538: Prominent Pollster Selzer on Youth & Minority Turnout in Polling

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Thursday, September 25, 2008
Ann Selzer on Youth & Minority Turnout

Ann Selzer, as you may know, is among the best pollsters in the business. In fact, we have her firm, Selzer & Co., rated as the single best pollster out of the 32 companies that we evaluated. Polling for the Des Moines Register, she nailed both the Democratic and Republican outcomes in the Iowa caucus, races that other pollsters had a great deal of trouble with.

Selzer's polls, as you also may know, have tended to have significantly better numbers for Barack Obama than most other agencies. In Indiana, for instance, Selzer has the race at Obama +3, whereas most other polling firms show John McCain with a (small) lead. In Michigan, while several polls have shown Obama with a fairly large lead, Selzer's poll for the Detroit Free Press pegs the race at Obama +13, the largest Obama lead in any current poll of the state.

Clearly this is not random variance; the Obama "house effect" is highly statistically significant. So I asked Selzer what she might be doing differently from other pollsters.

Selzer thinks that a lot of pollsters may be undercounting the youth vote, and potentially also the black vote. Young voters are becoming harder and harder to reach. They are in the habit of screening their phone calls. More problematically still, a great number of them (roughly 50 percent of voters under 30) rely principally or exclusively on cellphones, which most pollsters (including Selzer) will not call.

Pollsters can attempt to work around this problem by weighting the young voters they are able to reach more heavily; indeed, it is imperative that they make at least some attempt at weighting if they want to produce accurate results. But Selzer says she knows of at least one prominent polling firm -- she would not mention them by name -- which is not weighting by age groups at all.

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http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/ann-selzer-on-youth-minority-turnout.html