Posted on 09/18/2008 5:42:27 AM PDT by sunmars
The pollsters certainly are not adjusting for working Repubs who, when their land line rings, waits for the response to the answering machine and when none occurs, do not pick up. Or, if they do pick up and hear "dead air", hang up, because they know it's either a pollster or someone asking for money.
Maybe Dims haven't figured this out.
Oversampling rats again.
You are so correct. Excellent post. Furthermore, alot of polls occuring on weekends go unanswered by Repubs who are playing with their family and going to church. This is true in my situation as well as the situations you listed.
My wife and I do that all the time.
They didn't call the race. They did come out with reports on exit polls, undoubtedly to try to help their boy Lurch. Didn't work.
The PPP group that ran a poll in Virginia on Tuesday showed a narrow lead for Obama, but the sampling was weighted heavily toward women, 55% to 45%. Naturally, you’re going to see a Dem tilt with that imbalance.
Polls are inaccurate and biased when they’re against us and accurate and fair when they’re for us. A day at FR wouldn’t be complete without kvetching about rigged polls.
bump
No way is New Mexico 48% Democrat.
And these very high Democrat samples, do they take into account the Palin effect? I’ll bet not. Those were raw numbers, When McCain was “up by 2%”, he was actually up by 5%.
Also, only 13% of the electorate in NM is “Independent”? That’s insane. Especially in the Rockies, where everybody says they’re independent.
dems 50% Rep 32% Ind 15
The Value of Party Weighting for a Tracking PollAs we have noted many times, there is a disagreement within the polling industry as to whether or not polling firms should “weight” or adjust their sample to reflect a specific mix of Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters (see recent article on why some polls produce different results).
Rasmussen Reports does weight our sample to a set of partisan targets and bases those targets on surveys conducted in preceding months. Entering the month of June, our targets for the month were set so that the sample would include 9.44% more Democrats than Republicans. At the end of the month, a review of the data showed that if we had not used the party weights, the Democrats would have had a 9.37% advantage over the GOP. The bottom line is that—over the course of a full month—our results would have been the same with or without party weighting.
However, the value of party weighting for a tracking poll becomes clear when you look at the numbers on a day-to-day basis.
The table of data for June highlights the percentage of Republicans and Democrats in our sample each day in June. These numbers are derived after we weight for all factors except party and they show the expected statistical noise and results that bounce around generally within the margin of sampling error. The percentage of Republicans was within the margin of error from the full month sample on 29 of 30 days. For Democrats, there were four days where the daily results departed from the full month average by more than the theoretical daily margin of sampling error. But, in all cases, even those variances were quite modest.
Even these modest variations on a daily basis produced some significant differences in terms of the gap between Democrats and Republicans. On June 11, the gap was just 3.01 percentage points. On June 18, it was 16.4 percentage points.
To understand how this might impact a tracking poll, look at the final column in the table which shows a three-day rolling average of the gap between the parties. On days when the Democratic advantage is a bit larger, we would have showed a bigger lead for Obama. When it’s smaller, we would have shown McCain gaining ground. Pundits and bloggers would have tried to explain the bouncing by whatever the candidates had said or done in recent days even though most voters are not that closely attuned to the daily rhetoric.
In reality, of course, nothing happened. The fluctuations reported would have been nothing more than statistical noise. There has been little or no movement in the race for the White House since Barack Obama clinched the Democratic Presidential Nomination. Including leaners, Obama has been at 48% or 49% support in our daily Presidential Tracking Poll for twenty-one straight days leading up to the Fourth of July weekend. McCain has generally been at 43% or 44% during that time from. The full month results show Obama leading McCain 49% to 44%.
Rush called this 10 days ago when he said the polls will show McCain with an early lead, then Obama will go ahead so the MSM can say Obama is “surging”.”
There is another theory about weighing these polls.
There are actually some people who don’t form their own opinions and they don’t want to be on “the losing side” for the next 4 years, so they will try to vote the way that the “polls” are showing.
They are too lazy and sometimes too stupid to research their data and make an opinion, so they follow “the crowd”, even if “the crowd” is manufactured BS.
** 2 new polls in 2 days have tried to boost Obama,
however when you look deeper, theres a better answer
here, huge oversampling of Democrats. **
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I am SHOCKED! SHOCKED I tell ya !! :^O
The Mainstream Media?? BIASED to hep a Democrap ???
:^O
Aren’t they sampling according to REISTRATION/
What is wrong with that
Dont think so. Strategic Vision is a GOP pollster.
Correct. Furthermore, Rasmussen has it tied and the new Battleground Poll still has McCAin up by 2.
bmflr
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