Informative work here.

Ed: I wish that they did. That would remove more subjectivity. Yesterday’s poll from National Journal gave us the count of adults, but it didn’t give us the results of how they would vote.

Without that key assumption, I don’t think there’s much of an argument left to be had in this article.

Ed: The problem with your counter-argument is that there is ample historical evidence of a social acceptability bias when respondents are asked whether or not they intend to vote. Corroborating evidence for that is the high likelihood of passing through likely voters screens employed by most polling agencies. The best polling considers not just your answers, but your level of knowledge–ie., can you name the candidates running for office, your age, income levels, education levels, etc. Those are factors that in most years are relatively stable among the voting population. (2008 and 1992 may have been recent exceptions to those rules, but 2012 is likely to revert more to historical norms.)

As for correcting for non-response rates . . . the right way to do it is to query non-responders and then test the hypothesis that their results differ from the sample population you polled. The cheap way of doing it is to simply weight a non-representative sample, which is the method you implied above. Most open-source polls use the cheap method. Only the campaigns are looking at real polls that factor non-responders, not simply weight to account for them. Garbage in = Garbage out.

Ed: Then you should stick around for Part II when I talk about what delusion looks like from the inside.

Your statement that “the 1,382 ‘likely’ voters they identified out of a poll of 1,764 adults would indicate a voting age population percentage of 78%” is incorrect, inasmuch as the VAP is considerably larger than the pool of registered voters. That’s why, for your purposes, the chart of FEC data is more relevant.

Ed: I agree that the VAP is a much larger population, but I’m not sure of your point. BTW, I’ve been engaged in an email exchange with a left-leaning mathematics grad student who isn’t comfortable with the registration numbers being the basis for comparison. I think there’s merit in that argument. Thus comparing likely voter poll respondents as a percentage of adults polled with the percentage of the VAP that works would be more accurate. Unfortunately, only the ABC/WP (78%) and the AP-GFK (71%) polls give us those numbers. That is still much higher than even 2008 when turnout as a percentage of the VAP reached its record high in the post-26th Amendment era of about 62%.

The people likely to answer these calls are not representative of the population at large.

I mean, you say that the voters in Ohio are inundated, do you think they’re going to sit through all the crap just to try to get out of listening to all the crap? Pollsters only get a 10 percent response rate. And Rasmussen is often accused of being the outlier because it has been in the past. Also, one word, 2010.

If anything pollsters are putting too much emphasis on enthusiasm. I’m not going to sit around and take phone calls all day, but I always vote.

However, your article is well-written and thoughtful :)