Quote from futurecurrents:
I now see that Pew has written an article addressing this very issue...an excerpt.......
In every campaign cycle, pollwatchers pay close attention to the details of every election survey. And well they should. But focusing on the partisan balance of surveys is, in almost every circumstance, the wrong place to look.
In every presidential election since 1996, our final pre-election surveys have aligned with the actual vote outcome, because we measured rising Democratic or Republican fortunes in each year.
In short, because party identification is so tightly intertwined with candidate preferences, any effort to constrain or affix the partisan balance of a survey would certainly smooth out any peaks and valleys in our survey trends, but would also lead us to miss more fundamental changes in the electorate that may be occurring. In effect, standardizing, smoothing, or otherwise tinkering with the balance of party identification in a survey is tantamount to saying we know how well each candidate is doing before the survey is conducted.
So what could be happening is that people are reassessing what being Republican and Democrat really means. They see an out-of-touch rich guy who wants tax breaks for the wealthy, more defense spending, and cuts to social programs. They see a guy who's gamed the system for all it's worth with off-shore tax havens etc. They see a guy who bullied a gay person. They are finally starting to realize that this is the essence of Republicanism today, and they don't like it.
