Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:
noname2200 said:
2. Independents. State polls showed Romney winning big among independents. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents. The state polls weren't oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans - there just weren't as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents.
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If so that's one place the polls were wrong. They all tended to say Republican self identification was up.
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Exit Polls (rep 2008-32%; rep 2012-32%) (ind 2008-34%; ind 2009-34%) (dem 2008-39%; dem 2012-38%)-this is national level
Yeah, I'm actually not seeing much to support the article's claim. If you look at the state exit polls, the numbers seem to be pretty consistent between 2008 and 2012 as well. I'm just not seeing this movement from the republican party to the independent category. There actually seems to be a pretty big swing for how the independents voted as well (+8 Obama in 2008; -5 Obama in 2012). My guess, there are more indendents that lean republican this time around, but they didn't come from the republican party....this would match up with Obama's smaller popular vote victory as well.
Edit: Main point: Obama won because there are more democratic identifiers...not because of a movement from the republican to the independent category.
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Even that though is remotely shocking though. The pollsters models are either or for some reason self identified Republicans didn't go to the polls.
Example
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/archive/mood_of_america_archive/partisan_trends/summary_of_party_affiliation
Which is strange... all I can imagine is that it has to do with the demographic changes in the electoral college. It used to be that Democrats were always disadvantaged by it because they got less credit for their densley packed liberal states... however things have swung in their favor as can be seen by the population/electoral swing.
For said polls to be true, and pretty much every self identification poll had this, you'd have to assume this occured in "safe" states. Either Republican or Democrat.
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I'm personally leaning towards Rasmussen's numbers being off. If you look at comparable numbers for Gallup and ANES, you see there are much more independents than Rasmussen generally shows. I don't know their question wording, but something seems off. Generally speaking, the democrats have a party ID advantage, even in years where Republicans do very well, like 2010. As to why Rasmussen seems skewed so heavily republican in recent years (2010-2012), I don't know. As I said, I think something might be off with their question wording, such that they might induce independents to choose a side. Even looking at their data from 2008....it seems they overestimated democrats as well....at least compared to others.
Gallup
ANES
Here's Pew with a nice graph (only 1990-2012 are their numbers)
Found this as well: It is on dailykos but Abramowitz is quite a big name in the political science discipline. And this-in graph form! They don't include Gallup and Rasmussen for some reason, but you can see the issue Abramowitz is talking about.
