Anecdotaly, I've spoken to a few people I know from Ohio and Florida who were so fed up with the GOP GOTV calls in 2004, that they simply stopped answering the phone. One friend started telling the GOP volunteers that if she received one more call, she would vote for Kerry. She was fibbing, but that didn't stop the calls.
Anyway, I was reading
this recap of the Laffey/Chaffe race on why the polls were so off in the primary and read the following:
"Where we really missed the boat was on Chafee," he said. In a postmortem analysis, Profughi discovered an "extraordinary" number of people who declined to participate in the poll because they had apparently been repeatedly called by the Chafee campaign's get-out-the-vote effort.
"They wouldn't give us any answers. They terminated quick. What I think was happening was that Chafee supporters we normally would have been able to reach were being contacted [so frequently] by the Chafee camp, which was exactly what Chafee should have been doing. But when these voters got one more call they said, 'Hey that's it, buster.' "
With so many refusals, Profughi had to make more calls. "We continued to call and hit more Laffey people who had not been contacted nearly as frequently. And that went a long way in explaining what happened in underestimating Chafee and to some degree, being over on Laffey."
Don't know if this is happening in other races, but it sounds likely. Tuesday could be filled with surprises.
