Professor Nate Silver of the mind-blowing FiveThirtyEight has just given a dandy lecture via blog post over on New York Magazine's "Daily Intel: Early & Often" on how to read the polls between now and election day.
Some is common sense, sure... although how "common" that sense is may be seriously in question giving much of the panic currently spreading through the Democratic party. But even so, we'll take a look at some of the wisdom that perhaps is NOT so conventional, so to speak
So let's pop in and take a seat in the back of Dr. Poblano's class, and see what we might learn about this next, crucial phase in the election (and how we could and should respond to it).
NOTE: All credits for this course are completely transferable to Al Giordano's "No Chicken Little Left Behind" Academy.
What's up first, Professor P?
Six points is the convention over-under.
Where there is a convention, there is a convention bump. Each party gets the equivalent of about ten hours of free prime-time coverage between the three major networks (buying that ad time would run them a cool $180 million each). The key benchmark to keep in mind is six points; that has been the average size of a convention bump in the modern era. A convention that produces a bounce of more than six points can be considered a success and fewer than six points a failure.
I'd never heard that one before. That is good to know! What else ya got?
Don’t start panicking until October.
The polls typically begin to increase exponentially in accuracy about one month before the election. As such, this is the first time that a candidate can fall too far behind to plausibly catch up.
Oooh, that one's major! Though some may argue there is NEVER a good time to panic, perhaps this nugget will help amerliorate some the hand-wringing that's been dominating the blogosphere as of late.
Drop some more knowledge on us, Electoral Edification-er!
Watch who’s watching the debates.
The final presidential debate, on October 15, is probably the last opportunity to affect voter preferences at the wholesale level; after that, it all comes down to electoral math and ground game. But... historically, there is a rather strong relationship between the TV ratings for the presidential debates and turnout rates on Election Day, with each additional 10 million TV viewers translating to an increase in turnout of about 1.5 percent. If the audience for the debates is something like 50 million, expect fairly ordinary turnout. But if it’s more like 60, 70, or even 80 million viewers, turnout could be extremely high. That would favor Obama.
OMG, I already feel a million times smarter, seriously.
Those are just a few highlights from the curriculum syllabus, but there are 12 topics in total.
I strongly encourage all of you to take the entire course, so that come November 4th, we are all informed, focused... and ready to ace the final!
UPDATE: Based just on the couple of comments I received thus far, I wanted to add one more lecture topic from the Pepper Pundit that folks may find particularly informative:
Some polls are better than others.
The volume of polling typically accelerates rapidly after Labor Day — but more doesn’t necessarily mean better. And often it is the boutique firms, rather than the major brand names, that have tended to have the best results. You can trust polls from smaller firms like SurveyUSA, Rasmussen Reports, Mason-Dixon, Research 2000, and Quinnipiac. But be skeptical of what you see from Zogby — the firm that gave McCain a five-point lead yesterday — American Research Group, Fox News, and even the venerable Gallup.