be sure to click on the more info tab and read the information just so you have seen it.

I very briefly wanted to clarify for your readers “partisanship” as described in your post, as I think a misunderstanding of the term leads to some of the distrust folks have in the polls. There are two types of partisanship as measured by pollsters: Party ID and Party Registration. You correctly add that the majority of serious public pollsters do not weight by the former. Party ID is an attitudinal variable…the example I like to use is that weighting by Party ID is akin to weighting by the results from a previous election. A common criticism goes “Party ID in Poll X is D +9, but in 2008 it was D+5!” At the same time, I highly doubt someone would say “Obama is receiving 46% in this poll, but in 2008 he received 49%!” but in truth it’s the same thing (even leaving aside for the time being that the former statement is likely a comparison of Party ID to Party Reg, so it’s not even apples to apples in the first place).

Party registration, on the other hand can be included if the sample is drawn from a list that has been compiled based on the voter file. Most public polls are RDD polls, which makes this impossible, but it is why many internal polls do weight by “partisanship” (in this case Party Registration) which is far less of an attitudinal variable.

The issues come when people try and conflate the two measures, which are in fact very different, and the result is a lot of the back-and-forth we’ve seen over many of the public polls over the last couple of months.

Hope this helps for those that didn’t know the difference.

Peter Baumann

Remember, it is the media’s job to hype the unexpected, improbable and controversial, as opposed to covering the usual, highly probable and thus less newsworthy events. So, while it is certainly possible that in a close elections like I am forecasting for tomorrow there is a higher probability of some type of snafu,or tied Electoral College, or a repeat of Florida in 2000, I think it more likely that we’ll be pretty sure that one candidate beat the other guy. That won’t stop the extremists on either side from crying foul if their guy loses however!