Iowa pollster predicts Indiana, Iowa and Michigan outcomes

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

The polls are opening around the nation at this hour in Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, right here in New York, and Virginia. Joining us now is pollster Ann Selzer, who’s the president of Selzer and Company, Incorporated, from Des Moines, Iowa. Ann, thanks for being with us.

ANN SELZER:

Good morning.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You know, we were just talking about the difficulty of polling a place like Pennsylvania, which has so many communities that appear to not overlap a whole lot, and that your sample, depending on your geographic distribution, can be so, you know, different, depending on who calls you back. How do you deal with that as a pollster?

ANN SELZER:

Well, you know, each state presents its own challenges that way. It’s ? in a state like Iowa, where we poll, we have fewer worries that way. It’s more homogenous across the state.

We also poll in Michigan, which is really two states. You have the counties around Detroit and then you have everything else in the state, and that’s a little tricky, and we also poll in Indiana, which I think has some of the dynamics that you’re talking about in Pennsylvania. Regionally, they’re just very different pockets, depending on where you are in the state.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Let’s talk about Indiana for a moment. You were dead on in your polling of Iowa in advance of the Barack Obama victory in the Iowa caucuses. What do you think’s going to happen in Indiana which the polls close early there? It’s a toss-up state. There’s a lot of interesting trends demographically inside Indiana. What do you think’s going on there?

ANN SELZER:

Well, keep in mind that four years ago George Bush won by a 20-point margin, so for Indiana to be in play all by itself is significant, and very telling about what’s happening in this election.

Our latest poll showed Barack Obama with a less than one percentage point lead. It was six-tenths of one percentage point. It’s just that tight. You know, in my talking to people around that state, what I heard were Republicans who have felt that their party left them, and that they see enough that’s attractive in Barack Obama that they’re crossing over.

Now, incumbent Republican Mitch Daniels doesn’t have much to worry about. Hoosiers are good ticket splitters and we’ll see what happens there, but Indiana literally could go either way and the way that it goes – we’ll know fairly early, potentially, with the polls closing early there – will be indicative for many of the other states that people have thought were toss-ups.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

So Indiana’s outcome early could be a champagne bottle moment for some of the campaign parties around the nation. Ann Selzer, thanks for joining us.

She’s president of Selzer and Company, on the program, one of many pollsters who’s joining us here as we take a look at what’s going on, on Election Day here in the United States. Lines all over the country, we’re seeing them now on video – Dover, Delaware, just a moment ago there on CNN.

Andrea Bernstein, what Ann Selzer talked about there, the sort of passion gap between-

ANDREA BERNSTEIN:

Right.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

– voters for Republicans and voters for Democrats in this election is exactly what you were showing us day after day in the counties that count.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN:

Absolutely, and I think one of the things about Indiana is that it’s a state where it’s very hard for pollsters to figure it out. I mean, there are these areas like Bloomington, where the student population is so far Obama and so energized for Obama that it’s hard to calculate, it’s hard to guess how many of those people are going to vote. Youth are usually an underperforming part of the population.

Same for Lake County where Gary is, an extremely poor area, very African-American, hard to figure out exactly how to model statistically. When you look back over all these elections and people have undervoted, and then you just have to guess, well, how much more are going to vote. Suburbs of Indianapolis we’re going to be watching also-

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Right.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN:

– because it’s an area where there’s people moving into Indiana, so it’s really a state where the polling models, I mean, are going to be tested, and I think it’s going to happen to a lot of states this year.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, I love Indiana, and not just because I went to college in Illinois and used to spend a lot of time driving around to Indiana, and it’s very, very different, but the thing I love about Indiana election day is Gary’s polls close later than the rest of the state, which means there’s kind of like this built-in suspense, this built-in ace that gets played at the end of the hand.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN:

Right. [LAUGHS]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

It’s like it’s a Texas Hold ‘Em card or something.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN:

Well, the thing that’s sort of confusing about Indiana, and I came across it a lot while I was driving there, are these two small corners of the state are on Central time. The west is on ? the rest is on Eastern time. So you are driving across a time zone

within a state, and you – there are some areas around Indianapolis, big strong infrastructure areas like Gary ? not so great infrastructure.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Right.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN:

And that is reflected in the return.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Very interesting. All right, we are hosting America’s Exit Poll for an election that’s been two years in the making.

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SENATOR JOHN McCAIN:

I am announcing that I will be a candidate for President of the United States.

MAN: Oh boy!

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SENATOR BARACK OBAMA:

I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America.

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JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Make your own scrapbook of this two-year epic election on The Takeaway at 877-8MYTAKE.

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