Interesting. In the CT thread, I posted a chunk from a pollster.com analysis on the Tennessee Senate race, mostly illustrating how the Zogby Internet poll, specifically (as distinct from his phone polls, etc etc) has been strikingly out of sync. However, the same post, from 4 October, makes another interesting point that's more relevant to this thread.
Tennessee's Democratic Senate candidate, Harold Ford Jr., would be the first black Senator elected in the South since Reconstruction. Currently, the polls generally have the race pretty much exactly tied. So any effect in which some people will tell the pollster that they'll vote for the black person but then in actuality vote for his white opponent could be decisive.
However, something strange is the matter. You know that there is a new breed of polls out there - automated ones. That is to say, the respondent called on by the pollster no longer gets a real human being on the line; he gets an automated tape, which asks him the questions and records the answers (somehow, dont ask). Now you would think that any urge people might have about giving the more socially acceptable answer (eg, sure, I'll vote for the black guy who's standing for my party) would disappear if they're not actually talking to a live person. The advantage of anonymity and all. But the weird thing is: Ford is actually doing
better in the automated polls. Read on:
Quote:As Barone noticed, the five automated surveys conducted since July (including one by SurveyUSA) have been slightly and consistently more favorable to Ford than the three conventional surveys (to by Mason-Dixon and one by Middle Tennessee State University). But the differences are not large. [..]
Mickey Kaus picks up on Barone's observation that the automated polls have been a bit more favorable to the Democrats in Tennessee and speculates about a potentially hidden Democratic vote:
Maybe a new and different kind of PC error is at work--call it Red State Solidarity Error. Voters in Tennessee [b]don't want to admit in front of their conservative, patriotic fellow citizens that they've lost confidence in Bush and the GOPs in the middle of a war on terror[/b] and that they're going to vote for the [i]black Democrat[/i]. They're embarrassed to tell it to a human pollster. But talking to a robot--or voting by secret ballot--is a different story. A machine isn't going to call them "weak."
Reynolds updates his original post with a link to Kaus and asks whether the same pattern exists elsewhere.
Another good question, although for now our answer is incomplete. We did a similar "pollster compare" graphic on the Virginia Senate race over the weekend. The pattern of automated surveys showing a slightly more favorable result for the Democrats was similar from July to early September, but the pattern has disappeared over the last few weeks as the surveys have converged. In Virginia, the most recent Mason-Dixon survey has been the most favorable to Democrat Jim Webb.
While we will definitely take a closer look at this question in other states in the coming days and weeks, it is worth remembering that most of the "conventional surveys" in Tennessee and Virginia were done by one firm (Mason-Dixon), while most of the automated surveys to date in Tennessee have been done by Rasmussen. As such, the differences may result from differences in methodology other than the mode of interviewer among these firms (such as how they sample and select likely voters or whether they weight by party as Rasmussen does).
To follow the links that were originally included in the above see the
original post.
