Posted on 08/25/2003 3:33:28 PM PDT by DiamondDon1
We cannot bury our heads and must realize Bustamante is the favorite and has a solid bloc which will vote for him simply because of the D.
For example, the following statements are basically the same:
Your face could stop a clock!
When a look at your face, time stands still...
So you have left-leaning polesters asking the questions, questions prior to the candidate question were anti-Republican in general...so what other than they held a poll (and nobody cared...)
DD
Cruz will get anywhere from 30 - near 50% of the vote.
Skewed poll or not, this is reality.
It all depends on how it's done.
For instance, if I want to survey a population and compare let's say three age groups. If one of the age groups is underrepresented in the population, and I draw a random sample, I may not get enough of the oldest age group.
There just aren't that many of them and a random sampling will give me about 30 old respondents. That's not a big enough sample to compare them to the other groups.
So, I purposely interview 100 old respondents even though a random sample would not give me this result.
Now all I have to do is weight the old respondents down from 100 to 30, when extrapolating to the entire population.
That is only one of the many ways populations are over and under sampled. As long as you weight them back to their proper proportions, before extrapolating to the whole, your fine.
The proper method is to keep dialing randomly until you get a large enough group of Latino voters to complete the survey.
Then I can compare the answers of say White and Latino voters, and retain the ability to weight them back to the entire population, when looking at the population in total.
I'm not saying that a poll can't be skewed, even on purpose. But, over and under sampling is a valid procedure.
That being said, the pollster is paid by someone. I'd never put my name on a skewed poll, but I can't vouch for all of us.
Then I can compare the answers of say White and Latino voters, and retain the ability to weight them back to the entire population, when looking at the population in total.
Agreed...it is doubtful that this pollster suddenly found God, and took the time to randomly call people (white, black, asian, latino) to actually find the Latino likely voters...
I agree with your analysis on the 30 year old, however every community has 30 year olds, but if it were 90 year olds you're missing, it is all but too tempting to call retirement homes, rather than do it right...
I am glad that you would not put your name to this...
DD
However the pollster corrects this misconception before asking which canidate they would vote for (besides all the other push poll type questions).
As I have said before on other threads, Bustamante is going to take a hit from Democrats who don't bother to vote on question two, but the LA poll seems designed specifically not to reflect this.
Only the most die-hard liberals will bother to vote, many will not bother to vote for a canidate. By contrast the conservatives are reved up and anxious to get to the polls.
If a major media company called me for a poll I would probably suffer through it to give them the answers they really don't want.
They could then either:
A) Toss my answers and substitute what they think I really meant.
B) Add ten more "supplemental" samples to balance my opinions.
C) Remove my opinions from the population of likely voters, since I have voted in every election in the last 20 years and I am surely too tired to vote in another.
D) All of the above.
The bozos helped Bush waste time and money by saying their polls showed he had a chance to beat Gore and the race was very close.
They are incompetent boobs and get snookered again and again.
Not taking the Dems and how they will support Bustamante in lock step for the most part is a recipe for loss.
Better then bitter pessimism. I recall the 2002 election polls had Davis winning by a lot more then he did. If the Pubbies were a little more confident and reved up Davis probably would not have won.
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