How Accurate Are the 2012 Presidential Election Polls? (8/10/12)

Here is how the past few election cycles voted based on exit polls in terms of political ideology:

Year		Democrat %	Republican %	Independent %	Notes
2000		39	35	27	Gore Wins by 0.1% Popular Vote
2002		38	40	22	Republicans pick up a few House seats
2004		37	37	26	Bush by 3%
2006		38	36	26	Democrats make big gains in the House
2008		39	32	29	Obama by over 7%
2010		35	35	29	Republicans make big gains in the House

The difficult thing to measure is what is going to be the breakdown in political ideology in the 2012 Election. Here are some poll figures:

Poll		Democrat %	Republican %	Independent %	Obama %	Romney %	Notes
IPOS/Reuters		46	43	11	49		42		Democrat 3%
Gallup					46		46		Democrat 3.7%
Rasmussen					43		47		Republican 1.5%
NBC		35	23	39	49		43		Democrats 12%
FOX		44	35	20	49		40		Democrats 9%
PEW		33	22	42	51		41		Democrats 11%
CNN		59	41		52		45		Democrats 18%
CBS					46		47

To determine the ideological breakdowns of some polls I needed to carefully decipher these numbers from the questions within the polls (the information is not readily available).

Although Republicans are not overly excited by Romney, polls indicate they are more energized than Democrats because they do not want another 4 years of Obama. The generic congressional ballot between Democrats and Republicans is even and that is good news for Republicans because they historically trail in this poll. Are the poll models above correct? Many polls have Obama winning by similar margins as 2008. Obama may be much more popular than Romney, but the economy is in the dumps and not getting better so it is hard to believe that Obama will win independents as he did in 2008. If all these polls are averaged Obama has a large lead of over 4%. However, many of these polls seem to be oversampling Democrats by large margins when compared to historical trends outlined above. What’s worse, many of these same polling outlets are making the same mistake in state election polls. My best guess at an ideological breakdown in 2012 is 36-D/34-R/31-I. If that is the case this election will be a dead heat.