The national polls on the presidential election continue to be all over the place, with results ranging from President Obama with a 13-point lead in a Bloomberg poll to a Rasmussen poll that even has Republican Mitt Romney with a 5-point advantage. But once again the polls are likely to be extremely inaccurate because they are still trying to predict likely turnout based on previous voting patterns. That means they continue to undercount the impact blacks and Latinos—who both have millions of unregistered voters among their ranks—could have on the election if they come out in big numbers.
A poll analysis on the Huffington Post says the recent polls could indicate an advantage for Romney because more Republicans (73 percent) right now are saying they have given a lot of thought to the election than Democrats (66 percent), which pollsters take to mean that Republicans are more likely to vote in November. But historically it’s much too risky to draw many conclusions about voter interest when we’re still a couple of months away from the party conventions in August, when voter interest typically starts to rise.
In the polling, there’s another piece of data that bodes much better for the Democrats than Republicans: How people answered the question of whether they are satisfied with their choices—by a margin of 68 to 60 percent, Democrats are more satisfied with their choices. Also, many more voters say they support Obama strongly (30 percent) than support Romney strongly (17 percent).
But in the end, any polling results still come down to a key question: How many blacks and Hispanics will show up at the polls on November 6.
