This Election

Let's set aside who's ahead and who's behind in the U.S. presidential election and instead look at how interest in 2012 stacks up against previous years.

For example, "how much thought have you given to the coming presidential election" is a question asked last week and in previous early October election years (data source here).

              Quite   
Year        a Lot    

2012        73%    
2008        81%   
2004        74%
2000        60%

As you can see, while this year is a bit lower than the excitement of Barack Obama in 2008, it stacks up well in comparison with previous years.  I'd call this, at worst, an average year. 

Is this an enthusiasm gap?  Certainly compared to the Obama phenomenon of 2008, but overall 2012 compares pretty well with previous elections.  When asked if they plan to vote, respondents score as high this year as earlier.  Yes, people overestimate their turnout, but it's telling that the numbers are essentially identical to the last four presidential elections.

There is emotion out there.  Among Mitt Romney supporters, 31 percent feel strongly toward him.  That compares favorably to the 21 percent in early October 2008 who felt strongly toward John McCain.  Even Obama is not doing too badly.  Thirty-two percent feel strongly about him this year, down a bit from 36 percent who felt that way in 2008.  Want bad?  Kerry had only 24 percent back in 2004 who felt strongly for him.

The takeaway?  This is not a down year.  Indeed, it seems to compare well to previous years.  That bodes well for turnout, though it's hard to imagine it'll be as high in 2008.

Lying About Voting Intent

When people say they're going to vote, do they really vote?  Not according to this study (warning, not yet peer reviewed).  Even worse, from a research standpoint, they find many who say they're not going to vote actually voted.

The study gets at the question a number of ways.  One is simple.  Look at who said they're gonna vote in a survey and then go to the courthouse and see if they actually voted (it's a public record whether or not you voted, but not who you voted for).  They also used an experiment and some other approaches. 

To summarize, these "surprisingly inaccurate self-predictions" are full of measurement error, which can lead to all kinds of problems when you rely on them to, oh, decide on "likely voters" in a horserace poll (this is "grossly inadequate," the authors say) or even as a measure of political interest, motivation, or intent in academic studies.  The authors argue self-prediction is "far inferior to past vote history as a predictor of actual turnout."

Again, the caveat -- this manuscript is under review somewhere and has not as yet undergone a complete peer review.  As such, take the results with a grain of salt until it's been vetted by folks who are serious about this stuff.

But, there's some fascinating discussion at the end of the paper about the psychological underpinnings of saying you're gonna vote and you don't, or to me even more fascinating, saying you're not gonna vote and you do it anyway.  That latter, they argue, may in part be a function of frustration with the political process but among regular voters, the pull of Election Day is simply to much.  So pollsters in particular may be losing important data with their traditional screening questions.

People Don't Lie (as much as we thought)

My dad always told me people lie about three things: how often they vote, how often they went to church, and the gas mileage they get on their vehicle.

It's an accepted truism in the political science literature that survey respondents overestimate how often they vote.  Studies in the past have attempted to gauge this by checking the voting records of survey respondents, with some success.

(as a matter of information for you budding public records access scholars, you can't tell how someone voted, but you can tell if they voted, at least in most states)

There's a new report out at the ANES web site in which the authors examined the voting records of their 2008 national survey sample (report pdf here).   In surveys, the proportion of folks who say they voted is notoriously higher than the actual proportion of people who cast a ballot -- hence we know some folks are, to put it nicely, fudging.  Or so we thought.  See below.

In examining public records, the authors reported four findings:

1. Official government records "contain numerous errors" that makes voter validation difficult.
2. These errors differ widely from state to state.
3. How states report their data makes it tough to compare across states.
4. And here's the biggie -- "We found that for respondents whose government records can be identified, the records and self-reports show very high levels of agreement. This finding implies that overestimation of turnout rates by surveys is attributable to factors and processes other than respondent lying."

In other words, people aren't lying as much as we thought they were lying, and the gap between what people say in surveys about their voting habits may be due, in part, to crappy government record keeping.   Sure, people still fudge, but the difference is partly attributable to lousy records.

This is comforting for scholars who use survey data to study voting turnout, though it kinds makes my dad's advice from above a bit out of date.