Who is the Electorate?

Pollsters have been pulling out their hair trying to figure out who is going to vote this year.
Sen. Arlen Specter says people don't vote the way they poll. But mind you, he is a republican. Only two more days.

The Washington Post thinks the polling is right -- THINKS:

I don't consider any of these fatal or even very serious problems, but that doesn't mean I'm immune to pollster's paranoia. We could all be wrong -- at least theoretically.

Simply put, we may be wrong about who is likely to vote on Tuesday. One of the trickiest parts of political polling is determining which of the people interviewed in pre-election surveys will really vote. It's relatively easy for us to identify such sharply delineated groups as the population of all adults living in the United States or even all registered voters, but the pool of actual voters is a group that exists at a single point in time, on Election Day (plus those casting ballots early and by mail).

The upside:

These "likely voter models" vary widely from pollster to pollster. This year, the Gallup Organization is publishing two models. Its "traditional" model factors in respondents' reports of whether they voted in previous elections to determine who is a "likely" voter. But Gallup's new, "expanded" model drops this requirement, putting more young and minority voters into the "likely voter" category.

In Washington Post-ABC polling, we ask a series of questions about whether and how people plan to vote, whether they have voted before and basic knowledge about the voting process. We then feed all this information into a range of models, corresponding to different levels of turnout. We report a single model, but only after assessing the quality and impact of all of them. Likely voter modeling is a craft, bolstered by science.

I'm also often asked about the rising use of cellphones. The number of people ditching their home telephones has spiked in recent years, with the highest percentages among young adults and nonwhites. Does this affect the polls? Probably not -- or at least not yet. The exclusion of cellphone users appears to have no more than a minimal effect on the results. But even if these voters turn out to have been systematically underrepresented in this year's polls, that would actually mean that Obama had an even larger lead, because these voters overwhelmingly back him over McCain. And both the Gallup and Washington Post-ABC tracking polls interview complementary samples of voters who have only cellphones to make sure that we're not missing something. (Few state polls include cellphone interviews.)

Others who doubt this year's polls raise the question of a "Bradley effect." This syndrome gets its name from the bid by Tom Bradley, then the African American mayor of Los Angeles, to become governor of California in 1982. He headed into Election Day with a big seven-point lead in the last publicly released poll, only to lose narrowly. Some attributed this startling result to a quiet form of racism that revealed itself only in the voting booth, and the 1982 case has been trotted out ever since to cast doubt on the accuracy of pre-election polls in contests between white and black candidates.

But there is good reason to doubt that racism was the cause of Bradley's defeat, and decades of polling in other campaigns with black candidates should mute some of the skepticism. No "Bradley effect" has shown up for years, and a new analysis by one Harvard University researcher, Daniel Hopkins, shows that any such effect that existed in African American politicians' contests in the late 1980s and early 1990s has now disappeared.

The Bradley Effect Myth and Reverse Bradley

Here are two separate stories, one debunks the so-called Bradley effect and the other says there is a reverse Bradley effect, giving Obama a greater lead than polls show. What does Obama say about all this? He says it will be a wash, that as many people who vote against him based on race will vote for him based on race.

RCP: Bradley Effect believers assume that there is an undetectable tendency in the behavior of some white voters who tell pollsters that they are "undecided" when in fact their true preference is to vote against the black candidate. This so-called effect suggests the power or advantage to alter an outcome - a pretty serious charge. This would render poll projections inaccurate (overstating both the number of undecided voters and the African-American candidate's margin over a white opponent) and create an unaccounted for different outcome. However, it is indeed a "theory in search of data."

The hype surrounding the Bradley Effect has evolved to where some political pundits believe in 2008 that Obama must win in the national pre-election polls by 6-9 points before he can be assured a victory. That's absurd. There won't be a 6-9 point Bradley Effect -- there can't be, since few national polls show a large enough amount of undecided voters and it's in the undecided column where racism supposedly hides.

This comes via Electoral-Vote, where the electoral map is showing a Big win for Obama right now:

PhysOrg: Now a team of researchers from the University of Washington has analyzed the data from the 32 Democratic primaries this year and come to a surprising conclusion. The effect existed in California, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, but a reverse effect existed in 12 other states, largely in the Southeast. Obama did better in the elections there than in the polls leading up to them.

Here's that analysis:

"The Clinton-Obama raced dragged on so long, but it generated a lot of data. It is the only existing basis on which to predict how a black candidate will do in a national general election," said Greenwald, who pioneered studies how people's unconscious bias affects their behavior. "The level of inaccuracy of the polls in the primaries was unprecedented."
.....
The Bradley effect is named for former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, a black, who lost a close 1982 gubernatorial election in California after holding a solid lead in the polls. As the 2008 primaries played out, Greenwald and Albertson found that the Bradley effect only showed up in three states -- California, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.

However, they found a reverse Bradley effect in 12 primary states. In these states they found actual support for Obama exceeded pre-election polls by totals of 7 percent or more, well beyond the polls' margins of error. These errors ranged up to 18 percent in Georgia.
"The Bradley effect has mutated. We are seeing it in several states, but the reverse effect is much stronger," said Greenwald. "We didn't have a chance to look at these effects before on a national level. The prolonged Democratic primary process this year gave us a chance to look for this effect in 32 primaries in which the same two candidates faced each other."
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"Blacks understated their support for Obama and, even more surprising, whites did too. There also is some indication that this happened in such Republican states as Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Missouri and Indiana," Greenwald said.

"If you call people on the phone today and ask who they will vote for, some will give responses influenced by what may be understood, locally, as the more desirable response. It is easy to suppose that these people are lying to pollsters. I don't believe that. What I think is they may be undecided and experiencing social pressure which could increase their likelihood of naming the white candidate if their region or state has a history of white dominance. They also might give the name of the Republican if the state is strongly Republican.

A good analogy of a desirable response and social pressure, he said, would be if you lived in Detroit and you get a call asking if you will participate in an anonymous survey about automobiles.

"You agree and are asked if you prefer American or foreign cars. Even if you own a Japanese car, you might experience some pressure to give an answer that might be more appreciated by the caller -- that you prefer American cars," said Greenwald. "When it comes to politics, although voters are presumably anonymous when speaking to pollsters, the fact that the person calling them knows their phone number may not let them feel anonymous."