Gallup admits: it only releases likely voter results when they favor McCain!

by Dick Diver

The Gallup Daily Presidential tracking poll, which many of us follow more closely than we should, reports results based on a survey of registered voters. At some point in the future, Gallup is going to switch to likely voters for the tracking poll, but we don't know exactly when.

Just as Nate predicted over at 538, the Gallup tracking poll showed a stable, close race leading up to the conventions, then a bounce for Obama, and then a bounce for McCain that seems to be subsiding, though less quickly than Obama's. The longer-lasting effect of McCain's bounce is probably the result of his VP selection (and convention) stepping on Obama's, rather than any lasting shift in the race (despite what the pundits have rushed to conclude).

But I want to focus on the poll Gallup released last Monday, Sept. 8th, through USA Today, that used a sudden, unexplained, temporary shift to the likely voter model and caused a huge splash in the media.

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That poll, taken in the three days immediately following the Republican National Convention, showed by far the largest national lead McCain has ever had in any poll (54-44 among likely voters), and generated a tremendous amount of attention. It helped drive the buzz for all of last week -- that McCain got a huge bounce from his convention, that Palin was a game-changer, that Obama was in big trouble, etc.

Notice that Gallup never released a likely voter poll over the three days immediately following the Democratic convention -- nor did it release any polls through USA Today during Obama's bounce. Putting it in USA Today guarantees far greater attention than the tracking poll alone gets.

This was a deliberate choice by Gallup and USA Today -- to release a poll that would maximize the impression of McCain's bounce and help shape the campaign narrative in favor of McCain-Palin's favor.

On Friday, Gallup published this report discussing the differences between registered and likely voters. Perhaps unintentionally, Frank Newport, the head of Gallup, made a huge admission that bears directly on the September 8th likely voter poll:

Second, we are at this point reporting likely voter estimates on only an occasional basis. We feel that the trends among registered voters give us the best way to track election preferences in our daily poll, in part because many voters are not yet in a position to accurately estimate their chances of voting on Election Day. But from time to time, we do estimate (and report) likely voter results to give us a feel for the potential difference turnout could make in November. So far this summer, there have been occasions when -- as was the case this past weekend after the GOP convention -- likely voters were decidedly more Republican. But there have also been occasions when there was little difference between the vote patterns of likely voters and those of registered voters.

In other words, Gallup is admitting the following:

1. At the time it released the September 8th poll (showing McCain up by 10), it believed institutionally that likely voter results were less accurate than registered voter results.

2. Likely voter results have only occasionally diverged from the registered voter results.

3. Despite these facts, Gallup deliberately chose to release, to the widest fanfare possible, a poll using an admittedly less accurate method (the likely voter method) at the time of McCain's maximum convention bounce, knowing that it would show a large divergence (+10 for McCain vs. only +4 with registered voters) based on the likely voter method, even though such a divergence is not often present.

4. In short, they combined all possible factors in McCain's favor to make his lead seem as big as possible -- and the media went wild with it.

This is why DailyKos's tracking poll is such an important service to the country, and indeed to the world. Markos cannot be thanked enough for giving the world its one true "people's poll." It is the people's poll not because it favors Democrats -- it doesn't. It is the people's poll because it is transparent. It releases the internals every day. Instead of just setting forth party ID "targets," as Rasmussen does, the DailyKos poll simply tells the reader for each sample, exactly what proportion of Ds, Rs, and Is, were polled. And unlike Gallup, it doesn't switch from registered to likely voter models at opportune times to get attention and reshape the race.

Gallup wants attention and it wants to influence the election. We need to take back our process and DailyKos is helping with its honest, open tracking poll.

UPDATE: Wow! Top of the rec list! My first time. Thank you all so much for the recommendations.

This election is very, very close right now. Let's all keep up the fight, donate, work, and never let Gallup or Rasmussen or any pollster get us down!

UPDATE 2: Thanks to itswhatson, you can DIGG this diary if you're so inclined.

Original here