Silly poll
A Washington Post / ABC poll as reported by the Post in a story that seems phoned in:
Poll Finds Americans Pessimistic, Want Change — The overall landscape tilts in the direction of the Democrats…
at this point, in a matchup of current front-runners, Clinton and Giuliani are tightly paired: 50 percent of respondents would support Clinton, 46 percent Giuliani. Against McCain, Clinton has a clearer edge, 52 percent to 43 percent. She has even larger advantages over former senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee (16 points) and Romney (18 points), both of whom remain undefined in the eyes of many voters…
The Post-ABC poll was conducted by telephone Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 among a random sample of 1,131 adults, and includes additional interviews with randomly selected African Americans for a total of 203 black respondents. The results from the full poll have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Yawn. So Clinton beats Giuliani 50 to 46, in a poll of 1131 “adults,” not likely voters. We all know how such polls skew. Furthermore, the sample is 35/29 D to R, with leaners split 42/34 D to R. We’re not saying that Mrs. Clinton can’t win, or even trounce her opponents. But this empty shell of a story does nothing to provide enlightenment on that point.
November 6th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
As time goes on, telephone polls are increasingly inaccurate anyway. A surprising percentage of the population now has no landline, and relies exclusively on cell phones. It’s against the law to make unsolicited commercial calls to cell phones, and that includes pollsters.
And there are also a lot of people who hang up on pollsters when they call. It’s not clear that the subset of the population which have landlines and are willing to waste ten minutes answering silly questions are representative of the population as a whole, but the evidence is that increasingly they are not.
November 6th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Nice point, Steven. One might also mention that it is a long, long time before the election.