their registration efforts, which brought a whole bunch of people to the polls who weren't on anyone's radar to poll prior to the election, becuase they were new voters.

    1. And to keep those legions it would be wise for the next presidential election to be another energizing first…. HRC for first Madame President.  The new Dems will not stand in line for hours to fight to vote for old and boring. And a first Latino Veep wouldn't hurt either.

      Sorry Biden. After Obama,  those new Dem voters are going to be looking for another exciting chance to make history. As Sarah Palin proved, unless there is radical change, the GOP can't effectively counter just by offering up an interesting color or gender candidate who toes the unpopular party line and the base won't let them do anything else.

  3. Nate Silver's "The signal and the noise–why so many predictions fail-but some don't" is a good read. The problem (well, one of the problems) with Republicans is that many were trying to create noise, and to their detriment, many others listened to the noise. May they continue to miss the signal.

  4. Gallup polling has undertaken an internal review and will announce the findings next month.

    They will probably find that the issue in their methodology was the weighting. It's the assumption trap that a lot of pollsters found themselves in during both 2010 and 2012. In both cases, orgs like Gallup and Rassmusen assumed that GOP voter enthusiams would be much greater, and therefore weighted their final poll results to predict an assumed outcome.

    The problem with that is, just because the Tea Party (in 2010) and the Republicans (in 2012) was out there everyday on television talking about how fired up they were to be vote and beat the Dems doesn't mean that translates into actual votes. That's why polling firms like PPP, though left leaning, produced significantly more accurate polling data – because they didn't just assume the GOP vote-share would be greater because of high enthusiams and therefore didn't purposfully skew their own polls to prove their own assumptions. 

    There's times when weighting works (such as when you random sample does in fact poll a significanntly less % of Repulicans than the known % of actual registered Republicans), but when you base in on assumptions, you get what Gallup got. 

     

    1. Pardon the poor grammer in spots – sometimes when you go back and change sentances at the last second, you forget about verb and tense agreement wink

  5. Gallup was wrong. Does that mean every pollster should reweigh their samples to reduce Republicans? No, especially not for 2014. 2014 will be another midterm election like 2010, and Democrats will lose across the board.

    In fact, Gallup's 2012 models are probably the best out there for next year.

    1. Who's to say that Democrats won't be even more fired up to take back the House and keep the Senate so the Congress/Nation can return to actual productivity? 

      Just because you and your group of 10 friends are super jazzed to vote next year doesn't mean that's going to translate into a GOP victory. Somtimes it helps to look at the polling data yourself instead of have it regugitated for you by pundits with an agenda. 

    2. Gallop and every right leaning pollster was wrong.  Every rightie talking head was wrong.  Rightie pols' internal polling, especially Romney's, was wrong. Your world view is wrong.  Your perception of reality is wrong. Your mindless trashing of minorities, especially Latinos is wrong. 

      The fact that we're not hearing anyone on the right saying that the Heritage study, showing how many gazillions immigration reform is going to cost, can't possibly be considered credible since the numbers were provided and analyzed by a known racist is ridiculously wrong. And by the way, wonder how the Christian right base, as non-Jewish whites in this guy's study (so are we white or mud people this week? And if we're white, how are we another race? How are Latinos a race, for that matter? They come in all colors and mixes.  How many African Americans, who supposedly bring up the IQ rear, are entirely of one race? If Jews are a race, how come German ones ones look so much more European than Semitic?  Real scientific study there, with real well defined definitions of WTF race is) feels about being judged two steps below Jews in intelligence, in between Asians and Latinos. Sounds like we should be letting those eastern  urban centers with lots of them smart and mainly secular Jews run things, not Sarah Palin's "real America", huh?

      Pat Buchanan's brilliant theories on a new southern strategy are wrong.  Your pols are running on stands on gun control, gay marriage, the rich deserving huge tax breaks and the banks remaining unregulated and too big to fail that are rejected by the majority of Americans. 

      You are well on your way to history's dung heap. You may win a few more battles before it's over but you've already lost the war. A bunch of dead men walking.   Have a nice day ArapGoof.

  6. bwahahahahahaha.

    Oh- you are serious..really ? 

    Romney in a landlslide  electoral mandate  victory popular vote win a job at Marriott.

    You probably thought the Colorado Republican Party was actually going to support your R nominee for Governor last time. (ha!) You probably thought Buck was a mortal lock.

    Here's the thing – and there's no avoiding it: you don't get it.

     

     

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