|
"Likely" voters are those who are not newly registered, have voted in previous elections, and/or tell the pollster they are planning to vote in the upcoming election.
The pollster has the ability to define "likely" however they wish. Maybe they only want people who voted in the past two presidential elections, or the last presidential and the last off-year.
"Registered" voters are, as the name implies, officially registered to vote. They may be newly registered or veterans of 10 election campaigns.
Some pollsters rely only on self-identified likely and registered voters. In other words, they ask the respondent "Are you registered to vote?" Others may use voter rolls so that they only call people who really are registered.
Pollsters tailor their sampling to be as effective as they believe it can be. With all the newly registered voters, there's no precedent for determining how they will actually vote. The pollsters can only compare their poll results to actual PAST results, and the new voters don't have any history.
Any poll that includes them, therefore, is going to be less accurate than one that includes people who have a verifiable history of actually getting out there and voting.
If the Dem advantage in newly-registered voters pans out -- meaning they actually vote -- the polls may be shown to have been skewed. Right now, however, if they're polling "likely voters," they probably ARE NOT polling the newly registered.
I've posted on this exact subject several times.
Tansy Gold
|