Friday Open Thread [10.19.12]

Ezra Klein interviewed Gallup’s Frank Newport, after noticing that virtually the entire Romney lead was produced among respondents from the South, making him wonder if Gallup might be forecasting a 2000 result where the victor (Obama) wins the electoral college vote and the loser (Romney) wins the popular vote due to the high racist margins he is piling up in the South.

Last night, I spoke with Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup, to ask him if I was missing something. He said I wasn’t. “That’s certainly what it looks like,” he says.

But Newport was cautious in interpreting his numbers. Gallup’s poll cheered Romney supporters because it showed Romney gaining ground even after the second debate. But Newport didn’t see it like that. Remember, he warned, it’s a seven-day poll. “I think we’re still seeing leftover positive support for Romney and I don’t think we’re seeing impact yet from the second debate,” he says.

What you think is going on in the race depends on whether you think the electorate will ultimately look more like Gallup’s “likely voter” model, where the race is a blowout, or all registered voters, where it’s a dead heat. So I asked Newport to explain the likely voter model to me.

“The likely voters model takes into account changes in the response to questions about how closely they’re following and how enthusiastic they are,” he said. “It’s not just capturing underlying movement — it’s representing changes in enthusiasm.” That sounds, I replied, like a model that would tend to overstate the effects of major events that favored one candidate or the other, as their supporters would grow temporarily more enthusiastic and attentive, while the other side would grow temporarily disillusioned. Newport agreed. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘overstate,’ ” he said. “But it would be very sensitive to changes in enthusiasm.

Nate Cohn looked at the likely voter screen Gallup is using and found that it not only projected an electorate that looked more like 2010’s than 2008’s, but a whiter 2012 electorate than existed in 2010. Seriously, Gallup is expecting less minorities at the polls in 2012. Okayyyyy. I kinda hate talking about a pollster’s methodology and likely voter screens, because it makes me feel like those stupid conservatives with their unskewed polls bullshit from a month ago or so. But remember back then, those stupid conservatives were complaining that pollsters were using a likely voter model that looked like 2008 rather than 2010, and they were self-skewing the polling results to their 2010 liking. Which makes no fucking sense at all. It is an Apple and Oranges comparison. One is a Midterm election that experiences lower turnout of the party bases, and yes, in those Midterm elections the electorate is whiter with less minority participation. In Presidential years, like 2008 and 2012, you have higher turnout with much higher minority participation. To act, like conservatives and Gallup does, that 2012 is going to be 2010 in turnout and demographics is insane, but whatevs.

Ed Kilgore:

[G]allup’s own chief seems to be hinting we are likely to see additional big swings in their Tracking Poll quite soon, a tendency that Nate Silver notes is not unknown to characterize Gallup results in the recent past. […] Meanwhile, NBC/WSJ/Marist published two new battleground polls partially capturing post-second-debate sentiment (they were in the field Monday through Wednesday) and showing Obama’s leads holding up pretty well in Iowa (8 points among likely voters) and Wisconsin (6 points among LVs). Both polls suggested a landscape similar to that that prevailed before any of the debates. The Wisconsin results were particularly interesting as a contrast to yesterday’s Marquette Law School survey, taken entirely before the second debate, which showed Obama’s lead down to one point. And the NBC/WSJ/Marist findings also indicated that Obama was doing very well among early voters in both IA and WI.