The FiveThirtyEight Team Goes To Iowa

DES MOINES – Given that he’s hovering at just around 5 percent support in Iowa, many here have counted out Martin O’Malley, even going so far as to say he could win zero delegates. And yet there wasn’t a Clinton or Sanders sign in sight outside the entrance to tonight’s Brown and Black Forum at Drake University, where candidates will address issues that affect minority voters. There were dozens of O’Malley supporters who braved the cold temperatures to pledge their support to the Democratic candidate. They had traveled from as close as Des Moines and as far as Minneapolis, holding signs in both English and Spanish that touted O’Malley’s record on immigration issues and his plans to expand social security.

Abeena Abraham, 19, said she was here tonight supporting O’Malley because “he’s the only candidate who’s had a consistent record supporting DREAMers [Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors], making sure that we had in-state tuition in Maryland.” A student of Rochester Community and Technical College, Marco Alvarez, 21, said he was here in support of O’Malley because of the former Baltimore mayor’s strong stance on immigration reform. “I’m a huge advocate for immigration reform and so that’s why I support him,” he said.

DES MOINES — Well, evening has fallen here in Iowa and some of us have been up since the pre-5 a.m. hours that only elementary school teachers and “Today Show” hosts should have to see. But as I’m looking over my notes for the day there’s one voter comment that struck me as an individual working for a, shall we say, poll-attentive website? David John, 75, of Jefferson, Iowa, who I met at Bernie Sanders’s town hall in Perry was pretty emphatic about how he doesn’t answer the phone these days, unless it’s a number he knows, for fear of encountering a pollster. And sure enough, when I asked his wife, Carol, for their number, she wanted to be sure she knew the area code on my cell phone so she could look out for it. The people of Iowa are ruthless call screeners! When I asked John if he felt the polls he was hearing about were accurate and reflective of the sentiments he was seeing on the ground, he said this:

I don’t think they’re totally accurate because a lot of people like us don’t answer the phone, and we get a lot of calls and unless we know someone, we don’t answer. And there aren’t as many landlines anymore. I don’t know how people do polls anymore, but if they’re doing them over cellphones that’s probably a little more precarious than if they’re doing them over landlines.

The big polling problem illustrated here is one that has come with the rise of cellphone use and the decline of the good ol’ landline — thanks to regulations stemming from the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act, you can’t call cellphones via automatic dial. In other words, David and Carol John are outsmarting pollsters.