Over all, telephone calls to registered Republicans or those who participated in a recent Republican primary were about 12 percent likelier to yield a completed interview than calls to Democrats were.
Unlike party identification — how respondents respond to a question about their preferred party, which could potentially flip to independent and back with every news alert — party registration is a more or less fixed characteristic, and so is the partisan composition of a state. By contrast, the CNN/SSRS poll Mr. McLaughlin criticized found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by seven points among the adult population, with Republicans at just 25 percent of the sample.But few serious pollsters rely on the exit polls to determine the demographic or political makeup of their samples, with good reason. By Nate Cohn Voting in Florida’s primary in March. In 2016, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by three percentage points in the exit poll, and Republicans made up 33 percent of the electorate. He covers elections, polling and demographics.
If all the various measures of partisanship — say, Republicans plus-two in Arizona or Democrats plus-two in Florida — are added together across the 94 percent of the nation with a measure of partisanship, Democrats outnumber Republicans by six points, 36 percent to 30 percent. We know that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in Florida by a few points, even if we don’t know whether those same voters would identify as Democrats or Republicans today.Pollsters can take advantage of this if they use voter registration files, a large data set of every registered voter. Those without a party, disproportionately young and nonwhite, split toward Democrats by a narrow margin of 24 percent to 19 percent.
This might simply mean there are more Democrats than Republicans. In 2016, the failure of many state pollsters to weight by education wound up biasing surveys against Democrats: They might have had the right number of Democrats or Republicans, but too many of each had a college degree.
As a result, it’s easy to tell whether members of one party or another were more or less likely to respond to a survey.If registered Democrats were likelier to respond than registered Republicans, it would undermine a core assumption of most public pollsters. And several of the biggest problems with polling in the last election have either been addressed or become less relevant.Las encuestas muestran que Joe Biden no enfrenta deserciones serias de su flanco izquierdo.Polling shows Biden is not facing any serious defections from his left flank.Could this tilt turnout in Trump’s direction and affect the election result?A significant majority of people who voted for him in 2016 are planning to do so again.
When checked against census or voter file data, the exit polls are demonstrably inaccurate on many variables, like age and education. Everything else — turnout, age, gender, race, geography, and so on — had at least But it is still possible that Mr. Trump’s support could be underestimated, even if Republicans are equally likely to respond to surveys.
Thanks to the news this week, ... Our polls use a variety of different geographical variables in different contexts: census block group density, made up regions like 'philly suburbs', census-defined metro areas, or the NCHS urban-rural scheme. In addition to writing for The Times, he has discussed politics on CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and NPR, and at major colleges and universities. It’s just what their results show.Of course, those results could still be wrong. It’s not that pollsters at various news media organizations are trying to bring about a significant partisan advantage for the Democrats, as their detractors claim. In the last Times/Siena polls of six battleground states, for instance, respondents who voted in the 2016 election said they voted for Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 2.5 points, which was even more than Mr. Trump’s actual margin of victory.Mr. But the recent surveys that are weighted by party registration or primary vote history offer nearly the same picture as polls that are not. And if Republicans are just as likely to respond to surveys as Democrats, there’s little reason to believe that they’re vastly underrepresented in political surveys.It is hard to convey the surprising and complete irrelevance of partisanship in whether someone responded to the Times/Siena survey. Among those characterized as Democrats based on party registration or primary vote history, 69 percent identified as Democrats in the poll; similarly, 65 percent of those characterized as Republicans identified as Republicans. Nate Cohn is a domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times.
After these factors were controlled for, Republicans were no likelier than Democrats to respond to the survey. What is different about those who’ve had a change of heart?Dwindling white support for the president leads to a deficit of at least six points in each state.