[AntiGuv]

Please be gentle. I'm running a high fever. :(

The other SUSA polls will be posted here.

[AntiGuv]

election poll ping!

[nj26]

I've always been quite impressed by Heather Wilson, as a veteran, congresswoman, and campaigner.

What is happening here?

[AntiGuv]

Note that the 8% SUSA lead for Madrid (D) is identical to the 8% lead in the most recent Constituent Dynamics poll.

[Dane]

Yawn another day, another media poll.

I can't wait for the morning of November 8th and these polling experts have egg on their face.

[Henry Wilson]

Interesting - the only change between this poll and the previous one is in the likely voter model.

I wouldn't count Wilson out. She, like Anne Northrup, are always on the most endangered incumbent lists, but somehow manage to claw out wins.

[MplsSteve]

How reliable is Survey USA?

[Kuksool]

With 3 weeks to go, no use whining aobut polls. Better to focus on cranking out the turnout. This is how Heather Wilson wins.

[Salvey]

I'm wondering whether the conventional wisdom --that the folks moving to the southwestern states will add to the conservative voter base -- is wrong, and that they're actually 'RATS who will be tipping the balance in the opposite direction, towards the lefties.

[Recovering_Democrat]

Today, 10/16/06, SurveyUSA releases election polls in 4 Congressional Districts: Arizona 5, California 50, Minnesota 2, and New Mexico 1. In all four of these districts, we observe significant movement away from the Republican incumbent and towards the Democratic challenger, with the Republican's lead decreasing by between 9 and 13 points.

Yuk. This isn't good news. C'mon REPUBLICANS!!! LET'S ROLL!

[RetiredArmy]

Well, if republicans/conservatives/religious-right, whatever, are stupid enough to stay home and refuse to vote out of being "mad" or whatever at republicans, then they deserve all the socialist/communist/homosexual/muz-lum loving democrats casts upon them the next 2 years they are in power. If they think that by staying home and refusing to vote out of being pissed off at republicans, then they are actually too stupid to be voting anyway. Refusing to vote, refusing to back candidates that are more closely aliened with your thoughts and beliefs while allowing the communists to get into power is stupidity. Much like refusing to do anything about the muz-lums and their killing machines. Right, just toss the 3,000 wonderful men and women who died in defending this republic, right, just toss their sacrifices right out the windows. Go ahead. Stay home. You get what you refuse to vote to prevent.

Rush ranted about this today and I agree with him. Just go ahead and stay home while they raise your taxes, while they cut and run and give the muz-lum murderers exactly what they want. Right, give us ANTOHER VIETNAM! Another cut and run. We only had 58,000 lives wasted in my war. Go ahead and waste another 3,000. What the heck is another 3,000 great young people who gave their all. Shucks, the illegals and the illegitimate baby makers can just make us a few extras for our taxes to pay for.

[Kay]

Sorry to hear you are sick. Hope it isn't anything serious. We haven't seen any influenza in my area yet this year.

[ShandaLear]

BREAKING NEWS! The Dems take the House! The Dems take the Senate! President Bush is unelected and John Kerry is inaugurated. /sarcasm

I am so sick of these polls I could scream. I want to know where the RNC is in all this. too. I see no sign of them anywhere.

[GOP_1900AD]

Lots of New Age oriented people from LA have moved there. I am not surprised.

[machman]

Wilson is running a horrible, horrible campaign. The reason she is giving to vote for her is that "I'm not Bush", "I'm so Independent". Most people are thinking, yeah, I know Madrid is a crook, but Wilson is a RINO at best, and a closet dem, might as well vote for the real thing.....

[NeoCaveman]

1) Republicans are becoming less likely to vote, and Democrats are becoming more likely to vote;

SUSA is overweighting Democrats and are therfor worthless. Rasmussen and the others are alright.

[VeritatisSplendor]

I'm going to reply to you, who posted the thread, rather than to everyone individually.

First of all, Dane's obsession with weekend vs weekday polls is misplaced. We have literally thousands of polls' worth of data -- we have always polled weekdays and weekends. We do too many polls to be able to squeeze them all in on the same day of the week. Our sampling methods minimize the differences between weekday and weekend polling. The effects we saw today are much too large to be explained away like this.

Second, criticism of our polls for being automated misses the point -- we conducted the polls in each of the 4 districts the exact same way in both September and October, any "house effect" would affect both polls and not explain the large movements.

Third, we weight our samples to both census data and voter registration data. Different districts require different sampling and weighting methods, depending on how gerrymandered they are and how racially homogeneous they are. ("Random Digit Dial" is ideal, and is the choice in almost all statewide polls, but is not always possible in gerrymandered districts, and even RDD polls still get weighted to Census data to compensate for women being more likely to answer the phone, old people being easier to reach, etc.)

Fourth, our TV station clients ask us to poll particular races, but we are their experts and we schedule when the polls are in the field and write all the questions ourselves. Their only contribution to the process is to say which races they want to poll (and we may decline to poll exceptionally difficult contests). We may offer them a choice of days to have polls delivered, or consider their requests, but never at the expense of accuracy. (For example, we won't poll over holiday weekends because so many people are away, or on Yom Kippur in geographies with significant Jewish populations because many people we call would be annoyed or not answer).

Fifth, we are fully aware of all the current research on cell phones, caller ID, and voice mail (and do research of our own on these) -- they present challenges, but the track record of PRE-election polling (not exit polling) in recent years shows that accurate polling is achievable most of the time.

Sixth, although "races don't flip 13% if nothing significant has happened" when 4 out of 4 races show similar moves, we think something significant HAS likely happened, and the evidence that the poll is not a fluke is that the same thing happened elsewhere.

Finally, we certainly do not shift our results in order to please our clients, then give the "real" numbers in our final pre-election polls. There are frequently nationwide trends in the final week of a campaign, and sometimes one party has a big GOTV (get out the vote) advantage which will show up in the last few days, but we call them as we see them at the time our polls are taken.

[Intolerant in NJ]

Two possible explanations for this shift are:.......and two others are that 'pubs are getting tired of pollsters and are lying to them, or that the methodology for determining "likely voters" is weak, since most pollsters look for indications of this in elements such as history of recent voting which would not change suddenly over a period of a few weeks as could mere verbal reports...oh, and a another would be an inappropriate sample, since we get no breakdown of 'rat vs 'pub registration in the sample or against the underlying registration population of the district.....