Hat tip to Secular Right.

I normally make it a point to avoid anything to do with John Derbyshire and Heather MacDonald, who are otherwise quite repellant, but even while on vacation, I can't quite seem to get away from them. A friend of mine IM'd me their reading of the Pew Study, and I thought that it might be interesting to take a look at it.  They surveyed 2,905 American adults  from July 31, 2008 to August 10, 2008.  Anyone self-identifying as atheist, agnostic or unaffiliated with any religion were left out of the poll. The previous waves of the study were in 2002 and 2007.

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I'd like to follow up on Pluribus' brilliant post on downloading and using census data with an explanation of how these data can be useful to you from a polling perspective. You're starting to see some of this happen with voter file vendors, but, hey, remember, the point of this site is to help smaller groups who can't afford a Catalist subscription do all the crazy fun data things that we do. 

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There are many ways that candidates and politicians learn about the electorate. Polling is one important, albeit expensive way to do this. But, there are other tools that candidates can, and should, use. One such tool is the Census data gathered AND distributed by our very own Federal government.

www.census.gov

This is, quite literally, a gold-mine of information. In addition to the formal census taken every 10 years, our government pays for smaller efforts to keep tabs on important demographic shifts and provides ongoing projections on the many diverse faces of America. Changes in demographics will affect elections for the forseeable future in many complex and exciting ways. Traditional heavy-weight, but slowly growing states such as NY will continue to decline (slowly) in electoral importance. At the same time, rapidly growing minority groups such as Latinos will continue to flex their growing electoral strength. In the early stages of a campaign (think 2010, 2012) a smart candidate will look at his or her electoral map and want to know about demographic shifts that may affect the election.

I know that some of you may not want to download huge data sets and dig into this (that will come in a later posting) but there are many tools provided on the website to look at and play with the data.

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This week, I’m going to be spending some time discussing some of the problems with current polling methodology.  The numbers we’re seeing in today’s polls may not accurately represent the real shape of the electoral landscape. 

The stratified sampling problem has been almost completely ignored, in favor of more easily digestible problems like the Bradley Effect and cell-phone user undersampling.  Unfortunately, the stratified sampling problem may prove to be more influential than either of those concerns.

I’m going to do my best to keep this post understandable for anyone with an interest in polling, but be forewarned: I’m dealing with a deep-seated technical problem that suffuses the entire polling industry.  If the stratified sampling problem were easy to understand and manage, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

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Ben Smith on Politico has a new story today about research coming out of the University of Washington that suggests we may see a "Reverse Bradley Effect" this election cycle.

The Bradley Effect describes a situation where polls overrepresent the support a black candidate receives in the actual election.  It's named for Tom Bradley, a black Los Angeles mayor and 1982 California gubernatorial candidate.  Both pre-election polling and exit polling on election day showed Bradley to be the favorite to win the election, and some media outlets predicted a Bradley win.  Instead, once the votes were tallied, his white opponent George Deukmejian carried the race.

Instead, Anthony Greenwald and Bethany Anderson suggest that we may see a reverse effect this year, citing results from the Democratic primaries which suggested Bradley Effects in only three states (New Hampshire, California, and Rhode Island), but reverse effects where Obama exceeded polling predictions in 12 other states.  Greenwald and Anderson set as their threshold for identifying Bradley or Reverse-Bradley Effects a difference of more than 7% between predicted performance and actual performance.

Now, it's time for some intellectual honesty.

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Two of the most positive developments in the blogosphere are, first, the use of quantitative data to make points, a tactic used all too rarely by many established pundits; and secondly, the ability of multiple individuals to collaborate and improve each others' work.  I'm glad to participate in both trends.

Over at OpenLeft, Chris Bowers has posted some interesting numbers--the ad spending by the McCain and Obama campaigns in every state that either one has spent money in.  The data is very interesting, and Bowers has some good observations on it, so I'd recommend checking it out.

 When I was reading that post, I thought to myself that it would be more useful if we adjusted for population.  I decided to do so myself, using the voting-eligible population figures from the U.S. Elections Project at George Mason, .  Here are the results.  The numbers represent ad dollars per 100,000 residents.

This is the first installment of what promises to be an extremely interesting series by Jay at RealClearPolitics.   It takes a detailed geographic look at the opposing Democratic and Republican coalitions in Ohio, and gives a summary of who these people are and what they're voting for.  Later entries will address other swing states.  Definitely worth checking out if you're a political junkie.