Posted on 10/30/2004 3:36:59 PM PDT by jveritas
The latest Foxnews poll released today Oct/30 show President Bush 47% and Kerry 45% among likely voters. Yesterday they released their poll that shows President Bush 50% and Kerry 45% among likely voters.
The internal of today poll showed that 1200 LV were polled and identified as 367 Republicans, 400 Democrats, and 433 Independents. This means 30.6% R, 33.3% D, and 36.1% I.
The oversampling of Democrats and particularly the Independents is very bogus and make this poll worthless. The independents will not constitute more than 25% of voters this year, in 2000 they were only 26% of voters. The independents are very tricky in polls because many Democrats claim that they are independents and thus oversampling independents in any poll will favor Democrats.
This Foxnews poll released today is bogus, pure and simple. We need to call Foxnews and inform them about this.
Well, we do need to get all of our people to the polls.
Jay Cost handled this. Plus they outsample Dems.
From Horserace Blog (guy's a genius): http://jaycost.blogspot.com/
Update: Fox released its new poll about 45 minutes ago. Note that the poll uses the last day sample of the previous poll. This indicates that Fox is going to start doing a rolling average. As is typical of media organizations who do not know any better, they have junked the previous day's poll. This is quite stupid. If you average the two results out, taking in all the data collected in the four days thus far, Bush is ahead 49.2% to 45% with a margin of error of less than 3%. Apparently, Bush did not poll well in Friday's Fox sample. The Washington Post's polling director was on Fox just now and he said Kerry did very well on Friday, too. Look for that poll's margins to fall. Try not to let this upset you. They only sample about 200-300 people in any given day. Kerry had a blip last weekend in the WaPo tracking poll, too. It was just a blip. I would note that the evidence from last electiondoes not indicate that WaPo was pro-Gore on the weekends. This year, though, they are 3 for 3 pro-Kerry on the weekends, if the WaPo does the same now. Remember, too, that Bush/Cheney '04 has spent tens of millions to effectively make sure that the WaPo is undersampling Republicans.
This largely has to do with Friday's data. I have seen NO polling that favors Republicans of any stripe on Friday, Saturday or Sunday. They simply get screwed on weekend polling.
Problem with a Tuesday election is ALL the election eve polls are WEEKEND based which gives an automatic 5 point edge at least to the Democrats...maybe that is why polling is often off a great deal (like Zogby in 2000?)
Thanks, the party affiliations are way off. Happier at 39%D and 37%R.
Agreed 100%, but we need to point out the facts as well.
It's a ratings ploy. If the election appears to be up for grabs, viewership goes up on Tuesday night.
What does this mean????
"Remember, too, that Bush/Cheney '04 has spent tens of millions to effectively make sure that the WaPo is undersampling Republicans."
This is just another example of why you have to read the fine print with polls: some instances have polled 45-47% Democrat vs. 30+% Republican vs. 30+% Independents. Equal numbers of Rs and Is? No way. Exceeding larger proportion of Ds than Rs? No way. But that's how they're getting the poll numbers they want (and even with the skewed sample, it's still running neck and neck).
Go Bush!!!
I thought that poll was somehow rather biased. The ratio between men and women was way off too.
Fox, Like Gallup, doesn't weight there results based on demographics... That doesn't mean their data is invalid. It just means you have to do you own analysis on the data. If you adjust their numbers to a more likely demographic turn-out then you'll get a different picture...
What was REALLY annoying was when that gal kept saying that Bush's number dropped because of the Bin Laden tape. :^I
the dumbest thing FOX O/D did was to create a tracking poll but limit it to two days instead of using a 3 day sample.
Didn't the last 2000 polls show Bush with an edge in the popular vote?
What people tend to forget is the 'margin for error.'
People usually instinctively read it as a negative, that is, if the margin for error is +/- 3, and they see Bush at 47 and Kerry at 44, for example, they read it as a 'statistical tie.'
But you also have to consider trends. Bush has been consistently up in the polls, and quite a few polls tend to show him at leading 50 to 45 or so, and some even more.
I really think that the margin for error is where the networks, including beloved Fox, is cooking the books at best to keep things interesting, or at worst to shill for their boy Kerry.
That is, I think polls showing Bush +3 and others showing +8 reflect the far ends of the margin for error. The truth is that Bush is probably comfortably 5 points ahead nationally, but the range we keep on seeing is +2 to +7 or so. Split the difference - Bush is +5 nationally and the rest is television magic.
Exactly!!!! I just cannot believe how Foxnews has turned in the last six month. They are so afraid of being perceived as Republicans so they put down the President in a very unfair way just to satisfy their critics.
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