Obama pollster: Gallup, public polling needs a retooling

President Obama’s lead pollster, Joel Benenson, took issue with the wild variations in the Gallup polling data – and the various public surveys that were widely off the mark – in a post-election interview with POLITICO.

Benenson, whose forecasting model was critical to the campaign, went through the major issues with the public polls that showed wild variations throughout the final weeks of a remarkably stable race.

“I think it’s long overdue for an organization with a name as well-known as Gallup to recognize what the demographics of the American electorate actually are and figure out why their model has continued to skew too old, too white and less likely to be college educated than the nation’s voters,” Benenson said.

Benenson, like others in the Obama campaign high command, said the president won on values and not on demographics, as the Mitt Romney campaign has flagged.

“The American electorate does not bounce around as if it's on a pogo stick,” Benenson said. “If you look at the exit polls, 70 percent of voters had made up their mind before September... Mitt Romney would have had to have a phenomenal two months ... he would have had to won that 30 percent of voters, to make up a five point difference, by 17 points.”

In the Gallup surveys, their weighting for the youngest voters was less than where they were in the 2008 exit data. The same was true for some minority voters.

Jeff Jones, of Gallup, dismissed the idea that the exit polling is Gospel.

“We don't assume to know what the electorate is before it happens,” Jones said. “We take our sample [and] we weight it to ... known targets that are rock solid.”

He added, “People basically accept the exit poll as the gospel. The problem is it's the exit poll and those exit polls ... and i think it's pretty well known especially in the case of 2004 that the exit poll has issues.”

However, exit data has been a guide for the Obama campaign in terms of how the proportion of the white vote has declined since 1996, and how other demographic changes have taken place.

Benenson shot more broadly than just Gallup though, saying, “I think everybody.. should stop looking at the last poll and saying ‘we were accurate’...the sheer epidemic of polling going on right now starts creating a story line that really didn't exist.”

Their campaign, he said, had “three different buckets of data that we were looking at on our operation…there was no Romney surge taking place, and no Romney momentum.”

Romney made gains after the first debate by bringing back some soft Republicans who had drifted after the 47 percent tape went public, Benenson said.

“I think that every polling outfit has to look very closely when their numbers bounce around, particularly when you get close to an election the numbers just don't move that much .... there have been some academic studies that say that several of these models do measure changes in enthusiasm instead of real changes in the vote.”

But he added that firms that suddenly crop up, without a track record, and get incorporated into polling averages are problematic, especially with state-based polls.

To that end, he argued that the argument from Romney campaign’s pollsters – who he said he respects – that whoever won independents would win never made sense to their team.

Maggie Haberman is senior political reporter for Politico.