Say what you will about the Minnesota Poll and the Hubert H. Humphrey poll. As bad, inaccurate, DFL-biased and seemingly-rigged as both are, they both actually release their cross tabs – such as they are.
So far.
With the WaPo’s new practice of sitting on the data for their polls – which, naturally, show that Barack Obama has bounced back – I don’t expect that to last for long.
Ed Morrissey wrote about the new practice:
More importantly, though, the poll series has dropped its reporting of partisan identification within their samples. It’s the second time that the poll has not included the D/R/I split in its sample report, and now it looks as though this will be policy from this point forward. Since this is a poll series that has handed double-digit partisan advantages to Democrats in the past (for instance, this poll from April 2011 where the sample only had 22% Republicans), it’s not enough to just hear “trust us” on sample integrity from the Washington Post or ABC.
One cannot determine whether Obama’s improvement in this series is a result of the State of the Union speech, as Dan Balz and Jon Cohen suggest, or whether it’s due to shifting the sample to favor Democrats more so than in previous samples. The same is true for the Post’s report that Obama “for the first time has a clear edge” over Romney head-to-head. One would need a poll of registered or likely voters to actually make that claim (one has to register to cast a vote, after all), and one would need to see the difference in partisan splits between this and other surveys in the series to determine whether the movement actually exists or got manufactured by the pollster.
Expect the effort to get Obama re-coronated to result in the extinction of whatever passes for “Journalistic Standards” in the polling industry.
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