Another Badly Constructed Poll
Shocking, I Know
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Featured Stories | Miscellanea — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
So this looks pretty bad, right?
Well, see here. You will find that only 26% of the people polled for the survey were Republicans versus 37% identifying as Democrats.
I'm sorry, but how on Earth does this reflect the sharply polarized and evenly divided state of political affairs in America? There is no way that the gap between self-identifying Democrats and Republicans is that big nationwide. And I'm getting more than a little tired of polls that either make it appear otherwise, or hide the party identification numbers for its respondents (the link to the breakdown of the numbers was on the second page and it took a relatively discerning eye to find it) in order to mislead readers.
This was a lousy poll that is horrible at capturing the mood of the country. It oversamples Democrats at the expense of Republicans. Serious people shouldn't give it a second thought but as there is a dearth of seriousness in our national discourse these days, look for this immensely flawed poll to shape the political narrative in the days to come.
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Another Badly Constructed Poll 4 Comments (0 topical, 4 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
That is all you need to know about it.
.. one of the favorite techniques of the leftmedia, especially the NYT, skew the poll, questions and base, to reflect your opinion of what the results should be, then report the poll results as news. Ho Hum.
Whats surprising is that the Time's stock price is still around $24. per share. If it were based solely on truth and objectivity in reporting, the shares would be trading as penny stocks.
It looks bad no matter what. Use their weights
and you get 25.8 65.2 5.0 (F/O/DK). Use equal R&D
at 34% each and I at 28% gives 29.2 61.4 5.4.
Note those both total to 96%, it appears they have
put the 4% who do not specifically identify as R
or D or I into I to get their final 26/68 figure.
After the last election it is also not legit to
say R and D are still equal. If you take
'pre-election' weights as 35/35/26/4, it is
certainly not a reach to say post-election it is
29/38/29/4 so in fact, your complaint is not one
of overweight D, but of overweight I.
I think we should be spending our time more on
fixing what is wrong with the party and our
policies and execution thereof than on whining
about 2 or 3 point misrepresentation in polling,
especially when it has no material effect on the
result.
Rant Street! www.rant.st
It is obvious that this poll surveyed more democrats than republicans and that this poll, as opposed to all the other polls that show similar numbers, can tell us nothing of the national feeling.
What I find much more interesting is the percentage of Dems (10-15% or more, give or take a couple hippies) willing to jump ship to just about any Republican rather than vote for Hillary.