Fun With Polls, Part III

Fun With Polls, Part III - The left is hanging on every poll they can find that shows the President doing anything short of conquering the universe.

Yet there's more to the polls than meets the eye, says Michael Barone in next week's US News:

"Last week's Gallup Poll showed new entrant Wesley Clark leading the Democratic presidential field and leading Bush in a general election. This is a double reversal. Howard Dean had been the Democrat zooming to the top of the field; now we see something like a statistical tie, with Clark apparently a contender. Similarly, this is the first time Bush has trailed a specific (as opposed to generic) Democrat. But there is reason for caution here. The Gallup sample seems to be disproportionately Democratic (48 percent of respondents passed the screen as Democratic-primary voters), and it puts Bush's job rating at the lower end of the 49-percent-to-59-percent range in polls taken over the past month."

In other words, Bush is losing - as long as you ask a sample that includes triple the proportioinal number of likely Democrat voters.

Posted by Mitch at September 30, 2003 06:05 AM