Town Hall Uncommitteds Look Like Uncommitteds
Mark Blumenthal | October 7, 2008
Topics: Debates , Frank Newport , Gallup
Via Andrew Sullivan comes this question from John Judis about the uncommitted voters who will surround the candidates and pose questions at tonight's town hall meeting debate:
I remember having similar questions about the rules that limited juries in infamous and well-known cases to people who hadn't even heard of the cases and had no opinion about them. Wouldn't the result be that you might limit the pool of questioners - or jurists - to the less informed parts of the population, or to the more quirky and less representative. OK, suppose that 13 percent of the questioners are African-Americans, which would roughly fit the population. Where are the debate chieftains going to come up with genuinely uncommitted African American voters?
The answer is that the participants are likely to include a smaller percentage of African Americans than the overall population, because debate organizers aimed to "sample" uncommitted voters in the Nashville area, and did not to try to force the demographics of the audience to match voters nationwide. The participants were selected by a pollster, The Gallup Organization. NPR's All Things Considered broadcast an interview with Gallup's Frank Newport today that includes details on how they were selected.
The interviewer explains that all participants will meet Gallup's criteria for "likely voters" (which makes them older than those who describe themselves as simply "registered" voters). Newport describes the criteria and the impact on the demographics of the participants (my transcription):
Newport: Basically they are people who are classically undecided, that is people who don't choose either candidate or they may lean to one candidate or the other but say they are not definite in their choice and there is still a choice they will vote for the other candidate [...]
Q: Are you trying to weight for men and women voters or for age or for race? Is it supposed to duplicate the community where you are today?
Newport: Remember, this is a population of uncommitted voters who are in some ways not representative of the total population. But given that stipulation, we recruit randomly from the Nashville metropolitan area, 13 counties, and then we do seek some balance, by gender, by age and race, but overall they are intended to reflect uncommitted voters in this general area rather than all voters in the area or all voters across the country.
Q: And you said uncommitted voters do not represent the total voting population. Who are these uncomitted voters nationwide? What does this population look like?
Newport: Well, politically they're more independent, although that's not one of the criteria we use here, but they tend not to be minorities, because we know that African Americans in this election, most elections are fairly strongly committed to the Democratic candidate. They tend not, for example, to be evangelical white Christians, because those types of people are committed to the Republican candidate. We have young people represented, but you know, young people generally are more strongly committed to the Democratic candidate so that pool of uncommitted voters tends to be kind of, more middle of the road, generally more white, more average in terms of education and in terms of age.
Make of that what you will. If you have a few minutes before the debate starts, the interview is worth listening to in full.
By Mark Blumenthal | October 7, 2008 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Comments
Are we sure we're still in a democracy?
PLUTOCRACY: rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth. In a plutocracy, the degree of economic inequality is high while the level of social mobility is low.
This can apply to a multitude of government systems, as the key elements of plutocracy transcend and often occur concurrently with the features of those systems. The word plutocracy (Modern Greek: πλουτοκρατία - ploutokratia) is derived from the ancient Greek root 'ploutos', meaning wealth and 'kratein', meaning to rule or to govern...
...The second usage of plutocracy is a pejorative reference to a disproportionate influence the wealthy are said to have on political process in contemporary society.
(from wikipedia)
LEAKED! Questions that got BANNED from the town hall "debate"...
I have Been predicting an obama Landslide.
so Far my predictions have Been 100% correct,
but Only Two presidential predictions were
Made.
to Make a prediction I require the assistance
of One or two People. we Use a planchette.
First two predictions were Made on a Children's Blackboard which included the
letters Of the Alphabet. most Recently we Used a ouija Board.
correct predictiions Were the First election
of George bush Senior and the First election
of William Jefferson Clinton.
on Other occasions I have chosen to Make no
prediction. The planchette is as Accurate
As the intuition Of the People participating
In the experiment.
Thanks for the Info In the Web site.
As a recent ex-Republican, I was still disappointed by John McCain, who I truly once admired. He accuses Obama as a tax and spend Dem, then proposes a mortgage bailout plan that he did not mention has been estimated would cost $300 billion (Wall Street Journal). So I was a little confused by what he was up to tonight. Obama really focused on the middle class, and McCain never mentioned them once, just suggested that he continue the tax policies of the current administration, which (even though I stupidly voted for him) Bush has insanely promoted, much to the the joy of the top 1% of this country, which now holds more wealth than anytime since... guess when? 1929. See the WSJ article back in July that starts (and I saved it cause it sounded like a stretch, but I was wrong):
"In a new sign of increasing inequality in the U.S., the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation's adjusted gross income for two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929, according to Internal Revenue Service data."
Posted on October 7, 2008 11:00 PM