Free Republic

[snip] This provides evidence to support both aspects of my hypothesis. First, polls that weight [by party ID] are more similar to one another than polls that do not weight. Second, polling firms that weight show less movement from poll to poll than polling firms that do not weight. Well, yeah. If you weight every poll to the same PID [party identification], you will get the same vote. How can you not, when about 90% of Dems vote KE and about 90% of Reps vote BC? Imposing a pre-determined PID weight insures consistency, at the cost of repressing changes in...

We have seen a lot of polls thus far in the Bush-Kerry race and we're going to see a lot more.  Often polls by two different survey outfits taken at the same time will show results in pretty stark disagreement.  Literally as I write this, Rasmussen Reports has the race a virtual dead-heat (Bush 47.5, Kerry 46.8), while CBS News has Bush up by 7. All pollsters try to obtain a random, representative sample of voters to represent the full electorate.  In addition to vote choice (i.e., Bush, Kerry, or other), pollsters always ask respondents which party they align themselves...