Crush Liberalism

Fun with polls

Over the last couple of days, two polls that always oversample Democrats showed the Obamaliar opening up a 15% lead over Juanny Mac.  Today, Gallup releases a poll that shows a tie, 45%-45%.  Those of you who have been here long enough realize that I take polls with a grain of salt, but I put them up anyway for your consumption.

Anywho, Stacy McCain (who is not related to presidential candidate Juan McAmnesty) has a great explanation as to why the polls have varied so widely:

Given the fact that huge numbers of eligible voters don’t vote, a pollster — if his poll results are to be useful or credible — must try to screen for “likely voters.” This is a doggone difficult thing to do, but it must be attempted, because voters and non-voters differ significantly in their preferences. Non-voters are more likely to support liberal policies and Democratic candidates (a source of endless frustration to liberal Democrats). So a poll that doesn’t properly screen for “likely voters” will always skew leftward (as was true of the Newsweek poll that surveyed “registered voters” rather than “likely voters”).

This is probably why early polls have historically overstated support for Democratic presidential candidates. The closer you get to Election Day, the easier it becomes to determine who the “likely voters” are. Thus, the samples in early polls contain lots of liberal-leaning eligible voters who, in the end, won’t actually bother to vote.

Newsweak, the LA Slimes, and See B.S. have always loaded up their polls with extra Democrats (usually 10-15% more), smaller samples, and registered voters, and as a result, they’re always off come election day (at least, in terms of percentages, though not always outcome).  While I don’t know what party breakdown Gallup used here, at least their sample was respectable at 2,600.

To be fair, this Gallup poll also uses registered voters instead of likely voters.  But if that’s the case, and since it’s a well-known fact that “registered voter” polls always overstate Democrat support, this little snapshot in time (obligatory “if true” disclaimer) isn’t good news for our pathologically lying Dem candidate.

June 26, 2008 - Posted by crushliberalism | polls