Tag Archives: voters

“Pollsters defend craft amid string of high-profile misses”

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Researchers and polling organizations continue to defend their efforts:

Pollsters widely acknowledge the challenges and limitations taxing their craft. The universality of cellphones, the prevalence of the Internet and a growing reluctance among voters to respond to questions are “huge issues” confronting the field, said Ashley Koning, assistant director at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling…

“Not every poll,” Koning added, “is a poll worth reading.”

Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center, agreed. Placing too much trust in early surveys, when few voters are paying close attention and the candidate pools are their largest, “is asking more of a poll than what it can really do.”…

Kathryn Bowman, a public opinion specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, also downplayed the importance of early primary polls, saying they have “very little predictive value at this stage of the campaign.” Still, she said, the blame is widespread, lamenting the rise of pollsters who prioritize close races to gain coverage, journalists too eager to cover those results and news consumers who flock to those types of stories.

Given the reliance on data in today’s world, particularly in political campaigns, polls are unlikely to go away. But, there will be likely be changes in the future that might include:

  1. More consumers of polls, the media and potential voters, learn what exactly polls are saying and what they are not. Since the media seems to love polls and horse races, I’m not sure much will change in that realm. But, we need great numeracy among Americans to sort through all of these numbers.
  2. Continued efforts to improve methodology when it is harder to reach people and obtain representative samples and predict who will be voting.
  3. A consolidation of efforts by researchers and poling organizations as (a) some are knocked out by a string of bad results or high-profile wrong predictions and (b) groups try to pool their resources (money, knowledge, data) to improve their accuracy. Or, perhaps (c) polling will just become a partisan effort as more objective observers realize their efforts won’t be used correctly (see #1 above).

Growing troubles in surveying Americans

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International difficulties in polling are also present in the United States with fewer responses to telephone queries:

With sample sizes often small, fluctuations in polling numbers can be caused by less than a handful of people. A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal national survey of the Republican race out this week, for instance, represents the preferences of only 230 likely GOP voters. Analysis of certain subgroups, like evangelicals, could be shaped by the response of a single voter.Shifting demographics are also playing a role. In the U.S., non-whites, who have historically voted at a lower rate than whites, are likely to comprise a majority of the population by mid-century. As their share of the electorate grows, so might their tendency to vote. No one knows by how much, making turnout estimates hard…

To save money, more polling is done using robocalls, Internet-based surveys, and other non-standard methods. Such alternatives may prove useful but they come with real risks. Robocalls, for example, are forbidden by law from dialing mobile phones. Online polling may oversample young people or Democratic Party voters. While such methods don’t necessarily produce inaccurate results, Franklin and others note, their newness makes it harder to predict reliability…

As response rates have declined, the need to rely on risky mathematical maneuvers has increased. To compensate for under-represented groups, like younger voters, some pollsters adjust their results to better reflect the population — or their assessment of who will vote. Different firms have different models that factor in things like voter age, education, income, and historical election data to make up for the all the voters they couldn’t query.

The telephone provided new means of communication in society but also helped make national mass surveys possible once a majority of Americans had them. Yet, even with cell phone adoption increasing to over 90% in 2013 and cell phones spreading as fast as any technology (comparable to the television in the early 1950s), the era of the telephone as an instrument for survey data may be coming to an end.

Three other thoughts:

  1. Another issue at this point of the election cycle: there are so many candidates involved that it is difficult to get good data on all of them.
  2. If the costs of telephone surveys keep going up, might we see more door-to-door surveys? Given the increase in contractor/part-time work, couldn’t polling organizations get good idea from all over the country?
  3. If polls aren’t quite as accurate as they might have bee in the past, does this mean election outcomes will be more exciting for the public? If so, would voter turnout increase?

American culture wars to move next to fighting over the suburbs?

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Joel Kotkin is back with the claim that the next American culture war will be over the suburbs:

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently…

Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.

The obstacles being erected include incentives for density, urban growth boundaries, attempts to alter the race and class makeup of communities, and mounting environmental efforts to reduce sprawl. The EPA wants to designate even small, seasonal puddles as “wetlands,” creating a barrier to developers of middle-class housing, particularly in fast-growing communities in the Southwest. Denizens of free-market-oriented Texas could soon be experiencing what those in California, Oregon and other progressive bastions have long endured: environmental laws that make suburban development all but impossible, or impossibly expensive. Suburban family favorites like cul-de-sacs are being banned under pressure from planners…

Progressive theory today holds that the 2014 midterm results were a blast from the suburban past, and that the  key groups that will shape the metropolitan future—millennials and minorities—will embrace ever-denser, more urbanized environments. Yet in the last decennial accounting, inner cores gained 206,000 people, while communities 10 miles and more from the core gained approximately 15 million people.

This is one long piece but provides a lot of insight into what Kotkin and others have argued for years: liberals, for a variety of reasons, want to limit the spread and eventually reduce the American suburbs in favor of more pluralistic and diverse urban centers. I would be interested to know which issue Kotkin is most afraid of:

1. Maybe this is really just about politics and winning elections. The split between exurban Republican areas and Democratic urban centers has grown with the suburbs hanging in the balance. Perhaps conservatives fear moving people to cities will turn them more liberal and hand all future elections to Democrats. Of course, lots of liberals had fears after World War II that new suburbanites were going to immediately turn Republican.

2. This may be about the growing teeth of the environmental movement operating through legislation but also agencies and others that are difficult to counter. Suburban areas may just take up more resources but Kotkin and others don’t see this as a big issue compared to the freedom people should have to choose the suburbs. Should there be any limits to using the environment on a societal level?

3. Perhaps this is about maintaining a distinctively American way of life compared to Europeans. Some fear that international organizations and the United Nations are pushing denser, green policies that most Americans don’t really want. The suburbs represent the American quest for the frontier as well as having a plot of land where other people, particularly the government, can’t come after you. This ignores that there still are single-family homes in Europe – though on average smaller homes on smaller lots.

Or, maybe this is a combination of all three: “If the suburbs go, then what America was or stands for dies!” Something like that. Imagine “Don’t Tread On Me” making its last or most important stand on the green lawns of post-World War II split levels.

I have a hard time seeing this as the next big culture war topic that reaches a resolution in a short amount of time (say within a decade), primarily because so many Americans do live in the suburbs and the suburbs have such a long standing in American culture. But, perhaps a movement could start soon that would see fruition in the future.

Political campaigns combining big data, ground games

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Close elections mean both political parties are combining ground games and big data to try to eke out victories:

Workers like Ms. Wellington and Mr. Noble are, in the end, critical to any ground campaign, no matter how sophisticated data collection and targeting models are, said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.”

“The great irony of the modern ground game is it’s this meeting of incredibly modern analytics and data married to very old-fashioned delivery devices,” he said. “It’s people knocking on doors; it’s people making phone calls out of phone banks; but the calculations that are determining which door and which phone are different.”…

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ramped up its commitment, creating the “Bannock Street project,” a multimillion dollar, data-driven effort to persuade, register and turn out voters.

“The easiest way to look at it is our strategy to winning is expanding the voting universe,” said Preston Elliott, Hagan’s campaign manager, in an interview in his Greensboro office. “It’s a little more machineish than just catching a wave and riding momentum.”

Republicans say they are catching up. In Raleigh, campaign workers and volunteers showed off a new smartphone app that helps canvassers target their door knocks. But Republican officials refused to reveal volunteer numbers, paid staff totals, field office locations or a tabulation of voter contacts. Nor would they allow reporters to recount the phone-bank pitch, “the secret sauce,” as they called it.

This is taking new information about voters – something political parties always want – and putting it into real-time (or close) models in order to produce more effective targeted efforts with limited time and efforts before elections.

Two other thoughts:

1. It would be interesting to then see how these new efforts fit with broad appeals politicians make to the public. Does this new kind of information and targeting mean that politicians will spend less time making big claims and instead focus on smaller segments of voters?

2. Americans aren’t always thrilled with the kind of information corporations or tech companies have about them. Are they happy with political parties having more information? Of course, people don’t have to give out this information but this information is going into the hands of political parties who don’t exactly have the highest ratings these days.

More sprawl = more Republicans

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Richard Florida summarizes research that shows cities with more sprawl have more Republicans:

Hickory, a small industrial city in western North Carolina, lies within the state’s 10th congressional district, one that the Washington Post has called “one of the most Republican in the nation.” Its representative, Congressman Patrick McHenry, proudly boasts that, on family values issues, he is tied for the “most conservative voting record in Congress.”

Last week, Hickory topped another list. Researchers at Smart Growth America named the metro it anchors (Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, population 350,000) the most sprawling in the country (PDF). At the other extreme, the metros topping the list of “most compact” are also some of the country’s true blue strongholds, with New York and San Francisco ranking as the two most “compact metros” in America.

These two sets of metros reflect a more pervasive pattern. In recent decades, America’s politics have exhibited a new trend, where Red America finds its home base in some of the country’s most sprawling places, while Blue America is centered in denser, more compact metros and cities…

Researchers have identified a tipping point of roughly 800 people per square mile where counties shift from Red to Blue, as I noted in the weeks following Barack Obama’s reelection. Princeton historian Kevin Kruse similarly explained this spatial link between a spread-out landscape and Republican political positions to the New Republic. “There are certain things in which the physical nature of a city, the fact the people are piled on top of each other, requires some notion of the public good,” he said. “Conservative ideology works beautifully in the suburbs, because it makes sense spatially.”

While I’m not sure Florida’s correlations that are strong, his arguments are in line with other researchers who have uncovered this pattern in recent decades. But, the data could be even more fine-grained than just comparing metro areas (which have varying degrees of sprawl within them): dense cities are more Democrat, exurbs are more Republican, and the parties are fighting over middle-suburb residents, places that may have been more traditional suburbs but have recently experienced more demographic and economic change.

Recent book details the “new swing states” of suburbia

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Richard Florida describes the findings from a recent book titled The Political Ecology of the Metropolis that looks at the swing votes available in American suburbs:

Sellers and his colleagues analyze the political characteristics of cities and suburbs across many advanced nations. Sellers’s own chapter covers the U.S., and it includes some eye-opening insights. While most previous research has looked mainly at states and counties, Sellers has developed a detailed data set on the municipalities that make up America’s metro regions. He tracks the political geography of the 1996, 2000 and 2004 elections across twelve U.S. metros with populations of at least 450,000: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle, Cincinnati, Fresno, Birmingham, Syracuse, Wichita, and Kalamazoo.

Democrats have a “decisive” advantage in dense, urban localities and poorer, majority-minority suburbs. In the affluent suburbs, Sellers explains, “Republicans enjoy an analogous, if less dramatic” advantage. He notes that “a pervasive divide separates the Republican low density areas of metropolitan peripheries from the Democratic urban centres and minority suburbs.” At the broad metropolitan level, votes follow the same red/blue, rich/poor pattern identified by Larry Bartels and Andrew Gelman at the state level. Sellers found that municipalities with educated and affluent voters tended to vote with their state’s winners – they voted more Republican in red states and more Democratic in blue states.

With these bases locked down, the key political footballs – the new “swing states,” so to speak – are the swelling ranks of economically distressed suburbs, where poverty has been growing and where the economic crisis hit especially hard. There are now more poor people living in America’s suburbs than its center cities, and as a recent Brookings Institution report found, both Republican and Democratic districts have been affected by this reality…

America’s new metropolitan geography is overlaid by one additional factor: voter participation. Turnout levels have ranged between 52 and 62 percent over the past several national elections. Even though Democrats have the clear advantage in raw numbers, Republicans dominate the kinds of communities where people are more likely to actually vote. Turnout, Sellers finds, tends to be higher in GOP strongholds – the more affluent, highly educated suburbs and low-density rural and exurban areas, all places with higher levels of home-ownership.

See earlier posts on Joel Kotkin’s analysis of swing votes in the suburbs. The candidates should know this as well and we should see a lot of visits in the future to such suburbs.

These economically distressed suburbs, often inner-ring suburbs adjacent to big cities but also more far-flung places that are more working class and not as dependent on white-collar and professional work, may hold more than just the political key to metropolitan regions. While wealthier residents batten down the hatches in nicer suburbs and trendy urban neighborhoods, what happens to the majority of residents who face fewer prospects?

Gun control legislation to move forward due to the support of suburban politicians?

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Here is an interesting theory on how the gun control debate may turn out: suburban politicians could tilt the discussion in certain directions.

More recently, Democrats appear to have found a different source of bipartisan support for significant new gun control: otherwise right-leaning politicians who represent suburban constituents. Lawmakers from Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia have recently warmed to new gun legislation. As Philip Rucker and Paul Kane propose in the Washington Post:

The shift underscores a new reality of gun politics in America: The rapid growth of suburbs in historically gun-friendly states is forcing politicians to cater to the more centrist and pragmatic views of voters in subdivisions and cul-de-sacs as well as to constituents in shrinking rural hamlets where gun ownership is more of a way of life.

The growing political influence of the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh suburbs in particular may have something to do with Republican Sen. Patrick Toomey’s sudden involvement in forging a compromise. Something similar is happening in the rapidly expanding suburbs of Virginia, a state where politics are dramatically different in the Blue Ridge than they are in the D.C. suburbs (the NRA’s national office also happens to be located right in the heart of the Northern Virginia suburbs). In gun-friendly Georgia, Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns is betting on pro-gun control TV ads airing in the Atlanta region.

Rucker and Kane again:

Unlike every other debate that has unfolded recently in a bitterly divided Washington, the gun debate is much more about geography than party. The dividing lines are not between Democrats and Republicans, but between rural lawmakers and those who must cater to urban and suburban constituencies.

This is interesting but it isn’t new in American politics: with the majority of Americans now live in suburbs, there are plenty of voters in the suburbs who could go one or the other depending on the issue or election. Indeed, the past presidential elections have hinged on the suburban vote as big cities have voted Democratic and rural areas have voted Republican. There are splits within the suburban vote based on geography: those closer to big cities, living in places like inner-ring suburbs that face many big city issues lean more Democratic and suburbs further out and the exurbs lean Republican.

I think we could also flip the causal direction in this argument: suburban politicians could indeed influence the gun control debate one way or another but, more broadly, couldn’t suburban politicians throw their weight around if they could agree? Some might argue American politics in the last 60 years or so has already been dominated by suburban interests (think interstate highways, the emphasis on the middle class, etc.) but imagine a suburban lobby that doesn’t just mediate between urban and rural politicians but dictates the main terms.

Is it worth holding local elections for less than 15% turnout?

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The Daily Herald asks whether the low turnout for Tuesday’s local elections in the Chicago area means the elections should not be held:

Voter turnout Tuesday was so poor area election officials were calling the effort a waste of tax dollars…

Numbers show no county in the area managed even a 15 percent turnout. Suburban Cook County faired the best overall with a 13.8 percent turnout, according to the summary report available online. Much of even that low number is attributable to interest in the special primary to replace Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. In other places, such as Palatine Township, the top vote-getter was township clerk candidate Lisa Moran with a mere 1,612 votes.

Without a Congressional draw on the ballot, Lake County logged a turnout of a little more than 11 percent. The low total left Lake County Clerk Willard Helander scratching her head…

In DuPage County, a narrowly focused ballot fueled a 3.9 percent voter turnout, officials said. Tuesday’s primary affected voters in only two precincts who could make a choice between five candidates for Aurora Ward 9 alderman…

Kane County Clerk Jack Cunningham took that sentiment one step further. His county logged a 2.9 percent turnout. That works out to about one vote cast per minute in all of the county for the entire election day, Cunningham said. That’s not enough to justify the cost of running the election.

Those are some low turnout totals. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was anything to be voted on in DuPage County and I keep up with local news and regularly read the newspaper. If it hadn’t been for some of the coverage of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg giving money in the race for Jesse Jackson Jr.’s former seat, I may not have known anything was being voted on.

Some obvious points (to me):

1. Why not vote for these offices and other matters during bigger elections? Yes, this may mean there is more for voters to consider at a time and it is hard to keep up with it all, but at least people would have more of an idea to vote.

2. In response to the low turnout, one county clerk asked whether people care about their local government. My short answer: no, not really. Most communities don’t generate the kind of involvement or major issues that consistently divide the community that would drive people to vote. Even in talking to local public officials, some of them will tell you that they got involved in local government because they saw something they wanted to change and then got involved.

3. I would love to see this story include some data about local voter turnout over time. We know that election turnout has dropped even with the bigger elections. What about these smaller elections? Is there a “golden age” when people used to care more about local government and voted?

Data suggests cities, suburbs, and rural areas divided about Obama

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Recent data continues to suggest President Obama has quite different levels of support across cities, suburbs, and exurbs:

But the most important Obama divide to keep your eye on this year is the one between urban, suburban and rural places.

Urban America is still strongly in Mr. Obama’s corner, 66% say they are optimistic or satisfied. That’s down from 2009’s 74%, but not sharply. The suburbs have grown more skeptical with only 48% saying they are in the optimistic/satisfied camp. In 2009, 63% of the people in suburbs were feeling positive about Mr. Obama’s first term. And rural America is particularly gloomy about the next four years, with only 35% saying they are optimistic or satisfied. In 2009, 58% in rural America thought Mr. Obama would do a good job in the White House.

This is not a new split; Joel Kotkin, for example, has argued for years that the suburbs are the current battleground for voters as city dwellers tend to lean Democratic and people in rural areas tend to lean Republican. But the persistence of this divide goes beyond a red state, blue state divide that has been at the center of American political discourse for over a decade. It is not just about states, which matter particularly for Congress and electoral votes. Rather there are large divides even within states that lead to all sorts of more local issues about how resources should be allocated and who should be able to make decisions. President Obama is known for calling for a purple America bringing together red and blue states but perhaps he needs to call for an America that bridges the big divides between cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

The closer look at how the Obama campaign used big data to wage an intimate and winning campaign

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In MIT Technology Review, Sasha Issenberg has a three-part look at how the Obama campaign was effectively able to harness big data. Here are the concluding paragraphs from Part Three:

A few days after the election, as Florida authorities continued to count provisional ballots, a few staff members were directed, as four years before, to remain in Chicago. Their instructions were to produce another post-mortem report summing up the lessons of the past year and a half. The undertaking was called the Legacy Project, a grandiose title inspired by the idea that the innovations of Obama 2012 should be translated not only to the campaign of the next Democratic candidate for president but also to governance. Obama had succeeded in convincing some citizens that a modest adjustment to their behavior would affect, however marginally, the result of an election. Could he make them feel the same way about Congress?

Simas, who had served in the White House before joining the team, marveled at the intimacy of the campaign. Perhaps more than anyone else at headquarters, he appreciated the human aspect of politics. This had been his first presidential election, but before he became a political operative, Simas had been a politician himself, serving on the city council and school board in his hometown of Taunton, Massachusetts. He ran for office by knocking on doors and interacting individually with constituents (or those he hoped would become constituents), trying to track their moods and expectations.

In many respects, analytics had made it possible for the Obama campaign to recapture that style of politics. Though the old guard may have viewed such techniques as a disruptive force in campaigns, they enabled a presidential candidate to view the electorate the way local candidates do: as a collection of people who make up a more perfect union, each of them approachable on his or her terms, their changing levels of support and enthusiasm open to measurement and, thus, to respect. “What that gave us was the ability to run a national presidential campaign the way you’d do a local ward campaign,” Simas says. “You know the people on your block. People have relationships with one another, and you leverage them so you know the way they talk about issues, what they’re discussing at the coffee shop.”

Few events in American life other than a presidential election touch 126 million adults, or even a significant fraction that many, on a single day. Certainly no corporation, no civic institution, and very few government agencies ever do. Obama did so by reducing every American to a series of numbers. Yet those numbers somehow captured the individuality of each voter, and they were not demographic classifications. The scores measured the ability of people to change politics—and to be changed by it.

Combining numbers and a personal appeal made for a winning campaign. Part Two has more on how the Romney campaign watched what the Obama campaign was doing and tried to react and yet couldn’t quite figure it out.

Since this appears to have been the winning formula in 2012, I imagine there will be plenty of others who will try to duplicate it. One way would be to get the Obama campaign database and information and it is not clear who might be able to access that in the future. Another way would be to hire some of the Obama campaign people who made this happen – I imagine they will get some lucrative offers moving forward. A third option would be to try to find another way but this could be tedious, require a lot of resources, and may not come to the same conclusion.