Whit Ayres’ comments in Politico regarding polling and partisan identification:
Yet some Republicans, seeing some polls with a partisan identification breakdown unlikely to resemble the make-up of a state, believe it’s time to start weighting by party.
Veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres said his preference would be for survey takers to weight their data according to an average of the party ID results they get over the course of an election cycle, in order to minimize variation.
“The poor journalists who get this data are in the position of having to explain why Obama went up by 7 in this month and down by 7 in that month, even though nothing happened and they know in their gut that nothing happened,” said Ayres, who added, “I don’t buy this sinister motivation that some people attribution to polls. I just think it’s the luck of the draw when you’re drawing a sample.”
Ayres argued there’s no reason to avoid reality-based polling, which he said still shows a winnable race: “Are things not going as well as they should for the Romney campaign? Of course, that’s just obvious. But we’re at the start of the fourth quarter and the guy is a field goal behind.”
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