Consider
polling failures to predict the President’s victory compared to those that
misread FDR’s reelection in 1936.
Back
then, a previously accurate magazine straw poll foresaw Roosevelt’s defeat when
he actually won every state but Maine and Vermont. A huge self-selected sample was
based on its own privileged readers along with telephone listings and auto
registrations, which excluded most poor families (including mine).
Enter
Gallup with a smaller but demographically sound survey that nailed the result
to establish itself as the brand name of polling.
Three-quarters
of a century later, Gallup and other hot-shot pollsters are in trouble and for
comparable negligence to take into account social changes.
Parsing
the thickets of Nate Silver, one explanation lies is their failure to plumb sufficiently
the population of cell phone and Internet users, who skew toward the young,
ethnic and poor. Too many slipped under their radar.
If part
of the answer for last week’s surprise lies in not understanding what’s
really going in America below the media noise, what else are we and so-called powers-that-be in Washington missing?
Are
we overlooking any other manifestations of what the beloved Richard Nixon used
to call a Silent Majority?
Update: Now the Obama campaign is bragging about what it calls “the Optimizer,” a strategy leading to ad purchases on old-sitcom reruns to reach what it calls low-information voters who could be swayed.
Update: Now the Obama campaign is bragging about what it calls “the Optimizer,” a strategy leading to ad purchases on old-sitcom reruns to reach what it calls low-information voters who could be swayed.
Maybe, but it’s not encouraging to think about being
able to manipulate the clueless in future elections.
No comments:
Post a Comment