Say Anything Blog

From Chris Bowers...

Why then, some will ask, are congressional Democrats not polling higher than Republicans when it comes to favorablity and job approval?

The answer lies in the weak favorability and job approval Democrats receive from their own base--the same base that plans on voting for them anyway. While Democrats are crushing Republicans among Independents, and while congressional Democrats receive a noticeably higher job approval from Republicans than Republican congressional leaders receive from Democrats, Democratic congressional leaders are not well thought of by Democrats themselves.

This looks to be outside the margin of error of the other polls.  It would be interesting to look at the internals of the poll and compare demographics of the sample to the total population.  My guess is you will find that Democrats are oversampled in this poll. 

As a comparison, Rasmussen (one of the most reliable in the last election) is reporting Bush’s approval at 43% currently.

Also, popularity is irrelevent. This sick assed obsession with being popular is why we are having the problems we are today. Those who actually acomplish anything of substance are never popular. Leaders are never popular among those who do not wish to be led. Those who wish only to gratify their desire for sex, money, personal power, drugs, and avarice. Oh, yea. And when your polling agency calls the same 400 people, over and over, you will get the same results. Over and over and over.

Dems are in the crapper, not because their message is not getting out. It is precisely because the population of America hears their message, loud and clear, that they are in the crapper. Repubs are not doing any better. BECAUSE PEOPLE CAN FIND THE TRUTH FOR THEMSELVES!!!! Because of that plastic box you are sitting in front of right now. Welcometo the electronic age, what a nightmare for you it is. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

Those who actually acomplish anything of substance are never popular.

What? In art, that is an absolutely false statement (I can’t even begin to list the names of talented artists who were also extremely popular). In politics, it’s still pretty wrong--a relative statement would work far better than your absolute.

This isn’t a scientific poll. It’s an online poll, which means it’s next to useless. I can’t wait to see the next Gallup or Rasmussen polling. I suspect that you’ll see the President’s numbers improve, mostly because the GOP base is returning because giving the Democrats the responsibility of prosecuting the GWOT is an extremly scary thought.

Also, ignore the AP-Ipsos poll and most media polling. AP-Ipsos always vastly oversamples Democrats while undersampling Republicans. Most media polls are junk because they also oversample Dems. A recent ABC poll showed that only 23.8% of Americans were Republicans. That’s hogwash. Party registration as of the 2004 presidential election had Republicans and Democrats tied with 37% each.

The only reliable media polling is done by the Opinion Dynamics polling done for FNC.

As for polls, I have said it before and will continue to say it. Show me a poll with a minimum 1 million respondants, then I will accept it as accurate. As long as polling agencies continue to poll the same 400>600 people over and over it is all crapola.

I also believe that polls are hype-driven.  If everything you hear over and over again is that the President’s numbers are falling, it will raise a doubt in the minds of average people.  They may not have thought that the President was doing a bad job, but the press tells them he is and the polls tell them he is, so maybe he is.  This, in turn, drives the numbers down even more.

In these days of one-issue voters, negative poll numbers are going to become common place.  Rather than looking at the job performance as a whole, people will look at the one, specific topic that excites them and judge based on that.  Add the hype to that and you have a recipe for unhappiness.

Wikipedia: All polls based on samples are subject to sampling error which reflects the effects of chance in the sampling process.

The uncertainty is often expressed as a margin of error. The margin of error does not reflect other sources of error, such as measurement error.

A poll with a random sample of 1000 people has margin of sampling error of 3% for the estimated percentage of the whole population. A 3% margin of error means that 95% of the time the procedure used would give an estimate within 3% of the percentage to be estimated.

The margin of error can be reduced by using a larger sample, however if a pollster wishes to reduce the margin of error to 1% they would need a sample of around 10000 people.

In practice pollsters need to balance the cost of a large sample against the reduction in sampling error and a sample size of around 1000 is a typical compromise for political polls.

Ryan, please buy a clue. Polling agencies call the exact same set of people, over and over. They, all of them, Leftleanig or Rightleaning, do the exact same thing. Lawyers are shit, they believe all people are their servants, therefore, what we, the citizens, want or think, is irrelevent. They are appointed by GOD to run the entire world. Even as they gasp their last breath at the end of that rope, they still think THEY are you master.

[...] I think that’s something to remember when these negative polls are hyped by the left. Negative numbers on the President do not necessarily translate into positive numbers for Democrats. Americans may not be very happy with their President right now, but if there were another vote between him and John Kerry today he’d probably win again. [...]