Political Polls: Tea Leaves for the Campaign Manager

When they go your way - talk them up.

When they don't - invoke Harry S. Truman.

Political polls are the proverbial tea leaves of political campaigns and become news stories in their own right.  Political polls are difficult creatures particularly in Presidential Elections because the Electoral College System narrows the focus down to 18 swing states - five of which lean Democratic and five lean Republican.  National Presidential polls are, if not worthless, very limited in value because we do not elect the President based upon a national vote - something Al Gore ruefully notes at most speaking engagements. 

Divining the future electoral choice of the entire voting populace can be daunting.  According to Rasmussen, the polling organization found to be the most accurate in predicting the 2008 Presidential Race, pollsters must create a methodology that takes into that different segments of the population answer the telephone different ways:

• Women answer the phone more than men.
• Older people are home and answer more than younger people.
• Rural residents answer the phone more frequently than urban residents.
• Younger voters do not have a traditional landline.

Later, the sample pool then must be adjusted for likely voters, and most importantly a partisan weighing of Democratic, Republican and Independent voters.  This is more complicated than assuming that the same percentage of registered Democrats will also show up to vote.  

Harder to define is how polling on politics tend to be complicated by unwillingness to participate.  Iowahawk has an excellent blog explaining not only how the confidence rate of polls are calculated, but also several factors why the confidence rate - and by extension the poll results - can be worthless.  Comparing voters to colored balls in an urn, Iowahawk asks:

• What if 40% of the balls have personally chosen to live in an urn that you legally can't stick your hand into?
• What if 50% of the balls who live in the legal urn explicitly refuse to let you select them?
• What if the balls inside the urn are constantly interacting and talking and arguing with each other, and can decide to change their color on a whim?
• What if you have to rely on the balls to report their own color, and some unknown number are probably lying to you?
• What if you've been hired to count balls by a company who has endorsed blue as their favorite color? 
• What if you have outsourced the urn-ball counting to part-time temp balls, most of whom happen to be blue?
• What if the balls inside the urn are listening to you counting out there, and it affects whether they want to be counted, and/or which color they want to be?

The result, politically, is that when the polls are with you - talk them up.  The polls show that your campaign has momentum, that your message resonates with voters, and that it shows that voters are turned off by your opponent.  

If the polls are against you attack their methodology and declare that the only poll that counts is the one on election day.  If things are really dire, invoke the political fable of Harry Truman and tell everyone that the pundits and pollsters will be embarrassed on election day.  Although there are several reasons for the famous mis-predicition of Dewey's defeat of Truman in the 1948 election - don't worry - most of the voting populace won't know.