Monkey Business in political polls

Workout notes Nothing yet; I’ll lead a class at 7:15 and then walk some afterward.

Local Politics: Peoria Pundit, who has a better feel for local politics than I do, thinks that Colleen Callahan has a legitimate chance in IL-18.

National Politics There are two wildly diverging polls on the national Obama-McCain race. One shows McCain up by 4, another shows Obama up by 8. All the rest (done by different outfits) show Obama up, mostly just outside the margin of error. But what is weird is that the same outfit did the polls that shows two different results. What is going on? Are both of the Gallup polls outliers?

Here is an article that sorts things out: basically, Gallup did one poll of registered voters, and declared that many of Obama supporters are “registered but unlikely”.

Today, the Gallup polling firm was for Barack Obama’s lead over John McCain before they were against it.

If that sounds complicated, it’s only the beginning. Early Monday, Gallup released the latest of its daily tracking polls, which showed Obama holding an eight point lead over John McCain 48-40. Then, at the close of business, Gallup revealed results of its co-effort with USA Today, in which — gasp! — John McCain was shown to have a four-point lead over Obama.

In the latter instance, the metric being evaluated was one near and dear to the hearts of pollsters, the “likely voter.” In the earlier poll that showed Obama ahead, Gallup merely surveyed registered voters. [...]

Emory Univeristy political scientist Alan Abramowitz broke it down for the Huffington Post. Noting that out of the 900 voter sample surveyed by Gallup/USA Today, the pollsters deemed 791 of those individuals to be “likely” ones, and it is their responses which make up the 49-45 figure that immediately got coverage on MSNBC’s Hardball.

By contrast, the full 900 person sample of registered voters polled by USA Today showed Obama with a 47-44 lead. So what about those 109 unlikely voters? According to Abramowitz, “among your 109 unlikely voters, according to Gallup, Obama leads McCain by a whopping 61 percent to 7 percent. Putting it another way, according to Gallup 16 percent of registered Obama supporters are unlikely to vote compared with only 2 percent of registered McCain supporters.”

Meanwhile, Gallup’s independent tracking poll is conducted with an entirely different — and larger — sample of 3,000 voters.

Note it was the tracking poll of 3000 voters that showed an Obama lead.

Obama in Europe Note that 3 minutes into the video, they cover the reception that Obama is getting…in West Virginia! That area was supposed to be trouble for him.

McCain’s attack ad: simply not true.

MoveOn: counterattack.