Noted University of California – Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong has figured out why Mitt Romney is so far ahead in the Gallup tracking poll of likely voters.
His theory is that Obama supporters like him are only now figuring out where to vote, so they do not pass Gallup’s likely voter screen. Apparently, when contacted by Gallup and asked whether he is likely to vote, DeLong responds “where?”
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What will be delong’s lame excuse AFTER Romney’s landslide win on Nov 6 ? (Yeah, we all know, it’s RACISM.)
Excuse my language Professor, but Brad DeLong is a giant douchenozzle. I see his work at DU and on his blog, and bottom line, he is a pathetic fabricator that appears to be auditioning for a job at Media Matters.
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “low information voter”.
And, does his polling place change that much from one election to another, or has it been that long since he last voted?
What this guy really couldn’t pass is the Gallup OUGHT-to-be-a-voter screen.
Plus ca change…
Pauline Kael’s story about being surprised at Nixon’s wipeout of McGovern because she didn’t know anyone who voted for Nixon is apparently apocryphal. But it was unquestionably true in Berkeley. On election night, I remember gathering around a black and white 19-inch set with my 7 other college roommates in the big house we shared, all of feeling absolutely shell-shocked that this was happening. Who could possibly have voted for Nixon? Berkeley is hermetically sealed from reality.
I have family there and visit often enough. It’s another world. Ironically it boasts of dynamism and ferment but rather is like the bewitched province that never changes or accepts change. There is no drearier burg in America. My cheap fun while visiting is to wear patriotic hats and lapels and take in the scandalized and hostile glances. Believe me, these besotted souls have no idea what’s coming.
I saw a Gadsen flag hanging from a window on a house in Berkeley today. Did a double-take. It wasn’t a frat house or one that appeared to be inhabited by college students from the Central Valley, but a regular family house, recently painted. (It’s possible they’re renting out the upstairs room with the shocking flag.)
You can sometimes see a handful of defiant American flags around town, and not just on patriotic holidays.
Obama support is visible, but subdued — as though some people want to make a statement but they’re not trying hard to make sure you hear it (or see it when you walk by).
WTF?
I had a online encounter with Mr. DeLong once.
He was rude, so I called him some bad names.
IIRC there was some profanity involved too.
This is the quintessential problem with many polls this election year. Polls are getting nearly 90-95% pass through the likely voter screens where only 60-70% registered voters actually vote in presidential election years. They are now even further skewed with the early voting crap, which favors democrats by a very large margin.
Gallup is doing it right with their questioning for their likely voter poll because the net is much tighter, just look at some likely voter polls from MSM outfits that show their sampling get MORE Democrat after their questioning. The MSM questions to determine likely voters are usually enthusiasm based, which is WAAAY too loose.
That is why you are seeing many polls the way they are now. They are too loose with likely voter screens, DRI sample is completely off with scales tipped in favor of the Democrats, and/ or adjusting samples to have more women/ minorities/ young voters than there will ever be. And STILL, Romney leads or ties Obama in many of these polls. The most egregious examples are coming out of Ohio right now.
Bottom line is though, Mitt Romney is going to win if he wins the popular vote by 4-5% like current polling is showing. The left is going to go into serious shock on election night.
Michael Barone, nobody’s dummy, is now saying that this may very well be a 1980 type, late in the cycle, ‘landslide’ of the Reagan-Carter kind. My-O-My, how nice it would be to take it so BIG that the expected whiners & shriekers have NO traction for their post-election lies.
I damn near worship Michael Barone, and I HOPE he’s right as usual, but as stupid as the people in this country have become, I really have serious doubts about a landslide, late or otherwise.
I would never bet against Michael Barone.
He writes the “Almanac of American Politics,” which, for 2012, comes in at 1,856 pages.
During the 2004 election when it came down to Ohio, Susan Estrich came on and, delving into county by county minutiae, explained why Kerry was going to win Ohio.
I felt sick.
But then she was followed by Michael Barone going even further into the minutiae with microscopic probing into the historical voting patterns of various counties of Ohio and comparing it to what was know at that point that night … and he felt certain it was Bush’s night.
I don’t bet against Michael after that. No mainstream political pundit knows the electoral details of this country’s political geography like Michael.
He’s predicting a Romney win.
P.S.
As for DeLong, I think it was established a long time ago that he is a particularly nasty character who doesn’t even pretend to want any kind of civil discourse.
When someone is that way it just reflects complete insecurity in the integrity of their beliefs.
Estrich was positively giddy in 2004, having seen the leaked early exit polls showing a huge Kerry win. They were wrong, of course, but she believed them. She had no actual analysis to offer, just platitudes in the confidence she knew the outcome.
Barone was just reporting what he had found and analyzed, uncolored by those reports.
Estrich’s slow meltdown through that evening, as results proved the exits wrong and she had more and more drinks to drown the sorrow, was epic. It was very sweet after enduring hours of her smug and arrogant attitude earlier.
Watching on Twitter, libs are working overtime to build narrative Romney is not leading national polls and Ohio firewall is insurmountable. Sure they’ve been working this narrative for a while now but today it is just astounding how dedicated they are to resurrect the magical air of inevitability.
I am fully convinced some pollsters will go down with the ship. PPP just dumped a load of manure to feed the narrative, good Soros soldiers to the end. This is going to be painful to watch.
S
One of the sites I go to for some fun to & fro type discussions have been invade over by a very didactic wave of O supporters.
Apparently, when contacted by Gallup and asked whether he is likely to vote, DeLong responds “where?”
Hahahaaaa!! If DeLong says he doesn’t know where to go to vote, and he’s registered in California, he’s either lying or he’s a moron.
In California, every registered voter is sent a “Sample Ballot and Voter Information Pamphlet” a few weeks ahead of every election (mine arrived about on or about October 8th). That document specifically directs the recipient, via a specially colored label on its back cover, to a specific polling place. Hell, that pamphlet even covers information on such niceties as polling station Audio Touchscreen Voting, Handicapped Access, and Compact Disc Voting for the seeing-impaired. On the subject of one’s casting an election ballot, it’s comprehensive to the max.
As I see it, DeLong is bending the truth to suit his agenda.
He sounds like the typical, cocky academician our universities have become famous for. They are snarky, smart-assed and rude.
They should be sent to gulags to peel potatoes and make shoes the rest of their lives. Let them live that commie dream they think is so wonderful.
Indeed we do get a sample ballot telling us where our polling place is this time in early October.
I typically put it in one of the desk cubbyholes and pull it out and look at it the weekend before election day in early November.
Do you have a point?
Brad DeLong
Rush has it right. The polls are converging on reality so that on Nov. 7 they can claim competence. This election has been Romney’s for more than 6 months.
Now for the MSM. Will some start covering Libya now that the writing is on the wall?
What is sad, in terms of civic duty, that so many people only vote every four years. at the very least, people should be voting every two years, and also in their local elections.
Unless you’re new to the area, or it is your first time voting this shouldn’t be a factor.
When I lived in Chicago and was active in politics I was always amazed at how many educated affluent urban voters only vote in presidential elections. Interestingly these are the voters the Democrats are counting on the replace the blue collar white vote.
Is this man supposed to be a brilliant genius or something?
Kinda reminds me of the deer crossing lady caller….
And these lefties think they are oh! so brilliant!
I love that the Obots are so unaware of what’s about to happen to their criminal leader.
Monday’s Politico/Battleground poll has R +5.
Okay. Okay. Okay. I’ll bite.
If they’re Obama supporters, I can believe that they might not know where to vote!
(Oh, my. The next confession is going to be a long one)
Well, I hope they all look it up before the polls open on December 7th.
At this point they’re looking ahead to 11/7. If their constituents are so shocked that Romney actually won they can claim fraud or stupidity among the flyovers and deny there was a ‘MANDATE” accorded to Romney to govern. They’re always setting up the next day’s talking points.
He has a point, in that not everyone plans things out weeks or months in advance. If an individual hasn’t been at the same address for the past four years, he might not know the exact address of his voting location. I moved last spring, and I would not have passed the screen until last week, even though I’ve always been determined to vote this election.
However, the logic of his argument is fatally flawed: this should affect both parties roughly equally, unless one party has inherently more stable addresses. (But I doubt many Americans are facing much stability at the moment.) If one party passes the screen more often than the other, the answer could very well be enthusiasm, which is a huge factor in turnout.
People who are just now figuring out where to vote are people who haven’t voted recently. They *are* in fact less likely to actually vote come election day.
In fairness, though, this is something that will vary widely from state to state. Here in Massachusetts, I vote at the local high school — every election and every town meeting is held in the same place. Someone who doesn’t know that is *NOT* a likely voter. When I lived in San Francisco, the polling places were in people’s garages — so looking up the which polling place you were supposed to go to made a bit more sense.
I guess DeLong probably has trouble putting his underwear on so it’s facing front.
But probably not. He’s just spitting out lies for consumption by the zombies and by people whose egos are too tender to admit they are fools for supporting a moron as a president, and aiding in the destruction of their country.
The bad news for liberals in denial: YOU WERE AND STILL ARE FOOL. YOU TERRIBLY DAMAGED OUR COUNTRY AND YOU DAMAGED YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE AND CHANGED THEIR AND OUR WAY OF LIFE FOR THE WORSE. LASTLY, DON’T BE LIKE DeLONG: MAKE SURE YOUR UNDERWEAR IS NOT ON BACKWARDS.
If I was a student of this professor I would be embarrassed to have such an idiot as my professor.
So… He’s really saying that the average Obama voter is dumber (or isn’t as good at planning ahead and getting informed) as the average Romney voter).
Sounds like an ‘own-goal’ to me 🙂
I’ve never met the man, but just from that, he doesn’t come across as being very smart.
I got a polling call the other day and I thought it a bit odd that the last question was if I knew where to vote ? They clarified the question asking if I would give the exact location.
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I believe the term is suspension of disbelief. Too many indicators are pointing toward a Romney victory in the 4-6 point range ->
– Obama’s approval rating is at 47%, which is typically matches an incumbents pull on election day, indicating a 6 point win for Romney.
– Independents are going for Romney by double digits. A 10-12 advantage with independents translates to a 5% win on election day.
– Voter ID favors Republicans from both Gallup and Raz. Adjusting national polls for this gives Romney a 4% lead
I laugh when I see this stuff. Just remember
Ride Right Through Them, They are Demoralized As Hell
Gave again today, Mandel, Walsh and Romney/Ryan. The other week it was Love, Bongino and Romney/Ryan. They really are the gifts that keep on giving…
A glowing indictment of his peeps in academia IMHO. 🙂
Only the logic that is produced by liberal progessive education could finesse this to fit one’s world view. 🙂
I remain unsure why anyone ever paid any attention to Brad DeLong in the first place. From my first knowledge of him in the ’90s, he’s been completely wrong and a complete jerk about everything.
Did he predict Jeanne Dixon’s death or something? I just never got it.
*Sigh*
Usually the polling place is the elementary school. Sometimes it’s the fire barn. Occasionally it is somebody’s garage. Right now I don’t know which it is–and, as I said, won’t until the weekend before election day. But I am a very likely voter indeed. That’s a problem with Gallup’s likely voter screen.
This election, there are five interesting things about the polls that call for explanation:
* RAND has a huge pro-Obama house effect, and nobody knows why–but perhaps it is because RAND does reinterviews, and this is a treatment that transforms uninformed voters into informed voters over time.
* Ramussen has a smaller pro-Romney house effect relative to the average poll, and people think it may be because it doesn’t call cell phones.
* State-level polls have a small pro-Obama effect, and nobody knows why.
* Polls that are willing to interview in Spanish have a pro-Obama house effect.
* Gallup’s polls of registered voters are squarely in the middle of the distribution of national polls, but its gap between registered and likely voters is roughly twice that of any other national pollster.
Some places on the internet and elsewhere are places where people bring information about these (and other questions) and try to figure out what is going on.
Other places on the internet are like this.
Yours,
J. Bradford DeLong
Red Sweater writes: “The logic of [DeLong’s] argument is fatally flawed: this should affect both parties roughly equally, unless one party has inherently more stable addresses. (But I doubt many Americans are facing much stability at the moment.) If one party passes the screen more often than the other, the answer could very well be enthusiasm, which is a huge factor in turnout.”
The issue is that the Gallup poll right now has more than twice the difference between likely and registered voters than other national polls, and the question is why…
I think that Republican voters right now are more enthusiastic about the election than Democratic voters, and that this may be one reason for the large gap in Gallup–but Gallup assumes not that if you don’t know your polling place now you are less likely to vote, but that you will not vote. And that seems a rather extreme assumption.
It is true that Democratic voters tend to be poorer than Republican voters, and being poorer in America means that you move more often, but I think you are right in that that difference is too small to generate the gap between registered and likely voters that we see in Gallup.
It seems to me more likely to be a reflection of the enthusiasm gap, and the question is whether Gallup is overstating the likely electoral consequences of the enthusiasm gap, or whether its competitor pollsters are understating it…
Yours,
J. Bradford DeLong
The stupid is so vast…..it burns. This is what is teaching our youth?
In defense of DeLong, I would point out that not only do Democrats vote, many of them vote several times in any given election, often post-mortem. It doesn’t do well to vote multiple times at the same polling place, so they have to move around to various precincts. There are logistics!
And Gallup is now 48-48…
Strikes me as a substantial win for the proposition that their likely voter screen is not very good until the week before the election, no?
Mark your beliefs to market, people!
Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life!
And now we know. A week out from the election, Colonel Mustard’s second favorite pollster misses a presidential election by 8%–and 3/4 of the error is in the likely voter screen…
Come back to reality, people! You can mark your beliefs to market if you try!