Unlikely Voter

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.

While playing around with primary polling lets me practice how I look at an individual poll, it does nothing for my work on aggregating polls and creating national projections.

So if I can get the historical election week polling data I expect to start doing some backtesting over the spring and early summer. I’ll come up with models and test them by “projecting” past House elections, Senate elections, and Presidential elections.

Whichever model works best I will use to project the 2010 midterms. Additionally I’ll learn which pollsters are better than others, which will only improve my projections.

Welcome to Unlikely Voter! A plain summary of what this site is about can be seen in the About page, but I’ll now share the human side of that.