Unlikely Voter

Since Governor Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Senate had a big uproar over unions of government employees, and that uproar has spread to states like Ohio, there’s been a great deal of issue polling on unions and collective bargaining. I tend to ignore all of it, just as I ignore most issue polling. I’ve gotten comments that this is a failure of the site in fact, that I don’t hit these things more.

I have a standard answer for why I tend to ignore issue polling, though: the results are volatile and easily manipulated, either accidentally or intentionally.

Plug -2.8 into the Swingometer and you’ll see 5 districts swing. Louisiana’s second district was the fifth closest seat won by a Republican in 2008, and that Republican was Joseph Cao. He beat William Jefferson, the now-convicted felon who received bribes and kept the cash hidden in his freezer.

By election day Jefferson had already been caught, and the money had already been found. Why was the election so close? Incumbency matters.

National Journal noticed an event in the Gallup voter enthusiasm polling: Republicans have gone off the scale, while Democrats have fallen far off from 2006.

Since 1994 the numbers have tracked with victory and defeat, with the party ahead in enthusiasm winning the House, but this scale is… well, just look.

When I see people, and particularly conservatives, discussing why one poll is better than another, I see the sample pool frequently cited as a reason for favoring one or another. Specifically, some poll watchers insist that any poll not filtered for likely voters, instead of just registered voters or even adults, is not useful in a political context.

The dirty secret is that not all likely voters are created equal. Every pollster has his own secret sauce, and we have to be careful when trusting that kind of filtering. It might not be what we expect.