An interesting tidbit in Major Garrett's article in the National Journal about the confidence within the Obama campaign. Apparently they, as well as public pollsters an the Romney campaign, have detected a "surge" in democratic self ID in August, but they have no explanation as to why. Read about it below.
As to gravity, Obama’s team has begun preemptively making things look worse in its own polling. For at least two months, the campaign has detected a ripple in the data caused by a spike in voters identifying themselves as Democrats. The numbers that come back on self-identified Democrats don’t match, statistically, voter-registration rolls or historical patterns. This anomaly cropped up in public polls in August. Romney aides have taken careful note and don’t know what to make of it. They take comfort that Democratic voter registration from 2008 is down 800,000 while GOP registration is down less than a tenth of that. Independent registration in the same period is up 207,000. But what if independents are choosing to call themselves Democrats? What if Republicans are? What if people are lying? Obama’s analysts have decided to subtract at least 2 points from Obama’s support in every internal poll.
“We keep weighting our polls down,” Axelrod says. “This has been true of our national polling and state-by-state polling. We’re watching it. We don’t know what it means. We’re not willing to say this means there’s been some kind of conversion. But it certainly doesn’t mean there is a Republican wave. It’s a real subject for investigation. There’s no doubt there’s a pattern out there. At the very least, it kind of militates against their theory that there’s a big wave coming and the wave is going to move in their direction. There is nothing in the data that would suggest that.”
http://www.nationaljournal.com/...
Has anyone heard about this before or have any explanation/ reason for it? It's good to see that the Obama campaign is erring on the side of caution and weighting their internal polls down just in case this surge in democrats is a mirage. Anyway you try to explain it, though, it doesn't seem to be good news for the Republicans.