The Persuadables

Buzz and I have come to a saddening conclusion.  This year's Presidential election will be decided by people who really don't give a damn about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

Unlike Buzz, me, and all of our readers, the people who will decide this election just aren't engaged in politics now or probably ever. 

Buzz begins his day by pouring over all the latest polls and punching that data into the Univac 3000, checking for subtle changes which might give him even the smallest insight into electoral trends.   He then takes this material and produces a multitude of charts, diagrams, and graphs to supplement the OVC Daily Briefing memo.  All of this is presented at the morning staff meeting.

I begin my day by checking the latest WNBA news and setting my lineup for my WNBA Fantasy Basketball team.  I don't mean to brag, but I've won the league seven years in a row, but I digress.

Poll after poll in the last few months have consistently shown two things - each candidate has a floor percentage of which they seldom, if ever drop below, and a ceiling, of which they never rise above.  Most changes in the individual polls can be attributed to statistical sampling variations.  In other words, poll results vary greatly depending on who you sample.

The trick to good polling is to tailor your sample to represent the voting public as a whole.  If you have too many Democrats in your sample, your poll win inflate Democratic numbers, and vice versa if you include too many Republicans.  So what the pollsters do is massage the numbers to reflect past voting trends and put forth a calculated guess as to how the raw data collected translates into the numbers they release in the poll.

Some polling outfits are run by Democrats or liberal leaning folks, and some are run by Republican or conservative folks.  These polls may favor the political leanings of the folks conducting them, or contrary to what would seem to be common sense, may tend to overcompensate for the pollsters' biases and lean in the opposite direction of the pollster. 

After all, pollsters do not make money from the general public on their polling, they make money by the candidates or organizations who commission the polls.  The more accurate the polling results are, the more chance the pollster has of getting work.

With all of this said, Buzz tells me that if we averaged out all of the polls, a sort of poll of the polls, we'd be able to minimize the individual prejudices and biases of the pollsters.  I told Buzz that RealClearPolitics has already done this.

The RCP average of polls is an excellent source of information, and believe it or not, it has been a very accurate predictor of election results over the past ten years.  RCP does include what the pollsters refer to as an outlier (a poll that seems to be out of whack with all the others,) but do to the averaging of all the recent polls, an outlier won't throw the numbers off that much.

Over the past few months, there has been very little variation in the numbers.  Obama's numbers have ebbed and flowed, as have Romney's. Neither has dropped below the middle to low forties, and neither has jumped above the mid to high forties. 

What this means is that both of the major party candidates are guaranteed to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 percent of the vote come November. The trick is getting at least 51 percent of the remainder.

These undecideds are what this election is all about.  They are referred to as the swing voters, but Buzz and I like to call them the Persuadables.  Whoever wins the majority of these voters will win the election.

This presents two issues as Buzz and I see it.  First, you gotta identify these voters, and number two, you gotta convince them that you deserve their vote. 

We'll talk more about how this works later.  Gotta get to the morning meeting.

A Look Ahead to November

Pollster George Gallup (1901-1984)

Political Journalist Jeff Greenfield once said, when talking about polls conducted months before the election, that "65 percent of people surveyed said the would be 'surprised' if the 'election were held today.'"

Polls, polls, everywhere polls

Polling has become a daily obsession for many political junkies, Buzz and I included. It used to be that you would see a few polls a month, but now we have two major daily "tracking" polls and a plethora of other polls which cover everything from the Presidential race, Senate contest, House contests, Presidential approval ratings, favorability and unfavorability ratings, and even continuing polls on particular issues, such as the Affordable Care Act or "Obamacare."

Polling is done through survey sampling, wherein a polling organization randomly contacts people to get their opinions on a single subject or a series of subjects.  One such survey is Presidential election preference. It is, of course, impossible to survey every voter, so polling organizations will take a sample of the population and then interpret the raw data into a poll result.  The Gallup daily tracking poll is an example of this.

Gallup describes its daily tracking poll as follows. "These are the results when registered voters are asked: "Suppose the presidential election were held today. If Barack Obama were the Democratic Party's candidate and Mitt Romney were the Republican Party's candidate, who would you vote for Barack Obama, the Democrat or Mitt Romney, the Republican?" Those who are undecided are further asked if they lean more toward Obama or Romney and their leanings are incorporated into the results. Each seven-day rolling average is based on telephone interviews with approximately 3,050 registered voters; Margin of error is ±2 percentage points"

The latest Gallup Presidential Daily tracking poll shows a two point lead by President Barack Obama over Governor Mitt Romney 47 percent to 45 percent.  Since April, Obama's numbers have ranged from 43 to 50 percent.  Romney has ranged from 42 to 48.

There are a number of things we can learn from Gallup.

First and foremost, it is readily apparent that both Romney and Obama have a base support in the mid 40s.  These voters, in all likelihood, are entrenched and no matter how much either candidate spends or how much conditions change in the economy or any other issue, these voters will not change their preference.

These entrenched voters are solidly in either the Obama or Romney column. Certain voters will never vote for Obama and others will never vote for Romney.

With that said, there is only about 10, maybe 15 percent of the population who fall into the "persuadable" category -- that is voters who have either not made up their minds or will change their minds before election day in November.

How can Obama or Romney seal the deal on these voters?

The Obama camp believes that if the "persuadables" learn the "truth" about Romney, they will vote for Obama.  Conversely, the Romney camp believes that if the "persuadables" learn the "truth" about Obama, they will vote for Romney.  

Obama has attempted to move the persuadables by attacking Romney's strength -- his business record. Romney believes that his years as a businessman in the private sector makes him the perfect candidate to fix the economy. Obama has portrayed Romney as a "vulture" capitalist who was more interested in making large profits for his investors than creating jobs. He has already spent millions of dollars getting his point across, in an attempt to define Romney before he can define himself.

Romney has said repeatedly that Obama is a big spending liberal who is running up enormous deficits year after year and passing that debt onto future generations.  Obama is a big government guy who believes that the capitalist system doesn't work, and the government is the only one who can get us out of a poor economy. 

Just too early to tell

The most important thing to know about persuadables is that they are not obsessed with politics.  Probably the last thing on the persuadables are thinking about on these hot summer days is politics in general and the Presidential election in specific.

We do know one thing for certain -- the Obama camp, the Romney camp, and their respective surrogates will spend over a billion dollars to persuade the persuadables.