August 6, 2008
Panagakis: Response to Moore - Part II
Nick Panagakis is president of Market Shares Corporation, a marketing and public opinion research firm headquartered in Arlington Heights, Ill.
This post is the forth installment of a dialogue between pollsters David Moore and Nick Panagakis about the best way to measure and report how many voters are "undecided." See their earlier installments here, here and here.
I agree with much of what David Moore says in his response, including percentage undecided that seems too low as is currently being reported. Where we differ is on terminology. The potential for mind-changing is a lot less than you think.
Yes we are "interested in portraying what the electorate is thinking today". Now that general election national polling is underway, we will be interested in finding (needless to say) whether voters did change their minds about the candidate(s) since the last poll asking how they would vote "if the election were held today".
My issue is about reporting results with low conventional undecideds followed by a large number in the 20%+ range who could still change their minds. It's enough to give readers and viewers whiplash.
In my last post on this subject I hypothesized that such high numbers are not "indecision" as implied by "could change their minds". I said some voters willing to decide on a candidate in a poll won't rule out the possibility that some incident or candidate disclosure, however remote, could lead them to vote otherwise.
The ABC Polling Unit provides some validation of this. Their polls have been asking this question of decided voters since 2004: "Would you definitely vote for ___ or is there a chance you could change your mind and vote for someone else?" This has been asked three times since May this year and eight times in 2004, from June 20 to September 26. This year, "could change your mind" has ranged from 25% to 29%, similar to response levels seen in current polls, dissimilar wording not withstanding. In 2004, "could change your mind" was 28% in the June 20 poll then steadily declined to 16% in late September.
But unlike other polls, ABC then probed potential mind-changers by asking "Is there a good chance you'll change your mind, or would you say it's pretty unlikely?" So far this year, about half say "pretty unlikely" as did respondents in June, 2004 polls. July to September 2004 showed another pattern. 'Pretty unlikely" voters began to consistently outnumber "good chance" of mind-changing voters by a ratio of 2 to 1. This could mean that two-thirds of possible mind-changing voters in current polls, if asked their chances of doing so, would rate their chances as pretty remote. Should mind-changing as currently being presented be part of any story when the chances of doing so are so slim? I don't think so. I prefer the ABC qualifier.
Another thought. Shouldn't there be some analysis to validate such high could change their mind numbers? The analysis could compare poll stated undecideds with "could change their mind" levels with actual candidate vote preference changes from poll to poll and to election outcomes.
Another subject. David mentioned the recent CBS poll. According to their release they had 12% undecided which seems reasonable to me. If you go to pollster.com's national summary you will find many polls with much lower undecideds. However, half of Gallup's higher undecideds shown there are actually vote for "neither" which should not be combined with undecideds in that table. Click the Gallup links. Moreover, "neither" response is not very meaningful. It would be more precise to replace it with "vote for other" and "won't vote" with non-voters excluded from the base for calculation of voter percentages. All for now.
By Guest Pollster on August 6, 2008 4:55 PM | Permalink
