Just a short note to point out—or remind people of—a fact about how polling works. It is universally the case that as Election Day comes nearer, we get many, many reports that “the polls are tightening”, usually to the detriment of the Democratic candidate. The overall effect of these reports is to suggest that “the Republicans are gaining ground”, i.e. that as voters start to “pay attention” to the race they are finding the GOP more attractive somehow. And the effect of that narrative is….depressing. How could the public be being swayed by these clowns?
All I want to do is point out a simple fact. Look at the screen shot above from the Real Clear Politics poll aggregation site. Note that the two best results for Fetterman—+11 and +13—also happen to be the only two polls in the list with the notation “RV” rather than “LV”. What does that mean?
”RV” stands for “registered voter”, so every respondent counted in the poll has asserted they are registered. This is already a reduced group from some polls marked “A” or “All”, where it is not asked or filtered on whether someone is registered. But every other poll in the list is “LV” or “likely voter”. What is a likely voter? Well, whatever the polling outfit decides that is. Each outfit can throw on a “likely voter” screen and simply toss out responses from people they deem unlikely to vote. For example, people who did not vote in the last election. The move from RV to LV generally cuts down on the Democratic vote because more people supporting Democrats are deemed “unlikely to vote” by the pollster.
So as the election approaches, pollsters switch from reporting A to RV and then to LV, with the general effect of making the polls move in the GOP direction even though not a single person may have changed their mind. Further, whereas RV is an objective thing—people are either registered or not (although an unregistered voter at the time of an early poll may decide to register)—LV is just a guess by the polling outfit and can be manipulated by them. Don’t like a result? Change your LV screen until you get one you like better.
Finally, in an election like this one the LV screen may be particularly unreliable. We have all seen the data showing a huge jump is registration by women after Dobbs. Those newly registered voters may well be filtered out by a LV screen, and also will vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. So get out an support your candidates in every way possible, but don’t be too concerned about “tightening polls” without checking the data carefully first.