POLLING

A controversy about polling techniques has become hot political news. Gallup has been coming up with numbers that report a much larger Bush lead than other polls do, and has thereby so frustrated the left that MoveOn ran an ad against them in the New York Times.

The issue in question is whether to control for the party affiliation of respondents or not. When Gallup and others have taken polls since the Republican National Convention, they have tended to find more people calling themselves Republicans than was previously the case. Most pollsters respond by assuming they happened to oversample Republicans, and weighting Democrats and independents more to compensate. Gallup has assumed that they are finding more Republicans because more people are becoming Republicans. If this seems obviously more logical, consider a counter-example: suppose Republicans are excited about Bush, so they gladly talk to pollsters, whereas confused independents and disgruntled Democrats hang up.

The underlying issue is: How easily and quickly do people change party affiliations?

When econometricians encounter such difficulties, anecdote can be a useful guide to intuition. With that in mind, here’s my experience.

In 2000, I tried to convince myself I was neutral. I refused to vote for Bush, because he was a president’s son, and democracies aren’t supposed to have dynasties. But I really didn’t like Gore (and how rightly so, as it turned out!) When Bush’s victory made me happy, I had to admit to myself I’d wanted him all along.

I have mostly been very impressed by Bush in foreign policy, neutral on domestic policy. I loathe the potty-mouth left, Bush-is-Hitler and all that, but that makes me, if anything, more inclined to vote for a mainstream-moderate Democrat, the better to marginalize those jerks. I was on Lieberman’s campaign mailing list and would probably have voted him for president. And I committed on this blog a few months ago to vote for Edwards, as a reward to the Democrats for sparing us from a Kerry presidency.

All this time, I would have classified myself as independent. An independent whose sympathies lie on the right, to be sure. But an independent. Why get labeled?

But this year, Bush has inspired me more and more, and the Democrats have alienated me more and more. From the guest-worker proposal (even the hint of it helped a lot) to the talk of freedom, Bush has made Republicanism something that I can not just vote for, but commit to. Giuliani, McCain, Scwharzenegger and Zell Miller helped too, by showing that the Republicans are a broad church.

I registered to vote the other day at www.georgewbush.com. There was a pull-down list for party affiliation. The default was “Republican.” I thought about it. Hey, why not?

If there are a lot of people like me, Gallup’s methodology was right.