Dick Morris Explains Polls Understate Romney Vote: Agree?

However, what has occurred in this country in the last 20 years is the more critical. The dynamic is as follows: people on both sides of the aisle have identified themselves with one political party or another to the degree that they are not looking through the information beyond the limits of their own identity. All information is filtered to merely become part of the identity, with few people actually going beyond this. The other dynamic is the effect the initial message Mr. Obama used in 2008 to get elected. This particular type of message took full advantage of political identity processes and was so powerful that it is still having its political impact. Mr. Obama developed a message in that first election, (that even though and in spite of the fact that Mr. Bush had many, many repeated quarters of good economic growth and the fact of the impact of the housing finance bills late in Mr. Bush's presidency, which directly impacted the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debacle, and which were authored by the democratic party, and led to the 'lost another one to Ditech' mentality--thereby setting the basis for the subprime problems), that indicated the state of the economy was Mr. Bush's fault. Many democrats and independents and even some republicans believed this--which was ridiculous. But the powerful thing about this message in its impact on the young voter and the independent voter is that the identity of these individuals shaped itself around an assumption, which they are not willing to change. The assumption involves not a solution, 'we democrats can solve this;' but an accusation and determination, 'the republicans and their approach inevitably cause the economic ruin--their structuring of laws which impact financial institutions will consistently lead to ruin.' This is an assumption. It is inaccurate. This is an incredibly powerful message to build one's identity around politically. It disallows the evaluation of other elements and dynamics, including the impact of the larger processes and systems, which are based on international values; nor does it allow the systematic evaluation of those values to determine their fairness or what processes they give rise to in a civilization. This message continues to affect a large proportion of the vote. All that has to happen to have this election turn out badly for the republican candidates is to reactivate the key significant element in the identity for these youth voters and independents and they will vote, not so much FOR Obama, but against the republican view of economics--even against their own experience and awareness of the growth of the deficit due specifically not to decisions by Mr. Bush, but to specific decisions by Mr. Obama. They will choose the identity dynamic rather than their own knowledge of how things have not improved and even their gut telling them that things have gotten worse. That is what you are seeing in the polling data-identity processes. It is clear that these are identity issues by all the vitriole, name calling, ridiculing, denigrating that goes on on both sides. Such people cannot build a civilization
With Best Wishes,
Kit

The analogy to the 1980 election hinges on two basic, and flawed, assumptions.



The first is that the undecided voting block of 1980 will react the same way as the undecided voting block of 2012. For those of you who were of the voting age in 1980, do you believe that you are the same individual that you were in 1980? Or are you, on the other hand, willing to say that the general public of 1980 is comparable to the general public of today despite the vast differences in access to knowledge, technology, medicine, etc.?



The second assumption is that the pollsters of today have not learned how to compensate for such drastic swings within the last several weeks of the election. One of the reasons that polls are deemed to be more accurate today is simply because of the fact that there are more of them. If you are unwilling to accept the methodology of a particular poll, you can look to SEVERAL others that adopt different methodologies. And if you take a further step back and choose to look at an average of all of the polls, then you can get an even more accurate picture. Perhaps the polls to which Dick Morris cites (of which he cites one per day) were inherently flawed for some particular reason. If you believe that current pollsters are unwilling to have learned from such mistakes, then you are just too biased to be reasonable.



So no, Dick Morris, you have a convincing argument for why the polls should be accepted with a grain of salt. However, you're argument is flawed and your prediction is ultimately very unlikely to come true.