Harris Poll of Some American Beliefs

A Harris Interactive poll of 2,250 American adults conducted in November 2013 found the following:

• 74% believe in God, down from 82% in 2005, 2007, and 2009.  This is a decrease of 2% per year since 2009.
• 83% of those 68 or older believe in God, but only 64% of those between the ages of 18 and 36 do.
• 6% of those who believe in God are neither absolutely nor somewhat certain.
• 59% are either very religious or somewhat religious, which is down from 70% in 2007.  Religiosity is falling at a rate of nearly 2% a year.
• 23% are not at all religious, up from 12% in 2007, which is increasing at a rate of nearly 2% a year.
• 47% believe in Darwinian evolution (up from 42% in 2005), while 36% believe in creationism.
• 42% believe in ghosts, 36% in UFOs, and 29% in astrology.

And more than half of American voters voted for Obama in November 2012, despite observing his rule for four years.

Making Sense of the Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll

According to a three-day average over 3 - 5 October, the daily Rasmussen Presidential Poll reports that Romney was leading by 49% to 47%.  However, Rasmussen also says that Romney has the vote of 89% of Republicans and Obama has the vote of 88% of Democrats, while Romney is up 16% on Obama among those not affiliated with the Republican or Democrat Parties.  The report I have seen does not say how many Republicans are planning to vote for Obama or how many Democrats plan to vote for Romney.  The report also does not say what percentage of Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated voters were sampled.

The Rasmussen party affiliation survey for September is now available.  According to it party affiliation is as follows:

Republicans, 36.8%
Democrats, 34.2%
Other, 29.0%

Democrats have increased by 0.9% since August, Republicans have decreased by 0.6%, and Others have decreased by 0.2%.  I expect the media claims that the Romney campaign was losing and Romney did nothing but make gaffes had pushed down the Republican affiliations and boosted the Democrat affiliation.  Romney's debate performance may reverse that trend in October.

I will assume that 4% of the 29.0% may vote for the micro-parties such as Libertarian, Green, Constitution, and Socialist Workers.  This leaves 25.0% of non-affiliated voters to pick either Romney or Obama and Romney is up by +16, so this implies that 58% will vote for Romney and 42% will vote for Obama.  The last two Washington Post/ABC News polls I adjusted for party affiliation had about 7% of each party voting for the candidate of the other party, so I will assume that here, to the advantage of Obama.  So, how does the adjusted vote turn out then:

Romney:  (0.89)(36.8%) + (0.07)(34.2%) + (0.58)(25.0%) = 49.6%

Obama:   (0.07)(36.8%) + (0.88)(34.2%) + (0.42)(25.0%) = 43.2%

Thus, Romney had a 6.4% advantage in a poll including the day of the debate and the two days after the debate.  How on Earth Rasmussen manages to reduce this to a 2% Romney advantage, I have no idea.

If the pollsters are thinking that Republicans and anti-Obama unaffiliated voters are not going to vote in this election, I think they are out of their minds.  What is more, Rasmussen reported that this poll gave Romney a double-digit advantage with voters over 40 years of age and these voters do turn up at the polls.  Obama on the other hand had a double-digit advantage with voters under 40.  That part of his pool under 25 are represented among the unemployed in large numbers.  Many of them cannot afford the high Obama gasoline costs to fuel their overly expensive clunkers (thanks to the Cash for Clunkers Obama program that made old cars scarce) to get to the polling places.  In general, the younger voters do not vote in the same percentages as older voters, so my adjusted results probably understate the extent of the Romney advantage.

In my lifetime, no presidential candidate has won the electoral vote when behind in the popular vote by more than a few tenths of a percent.  Even before the debate, there was considerable evidence that the polls of the swing states were heavily over-sampling Democrats and the reported leads by Obama in many of those states were fallacious.  An evaluation of polls for the states of Florida, Ohio, and Virginia made before the debate indicated that they were highly misleading and that Romney was really ahead in each of them.  I think Romney is going to win the election despite the best efforts of most of the media to throw the election to Obama.

I am quite disappointed in Scott Rasmussen and his polls.  I thought he usually did a good job polling, but the evidence here is that he is not doing so now.

Adjustment of Washington Post/ABC Poll for Party Affiliation

The Washington Post/ABC News presidential poll published on 1 October 2012 says that Obama leads Romney among likely voters by 49% to 47% and among registered voters by 49% to 44%.  The poll was based on 1002 respondents between 26 and 29 September.  But the respondents broke down as follows:

Democrats 33%
Republicans 28%
Independents 34%
Other 4%
Don't Know 1%

Because only about 9% of the people asked to respond to a poll will do so and because there were 58 questions in this poll, it is very likely that those willing to respond are not necessarily a good representative sample of those who will vote.  For instance, what fraction of small business owners, struggling very hard these last four years to keep their businesses going in the Obama economy, will take the time to answer these questions?  Yet, this group of people is heavily Republican.  In general, one also can imagine that the sample of people willing to take this time on the phone may be more heavily weighted toward the unemployed than the employed.

So, we need to find a source of how many people are Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Others.  Rasmussen Reports has such data here.  They do not have their September numbers up yet, so I will use the August numbers as I did in my prior adjustment of Washington Post/ABC News presidential poll results from 11 September.  The Rasmussen party affiliation numbers are:

Democrats 33.3%
Republicans 37.6%
Other 29.2%, of whom I expect 25.2% are Independents and 4% are Libertarians, Greens, Constitutional Party, Social Workers Party and other micro-parties

We can use the registered voter results of the WaPo/ABC poll to see what percentage of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents will vote for either Obama or Romney and apply the Rasmussen party affiliation weightings to adjust for the proper sampling of voters by party.  According to this poll,

Democrats: 89% for Obama, 7% for Romney
Republicans: 7% for Obama, 87% for Romney
Independents: 47% for Obama, 47% for Romney

With the Rasmussen party weightings among registered voter respondents:

Votes for Obama = (0.89)(33.3%) + (0.07)(37.6%) + (0.47)(25.2%) = 44.1%

Votes for Romney = (0.07)(33.3%) + (0.87)(37.6%) + (0.47)(25.2%) = 46.9%

The Washington Post 49% to 44% advantage to Obama becomes a 47% to 44% advantage for Romney among registered voters.  If we use the WaPo/ABC poll adjustments for likely voters we get:

Votes for Obama = (0.91)(33.3%) + (0.06)(37.6%) + (0.45)(25.2%) = 43.9%

Votes for Romney = (0.07)(33.3%) + (0.90)(37.6%) + (0.49)(25.2%) = 48.5%

The recalculated likely voter advantage for Romney is 4.6% compared to his recalculated registered voter advantage of 2.8%.  The WaPo/ABC advantage of likely voters was given as a 2% Obama advantage by them.

Of course this change in the advantage hinges upon the Republicans having a registration advantage over Democrats. There have been a few people who have checked on this in some of the states that will report how many people are registered as Democrats, Republicans, and Other or Independents.  The general story seems to be that Democrat registrations are way down and registrations as Independents are way up compared to 2008.  Republican registrations are more constant, but generally up a bit.  Here is one such report by John Hinderaker at Powerline on registrations in Ohio.

We should also be aware that there are many more Republican governors, Senators, Representatives, and state legislators now than there were in 2008, so it is very probable that there has been a trend away from Democrat to Republican party affiliation since then.  Even in this election, Real Clear Politics has the Republicans in the House with 226 seats leaning to them, the Democrats with 183 seats leaning to them, and only 26 toss-up seats of which more than half are now Republican.  If the Republicans win in half of the toss-up seats, they will still have a substantial House majority.  Such a majority would be unlikely if the Democrats had the 5% registered voter edge implied by this WaPo/ABC poll with their sample of registered voters.  That cannot be the case.

It should also be noted that this is an unusual poll result in that it implies that among Independent registered voters the split for Obama/Romney is 50-50, or more precisely 47-47.  Almost every other poll has shown Romney to be winning among Independents.  It will be interesting to see if future WaPo/ABC polls continue to show a trend toward equality of Obama and Romney among Independents.  Personally, given the continued dire state of the Obama-mismanaged and abused economy and Obama's failure to provide adequate security in our embassies and consulates as the Mideast sinks into chaos, I expect Romney to improve his advantage among Independents.

The Democrats are claiming that Romney was greatly hurt by his fundraiser comments that he could not expect many of the votes of the 47% not paying income tax and of those highly dependent upon government welfare programs.  No doubt he was hurt, but one of the questions in this WaPo/ABC survey was whether people thought too many people were dependent upon the government and they answered heavily in favor that yes, too many were dependent.  This poll also noted that more people believed the economy would recover with Romney as President, despite the skewed sample.  That has to be a most important Romney advantage.

Examining the 11 September Washington Post/ABC Poll

The Washington Post/ABC presidential poll of 11 September 2012 says that Obama leads Romney by 50% to 44% among registered voters and by 49% to 48% among likely voters.  This is not really the correct result of this poll.  In their poll, the respondents broke down by party affiliation as follows:

Democrats, 33%
Republican, 23%
Independent, 37%
Other, 4%
Don't Know, 3%

So the poll result among registered voters is that for which Democrat affiliation exceeds Republican affiliation by 10%!  According to a Rasmussen Report of polling in August 2012, the breakdown by party affiliation is actually:

Democrats, 33.3%
Republican, 37.6%
Other, 29.2%

The Republicans have a 4.3% advantage in party affiliation, not the 10% disadvantage of the WP/ABC poll.  Consequently, the poll claim that Obama leads Romney by 50% to 44% among registered voters is nonsense.  Let us assume that we can at least use the poll results for the percentage of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who will vote for either Obama or Romney and recalculate the results with a proper weighting by party affiliation.  The poll says that:

Democrats will vote 91% for Obama and 5% for Romney.
Republicans will vote 6% for Obama and 89% for Romney.
Independents will vote 46% for Obama and 48% for Romney.

Now, I have a suspicion that just as the poll over-samples both Democrats and Independents, it also over-samples middle roader Republicans, given the higher vote percentage among Democrats for Obama than Romney gets among Republicans.  But, let us use these percentages anyway and combine them with the Rasmussen party affiliation results.  In addition, let us assume that among the Rasmussen others, about 4% are going to vote for the Libertarian, Green, Socialist Workers, or whatever other micro-party candidates are running.  I am taking the Independents to be 25.1% of the voters.  The registered voter result is then:

Obama:  (0.91)(33.3%) + (0.06)(37.6%) + (0.46)(25.1%) = 44.1%

Romney:   (0.05)(33.3%) + (0.89)(37.6%) + (0.48)(25.1%) = 47.2%

Thus by declared party affiliation, Romney leads Obama by 47.2% to 44.1%.  This is a Romney advantage of 3.1%.  When the WP/ABC poll made likely voter corrections, the big change was due to their assumption that Romney's advantage among Independent voters would increase from 2% to 11%.  Applying their expected likely voter percentages to the party affiliation percentages of Rasmussen, one gets the likely voter result:

Obama:    (0.94)(33.3%) + (0.06)(37.6%) + (0.43)(25.1%) = 44.4%

Romney:   (0.05)(33.3%) + (0.91)(37.6%) + (0.54)(25.1%) = 49.4%

So the likely voter advantage for Romney over Obama is 5.0%!  Now, I am not highly confident in the adjustments the WP/ABC poll makes for likely voters, but the Romney advantage in registered voter results of 3.1% will likely grow at the polls due to the likely higher turn-out of Republicans and those Independents favoring Romney.

Of course, if Romney does win the popular vote by 5%, it is extremely unlikely that he will not also win the electoral vote.