Posted on 10/30/2012 6:32:50 AM PDT by SoftwareEngineer
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows Mitt Romney attracting support from 49% of voters nationwide, while President Obama earns the vote from 47%. One percent (1%) prefers some other candidate, and another two percent (2%) remain undecided. See daily tracking history.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of voters have a favorable opinion of Romney and 48% say the same of Obama.
(Excerpt) Read more at rasmussenreports.com ...
States may not be competitve, true. Bad thunderstorm ? False. Im guessing by your handle that you are not in the hurricne path. Lots of people lost a lot, including neighbors and friends who had trees ripped up and fall on their houses and cars, floods with cars underwater etc....
Try not to be so condescending, hmm?
I live in PA. They were calling for us to get high winds and severe flooding...they cancelled school for 2 days...all we got was rain...I left my house, went to work, came home, and my house was still here...we had more power outages, and trees down this summer with thunder storms...this was nothing in my area...
Anyway, the sun has broken out down here as well and it's headed towards 70 degrees!
Weekly PPP/Daily Kos (D) poll has a tie at 49%. Romney leads independents by 6%. Obama underwater w/ 46-50 approval. Sample is D+2.
No, I don’t think most pollsters try to skew their polls, but the climate today (I don’t mean Sandy) makes it very difficult to conduct polls. With a response rate of something between 10 - 20% according to what some pollsters recounted it is very difficult to get a non-skewed sample - and how do you know that the minority who actually responds to polls is really representative of the whole sample? Well, you don’t.
Some pollsters correct (recalculate) their results according to what they know (or expect a correct sample would look like) others do not.
An example was the Battleground poll released yesterday. The basic result was that Obama had the lead with 49/48, however, the resulting election day result prediction was Romney by 52/47. How come?
When they looked at the different age categories there Romney was in the lead in everyone except the youngest one (18 - 25 I think). Obviously for Obama to be in the lead in the whole sample his lead in this group must have been huge. However, as we know, and as the pollsters know, this is also the group that has the least tendency to actually go to the polls. So, given the reply to some other questions, which would help them to quantify the voting behavior they applied correction factors that gave the above result.
Rasmussen’s Ohio report, also out yesterday, is another case of a similar kind. He reported that more than 30% of his sample had voted. That subset was very much in Obama’s favor. However, he could have compared with the actual number of early votes which indicates that less than 20% of the expected votes have been cast so far. Correcting his results for this skewness would have given Romney a lead of 52/45 instead of 50/48 but Rasmussen did not do that sort of correction.
So which polls to trust? Basically, you have to look at the sample data and compare with what you know. So what do we know?
Well, there have been two large investigations by two acknowledged polling institutes (Rasmussen and Gallup) showing Republicans in the lead by 1-3% (nation wide), so that is what you can expect on election day.
The racial, age, and gender distribution is also pretty well known, and pollsters ought to be able to handle that.
At the moment ca 18% of the expected turn-out has voted.
Polls that confirm to those figures in their samples are probably closest to the truth, but there is of course also the polling history of the different outfits to take into account - Gallup, Rasmussen, Battleground are usually in the top.
Given the recent results from those and some other polling institutes I am pretty confident that Romney and Ryan will win the popular vote with a significant margin, large enough so that will also ensure a win in the elctoral college.
However, polling is not an exact science (to say the least) and the only poll that really matters is the one on the election day.
exactly, we’ve had black outs all the time, trees down all the time and this summer had many bad storms.
Megyn Kelly having a fit saying these people need to get out, they are in danger, why are they standing there , why is he walking the dog, they need to get out , this is a massive storm and the worst we’ve seen hitting us.
Or other people reporting and then seeing lights on, a few branches down, parts of a road with water up to the tires of one car but the other side of the road quite alright.
I know most of this media live and work in the north east , mainly NY, NJ but I have not seen one reporter camped out in WV, , western PA and other places, I guess they think that NJ,NY is America and it is not.
For the record my MIL is up in MA , right on the coast and she said this was nothing compared to other bad thunder storms and tropical storms.
The media needs to get out of their two states in once and while.
Also what on earth is Christie on?
He;s needs to shut up and just get on with his job.
Benghazi wasn’t really having an impact.
Romney will be back in the news later this week when people really make final decisions.
Look, I am a little concerned as well the storm may help him, but even if it does (which I still kind of doubt because I think people are so turned off it will not change minds), it’s not going to save Obama I believe.
We will see.
Christie is doing what he has to do, as well. He can’t come on and attack him without a true problem....that would be put on Romney by the media.
Rasmussen: Romney 279, Obama 243
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/rasmussen-romney-279-obama-243_658100.html
First post here guys, I’ve been browsing through the articles and posts for a few days now and I have to admit I really dig yalls optimism and breakdown of polling info, it’s infectious and certainly has me in a better state of mind than previously. What I’d really like to know though, if somebody can answer, is the whole cell phone factor you hear libs and MSM drone on and on about. Every time a poll comes out that is even slightly favorable to Romney libs immediately pounce by saying that it is inaccurate because the poll in question didn’t include people who use cell phones exclusively, apparently group that is more likely to support Obama. There any validity to this? If this has already been discussed and addressed ad nauseam I apologize in advance.
yea.. in 2008. I don't recall the exact number, but the skew toward women was AT LEAST that much, or more...
Women in thus country are becoming more educated than men... and, they now VOTE more.
54% women/46% men. That will skew the results.
Correction: In 2008, the breakdown of actual voters was: 53.7% Women
46.3% Men
It's a surprisingly hard statistice to come up with. But, that's what I calculated, using actual voter numbers.
Unbelievable. What a heartless, ignorant statement.
I knew that women voted slightly more often than men, but a 54/46 difference! I’m really taken aback. What did it look like in 2010?
(It does explain why the result turned out like it did in 2008!!)
Having a HARD time replying to you.. FR is SLOOOW here..
Can’t find the same data for 2010, since there was no national election. I doubt it was all that much different.
HERE is the poll that really encourages me though...
http://www.gallup.com/poll/158399/2012-electorate-looks-like-2008.aspx
Ignore the headline... check out the political leanings of the “Likely Voters”... it’s at the very bottom. It shows a BIG drop in Democrats (4%) and a corresponding HUGE increase in Republicans..(7%). That, is GOOD NEWS for Romney.
And, that Gallup poll is NOT like all the other polls that come out every day. It’s a once-per-election cycle poll Gallup does, with 9,000 people.. and a Margin of Error of only 1%.
WELCOME to Free Republic! I've been here awhile. :-) it's a GREAT place to learn things.
To answer your question: Yes, there is SOME validity to it. Any poll that doesn't sample cell phones, and makes no correction for it, will likely undercount Dems by a couple of %.
That's what I heard Scott Rasmussen say in a radio interview a few days ago. The reason is two-fold:
1)People who ONLY use a cell phone, tend to skew younger, and younger people skew towards Obama, and
2) Of the people who do actually have land lines, people in urban areas tend to NOT ANSWER the phone as often as people in rural areas. So, the samples skew rural, which skews toward Rep's.
Rasmussen said his team has studied this affect, and they correct for it in their results. He must be doing SOMETHING right... cause, he was the most accurate pollster in the 2008 and 2010.
The impact is real, but... it's not as important as a poll that over-samples Democrats by 4-10%.
WELCOME to Free Republic! I've been here awhile. :-) it's a GREAT place to learn things.
To answer your question: Yes, there is SOME validity to it. Any poll that doesn't sample cell phones, and makes no correction for it, will likely undercount Dems by a couple of %.
That's what I heard Scott Rasmussen say in a radio interview a few days ago. The reason is two-fold:
1)People who ONLY use a cell phone, tend to skew younger, and younger people skew towards Obama, and
2) Of the people who do actually have land lines, people in urban areas tend to NOT ANSWER the phone as often as people in rural areas. So, the samples skew rural, which skews toward Rep's.
Rasmussen said his team has studied this affect, and they correct for it in their results. He must be doing SOMETHING right... cause, he was the most accurate pollster in the 2008 and 2010.
The impact is real, but... it's not as important as a poll that over-samples Democrats by 4-10%.
WELCOME to Free Republic! I've been here awhile. :-) it's a GREAT place to learn things.
To answer your question: Yes, there is SOME validity to it. Any poll that doesn't sample cell phones, and makes no correction for it, will likely undercount Dems by a couple of %.
That's what I heard Scott Rasmussen say in a radio interview a few days ago. The reason is two-fold:
1)People who ONLY use a cell phone, tend to skew younger, and younger people skew towards Obama, and
2) Of the people who do actually have land lines, people in urban areas tend to NOT ANSWER the phone as often as people in rural areas. So, the samples skew rural, which skews toward Rep's.
Rasmussen said his team has studied this affect, and they correct for it in their results. He must be doing SOMETHING right... cause, he was the most accurate pollster in the 2008 and 2010.
The impact is real, but... it's not as important as a poll that over-samples Democrats by 4-10%.
Yes, that’s the one + the Rasmussen party identification poll that are also making me very positive.
(BTW - I’m surfing from Sweden, and I don’t seem to have a major problem with FR. Sometimes I have renew the page twice to get it to load, but that’s really all. V. strange considering all the others who seem to have big problems.)
PS: You live and learn - apparently the gender break-down 2004 was 46/54 (!!!) What are the men doing???
It's a different topic but... for the past 20-25 years, there has been a concerted effort in or school systems to remove ALL competition, and build self-esteem. One (I assume) unintended consequence of this has been: Boys don't care as much about school, or learning.... and they are LAGGING behind, badly in education.
For 12 years, I have given a lecture each spring to Senior Chemical Engineering students at two local universities... When I first started, the classes were ~ 30% female. These days, they are easily 60% female. Many universities, overall, are skewing >65% female. Men are becoming dumber and poore. It's NOT a good trend.
Maybe... it's the impact of video games? I'm not sure. But, I KNOW it's a trend that needs to be corrected.
These polls show Romney is just barely winning http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/us/general_election_romney_vs_obama-1171.html, and list WI, OH, PA,CO and FL as toss up states. Do you think we can win WI ? I don’t, and will Romney is winning in OH, isn’t that the place where Obama’s supporters are trying the hardest to commit voter fraud and bus in illegals who don’t speak English to vote for Obama ?
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