IBD/TIPP Tracking Poll: Day Eleven

[fjc]

Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/Polls.aspx?id=309635713550536

McCain has cut into Obama's lead for a second day and is now just 1.1 points behind. The spread was 3.7 Wednesday and 6.0 Tuesday. The Republican is making headway with middle- and working- class voters, and has surged 10 points in two days among those earning between $30,000 and $75,000. He has also gone from an 11-point deficit to a 9-point lead among Catholics.

Read more: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/Polls.aspx?id=309635713550536

[Happyhippychick]

1. It's over for Obama. He should just go to Hawaii for a few days and pack it in.

[Happyhippychick]

2. Oops forgot this:

:sarcasm:

[livelongandprosper]

3. What is this poll? I never heard about it. n/t

[kstewart33]

4. This is Investors Business Daily.

They are to the right of the WSJ.

[livelongandprosper]

5. And is this a scientific poll or what the fuck? n/t

[jwirr]

10. If the business world believe this one they are in for a big crash Nov. 5.

[KansDem]

6. One need only look at the cartoon on this site to see where their loyalties lie...

[dennis4868]

7. I wonder why TPM....

includes it in the polls it reports everyday....how close were they in the last 2 elections (assuming the were around back then)?

[ejbr]

8. These dubious, positive McCain polls

must be to make the repigs think the race is close enough for them not to stay home on Nov. 4th.

[PatrynXX]

9. Displays Flag??

what exactly does that mean anyway? Certainly not the flag pin. Obama wears that all the time now. Not McCain :P

[DUlover2909]

11. 538 debunks this poll today. see link:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

[ddrucken]

12. Reality check

See Nate Silver's analysis of this poll here: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/whats-wrong-with-this-picture-aka-nate.html
538 is a good sanity check on poll results. Nate is an excellent poll watcher debunker and this site will give you a way to check on poll results

[AlinPA]

13. They say McCain leads with 18-24 year olds 74-22. That is a bullshit poll.

[ingac70]

14. McSame ahead 74-22 among 18-24 year olds???

Yeah, right. :eyes:

[AKing]

18. Sample probably taken from wingnut survivalist compound in Idaho

[Winterblues]

19. I think they polled Palin and McCain's kids

and still only got three quarters to say they were for McCain.

[ladywnch]

15. here's an analysis of this particular poll from fivethirtyeight.com

IBD/TIPP puts an asterisk by this result, stipulating that "Age 18-24 has much fluctuation due to small sample size".

Indeed, there may be some fluctuations when looking at small subgroups like these. That's why I generally don't pick on a poll if, say, it has John McCain winning 18 percent of the black vote when he's only "supposed" to be winning 7 percent or whatever. Fluctuations of that magnitude are going to be relatively common, mathematically speaking. In fact, they're entirely unavoidable, if you're taking enough polls and breaking out the results amongst enough subgroups.

But fluctuations of this magnitude are an entirely different matter.

Suppose that the true distribution of the 18-24 year old vote is a 15-point edge for Obama. This is a very conservative estimate; most pollsters show a gap of anywhere from 20-35 points among this age range.

About 9.3 percent of the electorate was between age 18-24 in 2004. Let's assume that the percentage is also 9.3 percent this year. Again, this is a highly conservative estimate. The IBD/TIPP poll has a sample size of 1,060 likely voters, which would imply that about 98 of those voters are in the 18-24 age range.

What are the odds, given the parameters above, that a random sampling of 98 voters aged 18-24would distribute themselves 74% to McCain and 22% to Obama?

Using a binomial distribution, the odds are 54,604,929,633-to-1 against. That is, about 55 billion to one.

So, there is an 0.000000002% chance that IBD/TIPP just got really unlucky. Conversely, there is a 99.999999998% chance that one of the following things is true:

(i) They're massively undersampling the youth vote. If you only have, say, 30 young voters when you should have 100 or so in your sample, than the odds of a freak occurrence like this are significantly more likely.
-or-
(ii) Something is dramatically wrong with their sampling or weighting procedures, or their likely voter model.

My guess is that it's some combination of the two -- that, for instance, IBD/TIPP is applying a very stringent likely voter model that removes you from the sample if you haven't voted in the past two elections, which would rule a great number of 18-24 year olds out.

A pollster could get away with a turnout model like that in 2004 (when IBD/TIPP did well in estimating the national popular vote), when the split in the youth vote was relatively small between John Kerry and George W. Bush. They can't get away with that this year, when the split is much larger.

But the basic takeaway is this: you should absolutely not assume that just because someone has published a poll, they have any particular idea what they're doing. Pollsters should be treated as guilty until proven otherwise.

[Proletariatprincess]

16. It is easier to steal an election when the polls show a close race.

Poll bias not withstanding.....LOL.

[Joe Chi Minh]

17. My Aunt Fannie surged 15.

[melody]

20. They polled crack smokers

Actually, Nate Silver rips them apart: http://fivethirtyeight.com