Via Wall Street investor and blogger Barry Ritholtz, Wall Street Journal’ s June Kronholz:
In Campaign 2008, Pollsters Are Biggest Losers
• The Issue – Opinion-poll results were wide of the mark in early-voting states and will likely misjudge the size of some victories on Super Tuesday.
• Why? – Huge turnout has skewed pollsters’ calculations.
• The Effect – Polls can influence how people vote by validating their choice or assuring them that a candidate is viable.[...] Voter turnout is typically low in primary elections, and turnout among the young, the poor and nonwhites is typically lower in all elections. Pollsters use past voting behavior to predict who will turn out in an election, and base their predictions on interviews with those people. But this year’s races are generating such interest that they are turning out people who don’t usually vote and whose preferences may not have been factored into polling calculations. [...] Younger voters are hard to find, too, because of their preference for cellphones. Cellphone numbers aren’t listed and often have area codes that don’t reflect where their users live; a pollster calling a California area code could reach a student in Texas, for example. People with only a cellphone tend to be younger, more Democratic and more liberal than those who also have a landline. But they also tend to be less politically active, which means they haven’t skewed poll results so far, pollsters said. [...]
And since the political prediction markets (organized by InTrade-TradeSports, BetFair-TradeFair, Betdaq, NewsFutures, HubDub, Inkling Markets, etc.) feed on polls, they will likely have trouble, too, foreseeing correctly Super Tuesday 2008.
