Cross-posted at The Next Hurrah with slight modification
Pew poll
The 'then' is exit polling, but let's start with the 'now'. The latest Pew Poll confirms Americans are not political junkies, but sense the Republicans are playing heavy-handed politics (and note Bush's 43% job approval: popular? feh!):
About as many Americans blame President Bush (38%) as blame congressional Democrats (34%) for the stalemate over judicial nominees. Opinion on the broader principles involved in the filibuster debate is decidedly mixed. While 62% believe the Senate's minority party should be able to block nominees they feel strongly about, a majority (53%) says that President Bush should be able to appoint anyone he wants to the courts if a majority of senators agree.
The survey shows that Washington's springtime battles are generally not resonating interest in the ethics complaints against House Majority Leader Tom Delay is even lower than in the filibuster controversy. However, these fights are taking a toll on opinions of the nation's political leaders. President Bush's overall job approval rating stands at 43%, down from 49% in late March. That equals the lowest mark in Bush's presidency (43% in April 2004).
Nearly two-thirds (64%) say Republicans and Democrats in Washington have been bickering and opposing one another more than usual this year, continuing an upward trend. This is a stark contrast to the beginning of Bush's first term in office both before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks when a significant proportion saw the parties working together more to solve problems.
Image courtesy of Pew
Although neither party is escaping blame, the damage to the Republican Party's image may be more severe. Just 35% of Americans say they approve of the job Republican leaders in Congress are doing; 50% disapprove, up from 44% in March of this year, and 42% a year ago. Public approval of Democratic leaders is only slightly higher (39% approve, 41% disapprove), but has remained unchanged over the past two years.
These generally unfavorable views may have political ramifications for incumbents seeking reelection in 2006. While by more than two-to-one (49%-23%), more say they approve than disapprove of their own representative in the House, this is comparable to measures of satisfaction in the summer of 1993, a year before the historic midterm elections in 1994 in which the Democratic Party lost its majority in the House.
Previous polls suggest it's Iraq and the economy, and to the extent that (Republican) Washington diddles on these issues while spending time punishing their enemies and sucking up to the Religious Right, the R's are going to have a problem in 2006.
Exit Polling
As for exit polls, don't miss Mystery Pollster's summary (complete with comments from some very engaged people at that blog - many of the commenters are pollsters, political scientists, etc. who were at the American Association for Public Opinion Research polling conference this was presented at - see also the other posts on the conference).
So this may be a bit belated, but after a day of travel and rest, I want to provide those not at the AAPOR conference with an update on some of the new information about the exit polls presented on Saturday. Our lunch session included presentations by Warren Mitofsky, who conducted the exit polls for the National Election Pool (NEP), Kathy Frankovic of CBS News, and Fritz Scheuren of the National Organization for Research and Computing (NORC) at the University of Chicago.
Mitofsky spoke first and explicitly recognized the contribution of Elizabeth Liddle (that I described at length a few weeks ago). He described "within precinct error" (WPE) the basic measure that Mitofsky had used to measure the discrepancy between the exit polls and the count within the sampled precincts: "There is a problem with it," he said, explaining that Liddle, "a woman a lot smarter than we are," had shown that the measure breaks down when used to look at how error varied by the "partisanship" of the precinct. The tabulation of error across types of precincts - heavily Republican to heavily Democratic - has been at the heart of an ongoing debate over the reasons for the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the vote count.
Mitofsky then presented the results of Liddle's computational model (including two charts) and her proposed "within precinct Error_Index" (all explained in detail here). He then presented two "scatter plot" charts. The first showed the values of the original within precinct error (WPE) measure by the partisanship of the precinct. Mitofsky gave MP permission to share that plot with you, and I have reproduced it below.
A non-geek summary of Fritz Scheuren's presentation can be found
here (with the presenter's slides
here).
The new study, commissioned by the Election Science Institute (ESI), was presented on Saturday at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Miami. It looked at the results of the exit polls, which were conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, and compared them to official results from 2004 and 2000.
The research team, led by Dr. Fritz Scheuren, used more detailed information from the exit polls than previous studies. The team was able to use this precinct-level information while preserving ballot secrecy at a local level.
"The more detailed information allowed us to see that voting patterns were consistent with past results and consistent with exit poll results across precincts. It looks more like Bush voters were refusing to participate and less like systematic fraud," Dr. Scheuren said.
Dr. Scheuren is the current President of the American Statistical Association, and Vice President for Statistics at NORC, a research institute based at the University of Chicago.
And if you haven't seen it, coverage of the exit poll controversy from TomPaine.com is
here. For balance, the main fraud arguments can generally be found at
Democratic Underground, but that was not a stream of thought coming from the conference, nor did fraud theories hold much currency with the professional pollsters. The focus was on better training of poll counters in future. More to come, I'm sure.
Oh, and sources tell me that Chris Bowers' speech to the AAPOR was very well received.