A bipartisan Lifetime poll released this week made the rounds for showing women "up for grabs." Obama's 11-point lead among women was called "lackluster" since it fell short (by a point) of majority.To me, this sounds much like the "Obama can't close the deal" Republican talking point.In this critique, Obama should be performing as well as an incumbent, in an open seat, and if he's not then he must be somehow weaker than McCain, even if McCain is trailing.It strains credulity.
In fact, Obama's lead among women is comparable to past elections, looking at national exit polls in the graph below (for this purpose, 1996 Dole and Perot support are combined).If Obama's support is lower, it's because, with 10% undecided, and presumably 3% voting for a third party candidate (the polling release is unclear), the sub-total of 87% is lower than the 100% in exit polls.If, as the Republican pollster said, Obama is underperforming with 49% (compared to 54% in 2000), then McCain is also underperforming with 38% as opposed to 43%.
A gender gap update
As I wrote last week, Obama's gender gap is currently at the high end of what we've seen in past elections.As one commenter correctly noted, Obama's 10-point gender gap from July 21-27 indeed had increased dramatically since June, and was reaching historic highs.But I didn't express alarm because I wasn't convinced the increase would continue.Indeed, an update to our Gallup gender gap graph shows that to be true.
Another commenter wondered what was causing the fluctuation in Obama's gender gap--Obama's support among women or men.The chart below shows both Obama and McCain's support by gender.And, in fact, Obama's support among women is (slightly) the most volatile.
However, by volatile, I mean a fluctuation of four points, compared to a fluctuation of two or three points for the other groupings.Now, four points obviously can mean a lot on election day, but this far out, in a national survey (as opposed to battleground state analysis) "slightly more volatile" is as far as I'm willing to go when talking about Obama's support among women."Lackluster" it is most certainly not.
Some of the press interest in targeting women voters appears to have died down some in the weeks since Hillary Clinton's exit from the race.It's worth checking in to see how the overall gender patterns in Obama's vote compare to previous Democratic nominees.
The Marriage Gap
Last week Women's Voices Women Vote Action Fund came out with a survey of unmarried women in battleground states (WVWV is a non-partisan organization; their surveys are typically conducted by Democratic polling firms).As we've noted before, "unmarried" people can be in many varied stages of life--the single and college-aged, co-habitating couples in their late 20s, single parents, gay couples in a committed relationship, divorced baby boomers, older widows and widowers.Such diversity makes me wonder about studying "unmarried" voters as a group.Is the implication that non-marriage is somehow unifying? Or does non-marriage frequently (but not always) co-vary with more dominant characteristics when it comes to predicting voting behavior, such as being younger, downscale, or more transient?If it's the latter, then maybe we should be studying those other demographic variables instead.
I've written before here and here about the "marriage gap in turnout" that, despite the lopsided press coverage, is actually larger among men than among women.I continue to worry about singling out a "marriage gap" in Democratic performance among women, leading some to think it a uniquely female phenomenon.For one, it sends a message that women form their political views based on their relationships to others.The "Soccer Moms" of yesteryear have given way to the "Carrie" voters of today; we are led to believe the presence or absence of husbands and/or children changes the way women (rather than men) view their worlds. One blogger immediately seized on the recent poll results with: "why is it that women change their party registration with their marriage license?"
Second, and most importantly, the marriage gap is actually not uniquely female.Recent Gallup research on the presidential race shows a marriage gap across gender, in the chart below.For both men and women, unmarried voters are more Democratic than are their married counterparts.In fact, as the chart below shows, the marriage gap in Democratic performance has frequently been larger for men than for women.(We used a definition of the marriage gap that is consistent with the definition of the gender gap.Here, it is the difference between unmarried and married voters' support for Obama.)
Further, Obama's marriage gap, even across gender, is consistent with past elections.WVWV's own materials show a similar pattern in the 2004 presidential race and 2006 midterm elections.The table below averages the marriage gap from the Gallup poll and compares it to past exit polls.
marriage gap/men
marriage gap/wmn
2004 exit polls
14
18
2006 exit polls
15
18
2008 gallup (average)
16
14
So the marriage gap is not a female-specific phenomenon.Further, Obama's marriage gap is consistent with what we've seen in the past.
The Gender Gap
Gallup's weekly tracking also allows us to monitor the overall gender gap.Since June, Obama's gender gap has widened slightly.
But either at its low end or high end, Obama's gender gap falls in the range established in recent elections.The chart below shows the gender gap from every presidential race since 1980, plus the 2006 midterm elections (using national exit polls).
We obviously still have a ways to go until November.But what strikes me about Obama's marriage gap, the gender gap, and this post on Obama's performance with white women, is how similar they all are to previous elections.Despite this election being historic, a pure open seat, and during both wartime and economic crisis, Obama's performance in many ways resembles the typical, contested elections of recent years.
Nick Panagakis is president of Market Shares Corporation, a marketing and public opinion research firm headquartered in Mt. Prospect, Ill.
This is in response to David Moore's July 25th column about use of a broader measure of voter indecision. For the first time, I also asked a similar question before the February 5th Illinois primary but am now having doubts about it's usefulness.
In the final CNN/University of New Hampshire primary poll, over 90% of voters stated their preference for a candidate in the commonly used "if the election were held today" forced choice question. That poll had Obama up by 9%. But Clinton won by 2.6 points. The candidate estimate error was 5.8 points, that means 5.8% high on Obama and 5.8% low on Clinton, near the average of all NH polls. When voters in that poll were asked if they were definite, leaning, or "still trying to decide", some 21% said still trying to decide which was the subject of Moore's blog.
Among the 21% who were "still trying to decide", that could mean 6% of all voters switched from Obama to Clinton or, a net 6% more voters switched from Obama to Clinton than from Clinton to Obama. The 21% more than covers such movement.
Other New Hampshire polls showed comparable numbers: Gallup's "could change mind" and in late December the LA Times' "might end up voting for someone else" both yielded 27%. I checked polls in other states that asked similar questions of decided voters and show comparable high percentages with no evidence that such mind-changing ever took palace.
My first issue is that the forced choice "if the election were held today" question historically comes close to the actual outcome, even though some voters may not have reached final closure when asked. I wouldn't call this "indecision" after so many could decide in response to the standard question. I believe it means some voters who are wiling to decide on a candidate in a poll won't rule out the possibility that some incident or disclosure, between now and election day, could lead them to vote otherwise. Isn't that what campaigns including negative elements are all about? This response is more conditional, perhaps remote, depending on unknown future events, not indecision. If it were indecision, a lot more polls than New Hampshire would have been be off the mark this Spring. In the post New Hampshire period, I cringed when I saw such numbers being reported. I think they de-values polls. There must be some better way of reporting these findings rather than "candidate A is up by 9 points - but 30% could change their minds".
During the week preceding the February 5th Illinois primary, our Chicago Tribune poll showed Obama ahead by 31 points in that primary, very close to the actual outcome. Our poll also got a similar number just days before election day - 24% of decided and leaners said they could "still change their minds". Could it be that a few days before any election, somewhere around 20%-25% of voters in all polls always say they could still change but most never do? Based on the Illinois outcome, not many minds were changed as is the case in most polls. To me, it seems that how voters would decide today has served us pretty well with some exceptions such as New Hampshire. (The question read: "Between now and next Tuesday, is there some chance that you could still change your mind about voting for this candidate...or have you definitely made up your mind?")
Re-calculating our Illinois Democratic poll numbers to combine possible mind-changers with undecideds as Moore did with the New Hampshire poll resulted in: Obama 44%, Clinton 16%, Others 1%, and 39% undecided. (The apparent reason for 39% here was an increase in conventional undecideds due to Edwards dropping out the day before interviewing began. Edwards did have 15% support in Illinois in a poll conducted a few days earlier by St. Louis Post-Dispatch,/KMOV-TV poll.) According to MSNBC, the NEP Illinois exit poll found 19% of voters who said they decided in the last 3 days, the period after we completed interviewing, close to our conventional undecideds. But the recalculated 39% undecided above that included voters who could "still change their mind" is twice as high as the 19% of voters NEP found deciding on a candidate during the 3 days before that election.
In the Illinois Republican primary, 36% of voters and leaners said they could change their minds. McCain was ahead in the poll by 23 points and went on to win by 19 points, a 2-point error on candidate estimates. Moore did not include a comparable number for the New Hampshire Republican primary but all polls matched the outcome.
In conclusion, perhaps in the New Hampshire Democratic primary this year such mind-changing took place. The state has always been a minefield for pollsters. The challenge for pollsters was mostly situational. This was a fluid situation, akin to trying to catch a falling knife. The campaign period was compressed, shortest-ever in New Hampshire, only 5 days after Obama's Iowa upset. Obama was described as over-confidant. Clinton perceived as a victim by some.
There were methodological challenges. Turnout that this year turned out to be historically high (a forewarning for us pollsters in later states). Only 52% of voters in the New Hampshire Democratic primary were registered Democrats according to the exit poll and 19% were first-time primary voters, a challenge for likely voter screening. According to one pollster, their best estimate of the New Hampshire outcome was based on all registered voters; i.e., no sample reduction at all for likely voters. The final chapter on this election has not yet been written. Neither has the value of routinely reporting that 25% or more of voters are undecided.
Any of us that like to look at political survey data -- and that's just about anyone reading these words -- have something of a trove in the now completed exit polls conducted during the 2008 primaries. As the exit pollsters point out in their valedictory blog post, we have just concluded "the busiest primary season in the history of exit poll research." There have been some difficulties along the way, to be sure, but the resulting data set is "gargantuan, as ABC's Gary Langer puts it. In addition to the election night tabulations that we have pointed to regularly (available via these links from MSNBC, CNN, CBS and Fox) there are two new collections worth checking out:
First, Gary Langer and the ABC Polling Unit put together summary spreadsheets (in PDF format) for both the Democratic and Republican contests that allow for easy comparisons using comparable subgroups across every state. The tables include some subgroups not available on the standard network tables (such as breaking down education and income among white voters only). They cover, according to Langer, "79,281 interviews in all, conducted in 68 contests in 39 states, encompassing all the Democratic state primaries, the contested Republican primaries and the Iowa and Nevada caucuses."
The Washington Post's Jon Cohen points out the "biggest contribution" of these tables is the "NET" column on the far left of each page, which shows the results based on a compilation of results across all states.
Second, the New York Times has put together an amazing interactive graphic based on a the exit poll data in the same 39 states. The graphic displays the Obama Clinton vote preference for all states with exit poll broken out by sixteen different subgroups. You really need to interact with the graphic (by pointing and clicking) to understand it, but trust me when I say that the early reviews from the academic number crunchers -- "awesome," "damn this is cool" -- are well deserved. And if you'd rather let someone else show you what it can do, the comedian/activist Baratunde Thurston provides a guided video tour (h/t: TechPresident).
OK..one last time (at least until November). Polls will close in South Dakota at 9:00 p.m. ET and in Montana at 10 p.m. ET. Official exit poll tabulations will appear shortly after the polls close at the following links:
All other comments will be in reverse chronological order. All times Eastern.
10:50 - Signing off for tonight. Back tomorrow morning, gods of Pepco allowing. I hope anyone still checking in will join me in thanking Mark Lindeman for crunching the numbers for us every primary night. Thanks Mark!
10:15 - South Dakota tabulations update: Now showing a slightly narrower Clinton lead, roughly 54% to 46%.
10:10 - The Montana tabulations update: Now showing an estimate of 56% Obama, 39% Clinton.
10:01 - MSNBC and CNN project Obama the winner of Montana. The vote estimate used to weight the exit poll cross-tabs now posted online is 54% Obama, 40% Clinton with the rest to undecided.
9:37 - While I was out in search of electricity, the networks apparently declared Obama the "presumptive nominee" based on his share of delegates in South Dakota. But I'm sure you know that already.
9:21 - Apologies. The wonderful DC weather knocked out our power, adding an extra margin of misery to this last primary night. Mark Lindeman tells us that the initial exit poll tabulations indicate a 55% to 45% estimate in Clinton's favor. And as I type this, MSNBC projects South Dakota for Clinton, (and CNN follows moments later).
8:07 - The AP story teases the honesty ratings of the two candidates in both states the the rough shares who say the would be satisfied with the nomination of both. Nate (Poblano) does some quick modeling of the relationship between these questions and the vote in past primaries. His analysis suggests an comfortable margin for Obama in Montana and a closer result (perhaps) in South Dakota.
About seven in 10 in both states called Obama honest and trustworthy. Nearly as many said that about Clinton in South Dakota but barely half in Montana called her honest and trustworthy.
7:54 - Here are some preliminary vote-result-free teasers from the mid-afternoon wave of exit poll interviews from AP, CNN, MSNBC and Fox (via The Page).
The exit poll conducted for Michigan's Democratic primary, and more specifically, the way it was used to help allocate Michigan's delegates this past weekend, has been the source of controversy over the last 48 hours. I will let others debate whether it is every appropriate to use any survey -- much less an exit poll -- to award delegates. However, amidst all the spin, some pertinent facts about exit polls and their performance this primary season have been confused.
The best example comes from two brief clips from CNN's coverage of the Puerto Rico results yesterday, the first from an interview of Clinton campaign chairman Terry McCauliffe and the second a response by CNN's Bill Schneider that followed soon thereafter:
Here is the gist of McCauliffe's complaint (my transcription):
The one thing I find amazing is, Wolf, is they say, actually, we are going to base some of this on exit poll data. There has not been an exit poll in this campaign -- I can remember standing in New Hampshire on election night saying, "hey Terry, you're going to lose by fifteen points." None of the exit polls have been right, and you're going to use that to take votes away from Hillary Clinton?
And Schneider's response and discussion a few minutes later with CNN's Wolf Blitzer:
Schneider: I can tell you that the exit polls have been pretty accurate in all the primaries so far, including New Hampshire. The exit polls have been very close to the actual result.
Everyone remembers the Waterloo of the polls in New Hampshire. That wasn't the exit poll. That was pre-election polls. The pre-election polls in New Hampshire, those taken before primary day back in January, many of them indicated that Barack Obama would win New Hampshire. In the event, on primary day, he actually lost New Hampshire. The exit poll got that right.
It was the pre-election polls that did not capture the final last minute swing of a lot of women, particularly older women, who had been undecided, they swung at the last minute to Hillary Clinton and that's what put her over the top.
Blitzer: And when we do these exit polls, we have three waves of exit polls, and sometimes the media gets told of only the first wave which may be distorted, may not be precise. It takes three waves to get an accurate assessment of what is actually going on. As a result, some confusion about the accuracy of these exit polls.
So either "none of the exit polls have been right" or the exit polls have been "pretty accurate in all the primaries." Not surprisingly, the whole truth lies somewhere in between.
Let's start with the comment from Wolf Blitzer at the end of the clip. He is right to point out that exit poll results get phoned in by interviewer/reporters in three waves, and that the biggest "errors" have involved early data based on the second wave or on the third wave called in just before the polls close (the networks now keep data "quarantined" and do not release it to network producers and decision desks until after 5:00 p.m.. Eastern time).
The second wave (late afternoon) estimates have often leaked this year, and those results have, more often than not, erred in Barack Obama's favor during the primaries (especially on 2/5 and 3/4 and in Pennsylvania). As I wrote back in March, "the early leaked results overestimated Obama's strength in 18 of 20 states, for an average error of 7 percentage points on the margin."
Assessing the accuracy of the third-wave, "at poll closing" estimates based only on the exit poll interviews is harder, because those numbers rarely leak. What we see more often, at least indirectly, are the estimates used to weight the official exit poll tabulations that appear on network web sites as the polls close. The estimates are usually a blend of the exit poll interview results and an average of pre-election polls (more details on this process here). These results, as extrapolated by our friend Mark Lindeman each primary night, have been far closer to the final results than the early leaked numbers. When I looked at the numbers from 2/5 and 3/4, I found that while big errors in Obama's favor persisted in six states, the errors in the remaining 11 states were small and canceled out (averaging to zero).
With respect to New Hampshire, I have heard rumors that mid-afternoon numbers showed Obama leading Clinton (Chris Matthews appears to say as much in this clip), but nothing as large as the "15 point lead" that McCauliffe claims. As the polls closed, our friend Mark Lindeman extrapolated a 38.3% to 36.9% margin in Obama's favor from the official exit poll tabulations appearing on network web sites. So if anyone told Terry McCaullife on "election night" that Clinton would lose by 15 points, it was not on the basis of an exit poll.
What is misleading about this entire discussion, however, is that the Michigan results relied up by the DNC on Saturday (and analyzed in more detail by Brian Schaffner) were not the second-wave or "at poll closing" estimates of the official count, but rather the results of this question after the tabulations had been weighted to match the official count:
If these had been the candidates on the ballot today, for whom would you have voted in the Democratic presidential primary?
46% - Hillary Clinton
12% - John Edwards
2% - Dennis Kucinich
35% - Barack Obama
1% - Bill Richardson
To be more specific about the weighting: Once the Associated Press reported a final count for Michigan on the evening of January 15, the exit poll analysts reweighted their tabulations so that the size of each poll region (labeled as "Geo Stratum Code") and the candidate vote shares within each of those regions matched the actual result. Thus, the "vote estimate" at the top of this final tabulation produced by Edison/Mitofsky (and posted online by ABC News) shows 56% for Clinton, 4% for Kucinich, less than 1% each for Dodd and Gravel and 39% supporting uncommitted.
Can we rely on the final exit poll data when weighted data "forced" to match actual results? That is the difficult-to-answer question many of us have been beenpondering this year. Does weighting the result by the vote preference and turn out eliminate all possible bias with respect to demographics or other attitudes? Perhaps. In this case, however, the correction for statistical bias is right on point. We know that the results are weighted so that the percentage who chose Clinton matches the actual count.
Actually, if anything, the final weights may favor Clinton slightly, for two reasons. First, the truly final count (available after these tabulations were done on the evening of January 15), gives Clinton 55% (not 56%) and undeclared 40% (not 39%).
Second, as reported on Saturday, the official count did not include approximately 30,000 write-in votes that were never counted or included in the official totals because no candidates filed the necessary papers to request the counting of write-in votes. Most assume these write-in votes were cast for either Barack Obama or John Edwards. The voters who cast write-in votes presumably had no idea their write-in votes would not count as they left their polling place and, we can assume, would have been just as likely to participate in the exit poll as other voters.
The exit poll questionnaire had a response option for other ("Other: Who? _______") that, presumably, would have been chosen by write-in voters (though I am not sure how the exit pollsters handled any such responses in the final tabulations). Since no write-in votes were reported, however, the weighting of the final tabulations did not reflect votes that could have increased the total vote by as much as 5%. So the weighting of the exit poll -- like the official count -- may have overstated Clinton's vote by a few percentages points over what it would have shown had all write-in votes been counted.
Another potential source of error would be those voters who cast absentee or early. Michigan allowed for early voting, but in this case, the exit pollsters did not conduct a telephone survey to specifically capture the attitudes of absentee voters. I have not been able to find any report on the percentage that voted early or by absentee ballot. However, the final tallies used to weight the final tabulations included absentees.
Again, reasonable people may question whether it is ever appropriate to use any survey -- no matter how accurate -- to allocate delegates from a primary election. However, the case for labeling this particular application of this survey as inaccurate is weak. The final Michigan exit poll tabulations are best evidence we have on which candidate voters would have favored had the names of all candidates appeared on the Michigan ballot. The weighting procedure provides reassurance that, in this case at least, the percentage of Clinton voters was either right or erred slightly in her favor.
The Page has posted a few numbers from the first wave of interviews from what he describes as "CNN's unilateral" Puerto Rico exit poll. I checked, and I'm told that Edison-Mitofsky -- the firm that usually does all of the exit polling for the consortium of the five major television networks and the Associated Press -- is conducting a Puerto Rico exit poll today exclusively for CNN.
The polls close at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time. A link to CNN's exit poll tabulations should appear here at that time. Further updates (and don't expect many) will be in reverse chronological order.
10:00 p.m - One last update for tonight: The final count in Puerto Rico, with 100% of precincts reporting, shows Hillary Clinton defeating Barack Obama by 68% to 32% margin, or by 141,662 of 384,578 votes cast.
Some of our readers have been debating the meaning of the turnout that was lower than some expected, but the biggest consequence of the turnout is that Barack Obama remains ahead in most counts of the "popular vote" even with Puerto Rico included. As ABC polling director Gary Langer explains tonight, Clinton only leads "by counting all her Michigan votes, and zero there for Obama." Adding Michigan's undeclared votes to Obama ahead would erase even that advantage.
The big problem with counting "the popular vote," is that so many different permutations exist for counting it, an issue I've written about twicepreviously. If you liked the Jay Cost spreadsheet that I linked to earlier -- the one with 15 different ways of counting the popular vote -- you will love the updgrade from FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver. He has posted a "Popular Vote Scenario Tester" tonight that provides 96 different ways of computing the Democratic "popular vote."
4:15 - The CNN exit poll tabulations have revised, presumably reflecting the gradual replacement in the estimate model of exit poll interviews with actual votes in the sampled precincts. The current estimate looks to be roughly 69% for Clinton and 31% for Obama.
3:24 - Thatcher and Uri ask in the comments about the likely margin and its impact on "the popular vote." When it comes to the Puerto Rico turnout and margins, I have no idea. The cable news networks will have the most current information.
As for the impact on the many potential "popular vote" totals, the best "what-if" tool I know of is the Jay Cost spreadsheet. You need to fill in the margins for West Virginia (147,410 for Clinton), Kentucky (249,436 for Clinton) and Oregon (148,458 for Obama -- all totals from the New York Timestallies).
3:04 - For those wondering (I was), MSNBC's call w(as apparently based (at least in part) on a telephone poll conducted over the last few days. They will have results from that shortly.
3:00 Both CNN and MSNBC call Puerto Rico for Clinton, CNN "by a wide margin" based on their exclusive exit poll, MSNBC by a "significant" margin. The initial CNN exit poll shows a 70% to 30% margin among both men and women, the easiest extrapolation of the primary season.
2:56 - MSNBC reports they expect a "low voter turnout," perhaps as low as 400,000.
2:45 p.m. Bill Schneider on CNN just announced that those who made up their minds in the last week went for Hillary Clinton 67% to 33%. That presumably means a comfortable Clinton win today, given her lead in the two pre-election polls. But we'll see.
Nate (the blogger formerly known as Poblano) had some similar speculation based on an earlier Schneider report earlier this afternoon.
I have a late appointment that will keep me off the grid until just before the polls close in Kentucky at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Even then, I've got sole responsibility for the MysteryChildren (ages 3 and 5) as the MysterySpouse is out of town at a conference this evening. So "live blogging" is likely going to be pretty sparse tonight.
However, consider this an open-thread for all comments about what the exit polls will have to tell us about the results in Kentucky and Oregon. Here are the links where exit poll tabulations will appear shortly after the polls close in each state
All other comments will be in reverse chronological order. All times Eastern.
11:12 - For anyone not watching one of the cable networks, NBC, CNN and Fox have all projected Barack Obama the winner in Oregon. I'm headed to sleep
10:58 - The Fox News web site appears to have put up the Oregon poll up a few minutes early. They show a roughly 13 point Obama lead: 56% to 42%. Keep in mind, as per the original update below, this is a telephone poll of early voters conducted over the last few days.
7:05 - Mark Lindeman has done his usual extrapolation from the exit poll cross-tabulations currently being displayed the network web sites, and they currently reflect a 65% Clinton, 29% Obama margin.
The usual caveats: These initial tabulations are weighted to an estimate of the result that is usually a mashup of pre-election polls and the interviews exit polls conducted at polling places and over the phone (with early voters) by the networks. These estimates improve, becoming more accurate over the course of the night. Click here for more detail on how these numbers are derived and how they improve over the course of the evening.
7:00 - The networks call Kentucky for Clinton.
4:26 Incidentally, in Oregon, where all votes are cast by mail,** the survey conducted by the networks is not technically an "exit" poll. They conduct supplemental surveys by telephone in the days leading up to the election in many states with significant early voting (such as North Carolina, Texas and California). They ask the same questions by telephone that voters get on "exit" poll questionnaires administered at polling places. In Oregon, however, all interviews have been done by telephone.
**Not quite says Mark Lindeman (in the comments) with a "metaphysical clarification . . . although Oregon has a Vote By Mail system, voters can deliver their ballots by hand until the polls close tonight."
Kathy Frankovic reviews new research on the impact of respondent age on question order effects and question response effects in surveys. Incidentally, Frankovic won the honor of the lifetime achievement award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR).
Poblano predicts a 19-point Clinton win in Kentucky and a 13-point Obama victory in Oregon (with a revised turnout estimate).
Jennifer Agiesta reviews poll internals in which voters compare the attributes of Barack Obama and John McCain.
Gary Langer takes a skeptical look at Hillary Clinton's popular vote claims.
Jay Cost examines the relationship between partisanship and the Obama-Clinton results in Indiana.
David Hill is skeptical of a "sharp rise in voter turnout among African-Americans this November."
Mark Mellman looks at the role of gas prices in driving pessimistic assessments of the economy.
John Sides wants to remind George Stephanopoulos not to confuse correlations with causation in exit polls.
Carl Bialik finds little evidence in the exit polls of a "Limbaugh Effect."
CJR's Zachary Roth uses exit poll evidence to question John Edward's appeal to working class voters (via Crowley); Poblano, looking at similar numbers, agrees.
Exit pollster Joe Lenski will lead the New York Chapter of AAPOR in 2009.
I will be live-blogging here tonight on what we might learn -- and what we might do better to ignore -- from the exit poll in Indiana and North Carolina. More details to follow, but please feel free to use this as an open-thread on what is appearing on the net and elsewhere on the exit polls. Here are the links where official exit poll tabulations will appear shortly after the polls close at 8:00 p.m.:
Comments will appear in reverse chronological order -- all times Eastern.
12:30 - And finally...while some important votes are still being counted n Indiana, at least some conclusions about pollster performance are inescapable. First, it does appear that most of the polls significantly understated Barack Obama's percentage of the African American vote, especially in North Carolina, as they have in other states. According to the most current exit poll tabulations (as of this writing), Obama won over 90% of African Americans in both North Carolina and Indiana.
Second, it seems clear that in terms of the overall result, the winner** among the pollsters tonight was Zogby International. Their final polls had Obama ahead by 14 in North Carolina and up by 2 in Indiana -- a closer margin in Indiana than any survey reported in the final week. [Update: Not so fast. Another pollster -- PPP -- did as well or better, depending on the yardstick. The SurveyUSA report cards for Indiana and North Carolina, as well as the Brian Schaffner's graphic, show that Zogby and PPP both scored well, with PPP doing slightly better on 10 of 16 rankings].
I have certainly been critical of Zogby over the years, but credit is due. Pollster reader political_junkie was right with this comment earlier tonight: "It took a lot of courage for them to publish their 'outlier' results last night, one night before primary."
Third, the non-polling based statistical model developed by Poblano at FiveThirtyEight.com outperformed most of the polls. His models predicted a narrow (51.0% to 49.0%) margin in Indiana and a 17 point margin in North Carolina (58.6% to 41.4%).
10:16 - Better late than never, answering the question raised at 8:11: I am told that Edison/Mitofsky conducted a telephone poll of early voters in North Carolina to gather data to combine with the interviews completed at polling places. In Indiana, it was polling place interviews only.
10:11 -- Just posted by Poblano, who is doing his own modeling of the vote count:
I'm now showing Clinton winning Indiana by 1.8 percent, or about 23,000 votes. And one thing to remember about Indiana is the provisional ballot issue -- people who were rejected at the polls because they did not meet the state's ID requirements could still cast provisional ballots and prove their identity later. It's possible that we'll still have a hanging chads type of situation.
9:39 - Thatcher asks: "Did I just see MSNBC change their call from 'Too early' [to call] to "Too close'"? Yes you did.
I am watching MSNC coverage of the Indiana and North Carolina Democratic Primary results and I am struck by how profligate the network is with almost all of the exit poll results for Indiana (which has not yet been called) except the aggregate percentages for each of the candidates! The race is "too close to call," but that doesn't explain this.
Why don't the networks tell us who "won" according to the exit polls? The polls have closed, so they can't affect the results? Are the exit polls so lacking in trustworthiness that they aren't really informative? If that is the case, why are the demographic breakdowns from the exit polls thrown around and talked as if they were gospel? (They don't even mention margins of error when talking about them!)
Here's bottom line: When they say a race is "too close to call" or that it's "too early to call," they don't "know" who won yet. They have estimates, and they have a good sense of who is likely to win, but not enough statistical confidence in those estimates to project a winner with complete confidence. No one wants to repeat the mistakes made in projecting Florida eight years ago.
On the other hand, I tend to agree with those who wish the networks would make more of their estimate data available via the web on election night. The various estimates that the exit poll operation generates -- including the levels of statistical confidence in each measure and the real-time estimates of the precinct level error -- are truly fascinating.
8:25 - From Nora O'Donnell's report on MSNBC: In Indiana, Clinton carries whites without a college degree 63% to 34%; Obama ahead by two points (51% to 49%) among college educated white voters.
8:22 - Via Ambinder: CBS News has projected Hillary Clinton the winner in Indiana (thanks PHGrl).
8:15 - Reader Thatcher asks: "So does every network use the same exit poll info?" Yep.
8:11 - Reader RS asks a really good question: "Maybe this question has been answered earlier, but: Do the exit polls account for early voters?"
The networks typically do a pre-election telephone interviews among those who say they have already voted in states that typically get (or expect) a very large proportion of early voters, so I assume that they did one in North Carolina. But to be honest, I'm not sure.
7:55 - MSNBC's Nora O'Donnell just read results from two subgroups of North Carolina voters we've watched carefully in other states. Among white college educated voters, Clinton is leading by 7 (52% to 45%). Among white voters without a college degree, Clinton leads 68% to 26%.
7:54 - The North Carolina tabulations just updated with an additional 554 exit poll interviews not included in the first batch. My extrapolation of the underlying estimate now gives Obama a 14-point lead, 55% to 41%.
7:50 - Just a note on the mechanics of the exit poll updates and the network projection process. The numbers we have seen so far are -- presumably -- based on the exit poll interviews weighted based on some hard counts of turnout and (probably) weighted to the "composite estimate" which splits the difference between the exit poll tallies and pre-election polls. Right now, however, exit poll interviews and other results "reporters" are obtaining actual vote counts for the sampled precincts and these are being gradually incorporated into the estimates that the network "decision desks" look at to make their projections.
Unfortunately, If tonight's updates follow the pattern of recent election nights, the cross-tabulations we can see will not be updated until much later in the evening.
7:38 - Clinton again does better among the late than early deciders in North Carolina though not by as much as in Indiana. She won those deciding in the last three days by six points more (48%) than those who decided earlier (42%).
7:36 - The exit poll estimates 33% of North Carolina's Democrats as African American, and Obama is winning then 91% to 6%. Clinton is holding a 59% to 36% margin among white voters.
7:32 - CNN and MSNBC project Obama the winner in North Carolina. My extrapolation of the initial vote estimate used to weight the current exit poll tabulations shows Obama leading 55% to 41%, with 4% choosing "no preference."
7:27 - Polls close in NC shortly. Here's a CBS summary
7:19 - Once again, Hillary did better in Indiana among those who made up their minds in the last three days (+9) or within the last week (+8) than those who decided earlier (tie). See my Pennsylvania election night post (6:26 update) for comparative data from past primaries).
7:17 - Demographics: African Americans are 15% of the current estimate in Indiana. Obama is winning 92% of black voters, Clinton 60% of white voters. Compare to the pre-election polls here.
7:13 - Interesting that the MSNBC anchors have a new phrase that better fits the past problems with these numbers: "Too early to call."
7:12 - While I was typing, the Indiana table updated slightly but the overall estimate still rounds to 52-48% in Clinton's favor.
7:09 - Time for the usual caveats, with a twist. My usual election night helper Mark Lindeman had a social engagement tonight, so his spiffy extrapolation program is unavailable. I will be doing simpler extrapolations off of the vote by gender cross tab the old-fashioned way (which may mean a tad more rounding error).
Again, these initial tabulations are weighted to an estimate of the result that is usually a mashup of pre-election polls and the interviews exit polls conducted at polling places and over the phone (with early voters) by the networks. These estimates improve, becoming more accurate over the course of the night. Click here for more detail on how these numbers are derived and how they improve over the course of the evening.
7:04 - The exit poll tabulations now available on the network sites (links above) show an initial 52% to 48% estimate favoring Hillary Clinton. Please note that these initial estimates are usually a cross between the interviews conducted at polling places and an average of pre-election polls and, more importantly, have often been quite different than the final result.
These preliminary results indicate that a third of North Carolina's voters are African-Americans, in line with the norm, e.g. 31 percent in 1992, the last primary there for which exit poll data are available.
6:51 - Here (via The Page) are official early exit poll summaries, focusing mostly on results on questions other than vote preference from CNN, ABC, Fox, ABC, CBS, AP and MSNBC.
5:50 - Almost forgot. Halperin has these words of wisdom about "what makes it tough to produce good models for the exit polls in North Carolina and Indiana:"
1. They are not closed contests open only to Democrats.
2. Turnout is going to be huge (probably record breaking).
3. The absence of recent competitive primaries.
So let’s all be patient, shall we?
5:45. First out of the block in the leaked exit poll derby (at least that I'm aware of) is Huffington Post. Now before you click that link, please read my column on the problems exit polls have had this primary season (paying close attention to the table) and the follow-up this week on Pennsylvania. I'll be relocating to the Pollster.com "home office" over the next 30-40 minutes...see you back at 7:00.
Amidst the personal craziness last week, I neglected to link to two columns from network pollsters that provide some valuable data from the exit polls on the Obama-Clinton race tabulated by race, education and income. Interest in this issue peaked last week after Barack Obama, said the following after his loss in the Pennsylvania primary:
I have to say if you look at and I know my staff has talked about this: If you look at the numbers, in fact, our problem has less to do with white working class voters. In fact, the problem is that, to the extent there is a problem, is that the older voters are very loyal to Senator Clinton.
ABC's polling director Gary Langer combined data from exit polls to look at support for the two candidates among white voters by age and income. "Age clearly is a factor," he concludes, "but it’s equally clear that socioeconomic status, as measured by the education and income alike, is independently a factor, and a big one."
Langer's column has tables with all the data. To make the patterns easier to see, I created two charts I created using only the percentage supporting Obama.
Here is Langer's analysis:
Look just at seniors, for instance: Across all primaries to date, among less well-off white seniors (those with less than $50,000 in household incomes), Clinton has beaten Obama by 70-22 percent. Among white seniors with more than $100,000 in household incomes, by contrast, Obama’s actually run ahead, by 50-45 percent.
Put another way, Obama’s support from high-income white seniors has been 28 points higher than it’s been among working-class white seniors. That isn’t just a senior problem. [...]
The relationship is weakest in Obama’s best age group, under 30s, but it’s still there. He’s won under-30 whites in $100,000+ households by 65-33 percent; he’s won young whites in under-$50,000 households by a much closer 53-42 percent.
The results are similar by education – Obama does 21 points better with white seniors who’ve earned college degrees than with those who haven’t. College-educated white seniors have favored Clinton by just 8 points, 50-42 percent; those without degrees have backed her by a whopping 48 points, 69-21 percent.
Kathy Frankovic, polling director at CBS News, looks at the same exit polling data (or presumably the same -- she explained that she combined exit polls "weighted to total votes...excluding Florida and Michigan") and adds a little more granularity for the youngest voters:
Among white voters with a college degree, Obama and Clinton have run almost even so far this year - 49 percent for Obama, 47 percent for Clinton. The results are very different by age within this group - those under 45 have given Obama a lead, and those over 45 have chosen Clinton. This does seem to support Obama’s claim that older, better-educated Democratic voters are staying with what they know, keeping on “track.”
White voters without a college degree, however, vote differently. This year, they have voted for Clinton over Obama by almost two-to-one - 61 percent to 33 percent. And the age of the voter matters less. Clinton leads decisively with just about all age groups of these voters - as long as they are over 30. She even edged Obama, 48 percent to 47 percent, among non-degreed voters under 30, but over 24 years old. Only the white non-college graduates younger than 25 have favored Obama so far this primary season. They voted for him 59 percent to 38 percent.
Frankovic's column also draws on an innovative survey released last week conducted among college students in Pennsylvania in partnership with the website Uwire (another survey I neglected to link to last week). College students have always been notoriously difficult to survey, and the ubiquity of cell phones among students has made it even worse. In this case, CBS sampled and interviewed students online using email lists of all students, presumably obtained directly from the universities. The full results from CBS include more methodological details.
For those of us that have been following trends in the Obama-Clinton contest by race, education and income, these two columns from Langer and Frankovic are invaluable. Both are worth reading in full. Also, be on the lookout for analysis of this data and more by my colleague Ron Brownstein in National Journal on Friday.
Robert Novak's column last week led with this reference to the Pennsylvania exit poll results:
When Pennsylvania exit polls came out late Tuesday afternoon showing a lead of 3.6 points for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama, Democratic leaders who desperately wanted her to end her candidacy were not cheered. They were sure that this puny lead overstated Obama's strength, as exit polls nearly always have in diverse states with large urban populations. How is it possible, then, that Clinton, given up for dead by her party's establishment, won Pennsylvania in a 10-point landslide? The answer is the dreaded "Bradley effect."
Prominent Democrats only whisper when they compare Obama's experience, the first African American with a serious chance to be president, with what happened to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley a quarter-century ago. In 1982, exit polls showed Bradley, who was black, ahead in the race for governor of California, but he ultimately lost to Republican George Deukmejian. Pollster John Zogby (who predicted Clinton's double-digit win Tuesday) said what practicing Democrats would not: "I think voters face to face are not willing to say they would oppose an African American candidate."
Unfortunately, Novak confounds two issues, and Zogby's contribution confuses things further. The "Bradley effect" (also called the "Bradley/Wilder effect," the latter based on the 1989 election of Doug Wilder in Virginia by narrower margins than indicated by pre-election polls) pertained less to exit polls but to pre-election telephone surveys. The underlying theory was that white respondents were sometimes unwilling to reveal their preference for the white candidate in a bi-racial contest when they felt some "social discomfort" in doing so. That is, respondents would be less likely to reveal their true preference in a telephone interview if they believed the interviewer supported a different candidate. The most important evidence was an observed race-of-interviewer effect: Support for Doug Wilder in one 1989 survey (pdf) was eight points higher when the interviewer was black than when the interviewer was white.
The problem with extending this idea to the 2008 exit polls is that -- contrary to the apparent assumptions of both Bob Novak and John Zogby -- exit polls do not involve a "face to face" interview. Rather, the exit poll interviewer's task is to randomly select and recruit respondents, hand them a paper questionnaire, a pencil and a clipboard and allow the respondents to privately fill out the questionnaire and deposit it into a large "ballot box."
The more likely explanation for the consistent Obama skew in the exit polls this year is likely less about "voters not willing to say they would oppose an African American candidate," than about the relative youth of the interviewers, and the well established problem that the typically younger exit poll interviewers have in winning cooperation from older respondents. Here is a summary I wrote two years ago about information included in the official, post-election report on the 2004 exit polls:
The [National Election Pool] NEP exit polls depended heavily on younger and college age interviewers. More than a third (36%) were age 18-24 and more than half (52%) were under 35 years of age (p. 43-44). These younger interviewers had a much harder time completing interviews: The completion rate among 18-24 year olds was 50% compared to 61% among those 60 or older. The college age interviewers also reported having a harder time interviewing voters...The percentage of interviewers who said "the voters at your location" were "very cooperative" was 69% among interviewers over 55 but only 27% among those age 18 to 24 -- see p. 44 of the Edison/Mitofsky report.
Given the huge differences by age in both pre-election and exit polls -- Obama wins those under 30 while Clinton dominates among those over 60 -- an age-related selection bias is not surprising. And the issue may not be about simply getting the age mix right in the exit poll. The issue may also be related to the "social discomfort" theories behind the Bradley-Wilder effect.
Respondents may be making judgements about the exit poll interviewers based on their appearance (age, gender and race) that influence whether they agree to participate or avoid the interviewer altogether. Similarly, while exit poll interviewers are supposed to be carefully counting exiting voters and sticking rigidly to instructions that they select every fourth voter (or whatever interval they are instructed to select) anecdotal evidence suggests that those with less experience often deviate from the procedure and "take who they can get." So less experienced, overburdened interviewers are probably making judgments about which respondents (based on their age, gender and race) might be most likely to cooperate.
"It's not that younger interviewers aren't good," as Kathy Frankovic puts it (slide #30), "it's that different kinds of voters perceive them differently." Put all the evidence together, we have considerable support for the idea "that Bush voters were predisposed to steer around college-age interviewers" (Lindeman, p. 14) or, put another way, that "when the interviewer has a hard time, they may be tempted to gravitate to people like them" (Frankovic, slide #30).
It is not at all surprising that this same mix of issues -- younger interviewers who have trouble winning cooperation with older respondents and a huge age differential in the results -- produces a consistent skew to Obama in the context of 2008.
As of this writing, the Pennsylvania Secretary of State reports that Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama yesterday by a 9.2% margin (54.6% to 45.4%) with 99.4% of precincts reported. Given rounding and small discrepancies some news organizations have been reporting the margin as either nine or ten points, but for the purposes of comparing the pollster's performance, we are close enough. Our final "standard" estimate based on all the public polls showed Clinton ahead by seven points. Considering that Clinton once again did better among those who made up their minds over the last three days (leading 58% to 42%) than those who decided earlier (52% to 48%), on average at least, the public polls did reasonably well.
Also, via Jon Cohen at the Washington Post, the current exit poll results by race and education: Clinton won college educated white voters six points (53% to 47%; they were 41% of all voters) and whites without a college degree by 40 points (70% to 30%; 40% of all voters). As such, Clinton did better among both groups than in the Quinnipiac polling I featured here, although college educated voters, both white and of all races, where a significantly bigger portion of the electorate as measured by the exit polls than in most of the pre-election polls.
Obama's performance within these subgroups was only slightly better than in Ohio, where Clinton won white non-college educated voters by 44 (71% to 27%) and white college educated voters by 7 (52% to 45%). However, the Pennsylvania numbers may still be subject to one more round of re-weighting, so stay tuned.
I hope to have more later, but for now, here are some links to poll related post-election coverage.
I will be live-blogging here starting very soon on what the exit polls will have to tell us about the exit polls. More details to follow, but please feel free to use this as an open-thread on what is appearing on the net and elsewhere on the exit polls. Here are the links where official exit poll tabulations will appear shortly after the polls close at 8:00 p.m.:
Comments will appear in reverse chronological order.
11:25 - Folks, I'm calling it a night. With 88% of the vote counted as of this writing, Clinton is holding a lead of exactly 10 percentage points. The pre-election polls did reasonably well, especially given that Clinton did better among those deciding late. The early leaked exit poll estimates were off once again. More tomorrow.
9:50 - Reader "Anon" posted the link to the Pennsylvania Secretary of State's official count. At this point, the official count is probably the best source of information about the ultimate vote count. Though having posted that link, I now see that the percentage of the vote counted in the official network news sites.
9:45 - After nearly 90 minutes, the exit poll tabulations update, and Mark Lindeman reports the underlying estimate extrapolates to 54% Clinton, 46% Obama. The geostrata show Philadelphia at 18% of all voters, Philly suburbs at 16%.
8:57 - Noticed an error in the 2006 turnout numbers I posted below. Now corrected.
8:50 - NBC calls Pennsylvania for Clinton.
8:37 - Here are some of the most important numbers to watch in the exit pol
