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Barry Zeplowitz of Barry Zeplowitz and Associates, a local polling firm, says some experts did not buy into the notion the 2008 voting model would not match the one this year. "I think the danger becomes with pollsters who create models based on previous models, and believe or don't believe it will happen again as the basis for their surveys," believes Zeplowitz. "The pollsters who were wrong based the model that did not predict the turnout of minorities and particularly Hispanics in states that were affected."
Zeplowitz also thinks there was a danger that the automated calling did not pick up cell phones, which are used by many young voters. A polling group like Siena may have gotten it right because of live calls. "They used live callers like we do. All our data is based on having cell phones as part of the information pollsters should be calling, and third, they had a large enough polling group to stay within the margin of error," explains Zeplowitz.
He says Rasmussen oversampled Republicans, but the complaints from the Mitt Romney campaign were the public polls oversampled Democrats. But sometimes, the spin doctors can get in the way. "Sometimes, the pollsters inside the campaign tend to put the best spin on their results, and you can take any set of data and find information that will make your candidate winning possible," says Zeplowitz. He says the only difference between the Romney and Obama pollsters were how they were interpreting the data.