Oct 06 2008

Some Scary Polls Out For O-Bomba

Published by at 8:40 pm under 2008 Elections,All General Discussions

Ok, color me totally confused here. Two left leaning (and I mean they tilt sideways) polls have come out showing a shrinking Obama lead. First is the CBS News Poll showing Obama losing half his lead 5 days, going from a +9 (49-40) to a plus +4 (47-43) – that is a statistical tie (MoE is +/- 3%).  Another shocker in the poll, buried in the internals, McCain went from a -5 (38-43) with independents to a +5 (44-39) in the same 5 days. That is a 10% swing and staggering. Supposedly McCain is losing more Reps (+5) to Obamat than the prior poll, but picking up a lot of new Indies (+10)??? That makes no sense, but if it were to make sense it would push the numbers more towards McCain.

The second poll is from Democracy Corps – a democrat polling group. They have the race also a statistical tie with Obama +3%. Interestingly this poll is weight 40% Dems + 33% GOP, which is a surprise given the heavy democrat sample. This poll, in late July when Obama was leading, showed a +5% lead for Obama. I guess this could be an outlier, with the CBS News Poll.

13 responses so far

13 Responses to “Some Scary Polls Out For O-Bomba”

  1. Redteam says:

    I’ll take it.

  2. tarpon says:

    The polls have been cooked so much, even the cooks don’t know which end is up.

  3. ShoreMark says:

    IIRC, didn’t “they” overweight the polls with Reps in early Oct/04 to show Kerry faltering, then a couple weeks later overweight them with Dems to show a dramatic comeback for Kerry?

    Either way, I agree with tarpon, they’ve been manipulating reality for so long that not even they know which way is up.

  4. cochino says:

    AJ,
    I just finished work and read your post. You have addressed the issue with polls ably. Certainly, the really weird results this time are rooted in weighting by party affiliation. I’m not saying the weighting isn’t correct, only that it represents a strong deviation from historical patterns. If the weighting is off by a few percentage points, that would significantly cut into Obama’s lead all over the place. As discussed in a previous post, I don’t think exit polling in the past couple of decades shows anything more than a 4% difference between the parties. If it really is 9% (Dems over Reps), that would probably be the most drastic shift in party affiliation in generations in this country. If the affiliation numbers are truly approximating reality, it’s hard to see how McCain has any chance.

    On a related point, though, I think it’s best to ignore polls and historical precedence this election. That’s not because I doubt the polls (although they may be way off), but because we have never seen an election quite like this one before. I’ve read columns and heard commentary in the last few days about what chances McCain has, what normally happens in October, etc. But have we ever had a candidate like Obama before? A candidate with so many intensely damaging skeletons in his closet, but yet have not really been aired? By this stage in the game, the average voter in the past had probably heard all of the major damaging stuff by October. But Obama? This guy is buddies with a former member of the PLO (Rashid Khalidi), for Pete’s sake. He was going to dinner over his house, have thoughtful discussions with him, saying nice things about him. I mean, come on!

    You want to tell me that those middle-of-road voters in Virginia, for example (the ones that went for Webb over Allen, for example), wouldn’t be seriously turned off if they learned something like that? That’s the kind of stuff that’s floating around out there on Obama. Basic information that the average swing voter has perhaps never heard but could, to say the least, really change things.

    No, Obama is up to his eyeballs in this kind of stuff and is trying to run out the clock. No matter what the polls say, you have to just keep fighting and not get dispirited. There is no historical precedence for potentially electing a President who has actually been personal friends with two people (that we know of) who belonged to organizations that committed terrorist acts. This kind of information could change votes up to and including election day.

  5. crosspatch says:

    One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of Republicans registered Democrat to vote for Hillary. This has skewed the voter registration numbers. Then the pollsters adjust their polling to reflect the skewed registrations.

    But there is a problem with that. First of all, when they adjust their polling ratio, there is no guarantee that the Democrats they add for polling are the Republicans that changed party to vote in the primary. Secondly, most polling outfits have pools of known respondents of both parties. So when they adjust their ratio, they just poll more people out of the “known Democrat” pool. So they are probably never going to poll one of the Republicans who changed party to Democrat unless they happen to hit one who was in the “known Republican” pool.

    So basically, Operation Chaos does more than screw up the primaries, it screws up polling completely because it artificially changes the voter registration and therefore the polling ratios.

    Gotta love it! You are going to see Obama leading by 5 points going into the election and losing. It is going to be embarrassing for a lot of polling outfits.

  6. MerlinOS2 says:

    There could be a bit of operation chaos in reverse going on also.

    You get a call from a pollster who may know your zipcode or possibly at best if you have an listed phone number your voter registration if they paid for all those lists.

    Otherwise they are flying blind.

    So Koskid gets a call and claims to be a life long Republican voting for Obama. Who is to know and who is to prove it.

    In another life many moons ago when I did some internal state political polling we didn’t consider any poll worth its salt with less than 25000 respondents on registration percentage matchups.

    To poll 1000 people nationwide each week to combine for a 3000 people over 3 days rolling average total is using a teaspoon to sample the ocean.

    It is like taking a water sample off Boston and trying to judge the salt content offshore from Miami.

    Give me a city with half a million population and only poll 3000 people in that single city and you can still be way off on the election results just for that city.

    And they want to do that for national races.

    Now realize you are talking about and average of 20 people per state per week being polled.

    I could drive a truck though that and not even scrape the paint.

  7. ejbentz says:

    Zogby is now showing +3 for Obama as well, 48-45. Looks like a trend.

  8. AJ,

    Too many people have seen the SNL Sub-Prime mortgage Skit outing Herbert Sandler and George Soros that NBC took down.

    See:

    http://michellemalkin.com/2008/10/07/the-forbidden-skit-full-transcript-and-screenshots-of-snls-sorossandler-bailout-satire/

  9. OLDPUPPYMAX says:

    The polls be damned. McCain is going to have to win this election and thus far he has shown only the limp spine of a typical RINO. Stand up for the 70% of the American people who flooded Washington with calls, letters and e-mails, begging for the defeat of the trillion dollar, pork-laden bailout of every politicians favorite contributors? Nope. John the Brave signed right along with the Obamessiah, betraying voters and throwing away a chance to win the election right then and there. After all, telling the truth about the cause of the debacle might disturb some of his senate friends. And the pure, non-biased NY Times might call McCain a racist. We musn’t have that!! Better to steal a trillion taxpayer dollars and go back to hiding under his desk. Only a candidate as weak as McCain could have lost to a racist, America hating Marxist, the 24/7 bias of the MSM notwithstanding.

  10. […] starting to lose ground. Two recent polls show the erosion. First is a Democracy Corps poll I noted in an earlier post, which has some interesting internals. On key issues Obama has lost his […]

  11. AJ,

    Recomputing the voter party ID split yeilds some interesting numbers.

    If the party ID split, with the internals listed, is computerd as only 4%, then it’s McCain by a hair in the popular vote.

    If it’s 3%, McCain wins the national vote by almost a percentage point!

  12. […] more polls showing the race to be a statistical tie: ARG (Oct 7) and Zogby. That makes now 5 polls (Democracy Corps, CBS and Diageo/Hotline) showing a statistical […]

  13. chichilouise says:

    I keep reminding myself that Al Gore lost, losing even his home state of Tennessee. John Kerry lost. Bill Clinton would have lost both times if it had not been for Ross Perot entering and sucking away conservative voters. So if even the charming Bubba and the former vice president got their cans kicked by a majorly conservative America, how could Obama possibly have the support the polls say he has?

    I agree he is going to get his can handed to him on election day, and there will be angry rioting in the streets, especially because Obama has been yelling fire in a crowded theater for months, making it sound like if he doesn’t change america, hell is only two steps behind. especially since they are leaning on Obama’s every word all over the world, he ought to be jailed for claiming we are bombing civilians in afghanistan. What a traitor. he could get decent people killed overseas with that kind of lie. And, his seeking to delay troop pullouts till he is president. I say jail his can.