Time for another dirty polling secret. 60-70% of IA voters and 80% of NH voters are undecided

Last edited Sat Dec 5, 2015, 12:26 PM - Edit history (1)

During the primary season almost no casual voter is paying attention right now. And, to be honest, they won't until the Iowa contest is basically right on top of us (Within 4 weeks of the contest).

So why is this a polling secret? Because of the Registered Voter versus Likely Voter dichotomy. When you see results of a registered voter poll (designated by RV on RCP and Pollster) it is estimated that only around 25% to 35% of respondents are actually going to vote come a primary or caucus and that, of those, less than half have actually finalized their choices (Obviously doesn't apply to the much higher voting rate for the GE). What does this look like practically? Well, let's do this with a fake easy poll.

A poll of 400 RVs shows Clinton with 50%, Sanders with 30% and O'Malley with 20%. So 200 to Clinton, 120 to Sanders and 80 to O'Malley. Using the 25% estimate from the paragraph above, and assuming the percentages hold true for all candidate supporters, the committed, will show up for sure support are Clinton 25, Sanders 15 and O'Malley 10. 300 won't bother to vote, so that leaves 50 votes in the sample still effectively up for grabs.

So RV polls are pretty much worthless this far out in terms of actual predictive abilities.

However, likely voter screens are not. As much as people want to grouse about the underrepresentation of young people in LV screens, likely voter polls tend, considerably, to be much more reflective of who will actually show up to vote in a primary. Likely voters also tend to be more informed earlier in the election season and are a very good barometer of how voting will probably go, as more people get up to speed on the race (Should be noted that there is a percentage of likely voters in polls who will also end up not voting or who haven't followed the campaigns.)

So there are three main TLDR takeaways:

RV polls aren't predictive, especially more than a month out of the first primary.

LV polls are more likely to be predictive than RV polls.

A very large segment of eventual voters are up for grabs the next 5 weeks.


So, get out the vote and don't stop until the primaries and caucuses actually happen.