NYT:

The number of Americans who approve of Mr. Bush’s handling of the campaign against terrorism dropped to 46 percent from 54 percent in the past two weeks, suggesting that he failed to gain any political lift from an orchestrated set of ceremonies marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. In addition, the poll shows that Americans are now evenly divided over which party they think can better handle terrorism…

So Bush plummeted, eh? Let’s briefly look at how the sample of the latest poll changed. The relevant columns are, from the left, self-identified liberals, moderates and conservatives:

Note that the current poll sample has 23% self-identified liberals, whereas the previous poll had 17%. That 6% difference in sampling accounts for a lot of the “decline” the NYT described. Powerline has lots more on this subject.

One further note: the NYT’s poll of October 30, 2004 — a poll which got the presidential election just about right — also had a 17% liberal sample, not 23%. We do, however, appreciate the NYT’s including the internals of the poll so that some analysis can be done.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Polling, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.