POLL-Kerry Opens Three-Point Lead on Bush

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic challenger John Kerry (news - web sites) expanded his slight lead over President Bush (news - web sites) to three points in a tight race for the White House, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Monday.

The Massachusetts senator held a 47-44 percent lead over Bush in the latest three-day tracking poll, up two points from Sunday. Bush's support dropped one point and Kerry's support rose one point in the new poll.

The close race turns up the pressure for Wednesday's final debate in Tempe, Arizona, when the White House rivals will have another chance to make their case to voters on domestic issues.

The poll found six percent of likely voters are still undecided about the race with barely more than three weeks to go until the Nov. 2 election, and 16 percent of the voters who identify themselves as independents are undecided.

Bush made small gains among young voters and Kerry picked up strength among women voters ahead of the debate -- the final chance for both candidates to speak directly to an audience of millions of voters.

"Wednesday's debate is vital because many sub-groups remain close and because so many independents have yet to make up their minds," pollster John Zogby said.

The poll of 1,214 likely voters was taken Friday through Sunday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points. The rolling poll will continue through Nov. 1 -- the day before the election.

The last two days of polling came after Bush and Kerry battered each other over Iraq (news - web sites), jobs and taxes during a debate on Friday. The economy and Iraq are consistently listed as the top issues in the race.

A tracking poll combines the results of three consecutive nights of polling, then drops the first night's results each time a new night is added. It allows pollsters to record shifts in voter sentiment as they happen.

The poll found 48 percent of voters thought the United States was headed in the wrong direction and 45 percent thought it was headed in the right direction.

It also showed independent candidate Ralph Nader (news - web sites), blamed by some Democrats for drawing enough votes from Al Gore (news - web sites) to cost him the election in 2000, earning the support of 1.7 percent of likely voters.

Zogby: Back in 1996, pollster Zogby hit the bullseye in predicting the results of the Presidential election. In 2000, they were close again, though their aggregate error tied them with 5 other national polls. In 2002, Zogby appeared to show a lean in favor of the Democrats, and he was way off in his mid-term election predictions. This year, at the end of the spring, John Zogby actually came out and predicted John Kerry would win the election, which appeared to indicate his bias had reached the point of full-blown partisanship against the President, reflected in a growing number of opinions made out of personal preference, rather than on the evidence. Zogby’s refusal to show his work, only magnifies the apparent distortion of his results.

Zogby runs two polls; a telephone poll and an Interactive Internet poll. Unlike almost every other poll, Zogby’s telephone poll is not RDD. Zogby describes his list as follows: “The majority of telephone lists for polls and surveys are produced in the IT department at Zogby International. Vendor-supplied lists are used for regions with complicated specifications, e.g., some Congressional Districts. Customer-supplied lists are used for special projects like customer satisfaction surveys and organization membership surveys. Telephone lists generated in our IT department are called from the 2002 version of a nationally published set of phone CDs of listed households, ordered by telephone number. Residential (or business) addresses are selected and then coded by region, where applicable. An appropriate replicate1 is generated from this parent list, applying the replicate algorithm repeatedly with a very large parent list, e.g., all of the US. Acquired lists are tested for duplicates, coded for region, tested for regional coverage, and ordered by telephone, as needed.” Zogby notes that “regional quotas are employed to ensure adequate coverage nationwide.” That is, Zogby takes pains to insure that his respondent poll is not random.

As for his weighting, Zogby states “Reported frequencies and crosstabs are weighted using the appropriate demographic profile to provide a sample that best represents the targeted population from which the sample is drawn from. The proportions comprising the demographic profile are compiled from historical exit poll data, census data, and from Zogby International survey data.”

In other words, Zogby uses his own polls to drive some of his demographic parameters, a practice not approved, much less recommended, by either the NCPP or the AAPOR.

All in all, Zogby’s habit of confusing his personal opinion with data-driven conclusions, his admitted practice of manipulating the respondent pool and his demographic weights, by standards not accepted anywhere else, along with mixing Internet polls with telephone interview results, forces me to reject his polls as unacceptable; they simply cannot be verified, and I strongly warn the reader that there is no established benchmark for the Zogby reports, even using previous Zogby polls, because he has changed his practices from his own history.

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