An ABC / Washington Post poll found that a majority of those polled favored the “public option.” The sample that the poll used — adults, not voters — favored Democrats over Republicans in Congressional races by an enormous margin of 51/29. It seems pretty obvious that the poll is oversampling Democrats by a wide margin. Gallup has the generic congressional ballot at 46/44, so ABC seems to be way off.

Two things are particularly offensive and tiresome about the poll and how it is reported. First, the headline reads “More Americans Prefer Public Option to Bipartisan Bill,” which is not supported by the poll’s results. Second, the pollsters never ask the respondents to identify themselves by political party; the poll only has that indirect question on congressional preferences, which seems unnecessarily indirect and looks suspicious to the untrained eye. Perhaps someone who knows more about these matters could enlighten us. (HT: Ace)

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 4:39 am and is filed under Democrats, Polling, Republicans. 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.