New Fox News Poll - Kerry leads 46-44 in Battleground States

[troublemaker]

7-8 Sep 04

Likely Voters (national): Bush 47% Kerry 43%
Registered Voters (national): Bush 42% Kerry 46%

Battleground States: Bush 44% Kerry 46%

It's confusing whether battleground result is LV or RV. My best guess is LV. Battlegrounds include: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

IMO the persistence of Bush leading only among "likely voters" may be partialy due to Dems not registering the kind of enthusiasm that some likely voter models look for. Hopefuly the debates will fire 'em up.

Full results:
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/090904_poll.pdf

[JPJones]

1. Fox needs to fire their pollster

What are the chances that Fox would hire an HONEST pollster? They just can't catch a break.

[Arugula Latte]

3. Yeah, if it's really fair and balanced, it's not "Fair and Balanced."

Up is down and black is white in FoxWorld.

[Rebel_with_a_cause]

5. If FOX has Kerry in a 2 point lead

what do you think that lead really is?

Has FOX News ever told the truth in its existence?

[Machiavelli05]

31. actually...

Actually, Fox News has a biased interest in showing Kerry ahead while everyone else is talking about the SBV for lies and the "convention bounce" because it looks like theyre not just endorsing the GOP and Im sure this will be used as O'Reilly's evidence as to how theyre fair and balanced! Assholes.

[MsTryska]

2. Hmmm.....

this is seeming suspiciously fair and balanced.....

[grytpype]

4. Yeah son!

Where's your bounce now, Duhbya?

[geek tragedy]

6. Key stat:

45% of Bush voters would be "SCARED" if Kerry won.

Republicans are cowards.

[Sydnie]

9. The have had a couple of Great Role Models haven't they? n/t

[luaneryder]

10. What on earth are they "scared" of?

I've heard this several times and can't imagine what they think will happen to them when Kerry wins.

[RevCheesehead]

29. Cheney

[rockymountaindem]

16. Would you be scared if Bush won?

I think it works both ways.

[geek tragedy]

18. Scared for civil rights and democracy itself, yes.

But these people are scared of terra. Given that most of his supporters live in Red States that AQ would never bother hitting . . .

[ezee]

20. The terror we should be afraid

of is the terror that will result if Bush is reselected Can you just imagine what will happen to our civial right. That is TERROR.

[citizen]

23. Amen!

http://www.civilthreat.com

[wryter2000]

24. Welcome to DU, citizen

:hi:

[abrock]

22. What Bush would do...

to civil rights and democracy as we know it in a second term would be far, far worse than any terrorist attack.

[KitSileya]

28. Ha! We beat them,

100% of Kerry voters will be pissed off if Bush wins.

KitSileya

[Thurston Howell IV]

40. More key stats

92% of democrats would be scared if Bush won.

[LiberalEsto]

7. They want us to be complacent

and feel we don't have to work our tails off through Nov. 2.

Whatever the polls say, we should act as though Bush were slightly ahead, and work like mad!

[charlie105]

8. These Fox polls have always puzzled me. Their polls always seem to give

Kerry an advantage of about 5-6 points over other national polls. Wonder why that is. Maybe they are setting up for the last couple of weeks where they artificially drop Kerry's numbers and the critics cannot complain.

:think:

[troublemaker]

11. They are not pushing leaners.

[sonicx]

36. fox, ras, and zogby weight their polls

time, newsweek and gallup don't (look at their internals, not the final number)

[Ducks In A Row]

12. so well the terror alert be today or tomorrow?

[CityDem]

13. Faux polls

It seems like Faux polls have been closer than the Time / Newsweek polls. In any case, the only poll that matters is on nov 2nd.

[barbaraann]

14. Here's why:

Kerry is rebuilding the grassroots of the Democratic Party in the battleground states, not just electioneering. Dirty tricks (which is basically all the GOP has) don't work as well against a grassroots campaign as they do against an electioneering campaign. In a grassroots campaign real, local people persuade other real, local people to vote for a candidate.

[bringbackfdr]

15. Now, can the national media un-bury Kerry?

Can we cease and desist with the stories about the Kerry campaign that include "faltering" "confused" "frustrated" or "fading" in the headline? Will columnists cease and desist with their "Kerry blew his chance" essays? Will anyone in the media wake up and realize this election is in a dead heat, there are six weeks to go and maybe someone should ask the incumbent a question or three about his miserable record?

[sonicx]

35. you're asking them to be journalists...

not gonna happen...

[obiwan]

41. Same deal they used with Howard Dean.

Sorry... you can't expect adult behavior from the children in the media. It's all about the ratings.

[AlCzervik]

17. Thats good news! Has the Fox "News" building collapsed yet?

[joefree1]

19. Huh?

I forget, did I take the red pill or the green pill?


Download the free poster/bumper art here:
http://ediablo.com/eDiabloGallery.html

[Beetwasher]

21. The Lesson: IGNORE NATIONAL POLLS

This election is going to be won LOCALLY. Kerry knows this and is pounding the pavement MERCILESSLY.

Fuck the national polls, fuck the national cable channels. Most people get their news from LOCAL sources, such as the local paper and local affiliates.

That's the name of the game folks and that's why Kerry surprised everyone in Iowa. Everyone was paying attention to all the national numbers w/out realizing the work Kerry was doing locally.

[West Coast Democrat]

25. Does "Likely Voters" mean not necessarily registered?

That's what I don't understand.

[Lefty Pragmatist]

26. Different polls define "likely" in different ways.

That's one reason the polls are all over the map. Another is that despite the alleged MOEs of 2-4%, the assumption that these polls actually have representative samples of the real electorate is tenuous -- I'd estimate that the MOE for the typical state poll is probably 5-8% -- in other words, watching them pinball back and forth and getting hung up on movements of less than 10 points is wasted effort.

Combining their polling figures for the battlegrounds is also useless. The only polling reports worth anything are demographically-balanced polling of registered or likely voters state by state. Zogby does that for paying customers; presumably Rasmussen does it (although I've heard their methodology is questionable); Quinnipiac may either do it or collect it from other sources; Gallup probably does it; Harris may do it. The networks' polling is entirely vacuuous -- they announce national figures which don't tell you anything predictive unless you make the statistically-naive assumption that variation within all demographic groups is homoscedastic within state sample.

Short answer: althouigh we're seeing a lot of polling data, 90% of it is "garbage in, garbage out." The political community is math-illiterate and has no idea what's going on.

[tedzbear]

30. Answer the question, for gods sakes!

What is a "likely voter" as compared to a "registered voter?"

[FlaIndie]

37. usually,

likely entails a series of questions, including if they voted in the last presidential race. That is what makes LV polls so worthless, since we all know people who didn't vote in 2000 because they bought the hype that Bush and Gore are as different as Coke and Pepsi, but now they see the light.

[Lefty Pragmatist]

43. The answer

is that it's hard to generalize because they all use different methods; see first sentence above.

However, it comes down to some weighting of:
+ are you registered?
+ did you vote last time?
+ do you know where your polling place is?
+ can you answer a couple rudimentary Am Gov questions?

People are poo-pooing the correlations of these indicators with rates of participation, saying that this time "it will be different." Much as I want to believe that, I don't. I think we'll see a slight uptick in particpation, on the order of what we got in the first perot run. But the stark truth is that a large segment of the population is apolitical for as many reasons as there are people.

Show me a well-constructed and demographically-balanced sample of voters, and I think you've got a pretty good predictor of future election participation.

[jefferson_dem]

27. Ah...numbers not bad. This is why the FauxNoose Buffoons were citing Time

poll rather than their own this weekend.

[liberalcanuck]

32. You wouldn't believe that we have such positive news by judging

the national 'media'. They keep slamming Kerry and saying he's not running an effective campaign. I couldn't stand it anymore - I had to turn it off. If that frickin' moron gets selected again I'm seriously going to have move back home to Canada - which isn't a bad thing at all. ;)

[MallRat]

33. LV models may be historically biased.

I don't think many LV models are taking into account how strongly motivated the Democrats are this year.

And even that aside, an 8-point difference between RV and LV is unwarranted in any election year.

-MR

[nolabels]

39. The polls were wrong in 2000

"Likely Voter" Bias: Why Gallup was Wrong in 2000
by Chris Bowers

On November 6th, 2000, the final Gallup/CNN/USA Today tracking poll showed Al Gore at 45% and George Bush at 47%. This poll was similar to others conducted by different services in the final days of the election. During the same time period, NBC/Wall Street Journal showed Gore at 44% and Bush at 47%; ABC/Washington Post showed Gore at 45% with Bush at 48%. Tarrance showed Gore 41%, Bush 46%; Christian Science Monitor showed Gore 46% and Bush 48%. Among all final polls, only CBS (45-44) and Zogby (47-46) showed Gore ahead.

I am not a subscriber to Gallup, and thus I do not have access to old poll internals. However, if you are willing to take my word for it, in early October of 2000 I spent a couple hours after class one day pouring over the internals of the latest Gallup tracking poll in an attempt to better understand the state of the campaign. One discovery, which has stayed with me to this day, led me to conclude that they were underestimating Gore's support by around 2-3%, and overestimating Bush's support by the same margin. The discovery was that they had incorporated race into their model, and had done so in a way that appeared to more heavily weight white opinion than minority opinion.
(snip)
the post that mosts intrigue me is this:

(snip)
There are a number of uncounted voters. (none / 0)

These polls don't take into account young mobile voters, like students or people with cell phones. This election younger voters may turn out in higher numbers especially with the Draft being on the ballot.
by FLS on Thu May 20th, 2004 at 10:31:03 AM EST
(snip)
There are a number of uncounted voters. (none / 0)

These polls don't take into account young mobile voters, like students or people with cell phones. This election younger voters may turn out in higher numbers especially with the Draft being on the ballot.
by FLS on Thu May 20th, 2004 at 10:31:03 AM EST
(snip)
http://www.mydd.com/story/2004/5/19/225039/641

A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud in America
By Victoria Collier
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Saturday 25 October 2003

�Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty� --Thomas Jefferson

In the 2000 election, George W. Bush stole the presidency by combining various forms of vote fraud, not all of which could be concealed from the American public. The month-long battle in Dade County ended with open slaughter of the democratic process, and the occupation of the country by a regime of what may be accurately described as corporate fascists.

That�s the bad news.

The good news is, the 2000 election also marked a turning point in American consciousness. Or, I might venture to say, an awakening.

Before W�s coup, most Americans were, for lack of a better metaphor, asleep at the wheel. This metaphor works just fine, because our electoral process is the wheel that guides our nation, the mechanism that allows us to control the engines of power, and to turn our country in a new direction if, for instance, we�re nearing the edge of a cliff.

Nothing is more important to an American citizen than the right to cast a ballot.
(snip)
http://www.truthout.com/docs_03/102503C.shtml

[LibeMatt]

42. Likely Voter thoughts

I'm under the impression that likely voter polls usually define the term as someone who's voted in (X%) of the last Y general and/or primary elections. Given that in most previous elections young, mobile people as described in the Bowers article usually voted in much smaller numbers than those in older demographics and that many people, under "normal" circumstances, do have fairly consistent patterns of voting behavior, in many recent elections, likely voter polls have proved to be the most accurate predictors, according to my erstwhile Media and Politics professor (who incidentally worked for Jon Kyl, the other Arizona senator, which naturally kept me on my toes :^) ).

As the Bowers article hints at, there are a lot of people who haven't reliably voted before who are very fired up and determined to vote the current administration out. I wouldn't be overly surprised if voter turnout this election topped 60% and if a lot of media and poll outlets wind up with egg on their face when the election isn't as close as they thought.

Remember, also, a lot of the younger generations get a lot of their news from The Daily Show...

[sonicx]

34. one stat i like and one i hate

good: kerry leads independents :)

bad: only 80% of democrats voting for kerry (9% for bush)

:puke:

has fox even reported this poll yet? they had such a hardon for newsweek and time, but will they report their own poll? :eyes:

[Lefty Pragmatist]

44. The 9% Dems for Bush

are "Zell Dems." There are stilla few -- the last remnants of the formerly solid south Dem coalition that was extremely socially conservative, and who we started losing in droves in the late 70's.

It's also the group that gives us our lead among registered voters in the country, which is usually about 4-5%. In truth, if you measure the ideolgoical orientation of the electorate, we're dead even. Probably one more election cycle will complete the realignment; then we'll see 50/50 registration rates that reflect the national split.

[cthrumatrix]

38. kick