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« Ginsburg, Baby! | Main | The Peter Principle »

Fishing in Stocked Ponds

I was going to write a post on the See-BS poll, but after reading John Hawkins explanation of the methodology of skewed polls, I figure I'll just like to his post

So, they undersampled the number of Republicans by more than 8.5% and over sampled Independents by more than 8%. Let's adjust for that (in a very general way). Add in 8 more Republicans and we'll say Bush's favorability goes up 8 points. Take out 8 Independents and we'll figure Bush loses 4 points of support (Independents were roughly split between Bush and Kerry in 2004) and now Bush's approval rating, after having 4 points added onto it, is at 45.5. Of course, it's not quite as simple as I've made it look here, nor is this as accurate as simply polling likely voters with a correct breakdown of party affiliation, but it's close enough for our purposes.

Then, we consider the polls margin of error, 3 points, and Bush's real approval rating among voters who'll actually be going to the polls in November is probably somewhere roughly between 42.5 - 48.5. That's not great, but it doesn't have exactly the same sort of zing that 34% has either, does it?.

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» Zogby Poll Propaganda from UNCoRRELATED
I've already written reams about the use of polls as propaganda. I'm not sure when it actually started but I first noticed it during the 2002 electoral cycle and have seen its use escalating ever since. Initially, skewed polls could be construed as a k... [Read More]

Comments (1)

mike:

while admirable that he caught the weighting bias, his subsequent math is wrong. Corrected number is 38%

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