Kuhl's poll contradicts last week's findings by two independent pollsters, who found that Kuhl was behind by 6-7 points.
]]>Kuhl's poll contradicts last week's findings by two independent pollsters, who found that Kuhl was behind by 6-7 points.
]]>Though this poll was commissioned for the Daily Kos, Research 2000 is an independent organization and other Daily Kos/Research 2000 polls are considered high-quality products. Kos posts full crosstabs, which show that Obama is leading McCain 48-45 in the 29th. Bush beat Kerry by 14 points in the district in 2004.
The poll has a small sample size (400), with a 5% margin of error.
(via The Albany Project)
]]>Though this poll was commissioned for the Daily Kos, Research 2000 is an independent organization and other Daily Kos/Research 2000 polls are considered high-quality products. Kos posts full crosstabs, which show that Obama is leading McCain 48-45 in the 29th. Bush beat Kerry by 14 points in the district in 2004.
The poll has a small sample size (400), with a 5% margin of error.
(via The Albany Project)
]]>FiveThirtyEight is a site that does extensive ranking of pollsters. They rate SurveyUSA as the most accurate polling organization in the nation, as explained here.
(via Rochesterturning)
]]>FiveThirtyEight is a site that does extensive ranking of pollsters. They rate SurveyUSA as the most accurate polling organization in the nation, as explained here.
(via Rochesterturning)
]]>This is a poll by an interested party and should be taken with a grain of salt. The last independent poll in the district was taken by the New York State Board of Elections in November, 2006.
]]>This is a poll by an interested party and should be taken with a grain of salt. The last independent poll in the district was taken by the New York State Board of Elections in November, 2006.
]]>
The WHAM13 blog post on the poll has the detail released by the pollster. Here's the tell:
Interview selection was random within predetermined election units. These units were structured to correlate with actual voter turnout.
One of the most important characteristics of a poll is its likely voter screen, the questions that pollsters ask to judge whether the person responding will actually vote. These weasel-words dodge the question of how voters were selected. With a sample size of 300, a slight tweak of the voter screen will lead to a huge effect in the poll's outcome. That's where this ham was watered.
What's more interesting is why the NRCC would release a poll so old that the Presidential choice section doesn't even include the presumptive Democratic nominee. The answer is that campaigns release these polls when they want to goose fundraising by convincing donors that their candidate has a chance. Since Kuhl is trailing Massa in funds raised, this poll is no surprise. What's really interesting is the weakness of this effort. The NRCC is so broke that they can't even afford to pay for a fresh poll, so they release this chestnut.
Update: As Zabriskie points out in the comments, the poll was conducted by McLaughlin and Associates on January 27-28. On January 30, the Kuhl campaign paid $16,215 to McLaughlin and Associates for a "Survey". So the NRCC press release is leveraging an old Kuhl poll. And the following assertion reported in the 13WHAM post is laughable:
“As far as the NRCC, Randy is a completely separate entity from the NRCC and really has no idea what they will or won’t do,” said Meghan Tisinger of Kuhl’s office.]]>
The WHAM13 blog post on the poll has the detail released by the pollster. Here's the tell:
Interview selection was random within predetermined election units. These units were structured to correlate with actual voter turnout.
One of the most important characteristics of a poll is its likely voter screen, the questions that pollsters ask to judge whether the person responding will actually vote. These weasel-words dodge the question of how voters were selected. With a sample size of 300, a slight tweak of the voter screen will lead to a huge effect in the poll's outcome. That's where this ham was watered.
What's more interesting is why the NRCC would release a poll so old that the Presidential choice section doesn't even include the presumptive Democratic nominee. The answer is that campaigns release these polls when they want to goose fundraising by convincing donors that their candidate has a chance. Since Kuhl is trailing Massa in funds raised, this poll is no surprise. What's really interesting is the weakness of this effort. The NRCC is so broke that they can't even afford to pay for a fresh poll, so they release this chestnut.
Update: As Zabriskie points out in the comments, the poll was conducted by McLaughlin and Associates on January 27-28. On January 30, the Kuhl campaign paid $16,215 to McLaughlin and Associates for a "Survey". So the NRCC press release is leveraging an old Kuhl poll. And the following assertion reported in the 13WHAM post is laughable:
“As far as the NRCC, Randy is a completely separate entity from the NRCC and really has no idea what they will or won’t do,” said Meghan Tisinger of Kuhl’s office.]]>
Turning to the actual polls, Rochesterturning has been posting graphical interpretations of election results. Today's post shows that a significantly smaller percentage of voters voted for Kuhl in 2006 than in 2004 in almost every county. This is especially interesting because the Conservative party fielded a candidate in 2004, as did the Independence party. Both of those candidates should have taken some votes from Kuhl in '04 that he regained in '06. In this analysis, and the other county-by-county post, keep in mind that the graphs are unweighted. So, for example, when you see that Kuhl lost roughly 15% of his vote in Yates county, remember that Yates had just under 7,000 votes cast in 2006. The 29th had about 200,000 voters in '06.
Rochesterturning also looked at correlations between census data and voting patterns. They found a positive relationship between income, education and a tendency to vote for Eric Massa. There are two ways to interpret this data. A partisan spin for Democrats is that smart people voted for Massa. Republicans could argue that the Democrats are turning into the party of the elites, rather than the party of the "average working man". I don't buy that. I agree with RT that those numbers show that more educated people are more likely to inform themselves about the candidates in an election, and therefore are more likely to vote for a less-well-known challenger like Massa. Also, the income split mirrors the North/South split in the 29th, with Monroe being the most wealthy county. By registration, that county is also the most Democratic of the bunch.
]]>Turning to the actual polls, Rochesterturning has been posting graphical interpretations of election results. Today's post shows that a significantly smaller percentage of voters voted for Kuhl in 2006 than in 2004 in almost every county. This is especially interesting because the Conservative party fielded a candidate in 2004, as did the Independence party. Both of those candidates should have taken some votes from Kuhl in '04 that he regained in '06. In this analysis, and the other county-by-county post, keep in mind that the graphs are unweighted. So, for example, when you see that Kuhl lost roughly 15% of his vote in Yates county, remember that Yates had just under 7,000 votes cast in 2006. The 29th had about 200,000 voters in '06.
Rochesterturning also looked at correlations between census data and voting patterns. They found a positive relationship between income, education and a tendency to vote for Eric Massa. There are two ways to interpret this data. A partisan spin for Democrats is that smart people voted for Massa. Republicans could argue that the Democrats are turning into the party of the elites, rather than the party of the "average working man". I don't buy that. I agree with RT that those numbers show that more educated people are more likely to inform themselves about the candidates in an election, and therefore are more likely to vote for a less-well-known challenger like Massa. Also, the income split mirrors the North/South split in the 29th, with Monroe being the most wealthy county. By registration, that county is also the most Democratic of the bunch.
]]>Looking through the races at pollster.com's House page, it looks like NY-20 is still one of the area races where Majority Watch and other pollsters disagree. In that more heavily polled race, Majority Watch leans farther toward the Democrat, Kirsten Gillibrand, than even her own polls. Yet there are a number of other races were Majority Watch is consistent with other non-partisan polls. So this one could be dead on, or out to lunch. We'll find out a week from tomorrow.
]]>Looking through the races at pollster.com's House page, it looks like NY-20 is still one of the area races where Majority Watch and other pollsters disagree. In that more heavily polled race, Majority Watch leans farther toward the Democrat, Kirsten Gillibrand, than even her own polls. Yet there are a number of other races were Majority Watch is consistent with other non-partisan polls. So this one could be dead on, or out to lunch. We'll find out a week from tomorrow.
]]>It's a left-leaning group. I wouldn't call them independent. They're a group that wants to see a Democratic majority in Congress, from what I understand.
Majority Watch is a project of Constituent Dynamics and RT Strategies. Constituent Dynamics is a recently established polling company trying to perfect IVR polls, or robo-polling. RT is a joint project of one Democrat and one Republican. They're the same firm that does polling for independent, well-respected political analyst Charlie Cook. Many have called their polls wrong, nobody's called them biased.
And we don't know anything about the methodology of the poll, other than the little information they gave, so we're sort of skeptical about the questions they may have asked, or how they asked them.
A full discussion of methodology, as well as every question asked in the poll [pdf], is easily accessible on the Majority Watch site. As for how the questions are asked, it's a robo-poll, so every question is asked the same way by a pre-recorded voice.
It doesn't at all compute with any of our internal polling [...] So we'll just sort of discount it.
Finally, after two heaping helpings of bullshit, a little bit of truthful spin. I expect spin from a flack, but Mr. VanWicklin's bull-to-spin ratio is chronically high.
]]>It's a left-leaning group. I wouldn't call them independent. They're a group that wants to see a Democratic majority in Congress, from what I understand.
Majority Watch is a project of Constituent Dynamics and RT Strategies. Constituent Dynamics is a recently established polling company trying to perfect IVR polls, or robo-polling. RT is a joint project of one Democrat and one Republican. They're the same firm that does polling for independent, well-respected political analyst Charlie Cook. Many have called their polls wrong, nobody's called them biased.
And we don't know anything about the methodology of the poll, other than the little information they gave, so we're sort of skeptical about the questions they may have asked, or how they asked them.
A full discussion of methodology, as well as every question asked in the poll [pdf], is easily accessible on the Majority Watch site. As for how the questions are asked, it's a robo-poll, so every question is asked the same way by a pre-recorded voice.
It doesn't at all compute with any of our internal polling [...] So we'll just sort of discount it.
Finally, after two heaping helpings of bullshit, a little bit of truthful spin. I expect spin from a flack, but Mr. VanWicklin's bull-to-spin ratio is chronically high.
]]>