Now, GOP pollsters will enter a period of introspection. Party strategists will demand accountability, and concrete assurances that the number-crunchers can get it right.
Some answers are easy to implement: Pollsters should fix voter screens, used to weed out of their samples irregular voters who aren’t likely to vote. Including only likely voters often leads to a more Republican-heavy sample. But in an era of fine-tuned turnout machines and get-out-the-vote drives, even those irregular voters are likely to show up. Polling all registered voters, rather than those most likely to make it to the polls, would at least give Republicans an idea of the worst-case scenario.
Pollsters should also control more for age, gender, and race than for party identification. One prominent party pollster pointed to a late survey conducted for Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock that showed him leading Democrat Joe Donnelly by 2 points. That survey, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, showed that 56 percent of Indiana electorate would be over age 55. Exit polls revealed that number to be vastly overstated; only 43 percent of the electorate was over 50.
The party-identification question gets to the heart of another misperception that pollsters make. Tell almost anyone that Romney would have won self-identified independent voters by 5 points and logic would dictate that Romney would win a clear victory. But Democratic pollsters say that metric is flawed, and that many Republicans remain so disaffected by their own party that they refuse to identify with it. Instead, some say that pollsters should look at self-described ideology, rather than party identification. Indeed, Obama beat Romney among the 41 percent of voters who call themselves moderate by 15 points.
Pollsters also recognize that Americans’ daily routines are changing, something that has an impact on their surveys. About one-third of all households do not have a landline, according to the National Health Interview Survey, meaning that a significant swath of the electorate is available to pollsters only by cell phone. The percentage of younger Americans who don’t have a landline is almost double that. Pollsters who don’t include a sufficient number of cell-phone respondents in their surveys risk missing out on younger voters — voters most likely to back Democrats, thus skewing polls to the right.
One top Republican pollster said he would immediately begin relying on cell-phone respondents to make up at least 30 percent of his samples, and that by 2016 that number could reach 50 percent or more. Then again, campaigns that have paid a set rate for polling in recent years might balk at the higher cost of a poll with significant numbers of cell-phone respondents.
No matter what the answer is, the GOP knows it must come up with a more reliable method of measuring the electorate. It hurts to lose; it hurts more when a party doesn’t see it coming. And this year, Republicans were completely blindsided.
Democrats “must be looking at us like we’re the biggest f—– morons in the world,” one frustrated Republican said. “That’s what I’d be doing.”
Though conservatives put themselves through the paces of trying to like Mr. Romney, he was never a natural standard bearer for the GOP. He was, instead, a consensus politician in the mold of Jerry Ford and George H.W. Bush; a technocrat who loved to “wallow in data”; a plutocrat with a fatal touch of class guilt. His campaign was a study in missed opportunities, punctuated by 90 brilliant minutes in Denver. Like a certain Massachusetts governor who preceded him, he staked his presidential claims on “competence.” But Americans want inspiration from their presidents.
Mr. Romney was never likely to deliver on that score. And though I have my anxieties about the president’s next term, I also have a hunch the GOP dodged a bullet with Mr. Romney’s loss.
It dodged a bullet because a Romney victory would have obscured deeper trends in American politics the GOP must take into account. A Romney administration would also have been politically cautious and ideologically defensive in a way that rarely serves the party well.
Finally, the GOP dodged ownership of the second great recession, which will inevitably hit when the Federal Reserve can no longer float the economy in pools of free money. When that happens, Barack Obama won’t have George W. Bush to kick around.
So get a grip, Republicans: Our republican experiment in self-government didn’t die last week. But a useful message has been sent to a party that spent too much of the past four years listening intently to echoes of itself. Change the channel for a little while.
Sometime before the conventions I was doing some focus groups in Ohio when I saw the dam break against Mitt Romney among undecided voters. They were undecided but when you asked them why they were not voting for Romney they would volunteer that they were worried about Bain Capital or didn’t like him hiding his tax returns, or that Romney wanted the auto industry to go bankrupt – fair or not – the unanswered negatives on Romney had taken hold – and I knew in my gut Ohio was over – Romney would never win it.
A few days later I was in Chicago. David Axelrod was in Iowa traveling with the President but I got an email from him saying he would be back the next day and if I stayed we could get together. When I mentioned to Ax that I thought Obama was going to win Ohio and that Romney was a terrible candidate for the Midwest, he told me he had always thought the same thing and that their polling for weeks had had the President ahead by 4 to 5 points always outside the margin of error in Ohio. I knew they were building a massive early vote and get out the vote effort in Ohio and other key states. Armed with my focus group experience, Axelrod’s comments reinforced my own confidence that Ohio was moving solidly in Obama’s direction.
…
Then one day at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina the Obama team invited the Fox News contingent in for a briefing on what to expect from the convention line-up. When we walked into the briefing Jim Messina, the President’s campaign manager, and I started to talk as others found their chairs and he whispered to me that he had seen two new internal Democratic polls in Ohio that showed 9 point leads for Obama in the state and that the President’s lead had expanded since I had seen Axelrod a few weeks earlier.
I was certain whoever won Ohio was going to be the next President of the United States and I had now become pretty sure Ohio and the Presidency would be won by Barack Obama.