Bizzare MSNBC Poll

[AndyMarquisLIVE]

Originally Posted by Bruzilla

I agree. If what they were looking for is how blacks specifically feel about Wright, then poll just Blacks. It's not fair t oversample blacks and then use the poll to indicate Clinton is slipping.

I watched MSNBC last night FOR HOURS and couldn't get my one question answered. Do we know if the approval ratings polls consisted of Democrats alone?

[Lenny]

Originally Posted by SamSpade

You just scale your results accordingly.

Let's take a simple example. Let's say we had a sample of 300 voters and we wanted to know which candidate - of the three remaining - they favored. And then let's say we wanted to know how *Asian* Americans felt.

Well, they comprise about 4.4% of the population. Any RANDOM sample of 300 Americans is going to yield somewhere in the vicinity of 15 Asians, tops. Split that three ways in a cross tab, and you get a handful of Asians proportionally representing the nation. And that's WAY too small a sample. Suppose just 4 or 5 answer "I don't know". Isn't THAT going to blow your findings all to hell, especially if most Asians DO KNOW who they support.

So you oversample, and scale your results back in proportion to the known population. That way, instead of 5 "I don't knows" which comprise a third of your universe - maybe you'd get a smaller proportion, and that would be more accurate.

Most polling outlets do try to be fair, because they compete. But I always like to see methodology. Opinion polling is always the hardest, because you have to assume that people aren't lying - that the sample of people WHO COOPERATE still is representative of the whole - and that you haven't overlooked something really vital in your methodology. For example, overnight telephone polls tend to be VERY inaccurate, but ones conducted over several days starting with Thursday tend to be good - because lots of people are home on Thursday nights. Exit polling at polls can be poor because in many precincts, the bulk of the voting is done in the evening, and a sample of people who don't work during the day isn't representative of the whole population.

I've got no beef with oversampling, if they scale it accordingly.

Hmmmmm. This may explain why winning Republicans ignore the polls.

[PsyOps]

Originally Posted by AndyMarquisLIVE

I watched MSNBC last night FOR HOURS and couldn't get my one question answered. Do we know if the approval ratings polls consisted of Democrats alone?

Maybe if you watched a difference channel?

Originally Posted by AndyMarquisLIVE

I watched MSNBC last night FOR HOURS and couldn't get my one question answered. Do we know if the approval ratings polls consisted of Democrats alone?

According to the WSJ write-up, both Repulicans and Dems were polled on an overall basis, but Republicans were excluded from some questions.